First I thought it had hit full stride when the parents danced around the kid and sang as he urinated. Then I thought the peak was when they did the same thing as the kid gritted his teeth and squeezed out a dump. The part where the freed turd giggles coyly as it splashes about in the toilet bowel is also a contender. But all told I think the ending is the real topper.
Remember in the 90's when there was a remake of Romeo and Juliet, where the sets where modern, but they still used the original script of old English? Sukiyaki Western, a Japanese reamke of the "spaghetti western" Django, looks like it'll deal with those types of juxtapositions.
It's a Western with Japanese actors delivering their lines in English. Some sound fluent, some sound like they barely understand what they're saying. In costume everyone dresses the part. But despite the dust and horses, all the sets indicate its set in Japan, about 1000 years ago.
They even got Quentin Tarantino to play a small part. I'll bet that cost them more than the budget for the rest of the movie. Opens September 15th here in Japan, no word on a North American release date yet.
Is it just me, or is it just astonishing how good Feist is right now? If you're reading this from Canada you might be used to her by now, but here in Japan I'm just hearing it for the first time, and she's already a contender for one of my favorite singers anywhere.
What's really weird is I met her several years back, and she appeared to be a perfectly normal human being. I had no idea.
Bonus: Featuring the dancing of Buck 65/Stinkin' Rich
Bonus 2: Live
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
So now Mitt Romney is trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the tale, in fact, of American politics past and future, and the ultimate reason Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority was a foolish fantasy.
Willie Horton, for those who don’t remember the 1988 election, was a convict from Massachusetts who committed armed robbery and rape after being released from prison on a weekend furlough program. He was made famous by an attack ad, featuring a menacing mugshot, that played into racial fears. Many believe that the ad played an important role in George H.W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis.
Now some Republicans are trying to make similar use of the recent murder of three college students in Newark, a crime in which two of the suspects are Hispanic illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo flew into Newark to accuse the city’s leaders of inviting the crime by failing to enforce immigration laws, while Newt Gingrich declared that the “war here at home” against illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And Mr. Romney, who pretends to be whatever he thinks the G.O.P. base wants him to be, is running a radio ad denouncing New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants, an implicit attack on Mr. Giuliani.
Strangely, nobody seems to be trying to make a national political issue out of other horrifying crimes, like the Connecticut home invasion in which two paroled convicts, both white, are accused of killing a mother and her two daughters. Oh, and by the way: over all, Hispanic immigrants appear to commit relatively few crimes — in fact, their incarceration rate is actually lower than that of native-born non-Hispanic whites.
To appreciate what’s going on here you need to understand the difference between the goals of the modern Republican Party and the strategy it uses to win elections.
The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist once put it, is to get America back to the way it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over,” getting rid of “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”
But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party’s electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity.
Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.
In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.
But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply, America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration. Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in 1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 — and that number will keep rising for the foreseeable future.
Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From their point of view, it’s us versus them — and everyone who looks different is one of them.
So now we have the spectacle of Republicans competing over who can be most convincingly anti-Hispanic. I know, officially they’re not hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but that’s a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes seriously.
Today’s G.O.P., in short, is trapped by its history of cynicism. For decades it has exploited racial animosity to win over white voters — and now, when Republican politicians need to reach out to an increasingly diverse country, the base won’t let them.
Last week,with my soul crushed from the drudgery of marking papers, I decided to put work aside and do a hitch-hiking trip through southern Japan and on to Okinawa. The last time I did this I crashed in 24-hour Net Cafes, which were trying to keep customers coming through the night by offering discounted rates for long lumps of time. The computers are partitioned by little cubicles, and the seats are usually lazy-boys, so in a pinch they can double as cheap places to sleep.
It had been a while since I had done that, and I was wondering if the cafes had done something to close that loophole and rid themselves of such people. To the contrary- net cafes are catering to the overnight market, and now seem to be a very popular accommodation for kids 17-25.
