I bought a rake

I have an odd sort of rule that I don't often get to implement (That's a rake pun, right there). If I get two consecutive days off and I don't have a backlog of work to catch up on or lessons that need to be tweaked or housework to trudge through, then one of those days is spent doing absolutely nothing. I spend no more energy than it takes to do my daily stretching, make a pot of coffee, round up a book or two and turn on the computer.

Yesterday was such a day, but the weather was so warm and inviting that I just couldn't resist a little excursion. Morioka is the kind of city that has so many Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples dotting it's landscape that you can't swing a small monkey around without running into one. They are generally the quiet idyllic kind of place that allows you to come to terms with your place in the world and gives realization that you don't really have much time to waste doing it.

You might notice his disapproval of the way I spend my time.

Just behind the place that I call home is a fairly decent sized parcel of land that lets me do the same kind of reflecting from my verandah that I can do at a shrine. On sunny days I watch the local kids run around and make noise and play games that seem to have no rules to them. I sit with my guitar and enjoy the effort my neighbor makes at turning the area behind her apartment into a flower and vegetable garden. During the winter I stand at the window and watch the snow fall and bemoan that I will soon have to drive through the frozen precipitate on my way to work.

But that space wasn't always like this...

It needed to be reclaimed from the wild, tamed and made worthwhile- 

see my previous post about how this all started. http://thenyd.blogspot.jp/2008/11/no-man-is-island.html

The problem with doing something like this is about the same as adopting a pet...your responsibility never ends.
The energy we expend on nurturing and maintaining the things that have importance to us is never truly wasted. Over time we are invigorated and rewarded with far more than we have invested  and on this particular project I even get a fair amount of physical exercise. 

It's important to keep the clutter and undergrowth from encroaching on the order you have struggled to create in your life. Personally, I like to put all my problems into neat little piles and deal with them one at a time. You still have to get that stuff out of the way and onto the garbage heap, but you don't have to strain with the whole damned miserable mess in one fell swoop.

That's why I needed the rake...

Idle Hands

Two whole days off.
Two in a row! Sunday and Monday Together, side by side and I don't have to work.
I can sit and watch the milk turn into yogurt if I wanted to. I could study the growth of my fingernails, if that was my thing. It ain't.

It's kinda hard to decide on what to do when you finally get a large block of freedom to play with. You'd think it was easy, but it's not. Maybe if you can imagine being really hungry and then going to a smorgasbord and you can't decide what it is you wanna eat.

Speaking of food. I had lunch at Mickey-D's the other day and you'll never believe what has become a HUGE hit in Japanland. Are you ready for this?
The Quarter Pounder WTF? Is it like, 1973 here? I guess the Japanese, like the rest of the world, have finally given up on trying to convert Americans to the metric system and have allowed the burger to enter the country legally. It is well known that Quarter pounders and their cohorts with cheese have been illegally crossing the border for many years now.





I for one am glad this new phenomenon has occurred. Now I no longer have to explain a certain scene in Pulp Fiction and can just sit back and relax until Arnold the pig is mentioned.

By now I have just wasted about twenty minutes of my day. Well not really wasted it. I nibbled on some cheese while writing this. Maybe I am a rat after all.

I just couldn't help but think that there are even more ways to waste my time while waiting for dearest Crispy to wake up from her beauty sleep.
I decided to clean out our storage room but I wasn't sure where I ought to put the stuff. I figured this guy could help me out

Absolutely! Leave it to the pros. While that's being taken care of I might as well go out and see if I can't pick up some new furniture for my digs.

I don't believe that two days will be enough to cure what ails me, do you?

Turn on the hot water.

I am a whore!

Click to see gumby in the background.

I know it's true, because my wife agrees with me and she just don't lie.
Let me set the facts down for you..

1.) I live in Japanland and and make a bit of gelt from transforming gibberish into something that resembles the English language. Not the kind of language that most teenagers and rappers express themselves with, but a certain kind of English nonetheless.

2.) I quit smoking over a year ago and I pride myself on not having that unmistakable "holier than thou" stinky attitude that seems to infect any form of reformed dip-shit. You know who I'm talking about.

3.) I have this thing about "truth". Although I will prevaricate when necessary, fib in order to save someones feelings, stretch veracity to provide entertainment and tell a bald faced lie in order to protect those I love- I still got this thing about truth. I don't like bullshit. This is probably why I am a big fan of Penn & Teller.

