Why FOX Viewers think Neil Cavuto "Owned" Paul Krugman

This video appeared on Youtube entitled "Neil Cavuto mops the floor with NYT Loon Paul Krugman". Quite a claim- Krugman has been an internationally respected, award winning economist for decades, and since he started writing about the fraudulence of then-president elect George W. Bush's economic policies in 2000, become one of the most important political commentators of our time. Cavuto, on the other hand, is a lowly hack at Fox News Channels who gets his marching orders from memos on how to "spin" the news when he comes into work each day.

At first, I was even more confused when I saw the video. Krugman talks about the "Joyless Economy" in America, about how despite the fact that many corporations are posting record profits, so many Americans feel left behind and are unenthusiastic (you can read one of Krugman's columns on it here- well worth your time). Krugman argues that the average opinion is on the mark- While the rich continue to get richer, adjusted for inflation, Americans are worse off than they were 30 years ago, and in a depressing sign of the times, Wal-Mart has become the country's biggest employer, paying an average of 18,000 a year and little or no benefits. He comes with the facts.

Cavuto, on the other hand, speaks in generalities, calling Krugman a Bush Hater, challenges him to say something nice about Bush while he's trying to explain his position, and claiming in solemn, condescending tones, "Paul, what you are doing is lying to people". Lots of little potshots and no substance. When Krugman tries to quote the facts he talks over him with more BS.

The FOX news crowd ate it up though. The comments are along these lines-

"Neil Cavuto RULES!!"

"Cavuto exposes Krugman for the true fool that he is. Paul "people are stupid" Krugman."

"haha, ouch"

"Go Neil!!!!"

And amazingly-

"This just proves that many people like this Krugerman really have no cohesive argument, just ideology. And they cling to it like a religion."

Were we watching the same argument? It doesn't make sense...but try watching the video with the sound off. Going by body language, you might see a different story.

In print, Krugman is a master. But he's not suited for the television age. He stammers. A man of fairly short stature to begin with, he slouches in his chair, like he's taking up as little space as possible. He allows people to talk over him and interrupt him to get in their little bon mots and sidetrack him from his reasoned arguments. Most damningly, he has trouble making eye contact, and often looks away and down at the table when he speaks, which could give the impression that he's dishonest.

Cavuto, on the other hand, is in rare form. He has nothing intelligent to say, but as an anchor on FOX news he knows how to look like he does, voice low, posture confident, all the little jabs coming at the right times. If a tribe of baboons was watching the debate and they had to choose one of the two men to be their alpha male, you can be sure they would choose the cheeseball television anchor over the nerdy college professor.

But in a way, a pack of baboons was watching- the morons who watch FOX.

Paul Krugman: Doing something about Global Warning is Easier Than We Think

By Paul Krugman, from under the Timeselect barrier:

We can do something about global warming

2/27/2007 10:28:41 AM

The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it.

Aside from a few dead-enders on the political right, climate change skeptics seem to be making a seamless transition from denial to fatalism. In the past, they rejected the science. Now, with the scientific evidence pretty much irrefutable, they insist that it doesn't matter because any serious attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions is politically and economically impossible.

Behind this claim lies the assumption, explicit or implicit, that any substantial cut in energy use would require a drastic change in the way we live. To be fair, some people in the conservation movement seem to share that assumption.

But the assumption is false. Let me tell you about a real-world counterexample: an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle centered on automobiles and single-family houses.

The name of the economy? California.

There's nothing heroic about California's energy policy -- but that's precisely the point. Over the years the state has adopted a series of conservation measures that are anything but splashy. They're the kind of drab, colorless stuff that excites only real policy wonks. Yet the cumulative effect has been impressive, if still well short of what we really need to do.

The energy divergence between California and the rest of the United States dates from the 1970s. Both the nation and the state initially engaged in significant energy conservation after that decade's energy crisis. But conservation in most of America soon stalled: After a decade of rapid progress, improvements in auto mileage came to an end, while electricity consumption continued to rise rapidly, driven by the growing size of houses, the increasing use of air-conditioning and the proliferation of appliances.

In California, by contrast, the state continued to push policies designed to encourage conservation, especially of electricity. And these policies worked.

People in California have always used a bit less energy than other Americans because of the mild climate. But the difference has grown much larger since the 1970s. Today, the average Californian uses about a third less total energy than the average American, uses less than 60 percent as much electricity, and is responsible for emitting only about 55 percent as much carbon dioxide.

How did the state do it? In some cases conservation was mandated directly, through energy efficiency standards for appliances and rules governing new construction. Also, regulated power companies were given new incentives to promote conservation, via rule changes that "decoupled" their profits from the amount of electricity they sold.

And yes, a variety of state actions had the effect of raising energy prices. In the early 1970s, the price of electricity in California was close to the national average. Today, it's about 50 percent higher.

Incidentally, since someone is bound to mention it: The California energy crisis of 2000-01 has nothing to do with this story. That crisis was caused by market manipulation -- we've got it on tape -- made possible by ill-conceived deregulation, not conservation.

Back to California's success. As the higher price of power indicates, conservation didn't come free. Still, it's striking how invisible California's energy policy remains. It's easy to see why New York has much lower per capita energy consumption than, say, Georgia: It's a matter of high-rises versus sprawl, mass transit versus driving alone. It's less obvious that Los Angeles is a much greener city than Atlanta. But it is.

So is California a role model for climate policy? No and yes. Even if America as a whole had matched California's conservation efforts, we'd still be emitting about as much carbon dioxide now as we were in 1990. That's too much.

But California's experience shows that serious conservation is a lot less disruptive, imposes much less of a burden, than the skeptics would have it. And the fact that a state government, with far more limited powers than those at Washington's disposal, has been able to achieve so much is a good omen for our ability to do a lot to limit climate change, if and when we find the political will.

Japanese Fanta Commercials

UPDATE: Now with a better translation, which makes them funnier.

I love how dejected the kids get when they talk about the teachers out of class. Check out the DJ!

Wikipedia Gets Exclusive

One of Slate's writers has just done a great story about how his Wikipedia entry is due to be deleted because some of the editors don't deem him important enough to deserve one. Every month about 400 new entries get deleted for this reason. I've witnessed it before- One of my favorite bloggers, who has around 40,000 unique readers, got deleted the same way (Meanwhile, you can still read everything you'll ever need to know about My Little Pony, including detailed summaries of every episode).

The writer makes a good point- real encyclopedias have to cut down on entries to save paper and space, or at least manpower. But Wikipedia has endless servers and unlimited free labor, so why not just allow entries about everything under the sun? He argues that the reasons tie into the theory of the leisure class. People don't make exclusive clubs because they need to, but because they want to. There's a burning desire among people to separate wheat from chafe, worthy from unworthy.

I have a different theory- I think Wikipedia tries to cut down on unimportant entries in a misguided plight for respectability. Many people have pointed out that often entries for obscure Saturday morning cartoons will be longer and have more detail than entries on historical figures like, say, Francis Bacon. It's an embarrassment to the site's founders.

But I think that by trying to avoid occasional accusations of pointless entries by cutting back on content Wikipedia is missing the forest for the trees. They provide a fantastic service, even if a certain percentage of the entries are inevitably dumb. Wikipedia is as popular as it is One because it's free, Two because it's online and easily accessible, but also Three, it can tell you pretty much anything you need to know about anything, far, far more than any conventional encyclopedia could ever dreamed of doing. That last characteristic should be encouraged, not policed.

Google's founders envisioned a world where anyone could get any information, anytime, anywhere. Google plays a large role in helping people find that information. But Wikipedia has done the harder job of making sure it's all there to find. That's why Wikipedia ranks so high on so many Google searches. They should keep at it- people are asking all kinds of questions to Google, occasionally even ones about only marginally famous Slate and Washington Post writers. Why shouldn't Wikipedia be there to provide the answers when they do?

Japanese Graffiti

So I was up at a lookout point in the hills on my way to work today (pretty good view up there by the way- click on the picture above to get a better look), and I found some Graffiti. They kids that did it call themselves the NBC, or the Night Bomb Crew. At first I thought NBC stood for the TV Network, which would have been the oddest shout-out ever.


I can't make out a single letter...it's just like American graffiti!

Steadily gettin' blunted...with Mickey Mouse. He looks like he's getting a really bad contact high.


Check out the numbers below "Fukuoka"...that's the city area code. Yeeeeaaahhh Boooyyy! Str8 Reprazentin' the 092!


The Police get no love...those kids must have been politely told not to park their bikes right in front of the train station one time too many.

