Chorus, Isolate, Confirm

Jesse Jace (P)resents TNB

2011-12-08T22:18:00.001+09:00

With close to four months since my last post, it has come to my attention that resuscitating Chorus, Isolate, Confirm will take more than just a couple of paragraphs about how much I like tea, or a photo of a goofy sign, or even a detailed essay on the differences between Hoshino Aki and Inoue Waka. (There are differences, by the way.) That is why I decided to make a comeback post out of the strategic demolition of three especially bad Tokyo Notice Board submissions.

In violation of my previous promise not to refer to the authors of said atrocities by full name, I have decided that there's no reason for me to be delicate with their identities. After all, Tokyo Notice Board prints the author's name at the top of every horrible, tedious essay they run. So no more pseudonyms to protect the guilty. From now on, I operate on a basis of glasnost, comrades.

Let's get this party started. My first target is called "Black Jack" by Hayden Bigree, appearing in the September 16, 2011 issue of Tokyo Notice How Bored I Am:

My friend Jane was staying in Tokyo for 3 months to learn Japanese, but the end of her stay was coming close. She loved Japanese manga and every time we went out she was always talking about Japanese manga. Please do not ask my why manga was so important to her...

After a number of these horrendous essays I've gotten quite used to native English speakers who can't spell brain-busters like the word "three," but Hayden's mysterious ellipsis at the end of his first paragraph fools me into thinking that this essay is going to be all about Jane and her manga. Unfortunately for mankind, it starts to be all about Mr. Bigree in a hurry:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me take this opportunity to declare that I do not care if somebody chooses manga over me. From the bottom of my heart, I do not care.

Hayden, your repetition of "I do not care" betrays your efforts to hide a deep sea of bitterness stemming from the rejection of your otaku friend. And your reluctance to use contractions reveals that high school English class is a memory not buried very deep in your mind. On the one hand, I'm glad you learned something in school. On the other hand, your writing comes across as sounding more posh than a cartoon butler.

I respect Manga. I really do. In particular, I have enormous respect for the legendary "Black Jack" by Osamu Tezuka. It is simply amazing. So When Jane told me she does not know "Black Jack", I was not even drunk and told her: "How dare you call yourself a manga fan when you do not even know 'Black Jack'? Do not make me laugh, that is just ridiculous. Before you leave, go to Tsutaya and buy the whole series of Black Jack you fat idiot [sic]."

A number of issues here. Hayden can't decide how to treat the title of a comic book (it should be italicized), so he alternates between quotes and no quotes. And he robs needy sentences of their commas, instead using them to splice other sentences together, which is really exasperating. But I'm glad he quoted himself, because now we know that he's not just removing contractions because his teacher told him to. He actually talks like this. And the British tendency to put his punctuation outside his quotes (you know how much I hate that) reveals that he might just be the cartoon butler I've imagined him to be. Then again, most butlers would be too polite to call their female friends fat idiots.

Composition aside, "I was not even drunk?" Quit bragging.

"How dare you speak like that to a lady!" Every beautiful female reader of TNB, I beg you. Please understand my rage. My feeling right now is like this: "Ohhhhh!"

My feeling is like that now, too. Consider your rage understood.

When I talk about Black Jack, I can not help screaming. I just can not help screaming.

Redundant.

Black Jack was the coolest Japanese man in the whole wide world. There is no doubt about that. He was the world's best surgeon, and he could cure any disease. He could even do surgery on himself. And he could undress any woman and insert a knife into their body. So Black Jack could have had any lady.

At this point, the realization that Hayden has idolized a fictional character based on his ability to cut women open hits us like fifty kilograms of fresh fish and we politely decline to read any more about Black Jack, thank you very much.

Moving on, then. Next we have an essay dated March 2011 by Curt Neilson, cumbersomely titled "See! Hear! And Speak Purely! Nikko Mountain Awaits!" Apparently this is going to be about the famous monkey carvings that attract tourists to Nikko. One can only hope Curt has exhausted his supply of exclamation points by cramming four of them into the title. History has taught me, however, that hope is wrong.

So, after monkeying around for nearly 2 years

Jesus.

So, after monkeying around for nearly 2 years, I finally went with my girlfriend in her car to Tosho-gu, Nikko, Japan. The place of the "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" Monkey carving at the sacred site of Shogun Tokugawa's mausoleum. As we marched upwards and upwards like some holy rite to an ancient shrine

(Curt uses an ancient shrine as a simile for an ancient shrine.)

...we saw groups snapping photos under 3 panels of wood carvings. Oh cute, I thought, monkeys. Then I looked at the center panel and it was THE ONE. Shock. Surprise. And a little disappointed.

And a lot of sentence fragments.

So small!!!

Curt produces three exclamation points from his bag of tricks to punctuate yet another sentence fragment (one that suggests Curt might be spending too much time around ESL students, their broken English perhaps rubbing off on him).

But I was also pleased a moment later as I appreciated its artistry and lack of souvenir-store. After shooting up the 3Wise Monkeys sufficiently, we visited the Sleeping Cat (maybe more famous in Japan than the 3 Wise Simians). And it was even smaller carving and it was placed over the doorway of the Temple Interior!

I have no idea why that last sentence deserves an exclamation point. It doesn't even really deserve a period.

Where hordes and hordes of pilgrims smashed through......so it was comedy as people tried to get quick pics of blocked the way cluelessly or rudely.

My computer doesn't recognize "cluelessly" as a word, Curt. Nor does it recognize a "where" clause as a sentence. Nor does it recognize your story as entertaining.

After the Sleeping Cat we proceeded to the lair of the Crying Dragon (I guess animals need adjectives here).

Why do I get the sinking feeling that this whole essay is just a vehicle for that observation?

It was a big painting on the ceiling, think Michel Angelo).

Michel Angelo? Who's she? She sounds hot.

Pretty cool, I gotta' admit, but that damn bell/knocker thing the priest kept gonging can really rattle your brain.

Frustrated with Curt's inability to pick a noun, I leave him by the wayside and move on to my final target. And what a target it is. This essay from the November 4, 2011 issue of Tokyo Novice Blurb is called "EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE ON TELLY!" (yes, with capital letters and an exclamation point, just for good measure) by Jan Niemand. I saved the best for last. Get ready to wish you were dead.

I woke up, correction, I was woken up by a noisy japanese TV crew the other day. These kind of places seem to light up a very special interest in them, as they already visited the last place I was staying in. Both times I've kept myself out of sight, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been bothered by all the fuss. There have been some differences between these two unpleasant encounters with the mass media though [sic].

Thus begins Jan's complicated relationship with the concept of tense. Her apparently random shifting from past simple to present perfect suggests she is trying to make herself sound more intelligent than she really is (ironically succeeding only in sounding dumber than anybody ever will be).

First time [sic], back in October, they interviewed my room mate Masa inside his 2 meter long, 1.50 meter high, 1 meter wide crib. I think there was some money involved, but nobody else accepted to be in. I was locked next door, panicking they would slam into my room with TV cameras on, but they were respectful of my denial to be part of the show. Being there, and although I didn't quite understand the language yet,

"Yet?" You still don't! (We are talking about English, right?)

it seemed to me it was a sort of informational kind of interview, the classical one question one answer interview thing.

The word you're searching for is "interview."

Pretended serious journalism. Maybe it was, but talking about television, please let me doubt it. It annoyed me that I couldn't get out of my room because they were there and I didn't want to be on telly. I might be about the only one, I know. But crib and all, it was my home at that moment and being trapped in your own home, not being able to open the door

Yeah, I know what "trapped" means! God, these run-on sentences are long enough that they'd reach the Moon if they weren't so completely aimless. Point is, Jan had to go potty but the scary TV people were in the way. Next paragraph.

Second time [sic] has been this morning. I woke up to the noises and chats of somebody at 8 and I automatically cursed some crib mates for it, this time mistakenly so. A couple of days ago I found a note on my door

Oh, bad luck. Jan could have used past perfect tense just there and impressed the bejeezus out of us all, but instead she used up all her fancy tensework in all the wrong places. Shame.

A couple of days ago I found a note on my door reading that today a TV crew would be here, a note I thought similar to all the others hanging on every single door in the corridor.

I know, right? Notes. Peh! They're all the same.

Last time the cameras popped in in the evening so I thought, fine, I won't be here in the evening. But they came at 8 in the morning this time, it was them, it was TV!

Jan needs to settle down and take things one sentence at a time.

Pissed for the noise and violent awakening as I was I am a pretty polite person after all, but it didn't hit me until he said the word terebi. Do I speak Japanese? Well, chottou.

Here's where I run out of patience. Jan's eternal sentences that go nowhere are one thing. But "chottou?" That's not Japanese. That's nothing-nese.

After this, Jan goes on to make all kinds of educated observations about the sad state of Japanese television, the predictability of entertainment in general and the cultural ennui that has gripped society as a whole. Also, she types "finnish" instead of "finish," and that's when I fling my copy of Tokyo Notice Board into the night like a boomerang that I hope will never come back.

A man can only take so much.

Download my music!

2011-08-13T18:44:00.006+09:00

Why haven't I been updating the blog? One reason, two words: Toyland Trouble. That's the title of my belated (and re-belated) second album, which I've made available as a free download.

Get it here!

(Several songs from Toyland Trouble can also be heard on my YouTube channel, in case the immediate gratification of a free album download isn't quite immediate enough for you.)

"Twice" Remix

2011-07-24T01:39:00.005+09:00

I've been working extra-hard on original music these days, but here's a quick remix of "Twice" by Little Dragon. This song was easy fodder for extra rhythm tracks, but I tried to make it interesting by changing the chord structure in the chorus. It only took me a few hours to finish.

Call of Duty Commentary

2011-05-20T11:52:00.003+09:00

For some reason I found this funny.

Vietnam Photos

2011-05-08T21:02:00.005+09:00

Here are the photographic highlights from our brief trip to Ho Chi Minh City. All these were taken with the Digital Harinezumi, the only camera I carried with me to Vietnam. Click on individual images to view at 800x600 pixels.

First, a word about motor scooters. Thanks to the sheer volume of scooter traffic filling virtually every road in the city at virtually all hours of the day, riding in a Ho Chi Minh City taxi feels like trying to shake the Germans in an Indiana Jones movie. One night our cab driver actually hit someone on a scooter and knocked them over. The two drivers involved in the accident yelled at each other for about 90 seconds and then went their respective ways. Nobody was killed. True story.

Next I'd like to discuss signage.

Ho Chi Minh City is full of signs. Whether they're telling you where not to park or what socio-economic system is best, signs are many, and they are all colorful. One of my favorites was the sign outside the office of a dentist whose name is apparently Dr. Dentist:

The award for Most Terrifying Sign at Night goes to that of the Crazy Buffalo, a bar I'm glad we didn't go to.

Not far from the Crazy Buffalo, you can see this:

One afternoon I was standing on a street corner trying to grab a taxi when this guy on a bicycle-taxi (or what ever you call a bicycle with a low seat attached to the front, kind of like a rikisha that is pedaled instead of pushed) pulled up next to me. He wouldn't take no for an answer, even after I showed him the address of my hotel and told him it was too far to go by bike-shaw. When I decided to keep walking and look for a different street corner to wait for my taxi, he followed me. And he kept following me at walking speed for more than two blocks. After talking him down to what I thought was a reasonable fare, I decided to give this guy a chance.

It was a long trip back to the hotel. More than an hour, and a hair-raising ride at that, thanks to the aforementioned motor bikes that constantly swerved on either side of my "taxicle."

Along the way, the driver tried indicating points of interest to me, but I couldn't understand most of what he said. He pointed at a brewery and said, "Beer." He pointed at a statue of Ho Chi Minh and said, "Ho Chi Minh." Then he pointed at a post office and said, "Ho Chi Minh." When he pointed at a motorcycle shop and said, "Vroom," I sort of stopped listening. Here's what my vantage point from the seat looked like:

On my last day in Vietnam, I went to see the Ho Chi Minh Notre Dame Cathedral and the War Remnants Museum. Here are some exterior shots of the cathedral:

Out in front of the War Remnants Museum were an array of American military land and air vehicles:

I also met this guy:

He was selling books and DVDs outside the museum entrance. He was missing an eye and both forearms. Disappointed with how I had handled myself upon meeting the disfigured man outside Bến Thành Market days earlier, I talked with this man for several minutes and shook his elbow in lieu of his hand.

The War Remnants Museum is a solemn (and/or grim) place, but I recommend it, particularly to other Americans who might not otherwise have occasion to hear another side of the story of the Vietnam War. All exhibits therein located include English descriptions.

The Embarrassing Ten - Part Two

2011-03-29T00:09:00.003+09:00

This evening I took a break from packing for the big house move to finish this project. Here's the conclusion to my list of the Ten Most Embarrassing Songs on My MP3 Player.

Vietnam photos coming soon.

Leaving Vietnam tonight

2011-03-24T12:45:00.002+09:00

Wife's work relocation will continue a few more days, but I will be leaving Vietnam tonight and arriving back in Tokyo tomorrow morning, five days ahead of schedule. There hasn't been much else to do or blog about for the past three days, but once I'm back I can post the photos I've taken here.

Something That's Bothering Me

2011-03-20T12:25:00.007+09:00

It's morning on the second day of our stay in Ho Chi Minh City. Yesterday we practiced resisting the advances of various vendors as politely as possible in the Bến Thành Market, a place that isn't much fun for people who dislike haggling as intensely as I do. The market was oppressively stuffy and full of nauseating smells, so Wife and I decided to escape the crowds briefly by walking around the outer perimeter of the market building.

On the sidewalk outside the market, I felt a tap on my arm and turned to see a man who was missing several portions of the skin on his face. His lips were gone, perpetually showing a full set of teeth. His nose had been reduced to a slight protrusion with two nostrils and his right eye was surrounded by raw-looking tissue that barely seemed to cover the bone. I couldn't guess his age because what skin he had left was pulled too tightly around his head to reveal any natural wrinkles. I assume his injuries were not recent, because he didn't appear to be in pain, yet the tissue showing where his skin was missing looked wet and vulnerable. He didn't look like a leper; he looked like he had just tried to eat an exploding string of firecrackers.

The sight of this man was horrifying and something I wish I could forget, but what haunts me more is the way I reacted to him. The man met my eyes and said "hi" in English. I don't recall displaying any outright revulsion or shock at the man's appearance, but my response was nothing more than a similar "hi," after which I immediately turned ninety degrees and walked away with Wife in tow, hoping she wouldn't have to see him. I don't know what reaction would have been better, and I'm sure others before my have seen this man and reacted with more obvious horror than I did, but I can't help but feel like I was horribly rude to this man whose nightmarish appearance was no fault of his own. Curt as my responses to every vendor in the market may have been, they were all accompanied by a smile. This guy only got a parroted "hi" and a quick look away.

Follow the Ho Chi Minh Trail

2011-03-19T01:08:00.004+09:00

The French government has been quick to pull as many of its citizens out of Japan as possible during the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis. As an American, that would normally not make a difference one way or another for me. Wife, however, is employed by a French company, which has decided to move her entire team and their families to the company's Ho Chi Minh branch. And that's why this post is being written from a hotel room in Vietnam.

Neither of us feel good about this situation. Wife and I have essentially high-tailed it out of the so-called "danger zone" and left our friends, her family and many of my coworkers in Japan. Wife's family is a safe distance from the Fukushima radiation and my coworkers who have elected to stay are continuing their lives in a basically normal fashion (well, normal plus rolling blackouts), yet here we are, hiding.

Oh yeah. And I have no idea whether or not I'm putting myself in trouble with my own employer over this sudden absence, which is likely to last ten days.

The good news is that, with wife at work, I'll have nothing but time on my hands...and that means blog posts. See? Every cloud of radioactive particles has a silver lining.

I'm so tired I can barely think.

The Embarrassing Ten

2011-03-12T11:19:00.005+09:00

With Japan currently being shaken by one earthquake after another, the timing of this lighthearted video post is admittedly less than ideal. Wife and I are fine (or rather, we will be fine after we clean up all the books, CDs, papers and other things that were strewn about our apartment yesterday). I'd been working on this video for a while, and it just happens to be finished today. So, enjoy: The Ten Most Embarrassing Songs on My MP3 Player.

Video: Dodecamin Great

2010-12-19T13:31:00.005+09:00

Many apologies for the long stretch with no updates. My blogging capacity has been temporarily undermined by the recent decision Wife and I made to [gulp] buy a house. We'll be moving to nearby Saitama, best known for being dasai (uncool) next spring.

I did, however, find time to make this video about Energy Drink Dodecamin Great, the product of a collaboration between Capcom, publisher of the Monster Hunter game series, and Asahi Beverage. Give it a look-see. You might even learn something.

Quick TGS Recap

2010-10-01T21:33:00.001+09:00

Oooooops. It would seem I made promises about "covering" Tokyo Game Show and then failed to deliver. Truth is, I was going to make a video post about it, but none of the footage I took there was really interesting enough. That, and I've just been too busy over the past two weeks to undertake such a project. So here's a quick rundown of how it was and what we saw.