When I arrived around 10PM, the place was packed with teenagers and college kids getting ready to settle into their internet/gaming cubicles for the night. I rented this little cubicle for 12 hours for 1900 yen, or about $16. It has satellite TV, a DVD player, and a computer with high speed internet (I downloaded the latest Daily show at a rate of about 2 MB/s). You can also rent units with XBox 360s, Nintendo Wii's, or Playstation 3's.
Its a bit bigger than it looks here- its about the size of two tatami mats, and can fit two people. There's a little phone on one side, that allows you to order little snacks and beer. You can sit cross legged on the mats and play games/surf the net, or put your legs under the computer, lie down and sleep. Note the entrance with slippers. The whole area is darkly lit, with soft lullaby music piped in.
Other facilities-
Library with hundreds of DVDs, thousands of Manga titles, and magazine rack:
Shower. Take one before you go to bed though- in the morning there's usually a one-hour wait.
Jet-streamed foot bath
"Sauna Dome"..didn't try this one.
So last week I posted about Kayne's own hitch-hiking trip to Nagoya, about 800-900 km from Fukuoka. You can read about it in one of the previous posts, and read his own details in the comments.
He made it fine and had a great time. But the other day in Nagoya, as he rode into town to drop off resumes and find work there...the chain of his bicycle came loose, and he fell and broke his jaw in two places! He can't talk for two weeks and has it wired shut.
It sounds awful. He's had a really positive attitude about it, and from the sound of things will be fine. Get better soon Kayne!
Head of a Yakuza gang was shot here in Fukuoka city Saturday night. Hours later, the head of the rival gang was shot in the neighboring prefecture, Kumamoto.
Shooting One, Fukuoka
Shooting Two, the payback in Kumamoto
This could be the start of a major turf war in this area. I heard it's dangerous to go to certain parts of town where the various gangs hold fort, because something else might "go down".
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your father’s political campaign.
Last week, at one of Mitt Romney’s “Ask Mitt” forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.
The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. “It’s remarkable how we can show our support for our nation,” he said, “and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president.”
Wow. The important point isn’t the fact that Mr. Romney’s sons aren’t in uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe that we’re engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is, instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.
Yet the week’s prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P. nomination.
Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports that he insisted that the city’s emergency command center — which included a personal suite with its own elevator that he visited “often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced” — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center, an obvious potential terrorist target.
At the same time, Mr. Giuliani is being attacked for his failure to take adequate precautions to protect those who worked on the cleanup at ground zero from the hazards at the site. Many workers have since been sickened by the dust and toxic materials.
For a politician whose entire campaign is based on the myth of his leadership that fateful day — as The Onion put it, Mr. Giuliani is running for “president of 9/11” — anything that challenges his personal legend is a big problem. So here’s what Mr. Giuliani said last week in response: “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”
Real ground zero workers, who were digging through the toxic rubble while Mr. Giuliani held photo ops, were understandably outraged. So the next day Mr. Giuliani tried to recover, claiming that “what I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same risk.” But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can all watch Mr. Giuliani’s actual demeanor as he delivered the original remarks. Empathy had nothing to do with it.
What’s striking about these unintentional moments of self-revelation is how much Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani sound like the current occupant of the White House.
It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: “As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch.”
What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.
This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.
To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should “double Guantánamo,” or Mr. Giuliani’s dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a “Democratic, liberal assumption.”
So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to further their personal ambitions. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn that these men are monstrously self-centered.
All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?
Liberals like Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war saying that deposing Hussein would be the easy part, but that figuring out what to do afterward would be a nightmare and result in a Quagmire, costing the US endless resources and lives.
Who knew that Dick Cheney, of all people, completely agreed? Here's a clip of Cheney explaining why invading Iraq would be a disaster...in 1994.
It's funny...up until now, most of us have assumed that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld deluded themselves about how easy Iraq would be, and are now too proud to admit their mistake.