And finally, just to show you that even with the anti-authority streak, they have a sensitive side-



"HAPPY BARTHDAY MINAKO" (sp.)

Dude, don't write her name! You'll tip off the cops!

Furumachi Life: The Niigata Blog

Niigata Life -Memoirs

Most Japan blogs detail the culture shock and initial impressions of coming here. People want to hear about all the crazy, awkward situations and all the wild times had by foreigners hitting the mysterious orient. I'm used to things here now, so I don't dwell on those kinds of things so much anymore. But when I first came to Japan and lived in Niigata city I went through all the same stuff, feeling like a celebrity in a small Japanese town just because I was a foreigner, hitting all the bars in the Furumachi district, carousing for women, trying to make sense of the country and so on.

About a week ago someone got in touch with me about some stories I wrote from Bangkok about Niigata city about 3 years ago on a bulletin board. I'd thought that they were buried deep in the depths of the internet, and that they'd never see the light of day. It really surprised me that someone found them- I wasn't totally sure where they were myself. But it was really interesting reading them again.

I decided to repost them on blogger...If you're looking for the dirt on Japan it's worth looking through.

When I wrote it, it basically contained everything I thought I knew about Japan. Since then, I've moved to Fukuoka and revised a lot of those opinions. I really love where I live now, and appreciate the country a lot more now that I've spent more time here and experienced more of it. But these stories encapsulate my thoughts and feelings about a certain city during a certain era during a particular stage of my life. Sometimes they go a little overboard, but they do a good job explaining my experiences at the time.


Anyway, if you're still interested click here.

How to Learn Japanese

This is an ongoing guide for beginners who want to start learning Japanese. It's best suited for people who have come here for a year or so on business and are trying to learn on their feet, but there's some important advice for anybody.

I'm a bit less confident in my Japanese ability than I used to be. When I lived in Niigata city I prided myself on being able to do things in Japanese, and my friends were amazed by my ability to navigate my way through Japan without the aid of interpreters. I was widely considered to have some of the best Japanese among the 20-something English teachers that frequented the bars in that city, and I took pride in it.

But I soon found out that the distinguishment doesn't count for much. Here in Fukuoka, I know a lot of foreigners that speak Japanese uber-fluently, laughing at wry jokes made by political commentators on public television, and expressing outrage over things they read in the business sections of the newspapers. They include recipients of Master's Degrees in Japanese literature from Cambridge University, and plenty of people that have survived in office environments speaking and working in Japanese all day. Surrounded by these people, comments on my Japanese went from, "yeah, Jeff is more or less fluent" to, "Yeah, Jeff's Japanese is actually pretty good".

Still, I've learned enough to function out here. I can find and rent an apartment, take a computer or motorbike in for repairs and explain the problem, translate the lyrics of J-Pop songs aimed at 13 year old girls, and read and write emails in Japanese provided the topic doesn't swing over to international finance or anything.

And so I humbly present my own advice for learning Japanese, and a list of resources to help you carry it out.

1) Learn Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet.
Just do it. A lot of people try to be lazy about it and try to learn Japanese with words written in the English alphabet, but doing that can botch you up so much that it'll make any further progress difficult.
There are so few phonemes in the Japanese alphabet that ever last syllable counts in a Japanese word. If you botch even one vowel, or even elongate a vowel too long, no-one will understand what you're saying. In English, you can pronounce "Harvard" as "Haa-vaad" or "Hahhrrverd" and even if it sounds a little weird, people will get the idea. If you try doing that with a Japanese word you can wind up saying gibberish, or even a different word.

Don't despair and see learning all those Japanese symbols as this sort of unsurpassible barrier to moving on with your studies. You can start studying other aspects of Japanese before you master them. But it's important that you learn the theory behind the Japanese sound system, and learn which kinds of pronunciations are possible and legal and which aren't. Even if you do revert to the English alphabet for your notes, it's crucial you understand the sound system. The vowel U is pronounced "oo", not "uh". The letter "i" is pronounced "ee" not "ih". Writing down words in English won't help you if you don't know how to read/pronounce them later on.

2) Keep a wordlist, and study it.
Vocabulary is the key to any language. It can seem like a neverending task, like trying to fill and empty swimming pool with a bottlecap. But if you keep at it, the water level will slowly rise.
Actually it's not that bad...80% of communication commonly consists only of a language's 1000-2000 most common words (The other 20% consists of tens of thousands of stray words that'll take you forever to learn, but you can cross that bridge when you come to it). In the meantime, even learning as few as 20 of the most common verbs (go, come, eat, drink, etc), will have a huge impact on how well you can communicate.
Keep a dictionary, and look up words you don't know. Ask people how to say things on your mind in Japanese. But more importantly, write it all down and commit to memorizing it.
Keep an unsent mail message on your cellphone, and every time you hear a new word, go to "edit" and add it to the list. You should have about twenty words in it at any given time. You can study them and give pop quizzes to yourself whenever you have free time- when you're on the train for example.
Serious learners I know try to learn 5 or 6 a day, sometimes much more. Even if you're just dabbling in Japanese, I would try for at least that many per week.

3) Learn the Grammar

This is what separates the dabblers from the actual speakers. A lot of foreigners living in Japan a few years can come to soak up large vocabularies. When Japanese people talk, they can understand a lot of what's said.

The problem is, they can't say much themselves. When they try to speak, they just sort of throw related words out and hope others can piece together the meaning ("Uh, see burger, want, delicious")

Grammar isn't just a bunch of verbal P's and Q's designed to make it's users sound educated. It's a basic protocol for speaking that organizes the relationships between the items and actions you're talking about. "Dog eats man" has a much different meaning than "man eats dog", for example. So no matter how good your receptive vocabulary is, if you don't understand or learn those codings, your ability to speak is severely limited.

Rather than making things more complicated, learning grammar makes things easier. Once you learn the rules, you can roll a concept like "if you didn't want to be able to go" off your tongue as a single word ("iketakunakattara", incidentally). You won't have to commit extra words to memory, just rules that help shape the words you already know to give them new and different meanings. Your vocabulary and expressive power will triple with just a few rules. Suddenly, on top of just "eat" and "go", you can say "should go", "want to eat", "have to go", and so on.

For beginner Grammar, I recommend Schaum's Outlines, available at amazon here.

Technically, this is a cram guide for College students studying Japanese for courses. But it makes an ideal companion for people living in Japan who are learning a lot of words through osmosis, but need a little help with the grammar to help them structure what they know and take their Japanese to a basic level. It shows you how to form basic sentences (for example comparisons "X is bigger than Y" etc) in a simple, straightforward manner. Since it's an outline of the most fundamental grammar, all of it is highly relevant and useful, with no filler.

more steps coming...

Last week at Brighten

This week wrapped up my year at Brighten, the trade college I've been working at 3 days a week. I have a lot more classes at the university I teach at from April, so it's getting edged out of my schedule. When school starts again in spring I'll only be there for one morning a week, and this will be my last year with the class pictured here.

Most teachers don't have a lot of good things to say about trade colleges in Japan. A lot of people complain about surly students that sleep through class or check their cell phones and ignore the teachers. I took the job for the work experience and wasn't expecting much.

But it was a fun year. The kids were all great, got along with one another, and took class seriously and studied hard (well, most of the time). It was also the most successful year in the school's English program's history- there were significant gains in TOEIC scores across the board, and a lot of the students developed their English in a big way.

Everyone here in the top picture is doing that "Ahh-yeeeeee!" joke I wrote about a while back. I'm the tall blond guy in the back, the other foreigner sitting in the front center is Nick, the program director.

The bottom picture is of a pizza party we had. The girl on the left Hiromi looks suspicious because she knows that any picture I take is probably going to wind up online. She's right!

Click on any picture to enlarge.

Vending Machine

Check out the message to the left of the coin slot-



Well Good! That's exactly the kind of attitude I've come to expect from soft drink vendors.

Even more on "Learning to Bow"

Truly, he had mastered the ways of the Japanese people

The other day I wrote about "Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan", an extremely pretentious book by a westerner claiming to explain the ways of the mysterious orient. It gets great reviews, mostly from people who have either never been here, or have only been here a short time (You can read it below, or here, if you're coming in from Google or off a feed or something).

I teach a conversation class for the PTA moms at the international school. A couple of them saw my entry, but hadn't had time to decipher the English, and asked me to talk about it a bit more. I think this'll give you a good idea of what Japanese people think when they hear about books like this:

Me: "Okay, this foreigner wrote a book about Japan. It's called "Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan."