I was pleased to see that the Tokyo Game Show has gotten bigger since I last attended in 2005. Publisher booths are more extravagant, the fighting tournament now has its own entire room and there has been a much-needed improvement in merchandise presence.

Still, Wife and I were surprised to see foreign publishers rather under-represented. THQ didn't have a booth…EA didn't have a booth…in fact, the only major foreign console game company with their own booth was France's UbiSoft (whose smallish booth was dedicated to promoting their upcoming Wii dancing title, The Michael Jackson Experience.

The fact that it took the advent of Kinect for the Xbox 360 to get developers to start making dancing games for the Wii seems at least a little ironic, dontcha think?

Domestic bigwigs, on the other hand, showed up in full regalia. Especially Capcom, whose Monster Hunter-inspired village looked like something out of a theme park.

Visiting on general attendance day meant lines. Long ones. But between the two of us, we did manage to play Xbox 360 titles Dead Rising 2 (by Wife's request), Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Gun: Loco and Onechanbara Special for the PSP. We also watched a few minutes of a very heated Street Fighter IV tournament and passed judgment on countless costumed fans and booth girls.

In the interest of getting TGS out of the way so that I can blog about more current affairs, this will conclude my comments on TGS.

This Weekend: Tokyo Game Show

2010-09-13T16:27:00.005+09:00

This Sunday, Chorus, Isolate, Confirm will head to the Tokyo Game Show for the first time since 2005. Wife will join me for a day of wandering around Makuhari Messe, picking up free junk, pushing through crowds of sweaty otaku and taking pictures of girls dressed as space hookers.

Tunisia - Day Six

2010-08-29T14:03:00.007+09:00

The sixth and final day of our Tunisia travels took us to the Great Mosque of Kairouan (the oldest Islamic worship site in Africa and the fourth holiest site in Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem). We also visited one more worship site, whose name and location I can't seem to remember.

Of course, no guided tour of a foreign country is complete until the guide takes you to see some kind of artisan, who promptly makes an elaborate attempt on your wallet. In our case, it was a Berber rug shop.

After patiently withstanding about 45 minutes of sales pitches from the man working at the rug shop, we went to see one more spot: the ruins of the Zaghouan Aqueduct.

After returning to Sidi Bou Said, Wife and I spent the late evening hours taking one last wander around the neighborhood. My attempt to order dinner for the both of us that evening ended up being my biggest French language failure of the entire trip (long story short: I ordered two dishes for us, one of which I thought was steak and one of which I thought was seafood...but both of which turned out to be chicken).

The next day we returned to Japan and I vowed never to speak French again.

Tunisia - Day Five

2010-08-22T11:41:00.005+09:00

On the fifth day of our trip, we went to Hammamet to visit another touristy shopping district. I didn't take so many pictures, but I did overhear an amusing exchange between a shopkeeper and the bride's uncle about a rug (which the bride's uncle had no interest in buying...and which gradually changed in price, from 90 dinars to 10 dinars). Hearing the price of that rug drop almost 90% -- with no effort whatsoever on the part of the customer -- was a shock that made me question almost every purchase I had made in Tunisia until that point.

Click each image to see a larger version.

After seeing the sights and visiting a relaxation spa (where I received a massage involving hot stones on my back), we had another party to attend. This one was an evening garden party at the groom's family's second home (!), which was also in Hammamet. There was food, live music and dancing...and, again, ululation. The pictures below were taken before the event started, which is why there are no other guests. We were unfashionably early, I guess.

My next post will be about our sixth and final day in Tunisia, in which we visited the Grand Mosque of Kairouan.

Tunisia - Days Three and Four

2010-08-08T12:18:00.005+09:00

On the third day of our trip, Wife and I were invited to a lunch at the home of the groom's parents. There was much food, dancing and ululation. I didn't take any pictures of their actual home, which was beautiful, but these shots taken from the house's gigantic rear balcony should speak for themselves. Click each one for full-size viewing.

I also took this three-shot panorama:

The answer to the question "How did the groom's family afford such a nice house?" became apparent on Day Four, when we visited a vineyard/olive orchard owned and managed by the family near Takelsa. We took a tour of the property, enjoyed a barbecue lunch and then visited a small, secluded white sand beach about two kilometers away (visible in the background of the third photo below). This was the single most relaxing day of the entire trip for me. Only slightly less so for Wife, who found a turtle on the ground during lunch; she picked it up and it promptly relieved itself on her. The groom's brother assured us that such an occurrence was "good luck."

In Day Five, we visit Hammamet.

Tunisia - Day Two

2010-07-29T22:22:00.010+09:00

As I said, Day Two of our trip was devoted to guided sightseeing around Carthage, seat of the once great Carthaginian Empire. The strength and strategy of Carthage's relatively small armed force effectively halted Rome's southward expansion for more than a century. At the end of that period, Rome finally defeated the Carthaginian army at Zama (which wouldn't have happened if Russel Crowe had been there).

Much of the day was devoted to looking at stone ruins and my shutter finger got a serious workout. We saw graves, caves and...well, unfortunately, nothing else that rhymes with "graves." Oh wait, there were waves, too. You know...in the sea.

Again, click the photos to enlarge them.

Due to Rome's eventual control over and reconstruction of Carthage, Roman mosaic work is also a common sight. We saw a great deal of this, not only on Day Two but throughout the trip.

The red character in that last one looks like a cross between the Statue of Liberty and a lobster. Here are a few more shots from the Digital Harinezumi to finish Day Two:

I took the bricks photo as a memento of the construction work that was constantly visible around us during our visit. If I understood the explanation correctly, the budgeting process for construction projects in Tunisia is done piecemeal. Instead of saving up enough money to build an entire building, they build gradually as the funds become available. As a result, there are half-finished buildings everywhere. But since these projects can become drawn out pending availability of funds, a lot of the "new" buildings under construction don't look new at all. In fact, it's often difficult to tell whether a building is under construction, or being gradually demolished.

In the next installment, we take a relaxing break from the oppressive heat at the nicest house I've ever had the pleasure to visit.

Jet Lag

2010-07-26T08:02:00.003+09:00

Before we get into Day 2 of the Tunisia trip, a word about jet lag (which I have).

On Saturday night/Sunday morning, I went to bed past 3:00 AM with the intention of getting up at 10:00 AM. Instead, I slept until 2:00 PM. That left me in a difficult position. I needed to correct my sleeping pattern as quickly as possible, so as not to miss work on Monday morning.

With that in mind, I did my best to go to bed early last night. Of course, having slept more than ten hours the same day, falling asleep was an accomplishment I couldn't achieve until about two hours before my alarm went off. During those fleeting two hours, my brain concocted a dream in which I was a guest on a talk show hosted by Martin Short (wow, there's a name I don't often find myself uttering). Among the other guests on the show were a comedian named Supertrip Superspasm and a young blonde actress named Beautifuls.

After waking up, I could immediately identify Beautifuls as an original creation of my brain. But try as I may, I couldn't remember if Supertrip Superspasm was a real person or not. The name, believe it or not, really rang a bell. Somehow I had the idea there was this really popular comedian in the early 80's named Supertrip Superspasm, whose comedy was a little bit like that of Howie Mandel. This idea bugged me so much that I had to do a Google search of his name just to make sure.

Turns out, he's not real.

Tunisia - Day One

2010-07-25T11:02:00.002+09:00

Yesterday Wife and I got back from a week-long visit to northeastern Tunisia, where we celebrated our friends' wedding and did some sightseeing. The trip also entailed a great deal of photography -- so much, in fact, that at the end of the vacation, I had more than 400 photos on two cameras (the Konica Minolta Dimage A200 and the Digital Harinezumi 2++) to sort through. Due to the size of the endeavor, I am blogging about our trip one day at a time. So here is the first full day of our stay, as best I can remember. All images can be enlarged by clicking.

We stayed in Sidi Bou Said, a very Tunisian-looking tourist town that claims to be home to the World's Oldest Cafe (but who's counting?). Very picturesque, with stone roads, white buildings and those ubiquitous blue doors everywhere. A beach and yacht harbor were also accessible on foot, although the uphill return trip was quite brutal in the summer heat.

Due to the large amount of tourist traffic Sidi Bou Said gets, souvenir shops dominate the main road. One visit to a shop reminded me of something I hadn't thought about since my trip to Thailand years ago: I hate haggling with shopkeepers. It doesn't matter how good their English is, or how much of a "discount" haggling can achieve. It's a stressful ordeal every time. And for some reason, souvenir vendors kept calling me "chief" or "chef." Every time that happened, I thought to myself, If only you knew how unlike a chef I actually am.

Our hotel, the Hôtel Sidi Bou Fares, had a great deal of that Sidi Bou Said feel to it, with plaster and tile decoration in the hotel room and a nice courtyard where we had breakfast every morning. The courtyard was inhabited by a pair of turtles that hung around while we ate.

Coming up in Day Two: Carthage.

Novelty Drink Round-Up

2010-06-02T16:03:00.003+09:00

Another June, another goofy Pepsi product. Plus, some of the worst ramune drinks I could find. Watch the video.

No More Famitsu for Me

2010-05-25T12:04:00.020+09:00

In 2006, when Japanese game rag Famitsu gave Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (Xbox 360) conspicuously high review scores despite a consensus in the Western gaming community that the game wasn't that good, I shrugged and said, "culture gap." Any game publication could be expected to hand out an evaluation that differs -- sometimes wildly -- from the general consensus, especially in cases where a game had been localized for a foreign market. But, as I intend to illustrate below, an outlandish review score can also be an indication of plain, old-fashioned corruption.

Consider the history of Famitsu, a magazine once revered for the infrequency with which it gave out tens (Famitsu reviews games with a four-person format mimicked by EGM and others). In the first 12 years of its existence, Famitsu never gave a full 40/40 score to any game. Beginning in 1998 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, as many as fourteen games that may or may not have arguably deserved perfect scores started getting them. The trend accelerated, with three games winning perfect scores in 2008, and four games in 2009. At the same time, Famitsu started winning exclusives left and right, often reviewing games prior to their release dates. Together, these phenomena formed a strong suggestion that Famitsu was squarely in the business of hyping games, not criticizing them.

When Famitsu gave Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP) a perfect score of 40/40, it was a confirmation of prior suspicions for many. In particular, Gawker Media's game blog Kotaku pointed out that Famitsu's adulation for the game reeked of dishonesty (citing product tie-in agreements between Konami and two major Japanese game magazines, and an advertising campaign in which Hirokazu Hamamura, former Famitsu Editor-in-Chief and current president of the magazine's parent company Enterbrain endorses the game).

In response to the accusation, Konami and Famitsu teamed up in joint opposition of Kotaku, a move which only served to cement the idea that Famitsu could no longer be trusted as an impartial critic.

Those who remain unconvinced of Famitsu's conflict of interest needn't look any farther than the current print issue of Famitsu Xbox 360, in which three games, Lost Planet 2, Super Street Fighter IV and Splinter Cell: Conviction, have all been given scores of three nines and a ten (92.5%). On Gamerankings.com, however, Lost Planet 2 averages 68.87% over 24 reviews (at the time of this posting) from various English-language game websites.

Now, before you shrug and say "culture gap," consider this. I've singled out Lost Planet 2 for the Xbox 360 because it disproves the suggestion that the disagreement between Famitsu and Kotaku is founded in cultural difference between consumers in different countries: On the Japanese Amazon website, the very same game averages a measly 60.6% over 32 reviews (at the time of this posting), all from Japanese-speaking customers.

That's not a gap between cultures. That's a gap between advertisers and consumers.

In a world where consumers can go online and make decisions based on reviews from so many different sources, there is no demand for a biased print periodical like Famitsu. If the management of that publication aren't willing to abandon their current formula of charging people for the chance to be advertised to rather than informed, then they deserve the extinction to which they are doomed.

Comments Moderation

2010-05-12T10:36:00.004+09:00

Perhaps inevitably, it has become apparent that I must be vigilant about who is and isn't allowed to comment on my blog. After about one instance per week of someone posting spam ads (always consisting of a nonsense English sentence, followed by a series of about twenty links to various Chinese-language websites), it seems like it has become a necessity. So from now on, everyone who comments will have to sign in, and all comments will be moderated before they appear online.

Digital Harinezumi 2++ review

2010-05-01T19:44:00.017+09:00

In university, I practiced creative photography using my mom's Pentax SLR, a camera older than me. I became quite fond of the camera's honesty, not to mention the tricky, low-light bulb photography I could do with a tripod. But unlike many purists in the photography world, I found myself easily seduced away from the personality and warmth of film photography by the instant gratification and convenience of digital photography in the years that followed.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between the digital photography's convenience and analog photography's personality, Japanese cult camera maker SuperHeadz released the Digital Harinezumi (Japanese for "hedgehog"), a digital camera that emulates the lo-fi feel of old film shots with carefully tweaked saturation and contrast settings, in spring of 2009. The camera also boasted a video mode that did its best to imitate 8mm film. An upgraded sequel, the Digital Harinezumi 2, followed in November.

Currently the latest version of this product, the Digital Harinezumi 2++ offers greater convenience and image quality than its predecessor, while maintaining the same toy camera quirkiness that collectors and enthusiasts seek. Wife and I spent a day in Ueno with this little device and put it to the test.

Our first destination was the National Museum and Nature and Science and its temporary land mammal exhibition. The camera has two simulated ISO settings, 100 and 800 (the latter of which is sensitive enough for shooting in a dark indoor environment such as a museum without a flash). As a result, I was able to take a lot of goofy headshots of taxidermied animals...like this bear, who looks like he just heard a dirty joke.

I also grabbed the rare opportunity to use the Harinezumi to take a picture of a harinezumi:

Outdoor photography, especially in bright sunlight, is where the camera really shows off its characteristics. Its image processor washes certain tones out while boosting others. Which colors receive which treatment depends on the individual Harinezumi you buy; in keeping with the haphazard toy camera aesthetic, SuperHeadz thought it would be more appropriate if each unit had a slightly unique eye.

After leaving the museum, we headed for Ameya Yokocho, Ueno's famous street market district. It's a colorful place, ideal for testing out the camera's tendencies. It's also a good place for buying seafood.

The Harinezumi 2++, unlike the original Harinezumi, allows the user to use the camera's LCD screen as a viewfinder in all modes, but toward the end of the afternoon, I began to notice that some of my best photos resulted from ignoring the LCD screen completely and going for "lucky" shots.

The camera also shoots in a flattering monochrome mode, which I didn't use much on this outing, but plan to exploit in great depth in the near future.

As I said before, Ameyoko is a good place to buy seafood. We got a steal of a deal on some scallops and frozen salmon. Wife used those to cook up one of the best dinners we'd had in a long time:

So now that you've seen the pictures the Digital Harinezumi 2++ can produce, here's a breakdown of how I feel about it as a product.

What's Good

• It's small and light. Although its predominantly plastic construction also makes it feel cheap, it fits in a pocket and hardly weighs anything.

• It does what it's supposed to do. Manufactured nostalgia is what the Harinezumi is all about, and in that department, it delivers. Color exaggeration, contrast boosting and corner vignetting come together to produce some very convincing results.

• It offers a level of control. Although it's meant to recreate the chaos and unpredictability of low-tech film photography, the Digital Harinezumi 2++ sports two ISO settings, color and monochrome modes, a ten-second auto-timer and macro mode. And if you feel like you still have too much control over your shots, you can turn the preview mode off and use the folding plastic viewfinder (or no viewfinder at all).

• It's not too electricity-hungry. It runs on a single CR2 battery, admittedly not my favorite power source, since they are pricey (and rechargeable CR2s don't exist in Japan), but one CR2 will let you shoot constantly in video mode for almost two hours. To help you conserve power, the camera turns itself off after remaining idle for sixty seconds.

• The mic is surprisingly capable. I don't really recommend that anyone buy this camera mainly for the movie function, as the video you get is small (640x480) and poorly compressed. And it's likely that the vast majority of Harinezumi videos that appear on YouTube will be set to ambient music tracks (Four Tet comes to mind for some reason); it's just that kind of camera. All the same, when I did take video with sound, I was surprised at the fidelity of the tiny built-in microphone.

What's Bad

• It's overpriced. The camera can be purchased on its own for around ¥15,000, or in a "Box" that comes with a carrying pouch, a strap, a CR2 battery and a 2GB microSD card with USB reader for about ¥20,000. You could make the case that $150 is or isn't a reasonable asking price for such a simple camera, but let me be very clear about something: The Box version isn't worth the extra fifty bucks. The strap and pouch are nothing special. And if you own a Mac, I definitely cannot recommend the Box, as the included microSD card does not work with Mac OS.

• Menu navigation is cumbersome. Granted, this camera only has a few adjustable settings, and two of them (still/video and normal/macro) can be toggled with a single button stroke. But every time you want to change the image resolution, ISO speed, timer, review on/off, preview on/off, color/monochrome setting or sound on/off for video mode, you'll have to cycle through all seven of those options, each of which gets its own screen in the menu. I found myself muttering "come on, come on" more than once while fumbling with the menu mode.

• Video recording is 640x480 at 29 fps and that's that. Come on, SuperHeadz, really? 640x480? In this day and age? Do I have to remind you that analog film, the medium you're trying to emulate, had better resolution than the majority of 20th century televisions? I know you're going for retrograde, but spring for a bigger video resolution with your next upgrade.

