You are in for a mental beasting.

http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=5484697431

Hilarious in a terrible, guilty way.

Slow News Day

(Pictured: Heathrow crash - not quite as bad as we'd have you believe)
I have to admit to feeling slightly underwhelmed by the coverage of the BA 777 crash at Heathrow on Thursday. Fair enough, it could have been disastrous and people could have been killed, only saved by the actions of the skilled air crew (just doing their jobs, surely?), but I can't help thinking that the news media have blown the whole thing a little out of proportion. In an instant after they heard the news on the BBC News they were on the phone to Political Editor Nick Robinson, who happened to be grounded at Heathrow on the Prime Minister's flight to China. For his part, Robinson seemed to be quite annoyed with the whole affair. I suspect they might even have woken him up, or interrupted his reading of a particularly interesting article in the in-flight rag. They asked him what he could tell them about the incident, which happened to be very little, apart from that he told them he could see some fire engines. Soon enough they seem to have got a chopper in the air and took some pictures of the crash, clearly somewhat disappointed at the lack of flames and wounded at what was clearly the aeronautical equivalent of scraping a bollard in the car park at Asda. Long and short of it, I can think of worse plane crashes to be in. Soon the news that everybody had been evacuated safely reached the Beeb and they left it alone after that.

The next day the papers did their level best to make it sound a lot more dramatic than it really was. Metro, the only paper I have time to accommodate into my busy Friday schedule ran with the slightly ill-conceived headline "WE THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A BUMPY LANDING: Air crash passengers oblivious to their brush with death". That does tend to play down the seriousness of the situation. If it had been me I would have focussed on the pilots rather than the passengers, unless they were spacking out in the cabin and foaming at the mouth in pant-shitting terror. The best part about the article was the fact that it described the passengers as "survivors". Of course they were survivors! Nobody died! I mean, technically you could say the were survivors of a plane crash but that does sort of imply that some people didn't survive.

Well, at least it beats reading another article about the Diana inquest.

Journalism: it's a funny old game.

No to 2008

I know, I know I haven't blogged in a while. I've been horribly negligent. It's because I have a tendency to take on more than I can handle. Take for instance last year's poor career choice of journalism and supermarket shelf stacking at the same time. I walked around for weeks like a 1970's "slow" variety zombie (as opposed to a modern "fast" zombie) and have generally fallen behind with things. It's not good. This isn't even a proper blog either. Just a note to remind everyone that I'm still alive, and as soon as I can think of something witty or incisive to say and find coincidentally that I actually have the energy to write it then you can be assured I will. Quality guaranteed.

New Model Army

(Pictured: 'Evil' Tyrant Banks lords over all)

It’s funny how many women complain about being treated as objects, but yet so many of them aspire to work in modelling. How did this ever become the pinnacle of ambition for a generation of females? Being dressed up, posed, photographed in compromising positions wearing ludicrous outfits, then criticized for not being pretty enough by men who have (let’s be honest here) absolutely no interest in women beyond the academic. Who would want a life like that? I suppose the vast heaps of money might help.

Which is presumably why Oprah-in-waiting Tyrant Banks invented America’s Next Top Model. To give young women the opportunity to make a living in the competitive game of standing, walking, looking at things and very occasionally (but not often) talking.

With only six hopefuls left, this week Tyra whisks them off to Shanghai for a “posing challenge”, a make-up advert and photo shoot, and some more of that feminine cure-all, shopping. To the credit of the shows makers they do actually relent from the filming of female flesh to show a little bit of local colour. The shots of the city are glorious, and you almost feel a little jealousy for the girls who’ve been plucked out obscurity for a shot at a jet-setting life in the big time. But only almost, because by the end, one of them has to go.

At the hotel, they find that there are only five beds in their hotel room, obviously to foster yet more tension between Asperger’s sufferer Heather and bitchy hood-rat Bianca, who feels – perhaps rightly – that the show’s judges are carrying Heather because she has “a disability or whatever”.

After a nights kip the girls do their challenge which involves apparently learning “karate” (it’s not) and posing while flying through the air on a rope. Bianca throws a hissy fit and refuses to do it, putting her in the running for the boot.

Luckily for her, Amazonian Lisa screws up the shoot for her advert and Heather gurns all the way through hers. So who’s going to get shitcanned? I’ll give you a hint – it’s not Heather, because she “has something”. What it is that she has, I’m not entirely sure. But what do I know? I’m only a straight guy.

Fact of the Day

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine is an expert in Taekwondo, and can crush a man's skull in the palm of his hand.

In this picture, Dave has done just that, and as such is proclaimed the winner.

