I think Late Night with Conan O'Brien has gotten kind of boring over the last couple years, but this is a classic, nutso Conan sketch, exactly the type of thing that made me love the show back in college. I love the way he says sicker and sicker stuff with total glee.
UPDATE: I've actually tried this stuff.
Coming soon to Japan: Ice Cucumber Pepsi. Exactly what they're thinking still isn't clear. They might mean "Ice" as in "Ice Pepsi", which went on sale in southeast Asia as a mint-flavored variety. And "cucumber" likely means, well, cucumber. But that just confuses things even more.
Mint, Cucumber and Pepsi together at last? What the hell? Someone pointed out that while it sounds strange, peanut butter and celery actually mix quite well, so maybe this will too. But I'm still not convinced.
A Japanese blog pointed out that as odd as the green color is at first, it's the same as melon soda, which is already on sale and popular here. They also mentioned some kind of wive's tale that when dipped with honey, cucumber tastes a lot like melon. So maybe it's just a fancy phrasing for melon pepsi.
Part 2
Part 3
About a month ago I wrote put up this post with a video of Scientologists flipping out on a guy with a camera trying to do a (unfavorable) TV docudrama on them. It was a good example of how aggressive they are toward anyone who says anything negative about their organization publicly. They do everything they can to harass and silence critics, digging up and making public any negative information about their past, however irrelevant, and stalking them as an intimidation tactic.
The BBC attempted to do a documentary on them for the investigative journalism show Panorama, and bumped up against the same resistance. The Church decided to "fight fire with fire" by following the BBC around with their own cameras, to document everything THEY did (They've since released 100,000 copies of their own counter-documentary). Of course, the BBC filmed that too, creating something of a house of mirrors. The harassment prevented them from finishing a comprehensive study on the cult...but the footage of the clashes they had with them make for a riveting example of the kind of treatment Scientology gives it's critics.
Make sure to check out parts 2 and 3, it gets better and better.
(Note: I'll use the Canadian dollar as a point of comparison for this post. For a rough estimation of US prices, deduct ten percent from the Canadian quote, and watch prices get even lower).
Most people's image of Japan is of a ridiculously expensive country, where a coffee costs 9 dollars and a room the size of a large closet runs for thousands.
I arrived here long after the 80's bubble burst, but even when I first came here early 2001, 100 yen still went for 1.30, making travel to Japan quite expensive, and earning money here to send home quite lucrative.
But times have changed. The yen per 100 is actually lower than the Canadian dollar now, which means I lose 10% of my money when I travel home. And last year Tokyo got knocked down 2 places on the list of world's most expensive cities, losing it's status as number one and going all the way down to third.
But even if Tokyo can still be characterized as expensive, it's misleading to use it as a barometer for life around the country as a whole- doing that would be like judging US real estate prices by looking at rates in New York City. Life outside the city center is far cheaper. I live in Fukuoka, a city of about 1.5 million with a surrounding area of 4.5 million. But even in an area as urban as this with a strong local economy, prices are low.
As Japan's overall economy has levelled off, so have it's prices relative to the rest of the world. Slowly Japan, a country that almost used to pride itself on high prices, is taking to bargains and demanding more for its money. Dollar stores filled with cheap Chinese merchandise have become popular, providing everyone with basic household needs at rock-bottom prices. Chains now offer cheap haircuts for 1000 yen ($9.00 Canadian), a drastic fall from the 4000 yen norm of yesteryear.
Real estate is at an all time low too. An old house can now be bought for $100,000 CAN outside Fukuoka, unheard of even in most rural Canada these days. And while it's true that many apartments remain very small, they remain cheaper than Canadian rents when you calculate the price per square foot. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a 2-bedroom condo can run $850-900 a month in rent. In Fukuoka, a much larger city in Japan, I pay about 600 for a two-bedroom apartment in a 30 year old building, parking included. Even a newer place wouldn't cost much more than the Halifax rate.
Japan has gone through stagflation since I arrived. Many prices are the same now as they were 10 years ago. But with inflation continuing to raise prices in other parts of the world, the formerly high prices don't look so bad.
A good example is the cost of soda. It ran for 120 yen (about $1.08 CAN) for a can and 147 yen ($1.32) for a 500ml bottle at convenience stores when I first came here. Reasonable at the time, even given the fact the value of the yen was higher.
Since then, though, prices have continued to go up in Canada, but those prices remain the same in Japan, and now look cheap in comparison.
From my perspective, now that it's looking like I'll be here for the long term, all this is actually a good thing. Usually, cheaper prices mean lower salaries, meaning things even out. But I make a lot more money here than I ever did in Canada, and since the tax rate is so low here I get to keep a lot more of it than I would back. So not only is my cost of living lower, but my net income is a good deal higher too, even given the new exchange rate. But for better or for worse, Japan is not what it used to be.
Click the picture to enlarge.
I can't stand the RIAA and the lawsuits they're taking against their own customer to try to stop downloading...but there's no denying it, people just aren't buying CDs anymore. No wonder they're so terrified and desperate. The majority of people that buy music in large numbers are young people under 25, and those are the people doing all the downloading. iTunes and other digital sales online help, but they don't come anywhere close to making up for the losses in sales.
The common argument online is that CDs aren't selling because the music that the industry puts out sucks. But come on, look at the titles that were doing big numbers back in 1997 and 2002...does anyone really think Nickelback deserved to sell twice as much as Justin Timberlake? Or that Creed should have sold triple the numbers of Dreamgirls? Top 40 music of five and ten years ago sucked just as bad as today's variety. If anything, it was worse.
(Just to get it over with- in Japan when I mention my gay friend, people here ask, "So does that mean you're gay?" For the record, no).