LINK:

Official website (English)

AOKI Premium Wash Suit review

2010-04-24T00:52:00.002+09:00

Watch my video review of the AOKI Premium Wash Suit, an invention that could do to your work ethic what the advent of frozen pizza did to your eating habits.

Life Force Medley

2010-04-19T22:19:00.003+09:00

Life Force, an integral part of my gaming youth, is now immortalized in song for your YouTube pleasure.

Big Walk 2010

2010-04-08T08:42:00.007+09:00

The route was a little different from what I said it would be (I decided not to go to Nakameguro because I had gone there with Wife just a couple of days prior), but Big Walk 2010 turned out to be the biggest yet. Plus I decided to do the post in video format.

(You can watch this video in HD on YouTube. The motion video parts aren't high-definition, but the stills are.)

Coming Soon: Big Walk 2010

2010-03-27T20:39:00.003+09:00

With tomorrow's weather forecast looking cold and rainy, it looks like the sixth annual Big Walk will have to take place next Sunday, April 4th. If it rains again on that day, Wednesday the 7th will have to do (although waiting that long might mean missing the peak of the hanami season). The route will likely start at Inokashira Park in Kichijoji and finish near Nakameguro.

Until then, sacrifice a goat and pray for my meteorological fortuity.

Chocolat Brewery

2010-02-16T23:22:00.002+09:00

When something is bad, I will tell you. And now, thanks to the wonders of technology, I will tell you in video format. Enjoy CIC's first official video blog post.

Norfair Theme Video

2010-01-25T22:00:00.007+09:00

My arrangement of the Norfair Theme from Metroid is up in video form at YouTube. The sound quality isn't what I'd hoped for, but at least YouTube is recognizing my uploads again. For a while I couldn't get anything more than the first four seconds to appear.

Update: Quality is now improved.

Deface the Newspaper

2010-01-24T19:54:00.002+09:00

Sometimes I do this.

Vacation Addendum: Breatht

2010-01-11T23:20:00.004+09:00

On our way back to Tokyo, a dispenser in the airplane restroom offered small foil packages of a mouthwash called Breatht. In katakana, the name of this product is ブレスト (Buresuto) which is, quite funnily enough, identical to the katakana spelling of the English word "breast." If there's anything better than one Breatht, it's a pair of Breathts, so I grabbed two of them.

Sorry, I've just been informed that the plural form is actually "Breatht-th."

Pros and Cons: Holiday in Wisconsin

2009-12-31T19:13:00.002+09:00

2009 was, I'm sorry to say, a slow year for Chorus, Isolate, Confirm. I found myself with less time to write and less stuff to write about. I have no better excuse for my laziness from January 1 until December 22. As for the final week of the year, however, I do have an excuse.

Wife and I headed to Wisconsin to spend Christmas with my parents and siblings. It was my first Christmas in the US in six years, and it lived up to my every anticipation. Like all things, however, it had its pros and cons.

PRO: Food

Truth be told, I had been thinking about the food aspect of my holiday long before I boarded the plane at Narita. My co-worker asked me about my plans for the winter break and I answered, "FOOD." When I filled out my customs declaration form on the plane, I wrote that the total monetary value of gifts and merchandise I was bringing into the US was "FOOD." At O'Hare Airport, the immigrations officer asked me where I'd be staying during my vacation and I answered, "FOOD."

Yes, food. The cornerstone of any family holiday function. In my family, the holiday season usually entails a big potluck dinner on Christmas Eve, a big brunch and then turkey dinner on Christmas Day, and a seemingly endless stream of cookies and Chex mix in between. It's enough to make your stomach disown you, cut all ties with you and change its name and address to stop you ever contacting it again.

CON: Winter in Wisconsin

Living in Tokyo for six years has weakened my tolerance for winter. It rarely drops below freezing and it rarely snows -- and when it does snow, it doesn't bother me because I don't have to shovel it or drive in it.

Wisconsin may not technically be the "frozen tundra" that local football fans would have you believe it to be, but it's not exactly the ideal winter getaway, either. Christmas week was dominated by a particularly troublesome storm. It delayed our arrival by keeping us grounded in Chicago for two hours, then proceeded to sprinkle the entire Midwest with a disagreeable mix of freezing rain and snow. Through all of this, the temperature held steady at around the freezing mark, making for treacherous roads and driveways. In its wake the storm left bitter cold, icy winds and snow to be shoveled.

And another thing: When it's December at 45 degrees north latitude, the sun seems like it's constantly right in front of you. From the time it rises to the time it sets (granted, that's only, what, nine hours?), the sun is on a mission to blind you while you're driving and tire out your face muscles by making you squint.

PRO: Dexter

Dexter is my mom's cat. He's a big, fluffy dummy with a penchant for licking the bathtub after someone takes a shower. What Dex lacks in agility and brains, he makes up for by being friendly...at least by cat standards. Dexter is a very personable cat (if that makes any sense...people are personable, so are cats "catable?").

That's more than I can say for Muppy, my dad's cat, who'd just as soon sink his teeth into you as look at you. The name Muppy is a portmanteau of "Mister Puppy," a cat name that my sister and I came up with years ago. It's entirely possible that Muppy's misanthropy is a direct result of having that ridiculous moniker.

Wife took the below photo of Muppy looking like the mild-mannered host of a public television show. But don't be fooled. He's not introducing a Hitchcock film or comparing fine wines. He's thinking about eating your face.

PRO: America is cheap

Part of getting used to life in Japan is becoming accustomed to how expensive everything is. As such, when we visit the continental US, we feel like we've just stepped into a magical wonderland where everything is on clearance all the time. Observe this bargain basement find: Parappa the Rapper for the PSP, marked down to $4.99. You'd have to pay me not to buy that.

CON: America is stupid

On the other hand, a big of shopping reveals some of America's more troubling trends. For example, the Snuggie. Wife and I first saw an infomercial for this Harry Potter-esque garb in Japan and assumed it was some failed foreign invention, brought to Japan for a second chance at commercial success. The commercial showed a family of four, all wearing matching Snuggies and looking very much like members of some kind of warm, cozy religious cult. Imagine our shock when we saw every store in Wisconsin selling the things. And don't even get me started on Snuggie for Dogs.

Speaking of stupidity and shopping, consider this warning sign of America's descent into intellectual oblivion: I was most dismayed to find that the Fox River Mall in Appleton no longer has a bookstore. I walked up and down the mall, assuming that Waldenbooks had just moved to another spot or possibly been replaced by a Barnes & Noble, but there was nothing. I checked the mall directory and found only one store listed under the "Books and Software" category: GameStop.

God help us.

PRO: The Price is Right

At risk of coming across as a hypocrite after what I just said about America's intellect, I won't go into too much detail about this. I just forgot how much I liked this show back in the day. It isn't on in Japan, so I made sure to get an eyeful of it while I was in the US.

CON: "Security"

On Christmas morning, America shed a collective tear of sorrow. Not because our security was threatened by attempted terrorism...not because our holiday was marred by news of what could have been a large loss of life. No, we shed a tear in anticipation of all the stupid crap we'd have to put up with at the airport in the name of "additional security."

After hearing about the hot pants antics of crotch bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the news, Wife and I exchanged a look. We knew we'd be limited to one carry-on bag and no personal item. We we sure we'd have to walk through a Total Recall underwear scanner. We counted on being forced by nervous flight attendants to sit perfectly still, hands in our laps, looking straight ahead for the entirety of our 13-hour return flight to Japan.

PRO: Overbooking

Happily, none of our premonitions about came true. And on top of that, a Christmas miracle: Our tickets were magically upgraded to business class. So thank you, airline industry. I'll gladly surrender my privacy and convenience if it means I can have unlimited free champagne, lean my seat all the way back and order a BLT at any point during the flight.

Happy New Year from Chorus, Isolate, Confirm. May 2010 be a more bloggable year than ever.

Japanese FF13 Ad

2009-12-03T15:55:00.004+09:00

This is one of several humorous TV ads I've seen for Final Fantasy XIII over the past two weeks. A teacher taking time off to play video games...like that could ever happen. I mean...right?

When Morons Collide

2009-11-23T23:51:00.003+09:00

In other news, an army of under-informed Sarah Palin enthusiasts were captured on video at a book signing event. They displayed -- with great fervor -- their astounding lack of understanding about politics, policy, economics and science. Let their folly serve as a cautionary tale to any and all who would contribute to Palin's overinflated self-image.

Come on, America. It's time to stop stringing this woman along. She's already had too much ill-deserved time in the limelight. Cut her loose already.

Let's Learn Japanese: Tsui ni

2009-11-10T11:25:00.002+09:00

This evening in Osaka, Ichihashi Tatsuya was arrested in connection with the 2007 murder of British ESL teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker (which I briefly mentioned in another "Let's Learn Japanese" post from June of that year. Ichihashi had successfully eluded capture since the murder, fueling suspicions that the police didn't really care about catching him.

Less than two weeks prior to his arrest, an updated version of Ichihashi's "WANTED" photo was released, indicating that he had recently managed to undergo plastic surgery to alter his face. The renewed attention to the case is likely to have aided in his being recognized and subsequently captured.

Tsui ni is Japanese for "at last."

Who's a Pretty Car?

2009-10-26T16:55:00.005+09:00

*Updated since initial post*

Here are a few in-game shots I took using the Photo Mode of Turn 10's Forza Motorsport 3, which will be released for the Xbox 360 stateside tomorrow. Buy it immediately.

(Click each image to enlarge)

Tokyo Notice Bored

2009-10-21T12:12:00.006+09:00

Matthew Sweet's "Ugly Truth Rock" begins with this lyric about depression and boredom:

You don't wanna die
But the living gets you down

Why the long face, Matt? Haven't you noticed the veritable cornucopia of potential entertainment that surrounds you at any given moment? Well, I have. And it's called Tokyo Notice Board.

I used TNB as blog fodder last summer, remember? I'd do so more often, except that picking up a copy of this orgy of bad writing and weird personal ads has an effect on me similar to that of a garlic-scented oak crucifix through the heart on Dracula. The essays that people submit to this rag, I swear to god...

Have I mentioned? Getting your essay published in TNB nets you ¥3000. So when I make fun of these people, keep in mind at all times: They aren't just bad writers. They're bad writers who got thirty bucks to pollute the world with their inane musings. Let's get right into it, starting on page 35 of the October 9-15, 2009 issue of Tokyo Garbage Heap.

A hapless expat -- let's call him Chames Jarlton to protect his innocence -- explodes onto the page with an essay called "Being a vegetarian is hard in Japan!" Right off the bat, there's one of those exclamation marks that TNB contributors so often love to overuse. I'll resist the temptation to make fun of him straight away for being a vegetarian; there's bound to be other reasons to make fun of him coming up shortly.

When I first arrived in Japan I struggled hard to find anything to eat, even simple things like a "vegetable sandwich" always seemed to have some meat in it [sic], what could I do!

Ugh. Just....ugh. Really, Chames? Three sentences mashed together with commas? A question punctuated with an exclamation point? Subject-verb disagreement? All in the opening line of your essay?

The only word that describes my emotions right now is "ugh." Well, that and maybe, "rrrgh." Moving on:

One of the funniest situations I had

Oh lord. Get ready for a funny situation. I'm laughing just thinking about how funny it's going to be.

One of the funniest situations I had was during a stay in a mountain lodge in Nagano. I explained to the lodge owner in my broken Japanese that I don't eat meat or fish, could he prepare something different for dinner for me?

Okay, now let's get into the substance of it. I'm still not going to make fun of the guy for being a vegetarian. Some people are vegetarians, and sometimes vegetarians make special requests at restaurants. I get it. But refusing to eat fish in Japan? That's not vegetarianism....that's just being difficult. You might as well move to Norway and refuse to wear jackets.

I also want to point out that, in that last excerpt, Chames has defined his Japanese as "broken." Keep this in mind, as it will be important later.

Dinnertime came; first the "normal" meals came out, 2 slices of ham served with rice and vegetables. I was the last to get my special meal, 5 minutes passed and nothing was in front of me yet, I was so excited imagining the exotic new veggie food being prepared for me in the kitchen.

Yeah, and I'm so excited imagining giving you an electric shock for every time you misuse a comma or type a numeral when you should spell it out, Chames. And, assuming the restaurant in your mountain lodge wasn't a Burger King, I don't think five minutes is such a long time to wait, considering your request for special treatment. I feel bad for the people who invited Chames on this trip to the mountains. On the bright side, I'm sure they'll never make a mistake like that again.

Finally my meal came, a big serving of rice, some vegetables and.....one slice of ham? I thought to myself, where did I go wrong, what did I say incorrectly? Maybe I didn't make myself clear with my pigeon Japanese, so I just ate around the meat.

It wasn't bad enough that Chames's Japanese was "broken" (not that his English is in much better repair), but it was also "pigeon." Granted, he probably meant "pidgin Japanese," but I cannot ignore the possibility that Chames's request to the lodge owner consisted of a lot of cooing and bird-like head movements.

There is still more inanity to come in this essay, but I have to put it aside. Chames, you're on your own. My advice to you: Weigh your strict vegetarianism against your desire to live in Japan, because one of those two things has to go. And if you're an English teacher, god help you because you have catastrophic punctuation habits.

Next, we examine the October 16-22, 2009 issue of TNB. Here's something called "Getting a good dentist in Japan" by, shall we say, Tresmond Dotter.

Have you ever been to a good dentist in Japan?

Yes.

The answer is probably, no.

No. Yes.

In ten years, I've had nothing but trouble here. My front crown mainly. At first, my friend recommended a dentist who used a pink fluffy towel on my head to avoid the pain [sic]. Sure it was painless. But the crown was refitted incorrectly and I looked like a prawn.

I'm struggling to visualize that. Do prawns even have teeth?

When it came off, I was recommended a second dentist by the same person. Again the crown was put on wrong. I went back and incredulously this dentist started his recommended treatment -- he started shaving my good tooth to even it up. Can you believe it!

Can I believe what? That you took further advice from the same person who recommended the first bad dentist to you?

When I jumped out of the chair and threatened him with a series of expletives

He called the police? You got arrested? You got deported? I mean, I'm sorry about your mouth trouble and all, but come on. Don't give your fellow foreigners a bad name by assaulting your dentist. That's just unnecessary.

Not surprisingly, Tresmond's tooth issues continue. It's almost like nature is trying to tell him that he wasn't meant to have any teeth in the first place.

This time I turned to a woman on the Inokashira Line...

Wait a minute.

...Supposedly trained in Australia...

Hey, that's my dentist! Remember my root canal story from three years ago? Well, I assume he finally got his dental dysfunctions resolved, then. She was pretty good at her job.

Supposedly trained in Australia. Where -- In the outback with a stick? He refitted the crown at the wrong angle...

Oh, it was a man? Never mind, different person. Weird coincidence, though. About ten broken teeth later, Tresmond finishes with this cryptic message:

I just hope I now eat my sushi in

In what? In bed? In terror? In a chicken costume? The story doesn't continue on the next page. It doesn't continue on any page. It just ends in mid-sentence. Well, fine. I was about ready to set fire to the magazine, anyway. Memo to self: If I see an angry, toothless prawn walking around Tokyo, that's our friend Tresmond.

Sagami Lake Camping Trip

2009-10-14T09:50:00.006+09:00

With the national holiday known as Taiiku no Hi (Physical Education Day) on Monday, we had an extended weekend on our hands. Wife and I, along with four friends, spent Sunday and Monday at Sagamiko Picnicland, a combination of campground and amusement park situated on a hill overlooking Sagami Lake in Kanagawa Prefecture.

We rented this trailer with enough sleeping space for six people. The campground also offers tent and cabin rental, but the trailers are well furnished and have temperature control -- good thing, because it got quite chilly during the night.

(All images in this post can be enlarged by clicking.)

It wouldn't be a camping trip without gigantic bugs around every corner. The Sagami Lake area was especially teeming with large mantises and spiders, but I also got a chance to practice my wildlife photography on a stinkbug.

Sunday night was the best part of the trip: the barbecue. In central Tokyo, where most people don't have their own yard, a cook-out is a rare privilege. We took advantage of the occasion by simultaneously firing up a wood-burning grill (to make seafood paella) and a charcoal grill (for the meat and vegetables). The wood burner also proved suitable for roasting marshmallows after dinner.

On Monday, after cleaning up and checking out of our campsite, we spent most of the day at the amusement park. Most of the attractions were geared towards young children, but it was still a good way to spend an extra day off.

EXILE "The Next Door (Jesse Jace Thomas SF4 Mix)"

2009-09-28T23:13:00.004+09:00

EXILE's Street Fighter IV theme song, which originally struck me as annoying, began to sound an awful lot like potential remix material a couple weeks ago. Witness the result:

Funniest Thing I Have Seen So Far This Month

2009-09-15T02:42:00.003+09:00

I won't waste time trying to describe it. Just watch it for yourself. I can't embed the video, so here's the link.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

2009-08-20T16:33:00.004+09:00

A Nazi woman and a Jewish guy go to Vegas.