Student 1: "...Inside the Heart?"

Me: "Yeah, like the book will take you into Japan's soul".

-This caused some raised eyebrows- that would be a bold book title for a Japanese author, let alone someone who isn't even from here. Continuing-

Me : "So guess what this guy's experience in Japan is."

Student 2: "I don't know"

Me: "Yeah, but just guess"

Student 2: "Uh...He lived here for many, many years?"

Me: "uh-uh"

Student 3: (another student:) "I know! He was born here, and grew up here!"

Me: "No, not exactly. He was here for 12 months. On the Jet Program.

-At this point they all just started laughing.

Me: "And listen to some of the stuff he writes! He goes to an Onsen for the first time, right?"(a traditional bath where you bath nude), "and he writes, 'and so I came into Japan as I first came into the world...naked'".

-uproarious laughter.

Just imagine if a Japanese guy went to Denver for 12 months, learned enough English to order a Cheeseburger, and returned to Japan to write a book in Japanese that translated to something like, "Don't Fake the Funk on a Nasty Dunk: Penetrating the Very Souls of the American People".

And he wrote stuff like, "As I stepped into the Jacuzzi at the YMCA, I began to feel the water swirl around me, a spiritual re-christening my spirit. And so I came into America as I came into this world- unblemished and cleansed by chlorinated water".

That would just sound stupid, right? So why do guys who write the same basic stuff in books about Japan get so much respect?

Book Review: "Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan"

You've heard about people that come to Japan and get all kinds of respect and attention by virtue of being foreigners, and suddenly seen as some kind of symbol of the western world, right? What a lot of people don't realize is that it works in reverse too- foreigners will come back from a short stint in Japan, and pretend they've penetrated the deepest secrets of the mysterious orient. They act like they're fluent in Japanese and they have this astute understanding of the culture, and everyone takes their word for it, because they don't know any better.

There's a whole cottage industry of people that served a year-long stint or so teaching English in Japan, learned a couple words of Japanese, and then wrote books about it for a western public that has nothing better to compare their claptrap to. I now present you a review of one of the worst offenders of the genre: the incredibly pretentious "Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan" by Bruce Feiler.




I can understand how people who haven't lived in Japan could mistake this book as authoritive, but it amazes me that anyone who has lived out here more than a year could see this as much more than the bag of wind it is. With its pretentious title and lofty quotations of translated haikus, Feiler proves he knows how to make a good impression. The problem is, if you actually read it, you realize he isn't much good at doing much else as a writer.

Stylistically, this book is an imitation of travel writer Pico Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto", but while Feiler has the poetic trappings down, he doesn't have the insight into Japan to back it up.

At the time of writing this book, Feiler had been living out here a year as JET highschool teacher (though he doesn't actually admit to that in so many words- to hear him tell it, he was here on "special invite from the Japanese government", as if he was some kind of high-ranking diplomat).

The title ("Inside the heart of Japan") and chapter headings ("Drinking alone in rural Japan", for example), are great- they suggest that by reading it you'll gain powerful, poetic realities about this mysterious country. But every chapter left me unsatisfied (For example, all the chapter "Drinking alone in rural Japan" contains by way of anecdote him going to a Karaoke bar for a drink, and he isn't even alone).

He has a habit of starting chapters with an overwritten account of the kind of thing everyone does within a week of being here (drinking in a Karaoke bar, bathing at an Onsen, etc), and then, when its time to actually say anything, starts quoting press articles off the English language news services wire, listing off statistics about how many hours kids study after school and so on. If you comb the book carefully to separate these rote repetitions of facts already freely available from what he actually writes himself, you'll be left with a very slim and trite account of Japan indeed.

Its a good thing for the author there are so few books of this type about Japan out there, because if people had more to compare it with they'd realize how bad it is. Anyone who came out here to teach English for a year and scanned the internet for newspaper articles to quote from for padding could have written this book.

If you want to know more about life in Japan, Try the book by Pico Iyer it was cribbed from, or better still, "Hitching Rides with the Buddha, by Will Ferguson. Not as flashy in style, but a lot more knowledgeable and heavier in substance.

Edit- Read me beat up on Bruce Feiler and Learning to Bow even more here.

Japanese TV Commerical: A Dollhouse...for Grown Women!

So I saw this TV commercial in the gym sauna the other day...it's for a dollhouse for adults. You can see the commerical on the DeAgostini website. Click here, and when you see dollhouse picture in the top right hand corner, click on the yellow octagon that says TVCM to view the commercial.

I know you can find "collectible" stuff back home too, but never have I seen a commercial where the adults were so excited about it.This woman shows it off to her friend, and the friend goes "You built this yourself?!....WOW!!!!" Then her whole family (apparently she's married) comes to envy it and admire her.

I asked my friend if it was just for single women and people who are, you know, crazy..but she said some women over 40, happily married or not, get into this kind of thing. So apparently it's pretty socially acceptable.

"How to Spot a Jap" -The American Military Guide

A 1944 Comic guide for American soldiers, to help them tell the difference between the Japanese and "Our Chinese Allies". From what I can make out, the noble Chinese have more Western features, and torsos. Horribly racist, just in case you were wondering what I thought of it.

Click on the pictures to enlarge, or check out the originals here.

Album Review / Preview: Modest Mouse "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"

When "Good News for People who Like Bad News" came out a few years ago, Modest Mouse seemed like one of those indie bands on the verge of going mainstream. A lot of that album sounded like an Indie version of U2, and songs like "The World at Large" could work as cover fodder for a singer like Annie Lennox. Licensing songs for beer commercials didn't help their street cred much either.

While this new album "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"'s first single, the disco-tinged "Dashboard", was a little more raucous, it looked like Modest Mouse would continue in that direction. It follows closely in the footsteps of Franz Ferdinand, the last alternative band to really make it big.

But "Dead Before the Ship" comes as a surprise- There are only a few other songs in the disco-indie-rock stream ("Education" is another one). Almost entirely throughout, this is a gritty, substantial album. If you're expecting "The World at Large", your first reaction is likely to be, "What the hell is this?" Guitars shriek atonally, and lead singer shout-screams with more gusto than ever before -it makes his vocals on "float On" sound shaky and insecure in comparison. It's got a bluesy, discordant feel.

Of course, while these elements set the foundation for a decent album, they don't guarantee a really good one. Two things differentiate it from what you've already heard though-

First, the guitars are doing a lot, and underneath the blare there's some great musicianship going on. I wondered when Modest Mouse had become such great, inventive guitarists, and finally recalled that Smiths legend Johnny Marr had joined the band. Marr more than pulls his weight here.

Second, like, say, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse is experimenting with other instruments and sounds too. But instead of letting other influences consume their sound, they've found ways of letting it underscore their drunken, inventive bar-band sound in ways that enhance it rather than consume it. "Spitting Venom" starts with Isaac Brock hollering hootenanny over a twangy acoustic guitar, and breaks into a full-band all-over-the-place mess. But by the halfway point things change- Organs kick in, and
Brock begins to whisper sing over horns and single string delayed licks.

There's one instant where Modest Mouse shows that they haven't forgotten how to make the brand of Indie-pop they've forged. The subdued "Little Motel" is as soft, pretty and catchy as anything they've done in the past.

Also see: review of the new Arcade Fire album Neon Bible.

Japan Stories #1: The Crazy Japanese Tycoon

Couldn't Find a picture of an Asian Mr.Burns...


Throughout my time in Japan I've met some interesting people and heard some crazy stories. Here are some good ones about an eccentric/insane multi-millionaire here. I know someone that worked there, and the stories are just unreal.

Have you ever met someone so successful, so powerful, that they felt like they didn't have to answer to anybody, and so just started doing whatever they felt like, even the craziest, most jerk-off behavior? Think Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean Dictator. This is kind of like that...

I deliberated posting this because I'm worried about the person's identity...wouldn't want it getting back to the boss or anyone else in the quite-large organization. So there are no names, descriptions of the industry they're in, or details on where in Japan this takes place.

So how can you be sure any of it's true? Well you can't be, really...and I can't say I'd blame you if you didn't believe me, or at least thought I exaggerated or embellished some of this.

Anyway-

This guy is terrified of germs and keeps everything disinfected at all times. His office is in a bank vault. His employees have to open it up every 30 minutes to let air into it or he would suffocate. My source was summoned to the vault, with others, for an interview.

Interviews with this guy can be a nerve-racking experience. Things can go well for 1 or 2 phases, but then one time you might laugh at his joke a little too long, or not enough, or cross your legs in a way that offends him...and you're ordered out. No "Don't call us, we'll call you"...he just kicks you out mid interview in front of everyone else.

