» Stupid Colleagues

Dear Japanese Coworkers,
This is a memorandum to remind those who wish to write English business correspondence to offshore programming teams that the opposite of the English word "increment" is not "excrement". Please make a note of it.

Thanks awfully,
(Wed 9th Mar 2011, 1:58, More)

» I don't understand the attraction

Grown adults
...fawning over Japanese cartoons.

They're CARTOONS. They're not "anime", or fifteen other pretentious Martian ways to say it, they're ANIMATED PICTURES! Forms of entertainment! They're not insights into mysterious Oriental (god, I hate that word too) culture for you obnoxious fuckers to gnaw at like a bunch of lions fighting over a deceased antelope in a race to see which of you can think up the most hackneyed explanation for why there are women in leather bras and spiked green hair carrying automatic weapons and space robots. They keep children entertained so they bug their parents to go buy them plastic toys. That's all!

The international media spends hours and rivers of ink to ooh and aah over this mass-produced crap and people can't get enough of it. I don't get it. What is the appeal? Is it because of the exotic squiggly writing? Is it because cartoon women are more approachable than the real ones? Does it make you feel unique and underground?

Someone please point me in the right direction -- preferably toward a running wood chipper -- because if I hear one more word about Naruto Yayoi Hentai Bukkake Pokemon the 3rd, I'm going to start stabbing kittens. I mean it.
(Fri 16th Oct 2009, 5:21, More)

» Vomit Pt2

Don't sit in the back of the bus
...on the ride home from a company drink-up if you've had 2 or 3 or 11 beers and a belly full of various restaurant finger-foods.

You WILL get tossed around back there like a ping-pong ball in a washing machine. Like it did to me one night, all the way back from downtown.

I could feel the gut rumblings three blocks before my stop, but I decided to make a valiant effort not to blow chow all over my fellow passengers. I didn't want to make a bad impression.

So I held it. It was coming, but I held it back. Finally my stop came... I paid my fare... I stepped gingerly off the bus... I turned around from a safe distance, looked the driver in the eye, and said "Thank yoooooooooUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGH" as I looked like one of those ornamental lion fountains as he hurriedly slammed the door shut. I swear that bus left a smoky burnout as it left the scene.

I took a different route after that.
(Thu 7th Jan 2010, 23:41, More)

» Tramps

I wasn't expecting that.
Despite the prevalent image of Japan being a squeaky clean utopia of clean-shaven, impeccably-dressed men and women marching in neat rows and columns to and from their office jobs at the space robot construction companies every day, in all metropolitan areas you will inevitably see the shanty towns of cardboard and blue tarpaulin. Go to any train station and you'll see human beings slumped in doorways and alcoves, most unconscious due to the usual forms of chemical enhancement. Some are sitting cross-legged on the ground moaning at no one in particular. These are the homeless that are easy to spot.

However, there are a few that you never suspect of being those whom have fallen through the cracks, until it is far too late.

A few years back I was standing outside Shibuya Station -- one of the busiest, hysterically crowded mass-transit facilities in the entire solar system -- on a Tuesday morning in full businessman suited regalia, briefcase in hand, waiting for a coworker to show up before heading to a meeting with a client. I'm standing there amongst an endless sea of flowing humanity, in and out of the station and across the intersection opposite the front gates. Off to the side was a little waiting area with a fountain where you might expect a multitude of pigeons and various homeless people to congregate.

Presently I saw a middle-aged lady sitting on the marble facade of the fountain, calmly reading a tabloid newspaper. Her clothing, while weathered, didn't scream "tramp!" at me, and neither did her demeanor. She wasn't wobbly drunk, nor was she having animated conversations with alien beings from the planet Zoombak. She was just sitting there, reading a paper. There were no other people in the immediate vicinity. Just this one lady and her paper.

And then, as I was looking in her general direction, she looked up from her paper, and leaned a bit over to one side as if to peer at something on the ground.

At which point, without any warning, without any pre-heave, without any signal whatsoever, she proceeded to explode forth with the longest, most horribly sickening Mr. Creosote-style projectile vomit I have ever seen. Making a noise that sounded very much like RAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGH, she managed to achieve a spew distance reaching nearly five feet.

Keep in mind that throughout all this, there are hundreds and hundreds of people behind me walking to and fro, minding their own business, no one stopping or even looking in the direction of Mt. Vesuvius over there on the water fountain. It was just her, and me. A decidedly odd personal moment between us.

When she finished her nuclear vomitocaust, she slowly sat back upright again, and turned to the next page of her newspaper. Nobody acted as if anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

To this day I wonder if she was even a homeless person at all.
(Tue 7th Jul 2009, 8:19, More)

» Protest!

Raining rock on the racists
In 1988 a bunch of us skater dudes sneaked up on a Ku Klux Klan parade in upstate Maryland (yes, this sort of thing occasionally happened even in the 1980s), setting ourselves up behind a fence near a building along the marching route.

Picking up various mineral projectiles off the ground, we waited until we could see the pointy white hoods bobbing up and down in the distance beyond the fence, and -- on a count of three -- we lobbed the stones high in the air above the battalion of bigots, turned, and galloped away bounding over benches and parked cars like antelopes.

We didn't even wait to see if we'd hit anything, but I like to think my carefully aimed rock bonked some guy clean on his pointy head, altering his brain signals and changing him into a flower child or something. Okay, maybe not.
(Fri 12th Nov 2010, 0:01, More)