You're right. It's not very funny.

Know Your Mollusks

2009-08-17T21:26:00.006+09:00

The other day, Wife and I went to see Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (or, as it's known to the article- and preposition-challenged nation of Japan, Night Museum 2). Normally I pass on this kind of movie, but there's a theater in Kichijoji where tickets are ¥1000 all throughout your birth month, and Wife was psyched to watch yet another film in which Ben Stiller talks to animals, so our fate was sealed.

(Jeez, to think that ¥1000 for a movie ticket actually sounds like a bargain to me now....)

Now, I'm sure I've said before that people who work in marketing are prone to making astonishingly bad decisions, but the Japanese marketing of this film has been a brave, new world of nonsense. I challenge you to get your head around why the marketing people made the decision I'm about to describe. Thinking hats on.

As you may know, the film highlights a number of the Smithsonian Institution's actual exhibits, like the Apollo space capsule and the Wright Brothers' plane. One exhibit that failed to make it into the film, however, was the body of 24-foot giant squid displayed in a refrigerated tank.

What did make it into the film, on the other hand, was a giant CGI octopus.

Granted, I can imagine the scenario by which the Smithsonian's squid accidentally became an octopus. Hollywood has mistaken these two mollusks before, so it's par for the course that they do it again. Besides, at no point in the movie do they actually call the octopus "squid," so you could chalk the whole thing up to creative license and leave it at that. But what's much harder to fathom is that all the Japanese promotional material for the movie, and I mean ALL OF IT -- trailers, TV spots, printed leaflets and even a two-hour TV special designed specifically to promote the film's Japanese release -- persistently refers to the animal as a squid.

I'll do a quick Let's Learn Japanese here, just to be thorough:

tako (n.) Octopus.

ika (n.) Squid.

There, see? They're different. For these two to be confused in Japan, a country where both are routinely eaten, a country where the average child learns the difference between tako and ika in kindergarten, a country where the difference between the two is important enough that even visiting foreigners figure out how to tell them apart before they return home...well, that's just far fetched.

Like I said before, the movie itself never makes the mistake of calling this octopus a "squid." So why this concerted (not to mention downright Orwellian) effort to fool the moviegoing public? Is it out of an obligation to link the film to the Smithsonian Institution for advertising purposes? Is it just another example of empty-headed marketing?

Could it possibly be both?

Jesse Jace VS The World

2009-08-11T23:39:00.005+09:00

Yesterday I bought an Xbox Live Vision Camera. This small USB device provides functionality for a number of Xbox 360 games, but can also easily be used with MacOS or Windows. Unfortunately, a lot of the games that offer camera support kind of suck. For example, nobody has anything good to say about the You're In the Movies series, and my own experiences with Burnout: Paradise -- in which a fresh still of the player who's just bested you appears in a corner of the screen -- have been spotty at best (who wants to be taunted by a fat dude in his BVDs?). EA Sports, however, has done an exceptional job of putting the peripheral to good use.

One of the latest offerings from the aforementioned sports game giant, Fight Night: Round 4, via a feature called GameFace, allows the player to use the camera to put a photo-realistic (if perhaps excessively forgiving) version himself into the game as a prizefighter. User-created boxers can also be easily shared via Xbox Live, used in off- and on-line modes, and captured in the game's replay editor.

To illustrate just how much fun this can be, I made this video. Unfortunately iMovie, the only video editing software I have, is not good at compression, so the picture quality is lacking.

Fun with Bill, Kim and Dick

2009-08-06T11:12:00.005+09:00

On Tuesday night, Japanese TV news showed a video still of this week's meeting between Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton. This same striking still also appeared on the front page of yesterday's Yomiuri Shinbun. I failed to find the still anywhere online, so I decided to scan it and post it here.

Check out the grin on Kim. He looks like a twelve-year-old girl whose birthday party was just paid a surprise visit by David Beckham. (Come to think of it, Bill Clinton sort of looks like David Beckham being forced to visit a twelve-year-old girl's birthday party.)

Unfortunately, another person who resembles a child is Dick Morris, who has blasted Clinton for "boosting" North Korea. Apparently Dick Morris thinks that the foreign policy of the United States should more closely resemble the behavior of a child who thinks there are monsters under his bed. Morris would have us pretend that North Korea doesn't exist before he would have us engage them in diplomacy -- even if the diplomacy is successful, as it was in this case.

Dick Morris wants to plug his ears and cover his eyes while repeating the mantra, "If I can't see them, then they aren't there." He also contends that the freeing of hostages Euna Lee and Laura Ling was timed to distract Americans from the health care debate.

Dick Morris is stunningly dumb.

It's That Time of Year Again

2009-07-03T21:03:00.005+09:00

In Japan, one can always easily spot the signs of the changing seasons. You can tell spring is coming when the plum blossoms open. You can be certain spring is over when the humidity leaps dramatically and it rains every other day for a month. And you can tell that summer is on its way when a particularly unappetizing new flavor of Pepsi comes out.

Chorus, Isolate, Confirm has made a yearly tradition of blowing the lid -- or the cap -- off these bizarre concoctions. It's the closest I ever come to being an "investigative journalist." I'm your Pepsi correspondent in the field.

Last year it was Pepsi Blue Hawaii (do not mix with other cleaning agents), and the year before that it was Pepsi Ice Cucumber (for external use only). This year Pepsi continues its dynasty of beverage terror with Pepsi Shiso.

Shiso is the Japanese name for perilla, a plant normally used as a garnish for pasta or salad (and not normally used as a flavor for a carbonated drink). Like fennel and cilantro, perilla is one of those plants that doesn't necessarily taste like something that's meant to be eaten. For me, the taste of perilla brings back an ancient memory of being two years old and eating a leaf from a random plant in the backyard, just to see what would happen. As such, Pepsi Shiso sounds on paper like a flavor disaster waiting to happen...an inevitable failure that might as well be called Grass Cola.

It sounds marginally better than, say, teriyaki birthday cake or caramel-dipped charcoal briquettes.

Now for the surprising part: In practice, Pepsi Shiso isn't that bad. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the best limited-release Pepsi flavor I've tried so far. The shiso flavor keeps it from being too sweet, which is exactly what last year's Blue Hawaii had going against it. This blows Pepsi Blue Hawaii out of the toilet bowl, and it makes Pepsi Ice Cucumber look like Asparagus Banana Ketchup Sprite.

Does that mean I'll be buying any more of the stuff before it disappears from store shelves? No. In fact, in keeping with tradition, I'm unlikely to even finish the one bottle that I did buy.

I Now Pronounce You Bruddah and Wahine

2009-07-02T13:37:00.009+09:00

Wife and I got back from our Hawaiian wedding/honeymoon trip on Wednesday night. It was altogether an excellent vacation; somehow we managed to strike a balance between the busy madness of a wedding and the relaxation requisite of a week in Hawaii. Neither of us caught a cold on the plane, lost any luggage, got bitten by a shark or came back with crippling sunburn. All in all, not a bad little excursion.

Of course, while things went well overall, there were a few little things that could have been better. I've decided to highlight a few of the businesses we patronized during (and in preparation for) our trip and the experiences we had therewith, both good and bad.

The Willows [link]

We had a lunch reception at this restaurant, not far from Central Union Church, our ceremonial venue. Despite choosing the place based mainly on accessibility and affordability, the buffet food turned out to be quite good, and the staff were as helpful as could be. On top of that, this restaurant's macadamia nut pie was the single best desert item I ate during the entire trip. I think our wedding cake may have actually been a little jealous.

Ciao Mein [link]

While I'm pretty sure the founder of this much-hyped (and much-dimly-lit) restaurant came up with the idea of marrying Chinese and Italian food specifically as a vehicle for the clever name "Ciao Mein," the food we ate here was surprisingly good, if a bit too expensive. We ate a big dinner of breaded soft-shell crabs, shrimp with walnuts and peapods, and seafood lasagna with look-funn noodles (pictured below. It may not look much like lasagna, but the noodles certainly do look-funn, don't they? .....sorry). The service was also excellent. Our waiter spoke fluent English and Japanese...and for some reason, responded to everything we said with a burst of good-natured laughter. At least, I want to believe it was good natured.

Dollar Rent-a-Car [link]

I don't have too much experience with car rental companies, but none of my past experiences have been as cumbersome as our experience with Dollar was. Things were screwy from the very beginning. For example, when we failed to pick up our rental on the day of our reservation (what kind of rent-a-car office closes for the day at 2PM?), Dollar stopped expecting us to show up at all. The next day when we tried to pick up the compact, the eccentric lady at the desk told us our reservation was "deleted," and that all they had available were Jeeps and convertibles.

She eventually did give us a discount on a convertible for our trouble, but it took her something like 25 minutes of her typing and growling at her computer and complaining about the "new software system" before our rental was finalized. When we finally got the car it had, annoyingly, half a tank of gas in it. This challenged us to the guessing game of returning the car with the very same amount of gas in it, since the rates Dollar charged for missing gas were a good amount higher than the actual price.

(Unrelated to our experience with Dollar, have you ever driven in Honolulu? What an epic pain in the neck. How many one-way streets does one city need? That, combined with high price of parking, the trouble we had with Dollar and the availability of decent, affordable public transport, made me somewhat regret my decision to rent a car at all.)

Howard's Downtown Florist [link]

As the groom, my responsibilities were few in the planning of our wedding. One thing I did take responsibility for was the reservation and pickup of the flowers and petals used in our ceremony. Luckily I happened to find this idiot-proof (groom-proof) flower shop. The staff was very helpful on the phone, although he occasionally sounded surprised -- or maybe offended -- at my ignorance to the world of bridal bouquets.

Atlantis Submarines Oahu [link]

Kind of lame, I'm sorry to say. This submarine, touted as the biggest sightseeing sub in the world, goes 100 feet under the ocean to offer guests a close-up view of some artificial reefs and shipwrecks, along with the animals that inhabit them. Unfortunately, however, buying the pricey ticket to ride the sub doesn't guarantee that you'll actually see anything interesting. Sure, there were a couple of turtles and some fish here and there. But even when they do show up, at a depth of 100 feet with only natural lighting, every fish you see looks blue or black, no matter how colorful it actually is. This is a nice attraction for people who can't go snorkeling or diving...but if you're not one of those people, you're better off spending the afternoon at Hanauma Bay.

Hawaiian Bridal [link]

I won't mince words: Wedding planners will gleefully destroy your finances if you let them, and this truth is amplified when it comes to Japanese wedding planners. That's not just my jaded prejudice talking; many businesses in Japan make their money by offering a high level of service and convenience in exchange for every last yen you've got. Luckily for us, however, the hefty price tag on our wedding was (at least partially) justified by the astonishing work of wedding photographer Tomo, who also happens to be the president of Hawaiian Bridal. Tomo shot us at various locations on the day of our ceremony, including a sunset photo shoot at Ala Moana Park, and gave us all the photo data afterward -- almost 2000 pictures in all. It made for an exhausting day, but the results were very nice:

Weddings Make You Busy

2009-06-23T01:14:00.004+09:00

Chorus, Isolate, Confirm is not dead. My apologies for the lack of updates this month. Oh, and last month. Preparations for our wedding ceremony in Hawaii have been dominating the daily lives of Wife and me. But this week those preparations will finally come to fruition.

When I come back, I'll tell you all about it.

Miscellaneous Photos

2009-05-06T00:30:00.006+09:00

I have a handful of photos taken here and there around Tokyo over the past several months. I took each one with the intention of blogging about it, but none of them alone really seemed worthy of its own post. Now, posted together for your convenience, here they are.

Exhibit A. In my neighborhood there's a building which is apparently host to a partnership of attorneys, one of whom is a porn star.

Moving on, observe Swastika Man. He tells us, in this sign, not to run up or down the escalators in the train station. Swastika Man hopes that this sign will serve as the Final Solution to the problem of escalator-related injuries.

Ladies, did you know that you can literally roll the cellulite right out of your arms and legs? And if this little plastic roller can help, imagine what a steam roller could do!

Sorry, Burger King, but I'm a little skeptical of the claim you make in this next photo. I haven't "freaked out" after eating something in a long time...not since university.

Next: WE WATCH YOU.

This is a picture on a sign in a residential area warning drivers to watch out for kids playing near the road. Motorists should exercise particular caution if the kids look anything like this kid.

I saved the best one for last. This is in the front window of a motorcycle shop on Kannana Street between Shin-Daita and Daitabashi stations.

Don't Install MacCinema

2009-04-28T12:38:00.003+09:00

After a close call with this threat to Mac OS's hitherto ironclad security, I'll be extra careful about what I install on my machine.

[link]

Yahoo to End GeoCities

2009-04-25T18:25:00.004+09:00

Yahoo has said it will shut down GeoCities, the free website hosting service it purchased ten years ago, this year.

GeoCities was one of the most popular ad-driven hosts where people built their personal web pages back in the days before blog hosts became the easiest way to do so. It also became known as a virtually infinite graveyard of some of the most pointless, ill-looking and dysfunctional pages on the entire internet. Any time I was looking for information online and found a link to a GeoCities page, my hopes of discovering anything relevant on that page sank considerably. Most of the time the link would lead to a page that hadn't been updated in at least three years, and whose images had all vanished because the user's allotted bandwidth had been used up.

Hallmarks of GeoCities websites included random GIF animations, illogical linking, seizure-inducing color schemes and hit counters that looked like this:

(The way I'm describing it, GeoCities sounds an awful lot like MySpace...but trust me, it was totally different.)

Countless internet users, including myself, can truthfully say that GeoCities was their first ever "home on the web." The service GeoCities offered was perfect if you wanted to build a website with basically no content, and you wanted to do so for free. I took advantage of this perfect storm of pointlessness and created my first website, entitled The Hall of Crushes, in 1997. It was, as you can imagine, a high-tech shrine to unrequited love; kind of like the movie High Fidelity, only instead of my lost loves being played by Catherine Zeta Jones and Lili Taylor, they were portrayed in cute little caricatures I drew myself. It was a vigorous exercise in self-indulgence.

Aren't you glad I stopped being self-indulgent?

Mathew Chromecki: "It Wudn't Me"

2009-04-12T23:05:00.007+09:00

I received the comment below on my August 2008 post "When There's Nothing to Write About, I Make Fun of Other Writers." It contends that the attribution of the essay entitled "Right so, what am I doing here?" to Mathew Chromecki was a failure of editorial oversight on the part of Tokyo Notice Board. In light of the possibility that I have credited the wrong person with writing so bad not even light can escape it, I will not refer to authors of bad essays by full name in future TNB dissections.

Dear Jesse,
I've enjoyed reading your blog. I'm new to making Web logs. I found yours when I was surprised to find it on a search engine list with my own name. I was then further intrigued as to quotes assigned to me I never made. After opening your page and read your comments from something I never wrote, I chuckled. You could never know that TNB accredited the article to the wrong person, could you? But this is not the first time. Imagine receiving a check in the mail for something you didn't write? It's a small publication house. Now, I wish I could tell you who wrote the article, but I don't know myself. I do, however, sympathize with your sentiments. Where there is too much "I" in an essay, it begins to sound like depression writ large; somethings are best left unsaid.
As a happy coincidence, I, the real Mathew Chromecki, am pleasantly acquainted with M. Guffin who, by my humble account, is a fine bassist and accomplished music teacher. Guffin, if you happen to read this, I hope all is well you.
Thank you for your attention, Jesse. All the best for your blog.

My Xbox is Well Again

2009-04-02T21:19:00.003+09:00

My Xbox 360 came back from the shop today (in about half the time I was told the repairs would take). It seems to be in good order. It will be able to eat solid foods again in about a month, but sadly, it will never play the violin again.

QWOP

2009-04-01T12:36:00.002+09:00

Fiance pointed this Flash game out to me after it became a favorite time waster with her co-workers. Use the Q,W,O and P keys to move the runner as far as you can before he falls. My personal best distance so far is 13.5m; Fiance's is somewhere around 25m.

[LINK]

Big Walk 2009

2009-03-29T23:23:00.004+09:00

NOTE: This year's Big Walk report includes some terminology, denoted by orange type, which is part of a unique lexicon developed by Craig and I while we were roommates during our early days in Tokyo. When you see orange words in this report that don't exactly make sense, you'll just have to use your imagination to figure out what they mean. (Half the time, we don't know what they mean, either.)

It may not have been the ideal timing for a sakura photo trek, but Big Walk 5 proved to be just that: Big. Due to insufficient planning and note taking on my part, the actual distance of our haphazard route proved difficult to measure. Near as I can figure, Big Walk 2009 came very close to matching the distance of Big Walk 2005. In fact, taking into account the time we spent double-backing and wandering aimlessly, we very well may have outdone that distance. Here's the blow up:

We start in front of Kitasenju Station, the same place we began Big Walk 2007. It is 11:00 AM on an unseasonably cold but sunny day. According to my so-called "plan," we will cross the Sumida River and then slam west to something called Arakawa Shizen Kōen (Arakawa Nature Park). I've never been there, but it sounds rad like a pipe bomb. So we follow Route 4 southward and over the bridge.