But now, hearing Cheney speak so lucidly about all the problems this would cause, another possibility becomes clear. Maybe they knew how ugly this would be from day one...and decided to do it anyway.
In this clip, he talks about how deposing Saddam wouldn't be worth the American lives it would cost. But with Oil prices sky-high and billions being made by Halliburton, I guess he decided it was worth sending a few thousand soldiers to die over. And what's a trillion dollars when the taxpayers are footing the bill?
It seems like there's very little these guys won't do to get their hands on oil. It's like that joke on the Onion- "People say 'No Blood for Oil'...But wait a minute, just how much oil are we talking about here?"
As I mentioned last week I met blog reader Kayne, who's leaving Japan soon. He wanted to travel to Nagoya on the cheap, and the prospect of hitch-hiking like I did in these types of stories came up. He decided to make the plunge and just a couple days later he set off on his maiden voyage...an 800km trip all the way to Nagoya! He's even crashing in net cafes and capsule hotels, hard core all the way.
His first night his driver made a detour to a Taeko drumming concert, and the next day his drivers took him to a Zen Temple to meditate...basically, the kind of wish-list cultural stuff everyone wants to do when they come to Japan, but rarely actually get to. Now it's all falling in his lap, and for free. Tonight he's in Hiroshima, and tomorrow he'll head to Osaka via the expressway, maybe hit up Kyoto or Nara...(at least that's what I suggested- I get messages from him by cell phone and live vicariously through him by texting him hitching advice and suggesting plans, while I sit at home boringly marking endless papers).
It's funny, another blog reader Gabriel will stop by next week and was wanted some travel advice here. Best advice I can give is Hitch-hike- it rules! [Well, that, and don't forget sunscreen...right Kayne? ; ) ]
Yesterday I finished the last class of my last course at Temple University Japan for my Masters degree, and today I sent off my final papers.
Things have been mellow there, and the prof JD Brown has taught a really easygoing class, which was good for the summer...but I was talking to the other grads and we agreed, it's been a little anticlimatic. No big bang or climax, just all of the sudden it's done.
In a way I don't really feel like it's over, though. As far as an academic career goes it's really just getting started. I'm authoring/preparing three different publications right now (Vocabulary research, Classroom Management and Computer-assisted extensive reading), and planning two others. Temple taught me how to do this, now the real work begins...
Well, "featured" I don't know...but I was just checking out the trailer for the new Leonardo DiCaprio-hosted documentary about global warming, The 11th Hour, and you can see a clip of Fukuoka's own Acros building at the 50' mark on the counter!
The Acros building is a building downtown which has trees all down one side, making it look like an enormous hill slope from the back. Pictures here.
Met longtime blog reader Kayne today (Well, longtime considering its only existed since January, anyway). Kind of funny...I'd start talking about making Mexican taco spice, or hitch-hiking in Japan, and he'd keep going "Oh yeah, I remember when you wrote about that on your blog!"
Recently I also met Nick Szaz, the editor of the foreigner magazine in this city Fukuoka Now. He had stumbled onto this blog by sheer chance, and emailed me asking if I wanted to do some work. In the interview he told me he felt like he basically already knew what I was all about just by reading this blog (I'll probably have some freelance work in there in the near future, if you're wondering).
Anyway, its interesting how the blog has connected me with various people, both online and in the flesh around Fukuoka. Typing away on a computer is a pretty solitary activity, so its funny to realize how many people are learning about me in the process. I meet them for the first time, and they already know all about me.
Some people have "Summer reading", pulp-type suspense novels or what have you that they would normally never have the time to get around to. In lieu of that I've got summer TV. Due to the re-releases on DVD and, uh, other technology, I now have access to classic action shows of the 1980's that thrilled me as a 7-year-old child. Now with the enlightenment of semi-adulthood I can see these shows for what they really are, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Some thoughts...