Enough appetizer. Let's dig into some meat and potatoes or maybe some patchouli scented greens and granola for the vegans out there.

My wife Crispy* got some translation work from JT (Japan Tobacco). They have a factory here in Lilliput and unfortunately for the people who work there it is closing down. A sad, but all to common occurrence nowadays. The people at the factory are going to England to show them how cigarettes are made in Japanland, so they put this multimedia presentation together and wrote the English on their own without any assistance. I actually like it when folks do this because I end up making some pretty decent cheese for correcting their creative sentence constructions and seriously silly syntax.

Usually I do this kind of work for research scientists who are attempting to publish their work in international journals. This time I was poring my efforts into a company whose products I don't like and definitely do not support, so correcting mangled statements whose mathematical proof was specious at best or were down right falsehoods made me feel just a little itchy.What made it fun was the amount of hilarity this report has produced. Crispy and I have been infected by the ridiculousness of things and are trying to ward off the lingering feelings of guilt with laughter and mockery.

I don't like doing this kind of work. The company is being both demanding and parsimonious, but a rat's gotta eat and like I said; this is a pretty big piece of cheese.

*Not her real name.

A realy cool blogger, X-Dell, who is not a whore, has put something together that will amaze and entertain you. Go check it out, now.

Making the cut

Ya know something? As cool as he was; Andy Wharhol was fulla crap!

"Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." Bear soap!
A few of you might remember a post I did a few months ago in which I described the really fun times I had goofin' with a comedian on the street.
Well the show aired last Friday and my segment got left on the cutting room floor. Shucks, I was hopin to get another tatse of being on TV.

At least Mr Wharhol wasn't completely stupid. He might have actually been a little precient when he next stated: "I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is "In 15 minutes everybody will be famous"."

I guess he must have imagined the future world of the World Wide Web (of intrigue), Boogers, Faceplant and Twister.

Do you or do you know anyone who Tweets???

Gotta go score some Kleenex

For the last week I have had a cold.

It sucks!!

It sucks because the darned thing is just mildly annoying.

It doesn't really affect my performance at work and it doesn't detract from my ability to cognate. (at least I dont think it does.) What it does do is to is to wage a war in my sinuses and produce copious amounts of , of; uh, how do I say this to you, so that those who are eating or soon will be; won't be put off your meal?

Ah, hell, there is no way: snot, boogers, phlegm, goo, yuk, nasty, you name it. The only thing that hasn't come out of my nostrils is the hope diamond.

This time around most people were avoiding me because of the swine flu paranoia that has been spread though the nation by the health ministry and the media. But more often than not, whenever I have a cold everyone and their brother had a home remedy for me. "Mash up ginger root and beets then drink it down with hot water"-UGH! Gross "Tie a warm scallion around your neck"- Why do I look like; the jolly green giant? "Heat up some water and mix in honey cinnamon, cloves, star anise and a shot of whiskey"- That's more like it! At least if it doesn't work I won't mind the effects of the whiskey. Hmmm, better make that two shots.

Unfortunately what does happen is that my wife force feeds me some cold medicine from some mysterious box or bottle with curious indecipherable characters on the label.

That shit just fucked me up! I took two tablets and I was off to la la land. I was flying wild style around the school for half the day, Whew!

When rock bands come to japan they don't have to risk getting caught with illicit drugs all they have to do is go to the local pharmacy and score some cold medicine. That stuff was mad potent!

Ringling-a-Ding Bros. Sisters.

House guests.
I don't know what your experience with them has been, but I tend to liken them to a nice sunny day: sometimes they warm up the room just by being around and sometimes things turn cheery and bright when they leave. There is a third type of guest that turns day into night and makes everything a circus and that, my lovely readers, is exactly the type of creature who has been staying with me.

Pictured above is my wife's cat. I say my "my wife's" because the feline is retarded and I want nothing to do with her. Kinda like a sugar cookie: sweet, but without any nutritional value.

And here she is again only this time she is posing with her partner in crime sitting pompously in the background. From this particular photograph you might just be saying to yourself: "Well, they don't look so bad." You might even go so far as to think : "To tell the truth, these two kitties look quite harmless and very adorable."

That's exactly what cats want you to think. Look closely at the picture. Study the subtle expressions on their faces and the glint of mischievous evil in their eyes. It's there if you really look!

What the picture doesn't show you is the sound of eight, go ahead-count 'em, eight thundering paws as they leap and dash and crash along wooden flooring and furniture overturning food and water bowls as they 'rassle and frolic. No the photograph does not express the heart wrenching-wake you up at five-inthegodforsakingmorning-thirty feeling!