After bashing a trick over the river our goal is to stay as close to the river as possible and follow it west. We soon happen upon a little park called Tennō Kōen, which has a few cherry blossom trees (although most of these are still budding) and an artificial pond with tadpoles swimming in it. We find our way onto a path that follows the river and brings us to our first decent sakura of the day:

Craig's a damage fiend.

At a few minutes before noon, we reach Arakawa Nature Park. We soon realize that the park is located adjacent to Mikawa Water Recycling Center. This means that, from where we're standing, we can look to the east and see this:

But if we look to the west, we see this:

Ah, nature. Just when we think we can't take anymore of the pastoral serenity of this idyllic nature park and its neighboring industrial facility, we discover this filthy bridge leading from the park, over the water filtration equipment and down to the street:

Craig observes, correctly, that this bridge would be scary at night. Oh, mercy!

After leaving through the south exit of the "Nature Park," we decide that our next order of business should be to slice our way to Nippori Station. At this point we get a little lost because none of the streets in the area seem to go in the direction we want to go, which is southwest. On the way, we capture these random cherry blossoms:

We can't figure out our location until we find ourselves on a tiny street called Shichigosandōri (Seven-Five-Three Street, apparently named after a festival for children of those ages). Thank god for Shichigosandōri. Not only does this street help us get our bearings, it leads us to what is perhaps the highlight of Big Walk 2009: Swamp Thing's House.

Killa! We stop to marvel at this epic failure of pruning (half-expecting the house to catch on fire and burn down before our eyes), and also to take artsy photos using the traffic mirror at the entrance to an adjacent parking lot.

Nippori is one of Tokyo's Korea towns and, as such, is full of Korean restaurants. On reaching Nippori Station, we're bleeding for some medicine, so we decide it's time to stop and snort some Korean food: Chijimi and bibimba. It's a napalm lunch. We smash on and head west.

On the west side of Nippori Station is a Yanaka Cemetery. Even though most of the cherry blossoms are still closed, the road through the cemetery is bustling with flower viewers. On closer inspection, we notice that a lot of people are using the cemetery as a picnic venue. Apparently it's not considered morbid or taboo in Japan to get tinned and eat onigiri in the presence of the deceased. Bang dat! If I were dead I think I might be a little annoyed that everyone is enjoying food and drink in front of me while I'm preoccupied with not even being able to manipulate my environment. Remember how Patrick Swayze's character in Ghost could only do damage in the real world if he really concentrated? With practice, could that skill be applied to post-mortem consumption of fried chicken and Chu-Hi? Anyway. Back to the matter at hand.

Our route grows more and more complex as we hook east toward Uguisudani, which is a hotbed (if you will) of love hotels and appropriately trashy-looking women. From there, we bash a completely unnecessary half-circle around Ueno Station and into Ueno Park, Tokyo's de-facto hanami location. The park is predictably slammed with scum. Defying the slow tide of the crowd, I stop to take a close-up of an especially full branch of cherry blossoms. The photo doesn't turn out because some drunk guy, a real juice bag, distracts me by grabbing my arm, pointing at the tree I'm shooting and saying, "Eh, eh, uh, eh, TOGETHER?" To that, my response is a brusque "No." Must be the rage talking. The drunk guy leaves, presumably to go home and cry himself to sleep because his well-intentioned attempt at speaking English has just been crushed like a bug. Poor guy got a dose of reality.

Ueno Park is the last place I take any pictures. We exit the west side of the park and follow Kototoidōri past Nezu Station and through the campus of Tokyo University. Then we circumnavigate Tokyo Dome and take Sotoboridōri and Yasukunidōri west, past the defense ministry where the PAC-3 missile launchers that will defend us from North Korea's "communications satellite" are deployed, all the way to Shin-J. At 6:30PM, Big Walk 2009 is finished! We hit an izakaya to celebrate the completion of our journey with a food smash.

click map to blow up

Big Walk 2009 Is Today

2009-03-29T09:42:00.004+09:00

Thanks to the perverse weather we've had this spring, Tokyo is probably still about a week away from the peak of cherry blossom viewing season. In spite of that, my friend Craig and I will partake of Chorus, Isolate, Confirm's fifth annual Big Walk across Tokyo today. Resulting photography (and maps showing where we got lost) will be posted soon after.

Patient Transfer

2009-03-26T12:01:00.005+09:00

The cable that was supposed reach me ten days after yesterday was delivered this morning. Trying it out confirmed my suspicion: The problem is with my console proper, not with my cable. So now my only alternative is to send the Xbox 360 in to be repaired, which is also supposed to take ten days (and cost over ¥10,000). It's a bit spendy, but I've been told that doing so will also extend my warranty for an additional year from the time of the repairs.

After reading a lot of internet forum testimonials from people who partook of Microsoft's Xbox 360 repair services, I'm reassured that this won't be a waste of a hundred dollars (unless some cute intern falls in love with my Xbox, agrees to marry it and then cuts off its life support).

My Xbox 360 Needs Medical Attention

2009-03-25T17:55:00.004+09:00

There are many ways to annoy me. You can do it by using your screeching bicycle breaks within three meters of my ears. Or you can fall asleep while taking up the seat space normally occupied by two people on the Nambu Line. You can even annoy me by coming to your English lesson and answering the question "How are you?" with "I'm tired" or "I'm sick." (Many students don't understand that "How are you?" is a rhetorical question and that "I'm sick" is the last thing a teacher wants to hear at the beginning of an English lesson in a tiny classroom with no ventilation.)

The point is, when it comes to being annoyed, I'm just about the most versatile person I know. And this week, even my Xbox 360 decided to have a go at putting me in a mood by exhibiting symptoms of video card trouble...and doing so while I was in the middle of Street Fighter IV, Biohazard 5 and Call of Duty: World At War.

I'm not sure what course of action I'll take. Barring the appearance of the Red Ring of Death between now and October, my machine is out of warranty. And Microsoft's priced repair services, while supposedly helpful, are expensive and slow. The only reason I'm even considering using said repair service is that last year, when the R button on my out-of-warranty DS broke, Nintendo bolstered my faith in the basic goodness of humankind by repairing it free of charge.

I'm currently waiting for Microsoft to send me a new video cable, just to make sure that the problem isn't with the cable rather than the actual hardware. The simple act of sending me this cable is supposed to take ten days. Ten days?! What are they doing, carving the cable out of ivory?

I hope it is just the cable. It'd be sad if my Xbox became an ex-Xbox.

Games of Yore: Resident Evil

2009-03-06T23:08:00.008+09:00

After picking up my copy of Biohazard 5 (which was released this Thursday in Japan) and seeing first hand the dramatic changes Capcom has made in this incarnation of its zombie saga, I have decided that the subject of my second Games of Yore feature will be the game that started it all.

Game: Resident Evil (Capcom; 1996)
Console: PlayStation
Genre: Action/Adventure (later categorized as "Survival Horror")

I was in my final year of high school when this landmark title came out. My friends and I, none of whom owned a PlayStation at the time of the game's release, rented a console and a copy of the game and sat down for a long night of zombie intrigue. We screamed our heads off every time a giant tarantula dropped down from the ceiling or a diseased dog crashed through the window. It was a damn good time. Unfortunately, there were two things about the game we had to learn the hard way.

Thing one: We really should have pooled our cash together for a memory card. Without one, we faced the epic challenge of playing the game without dying (since, after the player died, his only recourse was to load his last saved game from the title screen). We actually became pretty good at this after a while. In fact, one of my friends finally mustered the stamina to finish the whole game on a single life. Soon after completing this task, he lost his mind and disappeared into the uncharted wilds of Wisconsin.

Thing two: Not even Sewer Shark could have prepared us for the sober truth that, with the quantum leap forward in game audio technology provided by a CD-based console like the PlayStation, would inevitably come a quantum leap backward in the quality of voice acting. Come to think of it, Sewer Shark didn't even succeed in preparing us for the part in Resident Evil where there were actual sharks in the sewer.

My buddies and I initially found great entertainment in the goofy lines uttered by the game's protagonists. But with repeated deaths and subsequent viewings of the game's opening scenes (which, cruelly, could not be skipped), it became apparent that "WHAT IS IT?" was to Resident Evil as "SMOKIN'!" was to The Mask. Fun at first, but ultimately exasperating. I'd be lying, however, if I said that I don't still get a little laugh out of golden classics like "You were almost a Jill Sandwich!"

After getting these two hard lessons behind us, Resident Evil proved to us that the video game format was capable of delivering a sense of dread more palpable than that of most horror movies. We learned to be afraid of certain hallways based solely on the music and the color of the wallpaper. For teenagers like my friends and me, that dread value alone was enough to make the game an integral part of our lives during the spring and summer of 1996.

Four PSP Games I Really Hope Don't Suck

2009-02-20T22:03:00.007+09:00

Over the past couple of years I've been holding the PlayStation Portable to a standard which, unfortunately, it usually doesn't reach. Sony's powerful little bundle of portable fun, as I have said on several occasions, would be the perfect vehicle for countless titles (especially fighting and puzzle games) which, for what ever reason, never make it onto the PSP roster. But even in the face of repeated disappointment, I won't lose hope. This spring will see a handful of new PSP titles that currently have me crossing my fingers, knocking on wood and throwing salt over my shoulder in hopes that they just don't suck too bad.

Title: Shin Sangokumusô: Multi Raid
Scheduled release: Feb. 26, 2009

Kôei, developers of about a thousand nearly identical action games set in Feudal China, will release what I hope will be a refreshing, new addition to the Musô family next week. This new title, sporting a healthy roster of 36 playable characters and placing a new emphasis on multiplayer gameplay, had better not suck because I'm probably going to buy it. (Hmmm, I should probably download the demo before I go shelling out any money.)

FUN FACT! The game's title was originally intended to be Shin Sangokumusô: Multi Revolution. Thank goodness Kôei realized this title was ridiculous and took the noble step of reducing its length by six whole letters. I'm hoping against hope that this game's sequel bears the title Shin Sangogkumusô: Panty Raid and involves stealing undergarments from Zhen Luo.

Title: Fate/unlimited codes PORTABLE
Scheduled release: June 2009

This is a 3D fighting game with chaotic capitalization going on in its title. To be honest, I haven't allowed myself to get acquainted with Capcom's Fate franchise, but that's irrelevant. It's a fighting game. It has cute girls in it. It has more depth than the Bleach: Heat the Soul series. I WANT IT. And as such, I want it not to suck.

Title: Makai Senki Disgaea 2 Portable
Scheduled release: March 26, 2009

I spent a lot of time playing the PSP version of the first Disgaea game. If you can get past the foolishness this series tends to pass off as "humor," it's a solid turn-based strategy RPG with strong character design and astonishing depth. The successful release of Disgaea on PSP proves that this portable is a viable vehicle for a number of PS2-native titles.

Title: Sunday vs. Magazine: Taisen Action
Scheduled release: March 2009

Konami takes a cue from the highly successful Jump comic-based DS fighting franchise and offers this cel-shaded orgy of comic character fisticuffs. This fighting game combines licenses based on manga periodicals Shûkan Shônen Sunday and Shûkan Shônen Magazine. Expect characters from titles like Hajime no Ippo, Negima and InuYasha to come and represent.

...But I'm Also Fair and Balanced

2009-02-15T10:33:00.008+09:00

Now that my initial Street Fighte IV mania has cooled a bit, I see that my Thursday night post doesn't mention any of what I don't like about the game. So here's a quick list:

As cool as it is to be able to set the language of each character's voice (during both fights and cutscenes), the English voices are consistently bad.

I still feel like there aren't enough moves for each character, especially supers.

Nitpicky, but when Zangief does his big spinning piledriver to finish a fight, the victim's humorously exaggerated expression of agony usually isn't visible at the K.O. moment. This wasn't so in the arcade version.

The Xbox 360 controller makes it pretty much impossible to do Guile's ultra combo, and there's no way I'm buying one of those monstrous arcade sticks

Some of the in-game move lists are incomplete and/or inaccurate.

The title theme song is annoying, although I guess I can forgive that because it's performed by well-meaning J-pop giants EXILE (of "Choo-Choo Train" fame).

The animated scenes that bookend each character's story mode are some of the worst anime I've seen since Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture.

No final boss should ever be called Seth, unless he's hell-bent on making this the best Chrismukkah ever.

I'm the Strongest Blogger in the World!

2009-02-12T23:28:00.002+09:00

A vast conspiracy to empty my wallet is afoot. The perpetrators are none other than the developers and publishers of all these "must have" video games that keep coming out. They got their foot in the door with Gears of War 2. They got their hand in my pocket with Call of Duty: World At War. They made a gutsy grab for my money with Fable 2. Now, adding insult to bankruptcy, the video game industry hits me with its very own 20-hit ultra combo finish.

Street Fighter IV was released today for Japanese Xbox 360 consoles.

When I first played the arcade version last summer, I thought it was all right, but just all right. It had nice character animation, tight controls and suitably high production value all around, but my honest first impression was that it was just a (mostly) cosmetic upgrade to the franchise. It didn't have enough playable characters, it didn't have enough moves, and where the hell was Cammy?

Little did I know that Capcom would eventually sweeten the deal for console owners by pouring a bunch more characters into the roster, adding a solid online infrastructure and giving players plenty of fun things to unlock. Now I think it's safe to call SF4 one of the best fighting titles the Xbox 360 has overall. And I'm not just saying that because I can't afford to buy any others at this point.

Some features I found pleasantly surprising in the console version of the game include:

The ability to set each character's voice to either English or Japanese

An option to allow online opponents to "buy in" while you play against the CPU in Arcade Mode

Strong English localization (especially in the post-fight screens, which are genuinely funny)

The fact that my Blanka skills of yesteryear somehow still prove relevant against today's competition

I'm going to be playing this one an awful lot, I'm afraid.

Comments Experiment

2009-02-10T11:24:00.005+09:00

I'm going to experiment for a few weeks with allowing anonymous comments from unregistered users. The idea is to get a better picture of how many regular readers I have. If my blog becomes a swamp of spam ads for Chinese herbal fertility medicine as a result, I'll go back to registered users only.

Neko Cafe

2009-02-09T12:23:00.010+09:00

From the country that brought you maid cafes (coffee shops where nerds go to be spoon-fed hayashi rice by staff dressed as maids) and host clubs (overpriced bars where lonely women go to be fawned over by guys with spiky hair and eye makeup) comes a new breed of uniquely Japanese business innovation: The neko cafe.

Neko is Japanese for "cat," and a cat cafe is just what it sounds like: A place where customers can drink tea or coffee while playing with the cats that "work" there. These businesses have begun to spring up in numerous locations in Japan, a country where most people are prohibited by their landlords from owning pets. One such neko cafe, called Coccolare, recently opened in Shimokitazawa, close to where we live. Yesterday, Fiance and I made it our duty to investigate the neko cafe and subsequently BLOW THE LID OFF it.

As I expected, the interior of a neko cafe turned out to be little more than an oversized "living room" full of chairs, sofas and scratching posts. Customers pay by the hour (¥1300 yen a piece, one drink included, in our case) to lounge around in this room and enjoy the company of about twenty full-grown cats. A laminated card at each table shows a "rogues' gallery" of their kitties, giving each cat's name, age, breed and a brief description of its personality. Off to the side sits a rack full of cat toys. There are bookshelves full of cat-related literature, and a screen on which looped video images of cats being aw, so cuuute! are projected non-stop.

My main concern after first hearing about neko cafes was that having a constant stream of strangers coming in all the time would be very stressful for the animals. Contrary to my expectations, however, the cats all appeared very relaxed and -- in true feline fashion -- indifferent to the presence of the customer. Not that they were antisocial...they just didn't seem to pay much attention to us for the most part. One or two customers even had cats jump up on their laps. And, not surprisingly, at least half of the cats were asleep for the entire hour we spent there.

This "wiener cat" was the newest addition to Coccolare's staff

A gigantic tabby that looked like a lion

When a cat falls asleep in a Japanese earthenware pot, it's called neko-nabe

Monkey Pile on Joe

2009-01-16T22:11:00.002+09:00

What did you think would happen, "Joe?" You say stupid stuff, you get dumped on. Now it's Rick Sanchez's turn.

Plumber the Reporter

2009-01-13T12:30:00.004+09:00

I take offense when Americans who suffer from a chronic case of "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about" syndrome (IDKWTHITAS) find ways to perpetuate the popular image of the Stupid American abroad.

Chromedomed idiot Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who became famous for no particular reason during the 2008 presidential race, has no experience as a war correspondent, no experience as a reporter, no experience as a journalist and, judging from turns of phrase such as "I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war," not very much experience speaking English.

Yet, for some reason, he's been sent to Israel as a "war correspondent" by conservative opinion website PajamasTV:

"Joe" says, in the above clip, that he "liked back in World War I and World War II, when you'd go to the threater and you'd see your troops on the screen." For someone who went to the threater during World War I, this "Joe" is incredibly well-preserved.