At this interview, he looked at one applicant and said "you...what do you do? What is your hobby, the thing you like to do most in your free time?"

Taken aback, the applicant said "Uh, I like jogging.."

So the tycoon answers, "then run...RUN! NOW!"

So the guy started doing laps around the vault.

When my source got the question, he mentioned he liked singing. "Then sing for me!" Snapped the Tycoon. "Sing the national anthem!" So he stood on the table and sang it. He was hired on the spot, and with a wave of his hand the Tycoon gave him a 60% salary increase over his previous job plus bonuses.

Employees that travel with him keep a lot of money on hand when they're around him, because you'll never know what he might ask of you. Once, eating in a hotel restaurant late at night with a large assembly of employees at a conference, he demanded melons, but the hotel didn't have any. Employees packed into cars and headed down to town to wake up the mom and pop owners of the local fruit story to hand over several hundred dollars for them.

"The thing is," My source explained, "If he wants melons, it's not just him that eats them. Everybody eats them."

I didn't really get it. "But what if you don't want to eat melons?" I asked.

His eyes widened. "Oh, you eat the melons".

..more coming?

What's so Hard to Understand About Web 2.0?

"Web 2.0" is beginning to be called the "synergy" of the 90's, basically just a BS term used by marketers and people trying to get others excited about new stocks. People have accused it of being vague and meaningless. I don't really get what the confusion is about.

Web 2.0 is basically user-generated content. In a nutshell-

The old way on the web (e.g. salon.com): Hire a staff of about 10-20 writers to write "content" for your site. Give them salaries that you pay by spending venture capital while your website is still in the red.

Wind up with mediocre content, and eventually go bankrupt.
OR: Wind up, against the odds, having above-average or even good content. Go bankrupt anyway, because since your website is free and relies on advertising your probably can't make enough money to pay everyone anyway.

The new way (e.g. Digg.com): Keep a bare-bones staff, and invite anyone who happens to stumble on your site to contribute or write content for it...for free. Worried about quality control? Let your audience vote on what is best or should be deleted...themselves. Wind up with a situation where literally millions of people are writing for you and making/bringing content to your site while your small staff basically just keeps the servers up and does dick all else.

The review section of amazon is one of the main reasons it has an advantage over all the other glorified mail-order .com companies. Wikipedia has astonishing amounts of information on everything. It's true they haven't made any money yet, but that's just because they haven't sold out yet. I found a complete history of practically every Transformer's cartoon ever made on there, for Christ's sake. No single company could have paid a staff of people to do all that, even for astronomical amounts of money. I know most reasonable people could care less about said cartoons, but that's not the point. As long as someone is willing to navigate through ads to read that, and it didn't cost you anything to make it, you're in good shape.

Millions of strangers fueling your website for free while you make the money...what's so airy-fairy or gobbledy-gook about that?


In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a video by a college professor explaining the new buzz phrase "Web 2.0" in Mcleun-esque terms. It's set to music and uses visual tricks, so it's pretty fun to watch.

The 1/2 Hour News Hour: FOX's Answer to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Here's a clip of FOX's spectacularly unfunny right-wing Daily show knock-off. Most commentary I've seen on this puts discussion of the right wing agenda aside just to express utter shock on how bad it is. Canned laughter punctuates aimless swipes at democrat politicians ("Learn everything you want to know about Barack Obama in B.O magazine!") It comes off like a random attack piece.

But since there isn't even a point behind the jeers, and they've put their usual "fake moral-outrage about those awful liberals" schtick aside in an attempt to come off more lighthearted and funny, they're basically just ammunitionless, running on empty and trying to shoot zingers from a pistol with nothing but empty chambers. Couldn't they at least wait for a liberal-type in the media to do something stupid and laugh-worthy?

The 1/2 Hour News Hour's Agenda- To get the liberals, and possibly get "revenge" against the Daily Show by fighting their jokes about FOX with a show of their own.

The Daily Show's Agenda- TO BE FUNNY.

That makes the Daily Show pretty tough to beat in the comedy market.

The Tipping Point for Mac's Market Share

This post grew out of some comments from my last post, about how Microsoft is no longer the dominant player in every market it competes in, and how chips in the market share of Windows could indicate a sea change.

Apple saw a 30% growth in U.S market share over the past year, bringing their Mac up to 4.7%. While the number is still dwarved by Windows, it's a surprisingly high growth rate for a rival operating system in a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft. And it could indicate even higher growth rates in the future, because unlike many products, Operating Systems are products that become more valuable simply by virtue of more people using them.

Externalities frequently determine what software becomes dominant in the market. The P2P File-sharing software of 5 or 6 years ago were good examples. Technically, some P2Ps that emerged in the wake of Napster were better software. But Napster had the most users and therefore the most music, which made it the best software of it's type until it's demise. Myspace is another example- many will argue that technically, there are better social networking sites out there. But Myspace is where all your friends are, so that's likely where you'll go, too.

For a long time, people that stuck with Mac were stuck in an insular world. Much of the hot software was available for PC first, and Mac a distant second, if ever. It was an isolation few end users were willing to tolerate.

Apple's recent increase in market share -even within the lower single digits- has been an uphill battle, a hard-won fight against the gravity of Microsoft's standard. But there's a possibility that the further Mac's market share increases, things could suddenly get easier things or them.

Mac versions of software will come quicker the more Mac's market share increases. The more Macs there are in the marketplace, the more willing developers are to make Mac a priority, and the more service people and stores there are willing to support the standard. And the more that happens, the more appealing the system becomes, and the more comfortable consumers will become with switching.

In this view then, the currently surge in sales due to the ipod would not be the true tipping point for apple, but merely the long, hot fire needed to act as a catalyst and push apple past 5%. But if the Mac passes this point and continues to move toward 10% market share over the next few years, it could reach a genuine tipping point, with the Mac OS taking on a life of its own.

The Slow, Almost Imperceptibly Gradual Decline Of Microsoft

The market share of the Mac recently jumped to 4.7% from 3.6% only a year ago, a close to 30% increase in 12 months, and a 50% increase from a few years ago, and there's every indication they're building momentum. The Buzz over the new Mac OS is much stronger than the buzz was over Windows Vista (which is selling underwhelming numbers). With versions of Linux making additional gains, that brings the overall market share of non-Windows OS to about 7.5% and climbing. In a few years Windows market share could drop from what used to be total domination of the market to below 90%.

It might seem like a small number now, but it indicates a sea change, and it marks an end to Window's iron grip on it's market. 10 years ago, more or less 100% of the software people used was Microsoft. They devoured Netscape, Wordperfect, Post-Steve Jobs Apple, and pretty much every other company that dared cross their path.

But times have changed over the last 10 years. Our Search Engine is Google. Our web-based email is Yahoo mail, not the Hotmail of just 5 years ago. In growing numbers, our browser is Mozilla Firefox. And at an alarming rate, our Operating Systems are becoming OS X and Linux for many.

When Bill Gates entered the scene, the PC market was dominated by brilliant tech people with great ideas and not a lot of business acumen, and suit-and-tie corporate types like IBM that had money and ambition, but didn't have the vision required to blaze new trails. Bill Gates was vicious enough to swim with the sharks, and smart enough to know what was going on in tech-world. He took those ideas when slow-footed corporations with more money didn't see the vision, and ate everyone alive.

But times have changed. The corporations are getting more tech savvy, and the tech savvy are getting more business-oriented. Steve Jobs came back with a vengeance, and this time Apple has the business side of things down too. The Phd-types that run Google looked like Bill Gates shark-food at first, but Microsoft failed to crush them.

The Zune, the so called "ipod-killer", is dead in the water, selling far below ipod numbers. It even sells less than upstart music player Sandisk. Recently the head of the Zune department resigned. Absolutely disgraceful given Microsoft's reputation as a giant that wins every game it plays.

Microsoft is a huge corporation, a behemoth that controls large chunks of an entire industry, and even if they enter decline it'll take a decade before anyone really notices. But the days when everything Microsoft touched it destroyed are over. Consumers are more tech-savvy than they used to be, and they're starting to notice that so much of what Microsoft does is just imitations of other companies. They'll be a huge company for years to come, but things have changed. They're not the only game in town anymore.