TV: A Minor Diversion on the Road to the Grave

(Pictured: Mulder literally does not give a fuck)

I watched a fine program on the telly last night. Mulder is back in X-Files Nights and is more raucous than ever. In this x-rated spin-off of the seminal 90's conspiracy documentary we follow Mulder in his sexcapades around the borough of LA and watch him lament his inability to pen his memoirs, but not that much because it's all about the sex really. In this episode Mulder drove around town in a fine car, drank liquor out of a bottle in a brown paper bag, insulted environmentalists, harrassed his ex-wife, traumatised his daughter slightly, suckerpunched an asshole and took advantage of a drunken girl. He also said the words "holy fucknuts" which should be all the reason you need to watch X-Files Nights, if you aren't frantically downloading already.

I also watched the American feature film Ghost starring Jed Eckert from Red Dawn as the eponymous anti-hero. Let me tell you that is a truly horrific film. It all starts when a crooked banker pays a latino thug to murder Ghost in order to steal money (or something). Unfortunately, Ghost doesn't stay dead and then all hell breaks loose. He vows to take revenge on his killers and tracks them down with the aid of Sister Act. Ghost finally finds his murderers and mounts a campaign of psychological torture on them, driving them half-way mad before brutally slaying them with his ghost-powers. Then - in a twist that isn't particularly well explained - despite having committed two murders himself, Ghost gets to go to heaven. God must not be particularly picky.

Not been there, but I bought the t-shirt anyway.

(Pictured: impossible lies)

You know what's been annoying me recently. The seemingly endless amount of guys who go around in t-shirts with OSAKA 07 and NAGOYA 12 on them. Do they think they are part of a Japanese sports team? Having passed two years of actual adult life in Japan and having visited most of the places that these t-shirts name I can't help but feel a great of annoyance. It's such a feeble trend. I quite want to ask them to name which island of Japan the city is on, or if they've ever been there. See, they don't know. They don't know why they're even wearing that shirt. Probably, they even own a pink shirt for going out in. Of course, they don't like pink, and they'd never say if you asked them "Hey dude, what's your favourite colour?"- "Pink!" That would lose them a few dozen masculinity points, and even where I come from earn them a 'kick-in'. Why are they so popular then? Why do people mindlessly follow trends? A few years ago Top Shop started a 'Rock Chick' fad that lasted a couple of months, whereby girls would become 'Rock Chicks' by buying a Motorhead (sorry, don't know how to get an umlaut on this keyboard) t-shirt and maybe a dog collar or something. I remember being surprised and delighted that so many pretty girls seemed to be into Motorhead, and then immediately dejected and sick when I realised that it was all a commercial sham and these foolish girls didn't actually know who Motorhead were. I wanted to grab them and scream in their faces, spittle arcing out of my mouth in slimy threads: "MOTORHEAD IS NOT FOR YOU! MOTORHEAD BELONGS TO UGLY, HAIRY BOYS! LEMMY HAS WARTS! REAL FUCKING WARTS! THEY DON'T EVEN ALLOW HIM ON THE TELLY ANYMORE, SO HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE YOU'VE EVER HEARD OF HIM! NOT ON TOP OF THE FUCKING POPS THAT'S FOR SURE!" Then, probably after someone had bailed me and I'd been forced to apologise to everyone involved, the girls would abandon the t-shirts in favour of some other stupid fad, big surprise there. Anyway, that's sort of how I feel about the OSAKA and NAGOYA t-shirts. Being that my knowledge of the places is so intimate, I just feel sad that these poseurs are wearing them, unaware of what they might mean to other people. How would you feel if some douche was walking around with YOUR hometown written across his chest because it had somehow become fashionable? Getting status by associating himself with YOUR background, YOUR personal history, YOUR heritage, or whatever? Could you find in your heart to say "Hey, nice KDY t-shirt, even though you're from Derbyshire." Maybe. But there's an equal chance you'd go Eazy fucking E and bash the twunt's head in with a rock.

Cohabiting

So I live in England now, with a girl. As my grandmother would say “in sin”. What can you do? Living with your girlfriend is quite like living with a flatmate, except that they are generally cleaner, much fussier, and require more to make them comfortable. Bath mats, for instance.

Living with a girl is not like living with a pal, because you can’t say things like “Dude! Look at this video I found on Youtube of a dog having sex with a cat!” If you do, it’s more likely that they will ask you why you are wasting your time looking at videos of interspecies sex on Youtube rather than working on that novel you’ve supposedly been writing for the last two years? Which is, of course, a good point.