I have labeled the beasts SK I & SK II. That stands for: Stupid Kitteh 1 (the wife's) and 2 (our friend's). Today, if God happens to look down from his station and decides to grace me with some semblance of peace, SK II will return home. All I can say is that I better get a really nice souvenir for my troubles.

I know that SK I will miss the furry friend and I am pretty sure that the wife will too. Thankfully there is ice cream in the freezer to salve her sadness and some catnip in the cupboard for the idiot.

Me? Well, I just can't wait till our friends go on vacation again.

The House of the Rising Sun

Here is my response to the second of five questions asked by Lime. They really are tough ones so I don't want to just peel off a frivolous answer just to fulfil my Memterview obligations.
This is the second question: What part of life in Japan do you love most? What part of life in the USA do you miss most?

As many of you have noticed, I am a little long winded and have a tendency to overcomplicate things that ordinary people handle in a straightforward manner. The question looks simple yet it offers myriad avenues for me to choose from. Shall I discuss the sights and sounds of my adopted home or shall I espouse upon the changes Japan has had upon me or will I be more pragmatic and tell you about the simple life I lead. It's not so easy.
What do you think of when you envision Japan? Is it a high-tech wonderland of neon, flashy gizmos and steaming bowls of noodles or do you see Geisha walking down lantern lighted lanes with Samurai at their sides. Is it a world of Judo and fast cars; of international business cartels and an incomprehensible sense of politeness and honor? It's all that and more. I like this place for all the good things, the silly things, the puzzling and outrageously frustrating things, but I like it most for all it has shown me about myself. In order to live here I had to tear down the walls of prejudice and ignorance and learn to learn again. I created a new and deeper value system for myself that had nothing to do with my own personal achievement, but rather on the effect I had on the world and folks around me. I had to realize that there are many ways to achieve the same objective and no two countries or people go about it in the same way. Yes I knew these things in my head and with my intellect, but feeling them in your bones is quite a different thing. I love the life I live because I have to work so damn hard to get it. In America things would have been a lot easier for me and I might not have valued it as much.

Plus the women are so damn HOT here!!!
A gift for Grant


The country, and especially the city of my birth is still the sweetest place I can imagine and there are times when I come back I feel that maybe "This time I'll stay for good", but I don't.
Before I tell you about the thing I miss most I would like to mention the one thing that I don't miss at all: Americans have a horrible habit of passionately stating their opinions as if they were cold hard facts. Now the irony of saying this is not lost on me. I am an American who has always said what he believes and I love this country even at times when it doesn't act in the most responsible and honorable way.
As far as countries go we' re special; ours is a land that is based on principles and ideas that before our forefathers applied them, they only existed as abstract ideas and ideals. Then again let's not forget that were still pretty new at this, two hundred thirty some odd years is not a whole helluva lot of time when you compare us to other nations. There are festivals here in Japan that are older than that.
So, what is it exactly that I miss about the USA?
I'll have to supply two answers to that query: 1. My family and 2. The food!
My god do I miss the glorious food of home. I can circle the globe just by walking into the multitude of restaurants that serve us gastronomical delicacies. In New York alone I can enjoy Cinco de Mayo in a Tapas bar or lift a stein of lager in a gasthaus during Oktoberfest, enjoy a funnel cake at a street fair and even celebrate San Gennaro with an eppie roll and plenty of wine.
The feasting and cornucopia of the United States is unmatched by any other country. Forget the fast food restaurants, it's only called fast food 'cause it speeds you on your way to the grave, take a road trip through the amazing, if not always gourmet fare that feeds the nation. The chillis of the southwest and fresh apple pie in Washington. Cheddar cheese in Wisconsin and Pralines in New Orleans don't forget to include a dirty water dog on the Coney island boardwalk.
Don't live to eat. Eat to live and live well. You have the best of everything, America. Majestic mountains. Thundering rivers. Cities that hold some of the most beautiful architecture and an amazing panoply of people from all over the world. You have it all, but I miss your food the most.

No man is an island,

yet there's no stopping him from creating one.

My backyard has looked like shit for more than a year. Now, it's not really mine, but seeing how I live closest to it I decided to spend the day cleaning it up a bit.

I got more than I bargained for....Start with a veritable jungle of bamboo like reeds and serious undergrowth.