MacGyver-
If you're too young to remember MacGyver first hand, you might remember it as the show Marge's sisters Selma and Thelma worship in old Simpsons re-runs. (Definitely not something that helped it's cool quotient).
Basically, MacGyver was about a secret agent with the touch of a handyman. Using only his Swiss Army knife, some duct-tape, and whatever random tools he could find lying around (cans of paint, rope, trashbags, etc), he would rig up all kinds of ingenious rube-goldberg-style contraptions to get him and whoever he was saving that episode out of sticky situations. Conveniently, many of the binds he found himself in involved the bad guys capturing him and locking him in an unsupervised room full of all kinds of useful junk.
That totally kicks ass...in theory. But in many cases the contraptions were just so corny they weren't very exciting. The inventions were just realistic enough that it seemed like the scriptwriters were trying to convince you they would work in real life, but preposterous enough that you just want to role your eyes and go, "Oh please. Do you really expect us to believe that would work?"
One episode I watched he escaped from captors by blowing a medical syringe full of tranquilizer through a makeshift peashooter made out of paper. The syringe flew, like, 20 feet, hit the armed guard straight in the jugular and took him out. WTF?
Macgyver never just solved problems with guns, that would be too easy. He and some beautiful woman would be trapped in a house as guys armed with UZI submachine guns stormed in to get them. He would manage to quietly take one of them out, and his gun would fall to the floor...and MacGyver would just leave it there, and go back to hunting down the rest armed only with a fire-extinguisher, kitchen bleach, and the remains of an old radio.
The A-Team
The A-Team was a little before my time. If you're not familiar with it, you're at least familiar with one of its stars, Mr.T.
The A-Team involved a crack team of commandos during the then-more-recent Vietnam war, that were "imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit". They escaped, and began lives as soldiers-of-fortune, helping out anyone with a problem that could pay their high fees. All the while, the military and police chase them as fugitives.
Every member had his own specialty they included-
Hannibal- the leader, pictured above. He came up with the teams' zany strategies, and was also a master of disguise, which came in handy. In the picture above he's pulling off his caddy disguise and holding up a corrupt general on a golf course.
Mr T/B.A Baracus- The strongman of the group. When it came to hand-to-hand combat, T was the team's point man. He would throw suckers through walls. He was also the team's driver, and a skilled mechanic, and could whip up armored cars out of scrap parts. Kind of like a poor man's MacGyver, but tougher and much more violent.
Murdoch- Murdoch was an expert airplane and helicopter pilot and considered one of the best in the military. He was also batshit crazy, and the actor that plays him was really annoying. Additionally, Murdoch could also whip together some crazy Macgyver-type inventions. In one of the first episodes, he broke him and his friends out of prison by rigging up hot-air balloons out of trashbags, The team just floated right out of the cell yard.
Dirk Benedict- I might be confusing his real name with the character's name. At any rate, this guy was a lovable conman that attracted women by posing as neurosurgeons, TV executives and fashion designers. This didn't do the team much good, but it helped give some comedy relief at the beginnings and endings of episodes.
The A-Team rocks! The whole thing plays like a live-action comic book. Unlike MacGyver, it doesn't even pretend to have dramatic undertones, or try to convince you that anything going on the screen is even half-way realistic. That opens the show up to all kinds of great stuff. If you're going to cross the lines of believability, you might as well stomp all over it. In one episode, the team warded off a militia attacking the compound they were holed up in by rigging up a makeshift tank out of scrap auto parts that shot dynamite sticks out of a wooden cannon...and they threw it together in under 2 hours. Thats just awesome.
Another advantage the A-Team has over MacGyver is that they use guns. Almost every episode seemed to involve a AK-47 shoot-out in which the teams faces off against about twice as many guys, and bullets fly all over the place. And yet no-one ever seems to get killed, or even really wounded!
Anyway, if you're looking for something new to watch I totally recommend this show. Its unlike anything thats been on the air for about 20 years.
