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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, March 28, 2004

http://local.google.com/lochp Google locally! This is being posted wireless from the GBD site near the Chou-Rinken subway station, about halfway between Tokyo and Kawasaki. This is my first blog entry from here and I really don’t have anything to say except to check out the beta Google site and that when I type in the URL for Google in Japan it defaults to http://www.google.co.jp/ But it still works. 10:58:19 PM    comment []

Filchyboy (http://chronotope.com/ - in case you haven’t checked out the top of the Salon Blog rankings page for the psat year or so) has corrected me on some misinformation I posted about Condomania. There is a US chain, in fact he helped start it. The Japanese chain of the same name is unrelated and has that name because Christopher did not get an international copyright because of some bad legal advice. The Japanese site (http://www.condomania.co.jp/ )does have a couple of interesting products though: “hotcap,” which is evidently a capsaicin laced condom and “TRY! Menthol” for those who prefer to keep a cool head. = 4:21:29 PM    comment []

I’d sure as fuck hate to play poker with Richard Clarke, though I would enjoy his company as an articulate and educated man, one who does not wear his intelligence on his sleeve. A man in touch with himself to realize precisely the right words America has needed to hear and voice them emotionally, when everyone else has been playing CYA for 2 ½ years. A man of character who would be a welcome dinner guest or serendipitous conversationalist at an upscale pub, but just now I realized he’d soon clean me out at a poker table. I wouldn’t want to meet him there. As Kerry is hitting exactly the right note – that Riceroni is indulging her right of free speech, but not under oath, to hit the airwaves with the predictable character assassination response and Junior is stepping over the bodies of his victims to make preppie WMD jokes (and Mark Hoback temporarily renames his blog “Declassify It” regarding the 911 report for the sake of accountability), Richard Clarke coolly asks that his complete testimony to the House-Senate intelligence committee be declassified to open it to public scrutiny. He’s calling the big bluff. This simple endgame strategy will quickly cut through the bullshit. He’s laid his cards on the table. Maybe he’s a con man, maybe he’s just another fucking liar as the smear squad has suggested. If so, let’s dispense with this game right away. It’s a mighty big pot on the table. I hear the sound of one shoe dropping, no Zen intended. The reciprocal move would be for Condi to quit the prime time posturing and do the same - declassify her testimony and cut the Nixonian “Executive Privilege” crap. If the facts conflict, someone has committed perjury about the greatest wound on the American psyche since Pearl Harbor – and so far nobody has even lost their job over it. Until Clarke testified, no one even admitted it was a colossal intelligence failure. There has been no accountability. Now there will be. Clarke has called. Maybe his hand is a loser, but I suspect it’s a royal flush – so to speak. Whatever it is, he’s played it perfectly. I’d sure as fuck hate to play poker with Richard Clarke. 1:36:59 PM    comment []

Music Review, with some restraint Hottest thing in Japan right now is a group called 12 Girls Band. As the name suggests, these are “12 Chinese lovely beauties” playing classics with “modern arrangements.” I heard a few cuts from their platinum album Miracle at a subway CD shop this morning, including “Take Five” and “Beethoven’s Fifth” – a particularly irritating “look at Us, wink-wink, we’re playing Ludwig Van” arrangement requiring minimal chops. The entire CD will soon loom in your brain like a PTSS flashback of a Hindenburg survivor. It is the aural equivalent of avian flu. You’ll be begging to hear some gangsta rap or white boy hip-hop, screaming for mercy like Bob Novak being tortured at Camp X-ray to reveal his Valerie Plame source, before 15 seconds have elapsed. It’s like some pervert took a horse turd and pureed it into a mousse, then topped it with whipped cream and a cherry. Looks good, but it’s still HORSESHIT. 6:31:09 AM    comment []

Jet lag hit the worst today, so this will likely be short and dumb. Last night was fitful sleep, bizarre dreams of bags of broken electronic parts arriving in the mail and me driving a dumpster truck that only had reverse. That, I thought, on my second groggy awakening, has got to be the low point of the day. The highpoint was the imaginary conductor on the computerized train from Shimbashi station out across Tokyo Bay, past a Statue Of Liberty replica with the Rainbow Bridge in the background, and on to Aqua World or some bullshit like that where we saw kids and adults paying 200 Yen for plastic dolls in plastics bubbles. I got carried away there myself, spending 200 Yen on plastic food replicas. Luck of the draw, I got an inch-long squid model. There was a Toyota car show, Hawaiian hamburgers, and a very large Ferris Wheel - but the highpoint was still the imaginary conductor. As we left Shimbashi, we noticed him at the front of our car, the first on the train. He had earphones and a two way radio that he barked commands into. When a train approached on the other tracks in the opposite he would give a tally-ho wave, the kind professional train guys the world over use to salute each other. No one returned the salute because the other train did not have a conductor. Neither did ours. These are computerized trains. 4:58:59 AM    comment []