I worked with David at a CIBC banking call center back in Canada around 2000. We moved to the night shift and did customer service and sales for President's Choice Financial, the best free bank in Canada run out of a supermarket Click here if you're confused).
David was an interesting guy. I feel a little weird writing his life story even with his blessing, but in a nutshell he had been born in California to a single doctor mother that had warned him about the evils of women from an early age. Around the age of 14 he moved to Nova Scotia to live with his estranged father, but it was only a matter of time before his dad picked up on the fact he was gay and kicked him out of the house. He lived on the street for a while, crashed with friends and eventually finished high school. He started working at CIBC at the age of 19- actually a pretty good job for a young person by Nova Scotia standards.
There was a lot of camaraderie on the night shift. Neither of us (hell, more or less none of us) were where we wanted to be in life, but looking back our shared cubicle at CIBC was a good pit stop on the way. He told me all about his visit to Japan a few years earlier, and when another friend hooked me up with a free stand-by ticket to anywhere in the world, it was David that convinced me to go there for a visit instead of Europe. So there's a good chance I wouldn't even be here if I hadn't met him when I did.
Anyway, I lost touch with him after a while, and recently found him again on facebook. Shortly after I left he went to college and got a degree in costume design. Now he's head Tailor at a ritzy store in Vancouver, and just wrapped up shooting for a CBC docu-drama to air in September called Tailor-made. On top of that he just got a job offer in London, England, so it looks like his career trajectory is still headed upward. I was really happy to hear how well everything worked out for him. Being in that banking call center together had been like being stuck in the trenches together during a war. So finding out he got out alive was a real relief.
His role on a TV show doesn't even come as a surprise, really. New times and events, same old David.
I've always been a little ambivalent about IQ. On one hand, I've liked to think I'm a pretty smart guy, and that I'd do well on any tests thrown my way. I have friends with IQ's of 140-150 that say, "Hell, you're as smart as/smarter than me! I'll bet you'd do great!"
On the other, I've been skeptical about IQ tests, and more to the point, skeptical about my ability to do well on them. I've secretly worried that if I ever got a real IQ test, it would be dismally, disappointingly low. So I was happy to just not have it tested, and remain a legend in my own mind.
But it turns out that without knowing it I already took one. To matriculate into Graduate school I took the Millers Analogies Test (MAT) which can be used as an IQ test of sorts. The analogies are stuff like: Mozart is to composing as Monet is to _____. a)eating b)painting c)dental hygiene, etc.
Pretty easy in theory right? But most of the analogies are more like this-
UNION JACK : VEXILLOLOGY
toad : ornithology
turtle : microbiology
gymnosperms : botany
friend : home economics
algae : zoology
So basically, if you don't know what vexillology is (and I sure don't- Hell, neither does the spell checker on this browser), then you're screwed. When I did the test the analogies were quite simple. My problem was general (and not so general) knowledge. Simply put, if you don't know the trivia, you can't do the analogies.
Some psychometricians distinguish between "crystallized" intelligence- having a broad cultural knowledge of historical facts, vocabulary, etc, that gives them advantages in many types of tests, and "fluid" intelligence, which is more of a general inferential process. Fluid intelligence is measured by tests with as little cultural bias as possible, and in theory would be just as easy for a person with a disadvantaged childhood, or even someone that doesn't speak English, as it would be for someone prepped all their lives for academic success.
Grady Towers, who wrote the article about High IQ people I posted a while back, complained that most of the high-IQ societies he belonged to were of the "crystallized" IQ variety, and that their members always seemed more interested in nit-picking various facts than in formulating new ideas or adding insights of their own (Towers tested well on both types of tests, though he preferred the company of people with "fluid" IQ).
While the MAT purports to test people's ability to draw abstract analogies, a tremendous amount of it relies on general historical and scientific knowledge. I know people that do really well at games like Trivial Pursuit, and always seem to know precisely what civilization had the run of central America in the 1400's, the name of the guy that invented the vacuum cleaner, and other stuff that comes in really handy when you do a test like the MAT. I'm not one of those people. I've always sucked at stuff like Jeopardy, so there was no way I was going to do well on this.
Despite getting matriculated okay, my score never arrived for some reason, and I let it go...but then Nick at Brighten College (one of the places I work) took the test for the program too, and got into the 98th percentile, good enough to get into MENSA. When I found out about his results I had to see my own.
Turns out I'm a stinking, like, 80th percentile of people applying to grad school, meaning I did better than 79% of people that took the test and worse than 19%. Not bad at all, the program director assured me. Pretty good, even...but it makes for a pretty mediocre genius. Translated into IQ points, that percentile works out to a lowly 110-115 (Nick would be a little above 130 using this measure).
The only consolation is that generally, IQ is supposed to test the population at large, with people with IQs of 60 being very, very slow (to the point of being unable to function in a basic way) and people with IQs of 140 being very, very bright, etc.
But the MAT is usually only taken by people trying to get into graduate school, which means they've already finished college and gotten B.A's- only about 20-25% of the population. So under that scale, a person with an "Imbecile" IQ of 30 or 40, who in the general population probably wouldn't even be able to talk, would still be a college graduate, and a guy with an "average" score would still be smarter than about half of the nation's college graduates that pursue higher education -a pretty strong average (hard as it is to believe, I just read that even today the average person doesn't finish college). So given that, if I took a general IQ test it would probably be a fair bit higher. Suppose that generally, only the top 50 percentile of the population took the test to begin with. That would put me up to the 90th percentile, for example.
As better as it makes me feel, That's all just rationalization though. And anyway, if 80th percentile translates to a much better general IQ score, where the heck does that put Nick? Rock on, Mensa Boy.