Japanese "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad"...and Why I'm switching to Mac

Went shopping the other day and saw a Japanese version of those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads at the Mac section of a computer store. In America, they made the mac a handsome, smirking young guy and the PC a pudgy, over-40 dork. In the Japanese ads, they both look around the same age, and if anything the Mac guy is uglier than the PC guy. But the PC guy looks like a psychotically driven salary-man, and the slovenly-dressed Mac guy looks like he might actually enjoy life a little. Nice touch.

Rough translation: PC introduces himself as a computer, Mac addresses himself as a Mac (or Maaku in Japanese).
PC asks "Aren't you a computer too?" Mac says, "yeah, but people call me Mac". They decide this is because since people use Mac at home, he's like a friend. PC is envious, because he doesn't have a nickname, and all his acquaintances are business-related (by no means an unfamiliar lot in life for a lot of Japanese men).
Mac proposes that since people use him on the job, his nickname could be Work (or "Waaku" with the Japanese pronunciation, which kind of Rhymes with "Maaku" the Japanese pronun of Mac).
PC is delighted by that, and goes "Maaku!" and pats him on the back like he's down and they're good buddies.

Poor lonely, isolated, friendless salaryman PC-guy. Wouldn't you rather spurn Japanese hive-like corporate life, Hang with Mac, work at part time jobs, live in a cubicle size apartment and drink, laugh and make love?

I'm thinking about getting this imac for my next computer. I usually go for laptops because they're easy to move around and don't take up too much space, but since this thing hangs vertically, with the whole computer behind the screen, it would take up less space on my desk than my laptop does now. It uses a wireless keyboard which you can use from anywhere.

A problem with Mac used to be cost, but this is only $1000 US. Sony has a PC version with identical specs, but it's bigger, uglier and costs more like $1500. There's just no comparison. And it can load up windows too via Boot Camp or Parallels, just in case you really need it. Design, price, compatibility...what's there not to like? I'll miss the right-click button on my mouse, but it's a small price to pay.

This Blog: 1 Month In.

Well, it's been one month since I started this blog. I figured it would be a good way for my friends and family back home to see what I'm up to, and maybe the odd surfer looking for info on Japan or Fukuoka would stop by once in a while.

So far it's had a little over 1000 visits, with the traffic growing steadily every week. Based on the traffic of the past week, next month it's likely to be around two thousand more.

I don't have much info about other blogs to compare that to, and I know most websites get more traffic than that every hour (hell, every couple minutes), but it sure seems like a lot for a little personal blogger blog. Maybe that's just the scale of the internet these days.

One thing noticed is that the more out-of-the-way the topics are, the more search engines send people here. Once I wrote about the iphone and got a spike in traffic from technorati, because pretty much everyone with even a shred of info on the iphone was having readers flock to them that particular day. But quickly that post got buried by the millions of similar posts across the internet. Meanwhile, stuff I wrote about how to make Old El Paso taco spice keeps getting hit everyday. I guess there just aren't that many people writing about that topic out there.

I know this one guy who passionately writes these long political essays on his blog everyday. Do you know what his big traffic generator is, the thing his blog will be remembered for? A throwaway post he did on an eye-twitching problem he had. He figured out what causes it and a way to solve it, and people flock from all over the globe to read his wisdom, like he's the eye-twitching guru. You just never know.

Another thing I noticed...the old el paso post and some others play well everywhere, but for the most part, despite the fact that I've only written one political post so far, people that come to this blog usually seem to live in America's "blue" states, and Canada and Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway...the very socialist states that conservatives keep telling liberal Americans to move to. They also use a disproportionate number of macs, and nearly everyone uses Firefox instead of IE.

So apparently you don't necessarily need to write about Bush to get a liberal audience...you just need to write about a particular blend of Japanese pop culture, Jon Stewart, strange soda flavors and rock bands.

A Japanese Joke That's Actually Funny

So earlier I was talking about how bad Japanese jokes are. I challenged some of my students to come up with a single joke I would actually laugh at. Finally I heard one that did it, it's pretty good!

The emperor was holding court with 3 samurai, and all of them were boasting about their skill as swordsman. Gesturing toward some mosquitos that had flown into the room, the Emperor issued them a challenge. "Whoever can cut a mosquito with a single swing of his sword will be named the best swordsman in the land."

The first samurai took a swing, and cut the mosquito in two.

Not to be outdone, the second samurai swung and clipped off his mosquito's wings, leaving the body to fall to the ground.

The third samurai swung at a mosquito, but it continued to fly around the room.

The emperor said, "You appear to have missed your mark, samurai. The mosquito still flies".

"Yes, my lord," replied the samurai. "But that mosquito will never bear children."

Album Review/Preview: Arcade Fire- Neon Bible

When I went back to Canada for a visit from Japan in 2005 Arcade Fire was all over the radio, a radical and welcome change from the Mariah Carey and John Mellencamp (And that was some of the better stuff, mind you) that I recall from the Canadian radio of my youth. I heard “Rebellion” on a radio station in Toronto. Fiddles and a noodly guitar broke into the mix over the spooky, persistent baseline, and a group of background singers started chanting “naa-a-ah! Naa-a-ah!” while the lead singer wailed his heart out. It was dark, beautiful, melancholy, uplifting and ridiculously catchy all at the same time.

Arcade Fire doesn’t just make music you can like, they make music you can respect, operatic visions that win over pretty much everyone they hear. Early reports indicated their next album, Neon Bible, would take the band to even dizzier heights. They decided to produce the entire album themselves, bought an old church in Quebec to record in, got a fully functional old pipe organ to put into songs, and talked about recording additional parts with a full orchestra in Budapest.

Have they pulled it off? Hell yeah. But what really puts this album over the top is something else- Arcade Fire have always been good musicians, but on this album they’ve made great strides as songwriters. Even unfocused, their music casts a strong spell. Given a good chord progression to heap their instrumentation on, and they can work wonders. These are the kinds of songs that are so simple and powerful fundamentally that they would sound great just played by a busker on an acoustic guitar. Played by Arcade Fire, accompanied by a church pipe organ, Guitars, Violins, Choirs, and a full orchestra recorded in Budapest? Effin’ Fantastic.

Too many highlights to really choose one, though “Black Mirror” and “Intervention” definitely give a good taste of the album’s feel. Altogether the songs on Neon Bible have more backbeat and drive than Funeral. Some interesting influences come out- The tune to “The Well and the Lighthouse” sounds so much like the Pixies I was checking to see if it was a cover. At other times Win Butler sounds like he’s doing a Bruce Springsteen impression (or in modern parlance, he sounds like Brandon Flowers on the new Killers album). But everything is covered with that dark Arcade Fire gauze, and it gels great.

Standout tracks: “Intervention”, “My Body is a Cage”, “No Cars Go”…though nearly all of it is high quality

Also see: Modest Mouse review- "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"

Canned Bread...and a Special Treat

Here's a tasty Japanese snack one of my students gave me the other day. It's called Kanpan, which is an abbreviation of what translates to English as Canned bread. Sealed up, it lasts 3 years, perfect for rainy days and those desperate moments when you're hungry and realize you have no other edible substances left anywhere your house. Its dry enough to parch your mouth. Oh, but that's not all! Buried near the bottom are special treats -crystallized chunks of icing sugar! The perfect reward for a 6 year old who has just spent the past 7 hours learning to divide fractions after school. But not until you finish your canned bread, Taro!

A lot of people in Japan have memories of Kanpan from their childhood. Another of my students told me that compared to the Kanpan of her youth this stuff is relatively edible, so apparently there have been great strides in canned bread technology in recent years.

Can You Trust Bloggers?

I read about an interesting social experiment in college. A college class was told that a Professor from a neighboring university was coming to give a guest lecture on the possibilities of life existing on other planets. The speaker came, and gave some measured, reasonable arguments as to why this could be so.

Then, another class was told that one of the building’s custodians had been studying about the possibilities of life on other planets, and that he had asked to come in and give a lecture about it. Then, the same speaker, behaving the same way, delivered the same lecture again.

The results? When polled, the class that had believed him to be a Professor was 80% more likely to be open to the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. The class that believed him to be a custodian, however, was barely swayed. Their likelihood of being more open to extraterrestrial life swayed around 20-30%.

The study tells us some interesting things about human nature. We’d like to believe that we’re rational beings, and that we examine arguments and opinions by their individual merits. But in reality, characteristics of the speaker usually have as much or more to do with what we listen to. We look at clothing, body language, confidence and tone of voice. When it comes to examining the world, we look for authority figures and experts. Listening to people can have more to do with trust than it does with critical thinking.

That could be part of the reason some people are suspicious of what they read on the internet. In many cases, what worries them the most could be whether or not who wrote it qualifies as an authority.