I'm also wondering if maybe his new bosses at PajamasTV couldn't have informed their new correspondent a little more thoroughly before sending him overseas. In this excerpt from a conversation between Wurzelbacher and an Israeli reporter, he attempts to create journalistic drama by manufacturing a "disagreement" (WARNING: This failed attempt at "gotcha!" reporting may cause confusion, dizziness and nausea):

JOE: The story here is people are being killed and the media's slanting it and trying to make it Hamas is, uh, as far as, that Israel's being bad. Do you believe Israel is bad?

REPORTER: Do I believe it?

JOE: Yeah, do you?!

REPORTER: I'm Israeli, so...

JOE: So answer the question!

REPORTER: No, I don't think Israel is bad.

JOE: Do you think Israel has every right to protect itself?

REPORTER: Yeah.

[pause]

JOE: You do?!

REPORTER: Yeah.

JOE: Have you said that on air?

REPORTER: I'm just a reporter.

Plumber, get out of the reporter's way before a rocket falls on your head. Your every action since last October has been designed for one purpose only: To get attention. What other explanation can their be for someone becoming a war correspondent and then using their airtime to decry the existence of war correspondents? Oh wait, there is another explanation. YOU'RE A PLUMBER.

2008: The Year in Review

2008-12-26T12:08:00.003+09:00

Next month Chorus, Isolate, Confirm will be four years old. They grow up so fast, don't they? When my blog's birthday is coming near, I like to recap the year's events and reminisce. Let's make like a mirror and reflect.

In January I explained why Kojima Yoshio is funny (or was funny...he hasn't been on TV much lately), asked the question "What's the deal with Stef?" and experienced iPod trouble.

In February I attacked the Delight Factory, saw The Police and recommended the music of Jerry Schroeder.

In March I BLEW THE LID OFF the Nomigawa boat graveyard and did my fourth annual Big Walk.

In April I saw a funny TV commercial, drank with Fiance's co-workers in the park and (accurately) predicted that Perfume was on a fast track to super stardom. Sure enough, they'll be one of this year's headlining acts on the New Year's Eve Kôhaku Uta Gassen music competition.

May was a busy month indeed. The highlight, however, would have to be my un-anesthetized vivisection of the Interchange ESL textbook and its ghastly illustrations.

Speaking of ghastly, June saw Debbie Schlussel, Cal Thomas, random stabbings AND blue Pepsi! The horror!

In July I pounded a big drum. I encouraged high school girls everywhere to enjoy the benefits of underwear. And I made the Japanese language just a little brighter with my own made-up words.

In August I turned 30 and there was much rejoicing. Then I used my Maximilian whirling blades of robotic death on an issue of Tokyo Notice Board.

In September I jumped on the Sarah-Palin-Is-Rubbish bandwagon. Then I built a bandwagon of my own: the Facebreaker-Is-Rubbish bandwagon.

October saw my attention divided between political intrigue and a most inconsiderate man whose failed suicide attempt killed a lot of people other than himself.

In November I was the curmudgeony old man who shook his cane at young good-for-nothing whippersnappers on the Yamanote Line. I also did a fairly timely video game review (Bleach: Soul Carnival) and a not-so-timely one (Life Force).

And this month Tokyo Tower turned 50 and I experienced a Christmas miracle!

Heartfelt thanks go out to all my regular readers. I encourage you all to write comments on my posts. Doing so will likely push me to update CIC more often.

Happy New Year!

Christmas Mission

2008-12-25T23:45:00.003+09:00

Ever since I first moved to Japan five and a half years ago, I've had this unfulfilled obsession with taking a decent photo of Mt. Fuji. I live close enough to the mountain to see it on a very clear day, but not close enough to take a respectable shot of it. I had today off but Fiance's employer, in a blatant attempt to make the baby Jesus cry, forced her to work on Christmas Day. The weather was clear and not too cold, so I decided I would put some real effort into satisfying my photographic ambition.

In the days leading up to my winter vacation, I had been consulting Google Earth to find a train-accessible vantage point from which to photograph my target. My research suggested that I'd find a clear line of sight from the cemetery behind Kômyôji, a temple near Kôzu Station on the JR Tôkaidô Line. The cemetary straddled either side of a walking path going up the side of a big hill called Mikanyama, which was the highest point in the immediate area.

I trusted Google Earth's guidance and boarded an Odakyû Line express train for Odawara. Odawara is not actually on the way to Kôzu; from there one has to double-back and ride two stops in the opposite direction on the JR Tôkaidô Line. But I wanted to go there to get some photos of Odawara Castle, just in case my Mt. Fuji mission ended up a failure (in which case I'd simply have written in this post that my mission was only to take photos of Odawara Castle...MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!).

But here's something I didn't notice during my Google Earth research: Between Shin Matsuda and Odawara, the Odakyû Line turns sharply and heads south for several minutes. During this stretch of track, the land to the west of the train is relatively flat and Mt. Fuji is plainly visible through the windows. I managed to get this shot during that window of opportunity:

Not bad, if you don't mind the power lines. Unfortunately, however, I do mind the power lines. So, unsatisfied with the photo I'd just taken, I continued the mission as planned. I got off the train at Odawara and walked to the castle, where I took these:

On the way back to the train station, I passed a little boy with his father. The boy pointed at the castle behind me and yelled, "Odawara-jo da! Yaaaay!" and then started to do a kind of Cossack dance as he walked. As he danced, he sang a song that went like this:

Odawara, Odawara, Odawara-jo!

I made the short trip from Odawara to Kôzu, my shutter finger twitching with the anticipation of my very own Most Dangerous Game. Mt. Fuji would be mine! I checked the way to my chosen vantage point on a map posted outside the station. Apparently I didn't check thoroughly enough because I then proceeded to get lost in the surrounding neighborhood for about twenty minutes. At long last, I found Kômyôji and the path leading up the hill. Just a fraction of the way up the hill, on the path between the two graveyards, I looked west and saw what would have been a perfect view of Mt. Fuji.

It would have been perfect, if not for the all clouds that had sprung up around the mountain peak during my visit to Odawara. The sky above me was flawless and blue, yet the sky around Mt. Fuji was hidden by clouds that didn't seem to be moving at all (despite the ridiculous winds I was experiencing on the hill). I waited there for thirty minutes, but the view looked like this the entire time:

Unacceptable.

All I wanted for Christmas was a photo of Mt. Fuji, and the one decent photo I got was marred by the presence of electrical wires. But if you think I'm above cheating to call this mission a success, you are mistaken, my friend. PhotoShop, don't fail me now.

Oh lord, mercy! It's a Christmas miracle! It's more beautiful than the Paramount Pictures logo! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

And that is the story of how I took a perfect photo of Mt. Fuji with no power lines, telephone poles, buildings or clouds obscuring the view. It's a long story. Maybe, for the sake of brevity, I'll omit the part about PhotoShop.

Fifty Years of Tokyo Tower

2008-12-23T14:33:00.002+09:00

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of Tokyo Tower, the tallest man-made structure in Japan. Though foreigners' first impressions of the tower often involve the words "Eiffel" and "rip-off," a person residing in any part of Japan today would likely pick Tokyo Tower as Tokyo's most emblematic landmark. In celebration of this big, red jumble of TV antennae, Chorus, Isolate, Confirm presents: FUN FACTS ABOUT TOKYO TOWER!

FACT! The 333-meter tower's ribbon cutting fell on December 23, 1958 (Showa Year 33). Whether this numeric alliteration was intentional or not is unclear. It had been determined that, for a single tower to serve the TV broadcasting needs of the entire Tokyo area, that tower would have to be at least 380 meters tall. Out of concern over high winds shaking the tower, however, the height of the final design was scaled down.

FACT! A public survey was conducted to collect suggestions for the tower's name. There were a total of 86,260 respondents. Among those, Japan Tower, Peace Tower, Showa Tower, Prince Tower and Space Tower were popular suggestions. For some reason the name Tokyo Tower was selected even though only 223 respondents (0.26%) had so voted.

FACT! The tower's original nighttime lighting scheme consisted entirely of incandescent light bulbs lining the tower's four corners from top to bottom. In 1989 those bulbs were replaced with 176 floodlights surrounding the tower's base. The colors used in this lighting scheme are periodically changed in complement with the season.

FACT! A five-story building called Foot Town lies nestled between the tower's "feet." Foot Town houses an aquarium, a wax museum, a Guinness World Records museum, an optical illusion gallery and a convenience store.

FACT! It costs ¥820 to ride the elevator to the Main Observatory (at a height of 150 meters). To continue from there to the Special Observatory (250 meters), it costs an additional ¥600.

FACT! Being the emblematic structure that it is, Tokyo Tower has been destroyed in various Japanese monster movies, including Mothra (1961), Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, (1964) Gamera (1965), Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs. Mothra vs. Mecha-Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003).

Automated Banner Ads Are Silly

2008-12-10T17:59:00.003+09:00

Games of Yore: Life Force

2008-11-28T22:36:00.003+09:00

Feeling the need to further rationalize my tendency to write about what ever the hell I please, I am starting a new games-related feature on Chorus, Isolate, Confirm. However much hullabaloo there may be over the latest title for this console or that, it's sometimes important for a gamer to reflect on his heritage. Hence, Games of Yore.

The games I write about in this column must meet only two requirements. They must have been released at least ten years ago, and they must have some significance to me. That's it. I like to keep the rules simple. Now, then...ARE YOU READY FOR YORE?

Game: Life Force (Konami; 1988)
Console: NES
Genre: Scrolling shooter

One Christmas morning, my friend Peter got an NES from Santa Claus. He graciously called me that same day to invite me over to play, as my household had not yet graduated from the Atari 2600 School of Hard Knocks. Over the phone, he told me that he had three games: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Life Force. I had never heard of Life Force, and asked him what it was. His response, as best I can remember:

"I'm playing it right now. It's pretty cool. I'm in a space fighter flying through something that looks like intestines, blowing up these things that look like giant polyps."

Repulsive as it sounded, I had to know what this bizarre marriage of outer space action and medical drama was all about, so I headed straight over to his house to investigate.

Life Force (also known as Salamander in Japan) turned out to be, for lack of a better analogy, like a drastic re-write of Fantastic Voyage in which the protagonists had no vested interest whatsoever in preserving the life of the organism into which they'd been injected. (Or, if you're not into books, imagine a remake of Innerspace in which Dennis Quaid's sole purpose is the destruction of Martin Short.)

As the game's instruction manual explains, a rather large alien called Zelos has become over-zealous in his eating habits. He has basically eaten everything in the universe, including Easter Island and ancient Egypt, and now must be destroyed from the inside. The 80s kid in me hears that plot description and can't help but yell, "TOTALLY AWESOME, DUDE!"

And it was awesome. But I have to say, a lot of stuff about Life Force didn't make a whole lot of sense. For example, why is the very first boss a huge, flying brain with arms and an eyeball? And why is Stage Five full of all that King Tut crap? And why is Stage Six infested with leaping moai heads that spit donuts?

In retrospect, however, my young mind didn't dwell for very long on such technicalities. I was too busy marveling at how radical it was to play a cooperative two-player game with my best friend, and not have to keep dropping quarters into it. I was too busy improving my Vic Viper space fighter with enough SPEED, MISSILE, LASER and OPTION upgrades to make it an unstoppable storm of flying firepower. I was too busy swearing at the hundreds of dirty tricks the game pulled, specifically for the purpose of killing me. Especially those damn solar flares in Stage Three.

Life Force's winning combination of giant brains, challenging gameplay and memorable music (a cornerstone of Konami's scrolling shooters) quickly endeared the game to my younger sister and I. We teamed up to plow through all six stages while singing impromptu lyrics to the game's soundtrack. We fought over who would pick up which power-ups. We were Konami kids, once and for all time.

Palin? "Nailing?"

2008-11-08T00:00:00.003+09:00

In this clip from Fox "News," reporter Carl Cameron BLOWS THE LID OFF!!! the dark, sticky underbelly of the McCain-Palin campaign. Bill O'Reilly halfheartedly defends his polar bear-killing sweetheart, but it's clear he's rearranging deck chairs on the already sunken Titanic. Among the amazing deficits in Sarah Palin's expertise:

She couldn't identify the countries that constitute North America.

She thought that Africa was a country, and South Africa just a region within that country.

She threw tantrums, despite being an adult (at least in the physical sense).

Lady, there are only three countries in North America. At least take a wild guess...you're bound to get at least one of them right!

(Huh huh huh..."nailing.")

Bleach: Soul Carnival

2008-11-06T20:46:00.004+09:00

Earlier this year I complained about the PSP's conspicuous lack of quality fighting games. Developers are skipping out on what I perceive as an obvious opportunity to bring "versus fighting" and side-scolling brawler titles to Sony's tough, little machine. As if in response to my woes, this autumn saw the release of Marvelous Entertainment's Ikkitousen: Eloquent Fist (a somewhat prurient, sprite-based Final Fight clone), and the subject of this quasi-review, Bleach: Soul Carnival.

Because of my past disappointments with Bleach games on the PSP, I was initially attracted to Soul Carnival because of what it appeared not to be: Another chapter in the overly simplified Heat the Soul fighting series. But, as it turns out, Sony's Soul Carnival deserves all the credit in the world just for being what it is: Fun (if occasionally mindless) platform/beat-em-up action framed by a comfortable amount of character management, item synthesis and a mercifully small amount of dialog.

This game embraces Bleach's relatively large cast of supporting characters by introducing them as playable and/or support units (like an improved, deeper version of the card system in the Bleach DS series). The player can then use the character of his choice, flanked by any combination of assistants, to rampage through levels and cut down all the resident thugs.

Said rampaging is made fun via smooth, fast controls and character graphics that aren't quite sprites, yet aren't quite cel-shaded 3D models. In fact, I literally haven't been able to figure out how the character graphics are rendered yet...but I have a feeling it's something akin to the free-rotational sprite system used in Sega Sammy's The Rumble Fish. What ever it is, it looks nice, if you don't mind the munchkinized "chibi" design that's been forced on all the characters.

My only major gripe with the game is its clumsy, poorly-designed menu interface, which becomes an obstacle when you're trying to equip your playable characters with accessories and support buddies. Years of gaming experience tell me that I should be able to switch characters in the menu by pressing the shoulder buttons. Alas, obvious as it may seem, no such function exists. Ignoring that, however, Bleach: Soul Carnival is just what the PSP's sparse fighting library needed.

Below is a YouTube video I found with some decent footage from early in the game. Skip the first minute to get straight to the fun part.

Well Done, America

2008-11-05T13:54:00.004+09:00

The US has been broken for eight years. Step 1 of its repair: Complete.

I spent this morning following the election coverage online, cheering in my chair for every republican defeat. I feel like I can finally take a long-overdue timeout from being frustrated. Let's hope the reduction of stress doesn't harm my ability to blog in any way.

Warm congratulations to Mr. Obama, and to everyone who helped him become President-elect.

Piss Me Off: Halloween on the Yamanote Line

2008-11-01T00:53:00.005+09:00

ATTENTION, FOREIGN REVELERS ON THE YAMANOTE LINE ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT!

You're giving the rest of us foreigners a bad name by making the already unpleasant experience of a home-rush train ride even worse with your obnoxious presence.

Stop it.

Obama 3; McCain 0

2008-10-16T20:24:00.003+09:00

Did you watch the third presidential debate? What the hell is wrong with John McCain? I think he needs an ambulance.

He might have had a chance in the debate if he had spent more time answering the questions being asked of him. Instead he verbally wandered around like Hansel and/or Gretel, making goofy allusions to Nancy Reagan, JFK, Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression and some mythical plumber named Joe (who somehow makes $250,000 a year). His eyes swam as if he was receiving a hidden opiate drip. And he made the face pictured above.

I can't help but think McCain doesn't really want to be president. He wants to take a nap. Let's get this election over with so he can retire with his last shred of dignity intact.

Right-Wing Rats Jumping Ship

2008-10-14T11:00:00.003+09:00

It's all the rage to distance yourself from John McCain these days. Everyone's doing it. Even the people you most expect to find defending the hapless geezer -- including the "big Bills," O'Reilly and Kristol -- have seen the bootlessness of their own positions, and are now lining up to have a shot at the Dunk a POW tank. Whether its down to his economic ineptitude, his laughable VP pick or his inability to raise his arms over his head, everyone finds something to dislike in John McCain.

And so can you.

Manager of Burning Mangakisa Cut Fire Alarm

2008-10-09T19:51:00.000+09:00

A development in the story of one man's failed attempt to say "goodbye, cruel world," about which I blogged one week ago:

Some blame now apparently rests on the shoulders of the elderly mangakisa employee who, upon hearing the fire warning, assumed it was a false alarm and turned off the system.

I don't want this to take away from my thesis about Japan's tendency toward ultimately inconvenient suicide methods (nor from the fact that Ogawa Kazuhiro put dozens of people in needless danger with his own attempt to escape his life), but it seems only fair of me to give appropriately thorough coverage of the story's development.

Man Kills 15 Instead of Self

2008-10-02T00:34:00.006+09:00

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If Japan is going to continue to be the world leader in annual suicides, then people have to stop being so careless about how they off themselves. Early Tuesday morning, a man started a fire in Osaka with the intention of killing himself. Instead, he survived and the fire killed fifteen other people.