You also have to watch what you eat around them. If they knew the full extent of the foul takeaway foods that students and other idle young males indulge in on a daily basis, the chances are she’d run a mile. Your best bet is just to eat what they eat and sneak out for a kebab when they’re not looking. Also it’s important not to drink too much in their presence, especially not in your boxer shorts in front of the TV or videogames console, lest you risk being called a “scrub”. This is a girl word for bon vivant.

Toilet etiquette: girls get funny about toilet seats for some reason. They have invented some kind of weird equation which states that since all women-doings are done sitting down, while one of a man’s doings is done standing, the duty of putting the toilet seat down is the man’s responsibility. Why the seat needs to be put down at all is a mystery to me. The solution? Leave the seat down and do your business anyway, pretty soon she’ll be the one putting the seat up after she’s used the crapper. Slambango!

Girl bidie-ins do have their benefits though. You are far more likely eat at least one good, hot meal a day and will often find that when you come home your underwear has been de-loused and smells of flowers. Nothing a man ever washes, no matter how many expensive powders he uses, will ever smell of flowers. Your general health and physical appearance will improve. You will find yourself becoming respectable pretty fast. Possibly, you now also think the bath mats were a good idea.

To top it off, girls are soft and smell pretty good, and every day you get to pet and cajole one another in the way that if you tried with your old flatmate, you’d probably have to have a quite serious talk about personal boundaries. As much as I have fond memories of my old flatmates, the idea of having tickle fights with them does not really have much appeal.

So, my conclusions: girls = good; cohabiting = not evil like the bible says. It’s a pretty sweet deal all round I think. Women are something of a civilizing influence on us dudes. I know many people will call me “domesticated” and “house-dude”, but it is true. Living with a girl gives us reasons to do things like clean our bodies and wash dishes. In the olden days, dirty dishes would pile up and pile up until we were eating beans with a pencil out of an old boot. For want of kitchen roll, I would wipe up all spillages with a slice of bread so I could save it for later. That sort of shit won’t wash with a woman in the house. No sir. Thank you, womankind, for saving us from ourselves and implementing domestic equilibrium.

I am on my own in the flat now. My sweetheart has gone down the street to buy some kind of kitchen implement that I have no knowledge of, or perhaps a vegetable that I would be unable to identify. That leaves nothing for me to do except watch that video of a monkey flagellating itself on Youtube. I am, after all, still a dude.

Death Parp

(pictured: Death Proof may look like a tough guy, but in reality he is a big wuss)

SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ THIS AND THEN BITCH TO ME LATER ABOUT ME HAVING SPOILED QUENTIN TARANTINO’S DEATH PROOF FOR YOU! THIS IS A SPOILER WARNING!

I went to see Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof the other night. I found it to be something of a mixed bag. It was very much a game of two halves, the first half being Death Proof stalking, perving on and then murdering a group of chicks by driving his stunt car into their automobile, and the second him stalking, perving on, and then being murdered by a similar group of chicks. The first half is definitely the best, as QT gives full time to character development, and although you don’t really ever get to like the lassies particularly, you at least get a good sense of their characters before the lot of them are slaughtered. Also, Kurt Russell as Death Proof plays a far more prominent role, actual interacting with his prey and generally creeping the shit out of them. By contrast the second half seems a bit rushed, the characters less definitively drawn, the lovely Rosario Dawson is a bit of a princess, the Kiwi girl is an adrenaline junkie, the black girl drops N bombs a lot but in terms of character development you get left feeling a little short changed.

The dialogue is Quentintino’s usual fare of snappy back-forth hipper-than-thou repartee, although it must be said a great deal less quotable than the likes of Pulp Fiction, for instance, or even Kill Bill. Q-Tip has been praised for being able to write convincingly from a female perspective in this movie. About 50% of women I know who have seen the film agree with this, but the other 50% have said “bullshit! We don’t talk like that!” Since I have no idea how girls talk when they’re alone I can’t possibly comment, except to say that it sounds OK to me. More or less. They talk about boys a lot, which at least sounds about right.

My final real complaint about the movie is that after being tough and scary in the first half of the movie, in the second half Death Proof turns into a massive pussy. He is woefully ineffective at killing those girls. You sort of expect him to come back for one more scare, but pretty much after he gets wounded in the arm by the black girl (who is, of course, packing heat) he turns into a big wuss and tries to get away. It’s sad to see, that Death Proof’s weakness is in fact bullets. After that he gets beaten savagely by the girls and the credits roll. That’s pretty much it, apart from Rosie Dawson landing an impressive stiletto kick into Death Proof’s surprised looking face.