Ideally, if you’re knowledgeable about the subject at hand, you should be able to determine whether or not the person you’re reading knows what he’s talking about pretty quickly yourself. But a lot of people want to know more about the speaker before they judge an argument’s value as an intellectual short-cut. Whenever possible, people want to classify others by their position in life, and shape their takes on what they say and do through those filters.

For a long time, doing that was tough on the net. In theory, people of every race, creed, age and color should appear equal. But as people become more net savvy, there are new distinctions being made. People are realizing that not all web pages are created equal, and that some websites carry more clout than others. They can’t judge you by what you look like, but they can judge you by where you are on the web, and blogs are on a pretty low rung.

I usually write about Japan and stuff that isn’t that controversial, but every once in a while I do an opinion piece, and a couple times I’ve gotten linked to at discussion forums (they probably found them on digg). When I check out the back-links I go in thinking everyone must love the article if it got linked, but it’s usually more of a mixed bag.

It’s interesting seeing some of the replies further down the threads by people that read my post and disagree with it. Sometimes they don’t argue against what I wrote that much. Rather than talking about the argument itself, they just bring up the fact that it was on a blog, as if that in and of itself discredits it, and use phrases like “what is it with these bloggers?”, like everyone in the world who has a blog gets together and decides what to write about and how.

The thing is, in a day and age when almost everyone under 40 has a net connection, it’s pretty difficult to typecast people who write blogs. Like people, you have to judge them individually. There are as many blogs out there as there are topics and walks of life. My favorites are written by a music journalist in New York City, a former white house aide, an English teacher in Tokyo, a guy who works at Wal-Mart, and an assortment of people who as good as they are at what they do don’t seem to do much of anything but post on the internet.

None of these people have much in common in terms of their walks in life. In most cases they don’t even write about the same things. The one thing that links them is that I find what they write really good and interesting. In most cases I didn’t know anything about their personal lives or credentials when I started reading them. It was just a matter liking what they delivered. In many cases, they were writing better stuff than anything I could find in the traditional media covering the same topics. Not because people doing news out of the traditional media are inherently better, but just because there are so many people blogging that if you use your judgment you can eventually find some great stuff out there.

Of course, if someone makes factual claims, for example, states that Barack Obama was educated at a radical Muslim school, that could involve them having some inside information you don’t, and trust is involved. But those concerns aren’t always as important when it comes to giving analysis, or examining current events. If the writer’s arguments are well thought out, and they link to the relevant evidence to support their claims, is whether or not they’re a “blogger”, or anyone else for that matter, really that important?

Karl Rove on why America Should Have Open Borders

Recently Karl Rove explained why the Bush administration is so keen on giving illegal immigrants work visas- so that no Americans will have to pick tomatoes or make beds. Basically, create a servant class that picks up after American citizens. America would become more like Saudi Arabia, where there are full citizens that enjoy rights and the best jobs, and a massive underclass that waits on them hand and foot with as few rights and for as little money as possible.

Of course, claiming to create servants for Americans doesn't explain what the Americans that already do those things for a living are going to do when illegal (well, legal) immigrants that are willing to work for well below minimum wage take their jobs.

One idea I haven't seen in the media as to why the Bush Admin might want to have open immigration- for big businesses' sake. Retailers, fast food restaurants, meat packing plants and pretty much every other business you can think of that staffs uneducated laborers would love open immigration. It would basically mark the end of minimum wage, because they could legally hire people willing to work for under it. Since immigrants aren't citizens, they wouldn't have any rights to fight for. It's a complete shunning of lower class Americans and people living near the poverty line. There would be outrage if they tried to lower minimum wage and make cheap labor more affordable. But this way, they won't even have to.

Everyone screams about cracking down on illegal immigrants and building huge gates to keep them out. Very little has been said about the businesses that keep them employed in the first place. If the law cracked down on businesses that hire these people (much easier to do), it wouldn't really matter if they could get across the border, because there wouldn't be any work for them once they got there.

Below is a great editorial against Rove's comments from none other than the National Review, William F. Buckley's ultra-conservative magazine. Never thought I'd agree with them about anything.


Not Our Kind of People [Mark Krikorian]

According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

As Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable." The farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government.

This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.

To borrow from Lincoln, our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Saudi Arabia, for instance.

02/09 11:40 AM National Review Online

Neko Hiroshi with Soran Happies- The video, with Lyrics

So here's that comedian Neko Hiroshi I wrote about earlier, whose big gimmick is raising his palms up as if they're cat claws. A Japanese para-para pop group called Soran Happies has made a video with him in it, and everyone does his cat-claw gimmick and chants "Nyah, nyah!" to the beat. Remember when on the Simpsons Bart recorded that "I didn't do it" song to cash in on his catchphrase? It's kind of like that.

The girls are magazine models put together by an agent, and most of their job is doing the para-para dance that goes with it. Incidentally one of the girls in this group comes from Fukuoka, apparently.

Here's a version which just has the girls dancing in front of a single camera. This dance is strangely mesmerizing for some reason, I've been watching it a lot-



Here's the songs's lyrics translated to English, just in case you were wondering-

(Just before the music starts they start by saying what sounds like "Listen Up!" in English)

Chorus:
YEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH-ren SORAN, SORAN-SORAN
SORAN, SORAN ([That guy Neko Hiroshi breaks in]- Hoy! Hoy! Nyah! Nyah! [That's that cat sound he does I was talking about])

Our friendship is eternal
Crying, Laughing, True Spirit!

[Bridge]: RA-TSE-RA! RA-TSE-RA! SO-RAN! SO-RAN!
RA-TSE-RA! RA-TSE-RA! SO-RAN! SO-RAN!

Telepathic Love, Bravery
Cat Spirit!

[Bridge]: RA-TSE-RA! RA-TSE-RA! SO-RAN! SO-RAN!
RA-TSE-RA! RA-TSE-RA! SO-RAN! SO-RAN!

A telepathic meeting of our thoughts and feelings
I * LOVE * YOU
Raise up and let your cat spirit burst out!

[In English: Everybody Say!!] Join your voices together- RAS-SE-RA! HAH! RAS-SERA! RAS-SE-RA!
[In English: Everybody Dance!!] Raise your hands!- RAS-SE-RA! HAH!
RAS-SERA! RAS-SE-RA!

[These parts repeat several times. Later on, you can hear Neko Hiroshi ad-lib screaming. I can't make out much of it, but he seems to be protesting because the soran happies won't leave him alone. He's so distraught that at one point he screams "Mommy!!!"]

That's about it...if you can read Japanese, here's a link to the original

Japan's Pepsi Nex, Pepsi Red and Pepsi Gold

The soda companies have put out some pretty bad products over the years (Pepsi blue, anyone?), so they should get some credit when a new product comes correct. Pepsi Nex here in Japan is a new 0-calorie cola that has all but replaced the original diet pepsi. It has a hint of lemon flavor and tastes zippy and sweet in a strangely non-fattening way. It's cola technology at it's finest.

I know that in most cases how good a soda is is a matter of taste and opinion, but those rules don't apply the same way with diet products. If you can make a diet pepsi that tastes more or less as good as the sugared version, you've pretty much won.

I was surprised that this stuff wasn't in the U.S, I figured this was one of those things that the whole world got simultaneously. But it turns out that Pepsi Nex isn't even a true Pepsi product, per se. It was actually developed and distributed by the Japanese drink company Suntory.

Here are some of Japan's other pepsi spin-offs. Here's Pepsi Red, yet another faux-pepsi developed by Suntory-

Pepsi Red is "spicy". Even people that hate it attest that it's a lot better than it's American cousin Pepsi Fire. I love it myself.

Here's Pepsi Gold, with a hint of ginger, but nowhere near the spice level of Pepsi Red. This version was also made by Suntory, although there are other versions of it sold in Southeast Asia and Russia-


Actually, there are countless varieties of Pepsi sold all over the world...even cappuccino flavored Pepsi!

Here's Pepsi Ice, a mint variety sold in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Guam. Man...if you think stuff in Japan is different, try going to Southeast Asia.



A lot of these drinks seem to get a reflex gag from most people. But they're all just water, sugary syrup and some extra flavorings...I mean come on, they're not all that different from the sodas we've grown up with. As kids, we get into the mentality that Cola, root beer, orange, lemon lime are "normal", and learn to spurn everything else.