Some pictures I thought I'd share. You can click to enlarge all but the last. Here's Canal City in Fukuoka from above-
Shrine out in Saga, the neighboring, (much) more rural prefecture-
Members of pop band Smap (or people very much like them) flee woman inexplicably attracted to them due to the Chemical-fresh scent of the gum they chew. Look at those
legs fly! By the way...this gum is DISGUSTING!
And finally, last because it would overshadow all that came before it, a picture Nick took of a Sad Cock shrine. What's he so glum about?
From Under the New York Times Select subscription barrier...
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
August 3, 2007
It’s been a good Democrats, bad Democrats kind of week. The bill expanding children’s health insurance that just passed in the House makes you want to stand up and cheer. Reports that Senator Charles Schumer opposes plans to close the hedge fund tax loophole make you want to sit down and cry.
Let’s start with the good news: The House bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would provide coverage to five million children who would otherwise be uninsured.
The bill is so good that it has Republicans spluttering. “The bill uses children as pawns,” declared Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. Yes, the Democrats are exploiting children — by providing them with health care.
The horror, the horror!
What’s especially encouraging is the way House Democrats were willing to take on the insurance companies. The bill pays for children’s health care in part by cutting subsidies to Medicare Advantage, a privatization scheme that yields big profits for insurers, but that the budget office estimates would cost taxpayers $54 billion in excess payments over the next five years.
Earlier this year I worried that many Democrats would be taken in by the insurance industry’s disinformation campaign in support of its subsidies, which included the pretense that Medicare Advantage offers big benefits to minority groups. In the end, however, House Democrats refused to be rolled.
All in all, the bill is both a fine piece of legislation and a demonstration that Democrats can stand up to special interests. Happy days are here again.
Or maybe not.
The hedge fund tax loophole is a crystal-clear example of unjustified privilege. Because of a quirk in the law, the people who run these funds don’t pay taxes like ordinary mortals.
For example, the salaries that pension fund employees receive for managing other peoples’ money are taxed as ordinary income, at rates up to 35 percent. But if that money is invested with a hedge fund — and 40 percent of the money in hedge funds comes from public, corporate and union pension plans — the fees the hedge fund manager receives for his services are mainly taxed as capital gains, with a maximum rate of 15 percent.
The arguments usually made on behalf of this unique privilege make no sense. We’re told that the tax rate on hedge fund managers has to be kept low to encourage risk-taking. But the managers aren’t risking their own money. The only risk they face is the uncertainty of their fees — and as any waitress who depends on tips or salesman who depends on commissions can tell you, most people with uncertain incomes don’t get any special tax breaks.
We’re also told that management fees would rise, reducing returns to investors, if the privileged status of fund managers is eliminated — as if someone with a $100-million-a-year hedge fund job would walk away if his take-home pay fell from $85 million to $65 million.
And we’re talking about a lot of lost revenue here. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the hedge fund loophole costs the government $6.3 billion a year — the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, almost $2 billion a year in unjustified tax breaks goes to just 25 individuals.
If being a Democrat means anything, it means opposing this kind of exorbitant privilege. Yet according to a report in The Times earlier this week, Mr. Schumer says that he opposes any increase in hedge fund taxes unless tax breaks for the energy and real estate industries are also eliminated, and pigs start flying. Seriously, his claim that he really would support closing the hedge fund loophole if other, deeply entrenched tax privileges were eliminated at the same time is a fig leaf that hides nothing.
Mr. Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, insists that the large financial contributions that hedge funds make to his party aren’t influencing him. Well, I can’t read his mind, but from the outside his position looks remarkably like money-driven politics as usual. And that’s not acceptable.
Look, the worst thing that could happen to Democrats is for voters to conclude that there’s no real difference between the parties, that when you replace Republicans with Democrats, all you do is replace sweet deals for Halliburton with sweet deals for hedge funds. The hedge fund loophole is a test — and it’s one that Mr. Schumer is failing.