[the story]

Ogawa Kazuhiro allegedly became "tired of life" and set fire to a newspaper in his private room at a mangakisa called Cats. Then, as his room filled with smoke, he claims he became frightened and fled the scene. Meanwhile, fifteen people Mr. Ogawa had probably never met before (and who were probably sleeping), died from carbon monoxide poisoning and burns.

English news articles vary in their description of the business where this crime took place, with labels ranging from "video rental shop" to "adult video theater." From the description I saw on the TV news here this evening, Cats is (or was, until its fiery baptism) a relatively typical Japanese comic/video/relaxation center. These mangakisa are routinely used as hotels by businessmen, as they tend to offer cheap overnight rates and often have private rooms with comfy reclining chairs. They also tend to be needlessly labyrinthine, and allow their guests to smoke, making for some real grand fire hazards.

I patronized a mangakisa several times during my first six months in Japan, when I had no internet connection at home. But I never tried the private room type, so when I went, I had to breathe the secondhand smoke of everyone around my while I checked my email and read the news. I guess I should count my blessings; at least I didn't die there.

Mr. Ogawa has been arrested on charges of arson and manslaughter.

Facebreaker = Hopebreaker

2008-09-12T10:30:00.006+09:00

Do you remember Ready 2 Rumble Boxing? It was a fun, cartoony Midway title that struck a decent balance between simplicity and depth. I remember playing it and thinking, This game is cool but I REALLY wish it had a Create-A-Character mode.

(I pretty much wish every game had such a mode, but some games seem to beg for it a little harder than others.)

With that in mind, I was psyched about the recent EA Sports boxing title, Facebreaker. It appeared to be everything I had hoped for: A stylized party game with a sense of humor, some celebrity appearances and the ability to create new characters (and even load a player's photo into the game to make a creation that was truly one's own).

But then Facebreaker came out and received some poor reviews. In fact, it did pretty badly overall. Critics cited an overly simplistic fighting system and ridiculous AI difficulty that make the game a lot less fun than it could have been. Disappointment became by new middle name, as a game I'd been anticipating revealed itself as a game that everyone hated.

And it wasn't the first time. Other games that have let me down over the course of history include:

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PS2) - because it traded the badass Snake for the annoying Raiden as protagonist for a large portion of the game

Red Faction (PS2) - because being able to destroy the game's environments sounded a lot more fun than it turned out to be

Soulcalibur Legends (Wii) - because it generally felt like it was rushed through production just for the sake of extending the franchise's presence to the Wii

Tenchu: Shinobi Taizen (PSP) - because shouldn't ninjas be able to see more than just a few meters ahead of themselves?

Obviously, oodles of crappy games are released every year. It's a fact of the industry. But when a game that should so closely match my personal criteria for greatness turns out to be garbage, it's hard not to be disappointed.

There Is Hope For Chris Matthews

2008-09-05T11:18:00.003+09:00

Once in a while, MSNBC's Chris Matthews makes a good point about something. Here he is at the RNC, making a point about Sarah Palin as he takes on a pair of her ditziest cheerleaders.

VIDEO

Note the contention by Republican Representative Adam Putnam (the red-headed stepchild on the right) that scrutiny of Sarah Palin is unfair in comparison to previous scrutiny of Hillary Clinton. The way I see it, he's effectively saying that all women who run for office are the same, and should all be held to the same burden of proof regardless of their credentials. Except this conversation isn't about all women. It's about Sarah Palin.

World to McCain: "You've Got to be Joking"

2008-09-02T10:48:00.004+09:00

I've been trying to resist the temptation to do any more political blogging for a while. But when strange stuff like this happens, I just can't stop myself.

Blogger friend Rick at Bent Corner has been doing a fine job of keeping up with the unbroken stream of weirdness that has ensued following John McCain's vice president selection, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. It feels like some new, damning chunk of bizarre news about this lady comes out every few hours. To summarize:

Her political career consists of six years as Village Elder of Wasilla, AK (population 5500), followed by a couple years as governor.

She appears to have lied about her fifth (and, god willing, final) pregnancy for the purpose of hiding the pregnancy of her teenage daughter.

She wants all those polar bears dead.

She has a very limited, spectatorial understanding of the Iraq War.

She's a bit confused regarding the origins of the Pledge of Allegiance (and I'm willing to bet that she's unaware of what kind of salute the writer of the Pledge of Allegiance had in mind when he wrote it...but I digress).
She did not possess a passport until 2007.

Apparently, being a baby factory runs in the family.

A few hand-wringing republicans are still intent on using Palin's inexperience as some kind of crooked crowbar for attacking Obama's résumé, but even they have to admit that Obama isn't asking this badly for ridicule. How can someone with four (to five) kids possibly be McCain's VP? Her time will be divided between parenthood and the changing of the president's adult diapers, with no time left over for VP-ing.

In this video from MSNBC, Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan take a sledgehammer to Palin's credentials before it's even announced that she's been picked by McCain.

With such a unanimously adverse reaction to his VP pick, I can't help but wonder if McCain won't try to take it back before November. You know, pull a CREM maneuver and say, "Couldn't you guys tell I was only joking?" On the other hand, maybe it doesn't matter. The damage to his campaign is done.

Portrait of a Badass: Maximilian

2008-08-26T01:10:00.005+09:00

Character: Maximilian
Actor: N/A
Film: The Black Hole (1979)
Badass Moment: VS Alex Durant

At the end of the 1970s, Star Wars had the science fiction world in an inescapable Dianoga stranglehold. Any and all challengers to George Lucas's throne would be thrown into the Sarlac Pit and slowly digested over a thousand years. Those who would attempt to stand on the shoulders of AT-ATs and capitalize on Star Wars mania with their own knock-off product would find themselves under a mighty, metal foot in quick order.

Conditions were perfect for an underdog.

Along came The Black Hole, Disney's space opera counter-attack. (We'll treat it as such for the purpose of this essay, even though its conceptualization pre-dated the release of Star Wars by two years.) This movie had guts. It blazed dark, new, PG-rated trails for a studio whose edgiest movie to date had been The Apple Dumpling Gang. More importantly, it stood in the face of Star Wars's iron-fisted oppression and said, "Oh yeah?"

Even though The Empire Strikes Back effectively responded with, "Yeah and so's your mama," while using The Force to crush The Black Hole's throat, The Black Hole stands out as an important science fiction film (and I'm not just saying that because it's the Walt Disney Company's most expensive box office failure ever, although that's always been a plus in my mind, too).

Contributing significantly to The Black Hole's dark tone was a silent, bucket-headed robot called Maximilian. This metal "mystery monster," as he is called by another robot in the film, floats around scaring the beezus out of everyone with his glowing red eye, his reluctance to speak and let's not forget his arm-mounted retractable food processor blades of death.

Glowing eye
Blades of death
What else do I have to say?
We didn't start the fire.

Speaking of fire (spoiler alert), some of the infernal imagery at the end of film seems to suggest that Maximilian's trip through the black hole lands him in charge of Hell itself. Talk about going over the top! The filmmakers couldn't have made this robot more badass if they showed him riding a Harley Davidson into an erupting volcano while killing John Wayne with a shuriken between the eyes from five hundred meters away.

Of course, I'm glossing over the fact fact that, despite boasting some relatively edgy themes and a particularly badass robot, The Black Hole is a really silly movie. It's full of sketchy science. It's packed with stiff-legged extras pretending really hard that they're androids. It even has a scene where a robot with a British accent laments the death of a robot with a southern accent. It's not exactly a masterpiece...but then again, neither is Star Wars in many ways.

Maximilian, you are a badass who could kick the crap out of Threepio any day. We salute you.

When There's Nothing to Write About, I Make Fun of Other Writers

2008-08-14T14:39:00.012+09:00

It's come to my attention that, despite being in the midst of a two-week summer vacation with very little to do, I haven't updated this blog since before Soul Calibur IV came out. (Hmmmm....Soul Calibur IV. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.) As happy as I am to be on summer vacation, however, something is missing. You see, as a blogger, I cannot be truly happy unless I'm making fun of someone who can't defend himself. If you recall, one of my most celebrated conquests was that of Japan newbie Erica Belling, a young Australian who came to Tokyo and allegedly had Japan all figured out within six to eight days of her arrival. I dissected her overly excited Tokyo Notice Board essay with a zweihander battle axe, leaving no paragraph un-cleft.

Her destruction was delicious.

Fondly remembering that day of reckoning, I began to show signs of "writer ridicule withdrawal syndrome" (WRWS) and found myself reaching for the latest issue of TNB to quench my proverbial bloodlust. Walk with me through its pages, won't you? A-destroying we shall go.

First I open to an essay entitled "Span in Japanese!" (yes, with an exclamation point) by someone who calls himself Harvey. Span? What does that mean? My curiosity is piqued. Little do I know, I'm in for trouble:

I've got another item for the "you know you've been in Japan too long list". [sic] You know you've been in Japan too long when you start getting tons of Japanese language spam (meiwaku mail in Japanese) in your email box!

Oh, spam? Not span? OK, my curiosity is now un-piqued. And Harvey goes the extra distance to annoy me by putting his sentence-ending punctuation outside his quotation marks. Worst part is, this dumb slob is probably an English teacher. I scan quickly through this five-paragraph essay and see that four of the five paragraphs contain at least one exclamation point each, in addition to the one in the title. This Harvey is one emphatic son of a bitch.

Skeptical that Harvey will be able to tell me anything I don't already know about....anything, I flip to another page and find an essay by Michael Curley called "To Bow or not to Bow, that is the Question." The seemingly arbitrary capitalization is not mine; it's printed like that. Once again, paragraph one does to my interest what penicillin does to an ear infection. First, he repeats the title (just in case you've blacked out since reading it):

To bow or not to bow, that is the question. This is how the honourable William Shakespeare would undoubtably have modified his most famous "to be or not to be" quotation from Hamlet, had he ever had the good fortune to visit Japan.

Thank god you explained the title like that, Michael. But I disagree. If the "honourable William Shakespeare" (what is he, a judge?) had indeed written anything about Japan, I'm pretty sure he would have come up with something more clever than just a rehash of his most famous line. On to paragraph two, if you dare:

The Japanese tradition of respectful bowing is a source of never ending and unfathomable fascination to me, and I feel sure that "the bard" himself would have been equally intrigued.

Continuation of this nonsensical Shakespeare theme notwithstanding, Mr. Curley is right about one thing: I, for one, cannot fathom his fascination with bowing. Six completely uninteresting paragraphs later, the author delivers his killing blow:

These are the questions, but alas, dear reader, I have no answers. Would Shakespeare have faired any better?

That depends. Do you mean, would Shakespeare have faired any better at understanding Japanese bowing tradition? Or, would Shakespeare have faired any better at writing this essay? Because I think you know my answer to the latter. I can't take any more of Michael Curley, so I jump backward a few pages and find Mathew Chromecki's opus magnum entitled "Right so, what am I doing here?" God, it hurts just to think about what might be contained in this essay. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I go in for a closer look.

Ever feel like you've wandering [sic] through your life with no real sense of direction?

Sometimes, yeah. But at times like those, I do the world a favor by NOT WRITING ABOUT IT, DUMBASS. I want to offer a more constructive analysis of this essay but I just can't. It's depressing and clichéd. At one point, Mathew writes:

Weekdays, work work work. Weekend, Roppongi or Shibuya or Shinjuku or some other busy place. Somehow, you always end up going to Roppongi, claiming you hate it but you go anyways.

Stop, Mathew, before you get stomped on. Somehow the fact that this moron is telling me what I do is the most offensive aspect of this foray into life-threatening stupidity. And he's dead wrong because my dislike of Roppongi results in me NOT going there. Why don't I like Roppongi? Because it's full of people like Mathew Chromecki.

I have to stop. Writing this blog post has been an exercise in rage-fueled self-destruction, and has probably shortened my life by about five years.

Tokyo Notice Board, I blame you.

ADDENDUM (April 12, 2009): It's a conspiracy!

My Contributions to the Japanese Language

2008-07-23T21:05:00.003+09:00

Foreigners living in Japan make invaluable cultural contributions all the time. From Hungarian sumo wrestlers to ceaseless TV appearances by Marty Friedman to David Aldwinckle's belabored efforts to popularize frivolous litigation, creative gaijin bring welcome variety to what has historically been a very uniform nation. As a relatively long-term resident, therefore, it's natural for me to examine my own cultural footprint and determine whether it's worth the price of the shoe that left it.

One of the most fascinating ways in which foreign residents of any country can affect their host is through the host's language. About three years ago I met an American teacher in Tokyo who had taken to prefixing Japanese adjectives with ero- (a Japanese-English loan word meaning "erotic" or "eroticism"). This teacher used ero- to amplify the subsequent adjective, the same way native Japanese speakers use chô- (super) or metcha- (seriously). So really good food is not just oishii (delicious), but ero-oishii (sexy-delicious).

Over the years, I've coined a few of my own Japanese words, all of which are a source of pride (not to mention newfound linguistic convenience) for me. Here are some examples:

クソい (kusoi) - This is an i-stem adjective built on the noun kuso, which is slang for excrement. Just as English has taken "shit" and morphed it into an adjective as "shitty," I felt Japanese should afford speakers the same privilege with its expletives. Usage would go something like this:

朝の気分は良かったけど、今はなんかクソい。
Asa no kibun wa yokatta kedo, ima wa nanka kusoi.
(I felt good this morning, but now I feel kinda shitty.)

邪魔邪魔しい (jamajamashii) - As you can see from the cumbersome kanji characters required to write it, "jamajamashii" is a word better suited to spoken Japanese than written Japanese. This shii-stem adjective is built out of a doubling of the noun jama, which means "obstruction" or "something in the way." It's similar to the (real) word bakabakashii ("foolish") which is similarly built, doubling the noun baka ("idiot") and adding an adjective suffix. I have to admit, this word was not born out of necessity so much as my own personal amusement. It's usually sufficient to say that something is jama and leave it at that, but I found myself muttering the made-up word jamajamashii when pushing through a crowd of slow-moving shoppers one Sunday in Kichijôji.

クレージく (kurêjiku) - Unfortunately, 99 percent of all loan words from English are treated like nouns in Japanese, regardless of their original part of speech. For example, the English adjective "crazy" is appropriated by Japanese as kurêjî, but its adverb form becomes the unwieldy kurêjî ni. Well, no more. Since kurêjî has the i ending characteristic of so many Japanese adjectives, I'm going to treat it like a Japanese adjective. As such, changing the last i to the syllable ku should make it an adverb, "crazily." By the way, if you found this paragraph interesting, you must be kurêjî.

ティッ者 (tissha) - This is a contraction of the loan word tisshu (tissue) and sha, which means "one who..." or "...person." Together, they describe a person handing out little packages of tissues stuffed with ad fliers; the "Tissue Person." Tissue distribution is a preferred method of advertising for a wide range of Japanese businesses, including loan brokers, English conversation schools, adult video shops, host(-ess) clubs and cell phone service providers. Usually the tissue distributor is described as tisshukubari-san, but I find tissha far more convenient.

モーニング息子 (morning musuko) - You may have heard of Morning Musume, the Japanese pop group composed of an annually-updated gaggle of giggly junior high school girls. The musume in their name means "daughter" or "little girl." Remove musume and substitute musuko (which means "son," but is also slang for "penis"), and you've got a handy Japanese word for nocturnal penile tumescence. Fiancee told me that she'd never heard this word used before (hence my willingness to take credit for coining it), but that she immediately understood its meaning.

PSP Equals Monster Hunter

2008-07-20T12:48:00.005+09:00

When I ride the train and see someone playing a PSP or DS, I get very nosy. It's in my nature to crane my neck and try to see which game the person is playing, out of sheer curiosity. I guess part of me believes that there's insight about one's personality that can be gleaned from observing what portable games they play on their daily commute.

What I've observed, however, is confounding: Every single person I've observed playing PSP on the train in the past six months has been playing Monster Hunter. This is not just a blogger's exaggeration. Since January 2008, every time I peeked at another person's PSP on the train, that person was playing one of the three Monster Hunter games currently available for Sony's handheld game system. I guess whoever said Japan was homogeneous was onto something.

If you've been reading Chorus, Isolate, Confirm for long enough, you know that I went through a couple of Monster Hunter phases myself. First I got hooked on Monster Hunter Portable in the spring of 2006. Then I worked my PS2 to death playing Monster Hunter 2 a couple months later. After that I found myself hamatta on Monster Hunter Portable 2nd in the spring of 2007.

Currently the series's popularity is kept afloat by the release of Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G, which I'm sure is delightful. I can't say for certain, however, as I have purposely steered clear of the franchise for almost a year now. Why? Because it's a huge, dinosaur-shaped black hole from which nothing -- especially not time and money -- can escape.

Consider the wink-nudge moneymaking relationship between Capcom, who develops and publishes the series, and strategy guide publishers like Dengeki and Famitsuu, who capitalize bigtime on the complexity of games like Monster Hunter. If you're Famitsuu and you get the chance to publish a guide the size of a desktop atlas (and price it accordingly), you leap at that chance like a Velociprey with 'roid rage. Combine that with Capcom's repeated re-release of what is basically the same game with very few changes made each time, and you've got yourself a perfect storm of hand-over-fist profit.