But in other countries it's different- Japanese people didn't grow up with Root Beer or Dr.Pepper, and they all think those drinks are repulsive when they try them, far more so than the newer pepsi knock-offs. They're just not used to them. It's like someone from a far-away, horse-eating tribe going "Eeewww....you guys eat cows?"

I'm not saying all new soda flavors are good, a lot of them are mediocre and some are even pretty awful. But if you keep an open mind you might even find one you like better than the originals. Sodas are like all other foods, you're better off if you learn to try new stuff.

Japanese Comedy: catchphrase fads

Every now and then a character or catchphrase sweeps North America. Long ago it was Steve Urkel whining "Did I do that?", then it was Wayne from Wayne's World saying "...not!", and Austin Powers saying "Yeah, baby, yeah!!" The Simpsons had a good parody of it when Bart got famous just for saying "I didn't do it". For a couple weeks 12 year olds can get laughs just repeating these phrases. But eventually it peters out, people get tired of it and realize its not funny, and the character and phrase tip off into oblivion.

Japan is a country of fads. Little gestures and catchphrase aren't just an important part of their comedy, they basically are their comedy. Every comedian needs some dumb little movement and catchphrase in order to get famous. He then repeats it ad nauseum on every show he appears on right up until his 15 minutes of fame are over.

Here's a couple oldies from the recent past: Put your extended palm under your neck and say, "eye-eeeee!" like this -here's a couple of my students demonstrating-

And then? And then nothing! That's the whole joke! I asked my students what it means, and they don't know. No-one does. But for about a year everyone laughed hilariously every time someone did it. And when I brought it up to them in class the other day they laughed hard all over again, just cause it had been a while.

Another one- bend your knees a bit, and accent your crotch with an upward motion of your hands. Hilarity ensues!


Here's the latest one, from a comedian called Neko Hiroshi (also pictured above). Hold out your hands like claws and go "nyah!" like a cat, or chant "Ne-ko Hi-ro-shi!"

"Neko" means "cat", and the dude's name is Hiroshi, so it's like the equivalent of if someone was called "Kangaroo Jim", and we all chanted "Kang-ga-roo Jim! Kang-ga-roo Jim!"

Here's a video from youtube by some Japanese people that was titled, "Neko Hiroshi will be popular abroad!" (oh no he won't!) The caption reads: "utako and i told my friends about jokes of neko hiroshi who is japanese comedian!!"




Neko Hiroshi is HOT right now. People line up just to get a chance to see him raise his hands like claws and chant his own name, apparently. He recently got married. He should enjoy it while he can, cause in 6 months after the fuss around him dies down his wife is going to look at him and think, "what the hell did I do?"

I developed my own gimmick: jerk your hand back and forth like a hip hop DJ scratching a record, and in a high-pitched voice say, "wicki-wicki-wickED!" I showed it to my class and they laughed like crazy. But could I get any of them to pose doing it like the other pictures above? Not a single one.

Blog War: Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen vs. Billionaire Mark Cuban

I'm guessing you can figure out which is which...

If you don't know about bittorrent by now you probably should. For the uninitiated, it's a type of P2P (peer to peer) software that allows people to download files from one another. Unlike it's predecessor napster, there's no central server working out who goes where, and thus no-one for the music and movie industries to sue or shut down. A staggering 55 Percent of all internet traffic is due to bittorrent. It's been the entertainment industry's worst nightmare.

The programmer is a singular genius with Asperger's Syndrome (borderline autism) called Bram Cohen. Unfortunately, as great as bittorrent is, since it's mainly used for downloading stolen music and movies, there isn't much of a business model for it. Currently, Bram lives off donations from grateful downloaders. Now that bittorrent is so huge there's talk of making a legitimate model, but it's all very vague.

So billionaire Mark Cuban, who made a name for himself during the first .com boom, currently owns the Dallas Mavericks, and for reasons unbeknown to me also runs a blog, was pointing out that as great as bittorrent is, he didn't see how bittorrent could make any money here (Here's the link to the deal with Warner Bros. and bittorrent that probably got him started)

Bram Cohen, who less surprisingly has his own blog, responded here. Cuban responded under the comments, and now he's fending off snipes from bittorrent users. It's a blog war of titans!

Both are pretty snippy with one another, it would be pretty typical petty stuff on the internet if the topic wasn't so interesting and they weren't such important people in real life. My own analysis, as far as who's "Owning" who goes-

When it comes to understanding and making software, Mark Cuban is Bram Cohen's b!tch.

While Mark Cuban might not exactly be Bill Gates...When it comes to making money and getting rich off the internet, Bram Cohen remains very, very much Mark Cuban's b!tch.

Bram's a genius and he gets full respect for revolutionizing the internet...but I think Mark's point was that there isn't a viable business model that'll allow him to get rich off of it. And let's face it, as much as I wish Bram wealth and prosperity, there's a good chance he's right. Years into bitorrent's creation, he's certainly been right thus far.

Sure, Warner wants to find a way to cash in...people desperately wanted to find ways to cash into Napster and mp3.com too, but that didn't mean they could do it. The napster out today is a different company with a completely different service; they basically just bought the trademark and logo.

Update: Mark Cuban's likely right...Someone on Cohen's blog just commented that Rogers, a service provider in Canada, is now capping bittorrent traffic. If other ISPs follow suit (and there's a good chance they'll all want to, given the massive amounts of money the bandwith bittorrent uses must cost them), it could spell the end of bittorrent as we know it. Damn, they always seem to find a way to kill a good downloading service...

How IQ Affects your Job and Life Decisions

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I thought this was pretty interesting...til I did a search on it, and found that some of the people most excited about it are on a white supremacist board...and half of those losers claim to have IQs over 140, as measured by standard tests conducted by psychologists.

Them it occurred to me...everyone I know who's "smart" in the sense that they have good, high-paying jobs and are generally on top of their own shit usually seem to have IQs "only" around 110-130...that seems to be just about as smart as you really need to be to get your act together and succeed in any measurable, meaningful way on this planet.

I have one friend who has an IQ of 147. He was a Rhodes scholar, and at the age of 32 is just one job level below ambassador/diplomat in the Canadian government. But he seems to be about as smart as you can measurably be in those circles.

Everyone I know who scores higher, 160, 170, 180? They all work hourly-rate sundry jobs and spend their nights playing magic cards or buffing up on military history. Every now and then you hear about a genius that got chaperoned through school, and now crunches numbers up at NASA, but that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

A prof at a workshop I took in Osaka this fall was talking about this brilliant, off the chart student she had that graduated from Tokyo University, did some mind boggling computer programming for her, and then gave it all up to become a train conductor. My Dad's an English prof- he told me the most brilliant student he ever had now works as a cashier at a cigar shop.

According to this chart, they're all CEOs or working in think-tanks determining how you and other mortals should live your lives. Where's the part of the chart that shows all the guys with high IQs that live with their moms and work as night watchmen?

Fukuoka Blogs and Bloggers- Anyone out there?

Recently it seems like every foreigner in Japan with a net connection has a blog. Some, like gaijinsmash and that one by the JET that keeps getting kanchoed, even get big traffic. There are lists and entire sites dedicated to blogs by ex-pats in Japan.

But you know something funny? Despite the fact that this city has a huge expat community, arguably one of the highest per capita in the country, I can't seem to find a single other english-language blog coming out of Fukuoka by an ex-pat.

I've come close..there's a guy called Yvonne with a well-indexed blog that comes up as soon as you type "fukuoka" into google blog...only problem is it's all in French. If you click on the expat-blogs link to the right and go to the asia directory, you can find a good one from a girl called Charity living out in the surrounding countryside. But nothing out of the city.

One thing I'm realizing, though...even if they're out there, for some reason they're hella hard to find. I know, because when it comes to searching for Fukuoka-related stuff, I can't even find my own. My blog already comes up on the first page of google and google blog for a number of random, out-of-the-way topics. But if I try to find it by typing in the word "fukuoka" it's no-where to be found. Every track meet, every art exhibit, every dental conference that's ever been held here comes flooding through the search results randomly and meaninglessly, burying whatever else is out there. At best you can find blogs by people that took a trip out here and stopped by the city for a weekend. But nothing by anyone that lives out here, as far as I can tell.

Going through the stats I notice there are some people from around Fukuoka and the surrounding area that read this, though..any of you guys know of any other blogs from around here?

Around Fukuoka- Momochi & Canal City Edition

In my mind Fukuoka is the best, most under-rated city in Asia. The largest city on one of Japan's most remote and southern-most islands, Kyushu, it consistently gets noted in newspaper and magazine studies as the best and most liveable city in Asia in terms of cleanliness, conveniences and cost of living, and yet it barely seems to register as a blip on the international radar. In some ways that's good...helps keep the property values low. But it's a shame more people don't know about it.