Hack out a path while whistling the theme song for Indiana Jones

Widen the path and then take a break...It's been over an hour.

Change direction and work on the under brush and vines that grow under my balcony.

Contemplate the folly of my descision to do this with hand tools...It's been three hours now.

Never say die!

Finally after a morning and the better part of the afternoon I have cleard the entire area leaving only a small island of bamboo in the middle of the clearing.

Time to start shaping the reeds to give them a sense of balance.

I'm done and done for!
You can't really tell from the photo but this was a fairly large field and the grove I created ought to look really nice once the snow starts falling. I did a fair bit of damage to my hand during the task acouple o' skratches and at one point a sharpened end of a reed got shoved between my knuckles. Boy, I hate when that happens. This was a good day, but I'm sure I'll be paying for it later.
How was your sunday?

What did you expect?

J is for...

Mute Monday- H

Heaven & Hell



I had promised you all a viewing of a wedding, Japanese style and although there was a delay in getting them to you here are the snapshots. Wedded life is, at it's best and worst, a mixed blessing.
I hope these kids have the blessing of the gods for they are good people

Thoughts from the feather duster.

Went for a ride on my motorbike this morning. Bright sunny morning with just a hint of Autumn in the air. Good for the soul. Good for the mind and body too. One of the best ways to unravel the knots of tension that form in your mind is to do something that you can do well. The feeling of confidence and relaxation is bettered by very few things in life.

Since I live among the mountains, the magnificent vistas that unravel before my eyes on a ride can be truly breathtaking. I mean that in the literal sense. Can you imagine travelling through the twists and turns of a country road, totally focused on the curves and sound of your machine as she works her way up and down the gears. You feel the road rise and take you forward, you reach into the gearbox and pull out as much power as the machine can deliver. The vibration tells you that all is in perfect harmony as you crest the hill and are greeted by a rolling lush plateau of verdant undergrowth and tress that are showing the barest tinge of rouge.

Summer is gone and now my thought are steerring me towards winter. Before the tress fully turn and create a landscape of intense, calico carpeting I have got to get through my semi annual cleaning. There is so much stuff that must be seperated into the "truly necessary" and "Junk" piles. There is also a blog that needs to be taken down since I haven't posted anything there for quite some time.

What do you like to do to clear out the cobwebs and clean up the flotsam that flows through life? I'll try to keep in touch over the weekend.

The check is in the mail

Well, hey there people. I have been away, but now I am back. Soon I will have to go away yet again and shortly thereafter I will once again return to divulge the mysteries of the mundane and to complicate that which usually needs no explanation.

The wedding and the weekend went off without a hitch, ahem, uh but there is just one teensy detail that was overlooked before we hit the highway home. The groom asked for my memory card so he might download and print the pictures I took. He told us that he would return it the next day but he left it in his friends computer and so I am now waiting for the return of my SD card and therefore by association, so are you.

Ain't it great to have something in common.

In the last ten days or so I, like many others, have had a crash course in international economics. I have read more and understood less than at any time in my life.
One of my students, a professor of the aforementioned subject sat down with me and tried to walk me through the global ramifications of the miasma of greed and irresponsible money management. The entire time he was making everything try to fit together in a way I could understand he was also apologising because, and he put it this way: "There is no simple explanation nor resolution the awful instability of the system." Being that he has studied and worked with a Nobel prize winning economist, I have a strong tendency to believe what he says.

I also have a strong belief in another person's opinion.

"Kilgore Trout, the ornithologist's son, wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It has never existed in Nature, never could, never will."

Trout is the only person who ever said a fiduciary was any sort of bird. The noun (from the Latin fiducia, confidence, trust) in fact identifies a sort of Homo sapiens who will conserve the property, and nowadays especially paper or computer representations of wealth, belonging to other people, including the treasuries of their governments.

He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong, et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety.

For Christ's sake, let's help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.

Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful."

Kurt Vonnegut.

I like ice cream. Its like eating an instant smile. I am on a diet so now I have to find something else that will put a grin on my face.

My sister sent me the most kick ass care package from home. An entire box of Halloween goodies. Not just your local Milky Way and Snickers bars These are the ultimate in grotesque: Road Kill snacks, vomit pouches and spider sacks.
I am hoping that this year we can really get folks into the spirit of things.

Thanks Sis!- Answer yer goddamn phone will ya!

Time to fly. The punnery has run dry and I have used up my allotment of words for the evening.

Talk soon, real soon.

There's always time to party!

Or at the very least there should be.