That laughing sound you just heard was Capcom and Famitsuu, on their way to the bank together.

Open Letter to the Girl I Saw Yesterday

2008-07-11T10:57:00.007+09:00

Dear High School Girl,

You don't know me, but I now know a little more about you than you should probably allow any stranger to know. I was walking near Ô-gâdo in west Shinjuku just after 5:00 PM, and you were walking about five paces in front of me. A rare gust of wind came along at such an altitude as to lift your skirt for the briefest of moments.

But it wasn't exactly the "briefest" of moments, was it? Because you weren't wearing any briefs.

Believe me when I say that, by walking through central Tokyo in your school uniform minus your skivvies, you put yourself in danger. And, considering the prospect of being arrested for seeing you in such a state, you are also putting grown men around you in danger (to say nothing of your contribution to the already unhealthy level of sexual repression that dominates Japan).

If you really must engage in such dangerous behavior, might I suggest that you wait until you're a legal adult? Our present day society has laws regarding you and your "going commando" in public, and age is definitely a factor. If you want to wander around Tokyo with no panties on after your 18th birthday, then more power to you.

I'll stand behind you 100%.

Sincerely,

Jesse Jace
Chorus, Isolate, Confirm

With Supporters Like These: Part III

2008-07-03T10:30:00.004+09:00

McCain backer's firm pleaded guilty to funding Columbian terrorists

Not only has Chiquita funded terrorist groups, they've funded terrorist groups that oppose each other. Talk about buttering one's banana (republic) on both sides.

Let's Learn Japanese: Mai Buumu

2008-07-01T23:25:00.008+09:00

Mai buumu ("my boom") is a corrupt English phrase used by Japanese people to express something that one has started doing a lot recently, usually for recreation. If you have been spending an uncharacteristic amount of time at karaoke as of late, then you can say, "Saikin (recently), karaoke wa mai buumu desu." The only trouble with this phrase is that Japanese people often misuse the English word "my" to mean "one's own," which leads to all sorts of noun-pronoun disagreement:

彼は、マイカーがあります。

Kare wa, mai kaa ga arimasu.

He has a "my car" (He has his own car).

As a result of this misunderstanding of the word "my," my students sometimes ask me strange questions like, "What is your 'my boom?'"

These days, my "my boom" is Taiko no Tatsujin, Namco's festive drum rhythm game. I've been banging the taiko on a casual basis since I moved to Japan, but this spring saw a marked increase in my efforts to become a tatsujin (master). I have been playing the arcade version of the game at various locations on a weekly basis for the past few months, enjoying its therapeutic effects on my mind and body. Pounding a big drum feels good, it turns out.

Two weeks ago I arrived early for a work shift in Gakugeidaigaku (try saying that five times fast...or just one time fast) and decided to kill some time by going to the arcade and playing my favorite Tatsujin song: the Difficult setting of "Super Mario Bros. Medley." I got through the whole thing without any mistakes -- in the industry, we call this a "full combo" -- and was told to enter my name, which I did most proudly.

Today I found myself with time to kill in the same neighborhood, so I decided to play the same song again. (There are only a few songs I can play on Difficult Mode without embarrassing myself...others include the "Mojipittan Medley" and "Polyrhythm" by Perfume.) I had to smile when I saw that my score from two weeks prior was still in the #1 spot for that song. Either I'm really good at that song, or I'm the only person who ever plays it at that particular arcade. Either premise is readily believable.

Cal Thomas: Terrorizer

2008-06-26T00:45:00.005+09:00

Every once in a while I get really sick of people trying to convince me that I'm in grave peril. Generally my worries in life are limited to issues such as the condition of my laptop, the possible inaccuracy of the weather forecast and the remote prospect of my apartment being destroyed by an earthquake. These are real, understandable apprehensions with basis in fact. But, once in a while, along comes some Cassandra who thinks I should also be worried about something really outlandish. Let me introduce you to one such fellow.

Creepy-looking conservative columnist Cal Thomas is trying his damnedest to make you spend every waking minute in fear of terrorism. He wants you to live in terror. He's a...I can't think of the word for this kind of person, but it's something like "terrorizer."

So, terrorizer Cal Thomas wrote last week that the US is under imminent danger of a terror attack (are you terrorized yet?). Every paragraph of his pessimistic little sermon entered my brain like a massive injection of some drug whose main side effect is uncontrollable eye-rolling. The subsequent headache I suffered might have been caused by said eye-rolling, or just by the inane content of the column. Probably both. Among the key points of Thomas's doomsday prophesy:

"Enemy combatants" (redundant, I know) will, upon being released from Guantanamo Bay by "liberal judges" (exaggeration, I know), kill us all

9/11 OMG CHANGED EVERYTHING (cliché, I know) and is still sufficient justification for the US government to hold your grandmother prisoner indefinitely without charge

The US's "War on Terror" (stupid, I know) is happening solely because of "their" hatred for "us," but not ours for them

Be afraid, be very afraid (movie trailer language, I know)

Maybe the most disturbing thing about this article is something Thomas didn't intend to scare us with: At the end of the column, he says

The next attack... will come in a shopping mall, or a school, or on Wall Street, or possibly all three. It will occur simultaneously in many places and probably kill more than the nearly 3,000 who died in 2001.

You can start fretting about your lunch plans at Panda Express if you want, but I'm more concerned about something else: Just how does Cal Thomas know so much about how the next terror attack on the US will happen? By failing to cite his source, isn't he obstructing justice and protecting those who would carry out this most heinous food court/lunchroom/stock exchange onslaught? When will Cal Thomas publicly admit his links to terrorizers?

It used to be that only Cal Thomas's appearance frightened me. In most photos, he looks like an embalmed cadaver, or at least an elderly man wearing make-up. But the truth is far more sinister.

This summer...Cal Thomas IS....Terrorizer.

Rated PG-13 for jingoist rhetoric, blatant fear-mongering and brief nudity.

Scary as he sounds, we can't let grumpy, old biddies like Cal Thomas have any impact on our daily lives. Try as he and his ilk may to convince you to cancel your shopping trip, home-school your kids and stay the hell off Wall Street, it's incumbent upon us all to ignore those mouthy Chicken Littles. For on the day that the fear of terrorism affects your actions and habits, the terrorizers have already won.

June Twenty-Fifth

2008-06-25T22:12:00.004+09:00

June 25th is a special day for me. It's the anniversary of my arrival in Tokyo, now five years ago. And next year, it will be the date of my wedding to Fiancee (who will thensforth be called "Wife"). It's almost as if June 25th were the junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.

With Supporters Like These: Part II

2008-06-24T12:59:00.002+09:00

Is it just me, or does this guy look like Donald Rumsfeld?

With Supporters Like These: Part I

2008-06-24T12:43:00.008+09:00

Fascinating stuff from Tran Trong Duyet, who was in charge of the prison where McCain claims to have been tortured. Duyet says no torture took place, AND that he'd vote for McCain if he were elligible to do so.

No torture? How about "enhanced interrogation?" Did any of that happen? This story demonstrates one of two things, take your pick:

1) McCain is a liar. Defend him at your own peril.

2) Liars support McCain. Defend him at your own peril.

Did You Ever Notice

2008-06-15T02:13:00.001+09:00

...that someone speaks the line "We're here" in every episode of Lost?

New! Toilet Bowl Pepsi

2008-06-10T20:59:00.004+09:00

We trade one disaster for another.

This week in 2007, Pepsi unleashed its Japan-only Ice Cucumber flavor on the populace. It looked like mouthwash and tasted like toothpaste. This year the gimmick is Pepsi Blue Hawaii, a carbonated drink which looks like Windex and tastes like a melted snow cone.

According to the label, the too-sweet-for-humanity flavor of this soft drink is achieved via the synergy of pineapple and lemon. But after drinking it, the only synergy happening in my body seems to be that of tooth decay and diabetes. My breath is attracting ants.

I bought this at the same convenience store where I found the Ice Cucumber Pepsi last summer. And, same as last year, I'm pretty sure the only people buying the stuff are bloggers who want to make fun of it.

Akistabara

2008-06-08T22:30:00.006+09:00

Today, disgruntled 25-year-old Kato Tomohiro went to Akihabara and started stabbing people at random.

There is a stereotype that Japanese people are interminably polite, but when they lose their minds, they often do so in a decidedly inconsiderate manner. Consider the common occurrence of people jumping in front of the JR Chuo Line, thereby delaying thousands of commuters. Or the woman who threw herself off the roof of Parco in Ikebukuro last fall ("last fall," indeed), striking a pedestrian in the process and putting him in a fatal coma. Or the Saitama woman who, in 2006, decided a the last second not to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, but rather to push a nearby stranger onto the tracks in her place. I can't find an English-language news link to that last example, so you're just going to have to take my word that it happened.

I don't know what it is about life in Japan that causes these unexpected explosions of violence, but the fact that today's attack happened in Akihabara -- not to mention past incidents of otaku gone bad -- suggests a link between the otaku lifestyle and dangerous mental instability. If you know anyone who could be described as otaku, do the world a service: Grab this person by the collar, slap them across the face and tell them, "Snap out of it!" Then congratulate yourself for saving the lives of countless innocents.

My Blog is Better Than Debbie Schlussel's

2008-06-02T21:37:00.004+09:00

Chorus, Isolate, Confirm does not pretend to be an important blog. It does not presume to be ground-breaking, nor does it view itself as a "top blog" in any category. But it's better than at least one political blog I can name:

DebbieSchlussel.com.

Her name sounds like a German pastry, but somewhere along the way, this woman has given up sweetness and decided to focus on just being flaky. Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel regales her audience (?) with hateful tirades against Muslims and a vindictive, unending dislike of Sex and the City. She plays at being a movie critic, cramming her reviews with unrelated political commentary and rating films with "Marxes" or "Reagans."

She is a loser.

Appropriately for someone who has nothing nice to say about anything, Debbie Schlussel looks and sounds like a Michigan soccer mom who's been ingesting lead for the past 40 years. Observe:

I know being a blogger normally entails a lot of trash-talk, but come on, Debbie Schlussel. What did Sex and the City ever do to you?

My Kind of RPG

2008-05-30T22:10:00.008+09:00

If there's one thing for which I respect Japanese game publishers to no end, it's that they've got guts. You don't give a game a title that takes longer to say than it does to write unless you're reasonably sure the game will live up to its epic moniker. And in the case of Banpresto's Mugen no Frontier: Super Robot Taisen - OG Saga, the title leaves some awfully big shoes to be filled (WARNING: the above link leads to Banpresto's very noisy Mugen no Frontier website).

Released yesterday in Japan, this game is a spin-off of Super Robot Taisen, a franchise that, in all honesty, didn't interest me in the slightest until they decided to cram it full of sexy android women. The game (whose long, tall title translates as Endless Frontier: Super Robot Wars - OG Saga) makes use of the button-tapping RPG battle system used in Namco x Capcom, a cross-brand fan service orgy unleashed by Mugen no Frontier developer Monolith Soft on PS2 owners in 2005. The result is unmistakably an RPG, but with a reduced dependence on clunky menu navigation during battles. And while the game's simplistic, top-down map wandering is also a hallmark of a boring genre, its in-battle sprite animations are good enough to make a lot of fighting games jealous.

Square Enix could win back my respect if they would put this much artistic flair into one of their Final Fantasy re-re-re-releases. Punishing enemies in Mugen no Frontier becomes a joyful occasion as you chain together one well-timed attack after another, and then hand the assault off to your teammate, occasionally unleashing an aesthetically pleasing super move.

As for the OG in the title, I apparently haven't played long enough to reach the "original gangstas" part of the story yet, but give me some time. I've only had the game in my possession for a day.

Mugen no Frontier: Super Robot Taisen - OG Saga has been rated B for boobs. That bounce. During battle. Here's the promo video, to prove it:

Don't Be So Idiomatic

2008-05-30T20:26:00.005+09:00

In 2005 and 2006 I put quite a bit of energy into slamming former White House press secretary Scottie-Scott McClellan. I saw him as a mushy marshmallow of a man whose career hinged on his ability to repeat whatever lies he was fed. And in regard to McClellan's capacity as the president's mouthpiece, I think that was an accurate assessment, "marshmallow" and all. Now, more than two years after his resignation from that post, McClellan has once again exploded onto the political scene with What Happened, his "oh no you di-int" account of the Bush Administration's misbehavior.

I'm not sure how interesting a book whose thesis is "Get this, the Iraq War is built on lies!" could possibly be, but I'm ready to read this book and let Scott McClellan redeem himself in full for all the times I cussed at his image on TV and drew goofy facial hair on his image in the newspaper.

Not everyone is as supportive, however, of McClellan's attempt to turn over a new leaf. Former White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy had this colorful comment about McClellan:

"Here's a guy who rode the president's coattails to the world stage and now is [urinating] on his political grave, all the way to the bank."

Now ignore, for a moment, the fact that the press secretary's job is to stand on the "world stage" in lieu of the president. Ignore the fact that riding the president's coattails is an inevitable side-effect of lying on his behalf. And ignore the fact that "deputy press secretary" sounds like a made-up title you'd bestow on a little girl on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Ignore all that and take a good look at Duffy's maelstrom of idioms. You've got coattails, a stage, a grave and a bank, all in the same sentence! How exactly does one [urinate] to the bank, anyway? If you're [micturating] on a grave (even if it's a political grave), while simultaneously going to the bank, doesn't that make it pretty tough to hit your target?

Maybe I've misunderstood. Maybe McClellan is laughing so hard all the way to the bank, that he's started [whizzing] involuntarily. That happens sometimes, even to grown men.

I hope Trent Duffy writes a book, too. And I hope the whole book reads like that quote.

Where Aesthetics Go To Die

2008-05-23T01:33:00.013+09:00

One of the ESL textbook series my employers force me to use is called Interchange. It's a cruddy hodge-podge of ill-conceived lessons put together by Jack C. Richards (a man who, in his own words, "is an internationally-recognized authority on English-language acquisition" and, in my own words, "needs a beating"). You may remember an earlier post in which I attacked Jack C. Richards, his slipshod attempts at language education and his arbitrary use of commas. And here's the icing on that health hazard of a cake:

The Interchange books contain some of the worst illustrations I've ever seen. It's as if the publishers went out of their way to find artists whose very raison d'être was to create the ugliest, most nauseating images possible. This image on the right is meant to be a suggestion of what clothing might look like in the future. If this prediction is accurate, they might as well follow this illustration up with a picture of a man strangling himself with his own necktie, as that would be a suggestion of what I would look like in such a future. What exactly happens in the future that causes everyone to start wearing those yellow gloves? Will dish-pan hands surpass cancer and heart disease as the prime killer of Americans? Is the gigantic hat evidence of ever-increasing Mexican influence on our fashion?

Maybe it seems I'm picking a nit here. But it's hard to think so when you're faced with these horrendous examples of first-degree ugliness on a daily basis. What started as amusement gradually morphs into resentment as you increasingly get the feeling that the two hapless dancers (who, at first glance, appear to have been drawn by someone who has never actually seen dancing, but may have read about it once in a book called Dancing: The Devil's Hobby) are actually mocking you.

My only recourse is to let my students in on the joke. Once in a while, I'll say, "Turn to page 78....look at this guy!" in order to lighten the mood of a lesson. Most of the time, however, it's a great enough challenge not to hurl my teacher's edition through a window.

I've got a hundred of these little scans, but I'll restrain myself and just share a few more choice images with you:

Gross.

GROSS!

Yes and yes.

She's gonna barf!

Indeed. What is your excuse, Mr. Illustrator? And don't give me any garbage about "artistic license." You and I both know that would just be a euphemism for "everything I create makes people want to gouge their own eyes out."

The PSP Needs a Better Fighting Library

2008-05-15T20:08:00.008+09:00

Bleach: Heat the Soul 5 for PSP was released today in Japan. It's a shallow 3D fighting game, similar in many ways to Bleach: Heat the Soul 4. And Bleach: Heat the Soul 3.

Why the hell are there so few quality one-on-one fighting titles for the PSP? Ports of Guilty Gear and Tekken have been welcome gestures so far, but the handheld has been out for two and a half years already. Where are the other franchises? I can name about a hundred fighting games I'd like to play on the PSP, but can't because they don't exist.

Marvel vs Capcom 2. Kinnikuman Muscle Gran Prix. Melty Blood. Arcana Heart. The Rumble Fish. Soul Calibur. Rival Schools. Street Fighter III. Any King of Fighters game after 1999.

Whether it's because of legal impossibility or just a misguided assumption that there's no demand for such ports, Sony leaves its fighting fanbase in the dark with idle thumbs and a whole lot of wishing for something good. Instead, we get title after title of ultra-simplified fighting games based on the same manga series.

I started playing the Bleach fighting series, not because I like the manga (in fact, I don't), but because the PSP's library of fighting games is so sparse, I'm increasingly willing to play any old fighting title they throw at me (and because Naruto suffers from a tragic lack of sexy females, a cornerstone of the genre).

Bleach: Heat the Soul 5 came with a free sports towel, but that isn't going to be enough to make me feel good about buying this title unless the gameplay gets better in a hurry.