In Japan, Tokyo and Osaka get top billing as cities to live in. For nightlife, Fukuoka can't hold a candle to either of these places. But as great as Tokyo and Osaka are for the weekend, they're generally pretty horrible places to live by any other measure. Massively overcrowded and expensive, they're these sprawling, endless, suffocating messes of concrete and steel. Great to visit, not so great to live in.

In contrast, Fukuoka is a place you can actually live. It has all the amenities of a decent sized city of 1.5 million and a surrounding area of 5 million- subways, good restaurants, more or less everything available for sale in Japan is represented. But unlike most urban areas, it's uncrowded and full of trees.

To start the tour off, here's my living room, where I'm writing this post. I'm located on a hill near the city center. Outside, it looks like the country, but as soon as I head down the hill I'm back in the middle of town.
It's an old 2 bedroom place (34 tatami mats for people who know what that means) on the fifth floor of a building on a hilltop, all for 60,000 a month, or $600 canadian. I know there are some great places in Tokyo if you have the money, but they're well out of range for all but the richest of people. In Fukuoka you can actually afford to live somewhere like this.

Next up, here's some pictures of Momochi, the area by the city beach. The international school I work at isn't too far from here...that's Fukuoka Tower in the back.

Here's the town museum, just south of where the first picture was taken
Here's some shots of that area from further along the hills I live on. Click to enlarge...you can see the ocean and the island Nokonoshima behind the tower.


Just 30 minutes drive west of that area, and you're out of the city and along sunset road, with beaches like this-
Yanked from google- an picture of a lantern festival in momochi...
Finally, some shots of Canal City, Fukuoka's wonky mall. Great place to shop and hang out, The first picture is mine, the bottom two are googled...

Book Review: "Hokkaido Highway Blues" aka "Hitching Rides with Buddha" by Will Ferguson

This is the story of a Canadian that hitch-hikes across Japan, South to North, to follow the cherry blossoms.

Technically, this is a review, but my since my life owes an almost embarrassingly large debt to this book it actually also borders on confession. For a period of a couple years I basically stalked Will Ferguson's old hitch-hiking routes.

I first came across this book in the ultra-conservative prefecture of Niigata. I opened it randomly to a page in which the author insults a drunk in a bar who shouts at him "Japan number 1!" by insinuating that he looks Korean. "Memoirs of a Geisha" it was not.

Still, the book pulled me in, in the end because of it's gritty, vaguely lowbrow attitude rather than despite it. As much as I had liked Japan, outside of maybe the seedier parts of Tokyo it hadn't struck me as a place where one could go off on wild adventures. It's a very quiet, controlled, conservative country for the most part. Hitchhiking across the country seemed to offer a kind of freedom I hadn't really experienced here yet.

Finally, I decided to travel down to Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island, where Ferguson had started his journey and had had some of his more colorful experiences, to do some hitch-hiking of my own. It was a whole new world!

Niigata city and the surrounding area had been damp, dark, and it had rained for what seemed like half the year. The whole area was covered with rice paddies and power lines, and it's beaches smothered and tamed with tetrapods to prevent soil erosion. The entire place, while still bland and essentially rural, seemed to have been urbanized within an inch of its life, a small patch of trees nary to be found. This, and the obviously much more urbanized Tokyo, had been the Japan I knew.

In contrast Kyushu was bursting with life, literally, as far as the nature went. The hills radiated luminescent shades of yellow and green. The first ride I hitched was with a German guy and a Canadian guy. They took me to a great beach, we met some Japanese people and headed up to the German guy's house, a spanish style place with a Jacuzzi and Sauna overlooking the beach on a hill, and drank and partied through the night. The following day I hitched through Kagoshima, then I headed back north through Nagasaki, then east to Oita. My head pulsed from speaking and navigating in Japanese at first, but I gradually began to get the hang of it, and found myself interacting with the country and society in a way I never had before. It was great!

I left Japan shortly after, but after a year decided I wanted to go back to Kyushu. I settled in the largest city, Fukuoka, eventually found a real job and have been here ever since. I still hitch-hike when my University is on break, I even did a trip up to Hokkaido and back.

Upon returning to Kyushu, I went to Amakusa, a remote island south of Nagasaki where Ferguson had lived, and wound up at a barbecue on the beach. I met a girl in her early 30's who had dated a foreigner 10 years prior, and known most of the Jets in the area. She remembered Will Ferguson! Said he was a really funny guy, but couldn't believe it when I told her he had since become a bestselling author. True story.

Buy it here.

Look closely...Can you spot what's odd about this building?

You might have to open the photos in larger windows and zoom in to see it, but there's something a little off about this 10-story building in downtown Fukuoka. Aside from the clover motif cast into the stone, that is.

Give up? Okay, I'll spill...the entire thing -all 10 floors, mind you, corners, walls, windows and balconies alike- are covered in a fine net mesh.

I've seen net mesh over balconies before from time to time, but over the entire building, windows and all? It's as if a giant came by and put an enormous hairnet over it.

BONUS SHOT: So later on the same day I notice that the trees in front of this hospital have been netted up the same way, you can see it if you open the window and look closely. Why? My only guess is so that when the leaves fall off in the fall, they won't get on the sidewalk and make a "mess". Japan's cities: so incredibly clean that they often feel sterile.

Japan's Mega Mac is...just a Double Big Mac!

So by now you might have heard of Japan's overwhelmingly popular Mega Mac, a big mac with 4 patties. Despite Japan's normally lean diet the burger has been selling like crazy, even bringing on a meat shortage for McDonald's. The U.S news reported on it, and a lot of burger aficionados seem jealous, and are wondering why Japan got it first.

Usually I don't eat big macs, but there are two situations where I crave McDonalds in large quantities, when I've got a hangover and when I'm sick. I've been sick all week, so I figured the fat boost might actually do me some good.

It looks and tastes pretty much like you'd expect it to...it's a big mac with 4 patties. Not only that, but while I ate it I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd had it before.

Then I recalled, only vaguely, eating something called something like a "double big mac" when I was 18 back in Canada. It hadn't seemed like a big deal, in fact I'm pretty sure it's a regular offering, or at least was for a while.

Checked out wikipedia...not only am I right, but it turns out Double/Mega big macs have been marketed all over the place. Who would've thought the U.S.A would be one of the only countries to get shortchanged over this?

Can Microsoft's planned Zune Phone compete with the Apple iphone?

Rumor has it that the planned Zune smartphone will interact with the Zune Marketplace, have wireless transmission from the Xbox 360, and run an OS similar to the current Zune.

The kicker is that they plan to release it for the 2007 holiday season! 10 months is short notice for designing any cell phone, let alone a revolutionary ipod/iphone rival.

I doubt it'll be as good as the iphone...apple spent years on their phone, and accumulated hundreds of patents. It'll be loaded with a touchscreen, accelerometer and other good stuff.

Can Microsoft throw together a decent zune phone in 9 months? Probably..but can they come up with a revolutionary new smart phone that beats everything else out there by miles, which is basically what it'll take to compete against the iphone? That's a tall order for anyone, let alone in 10 months. My guess is they'll be playing catch-up just to come up with something decent.

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but I think it's worth pointing out that their most recent products have all been less than spectacularly successful. There were few if any line-ups for the release of Windows Vista the other night, as people heeded expert's advice to just wait until they buy their next computer.

And despite the hype, Zune has been a big disappointment. When it was released, the media heralded it as the "number 2 music player". Yeah, right behind ipod video 60GB white, ipod video 30GB black, ipod nano 2BG black, and so on and so on, all the way down to a rank of 15-21 in electronics.

Currently, the Zune in its various colors rank somewhere between #100 - #151 in electronics at Amazon, while the various ipod offerings all hover near the top of the chart. Zune can't even claim to be #2 at a distance anymore. Starting at #27, Sandisk players are apparently selling far more, as are other offerings from creative and Toshiba. So Zune isn't even doing well in it's own market.

Recently, the head of the Zune division resigned, and their hardware division has taken a $200M loss.

The higher up you go, the longer it takes to fall back down. Microsoft is such a behemoth that even the total failure of the Zune wouldn't do much more than create a blip on their stock one quarter. But let's face it- if a smaller company had put it out, they would have lost their shirt by now. They might be the biggest company in computers for another decade to come, but if they keep under-performing like this, it could wind up being by a much smaller margin in the long run.