Death Proof is a good film, and pretty entertaining, but it isn’t a great film. And that’s what the Quentinator is supposed to be famed for. Hopefully, whatever he comes up with next, be it Inglorious Bastards or the Vega Brothers movie, fits that bill.

Personal Life Update

Just to let you know: got back from Englandshire a week ago, after spending a further two weeks plying yon trade. Saw some more whacked out things - the crown court gets way scarier felons than the Magistrate's court, a couple of paedos and rapists, was happy to see them go down - and also wrote some more stories. I tend to get a lot of kids-who-have-terminal-diseases-and-do-sports-with-cuddly-animals stories, which is fine. When I was up north they had me running around looking for 'attractive females' to photograph 'standing side on' for a piece on plastic surgery.
"Attractive females? In this town?" quoth I. So I went up to every vaguely attractive girl I saw and tried to entice them with my charms to be in my photo. Surprisingly, there were actually a few attractive girls out, but they were nearly all either English or some other kind of foreigner. The majority of them just thought I was a wandering pervert anyway. Eventually I got a few who fit the bill and was able to go home.

Tomorrow Kaki comes over from Canada. I will pick her up first thing in the morning and bring her home. I'm going to spend the next week playing the tour guide and then we'll move down to Nottingham next Saturday. I will keep you posted on events as they occur.

Shot to the Heart

(pictured: Shoot 'Em Up does what he does best) Went to see Clive Owen Is Shoot 'Em Up last night. Shoot 'Em Up lives up to his name by shooting everything in sight. I don't think he even lets up for 30 seconds in the whole film. He shoots while standing still, running, jumping, having sex with Monica Bellucci, parachuting and delivering a baby. It has a hilariously mixed message on gun control too, it seems to advocate stronger gun control measures while glorying in an almost unparalleled level of bloody violence and almost pornographic gun fetishism. It's hard to work out if the movie was even meant to be serious in the first place. It's almost like they tried and then halfway through got ripped and decided it would be funny to let Shoot 'Em Up kill someone with a carrot. He does - he kills about 8 people with this unobtrusive orange vegetable, the highest amount of carrot-based fatalities in any movie in history. Stupid as it may be, it's still a hugely entertaining film, with Clive Owen's Shoot 'Em Up proving an eminently watchable character. He is essentially a heartless misanthrope who several times commits random acts of violence for reasons which are largely gratuitous - he runs people's cars off the road for not signalling and mercilessly beats a woman who he deems to be a poor parent. If you don't take yourself too seriously, and you like your action fast, silly and with a very low BDQ then take yourself off to see the filmed version of Shoot 'Em Up's autobiography, stat.

Back in the saddle

Well, my disciples, it’s been nearly a month since my last post, and even that was just a list of things I liked about Die Hard 4. I make no excuses. I have been busy getting my shit together for the big move south and plying my trade (journalism, not prostitution) down in Englandshire.

Last week I was on a week’s placement at a popular regional evening paper (shan’t disclose which one). Being in a newsroom again was a great feeling. There’s a tension in newspaper offices not found anywhere else in the world – the feverish, desperate tapping of keys, the seething resentment & general desire for a better job coupled paradoxically with the knowledge that you are totally unqualified & unwilling to do anything else, and that you will almost certainly die aged 53 totally alone and unappreciated of a sudden brain embolism brought on by stress, long hours and a high salt diet. The office is filled with people who would be thin if they had time to exercise and would be fat if they had time to eat. Everyone smokes. Actually, it’s nothing like that at all, but the image of drunken cynical hacks in their dingy offices is the one that journalists like to sell in order to romanticize themselves, make the process of creating news stories seem somehow torturous and Byronic. Your average modern-day newspaper office is generally very clean and full of bright, upwardly mobile young professionals, at least some of whom have principles.

All things considered I had a successful week. I got a few things in the paper, which is always nice, did a couple of interviews, shook hands with a government minister and ambushed a paedophile.

A few things didn’t sit right with me though. For instance, I hate writing up deaths. I called an old woman whose husband had just died and started asking her questions about him. Predictably she started to weep and wail, and I felt like shit. Then I had to ask her to send pictures in to the paper as well (which she did, bless her). So I wrote an article about the man’s life and tried to make it tasteful and inoffensive. I think I did OK, although I haven't seen what the subeditors have done to it yet. If this depresses me so much, how am I going to deal with talking to the families of children killed in car accidents, people incinerated in gas fires, victims of sex attacks and terrorism? Amy “The Huntress” Hunt told me she had to do a death article every week for a year and a half.

Also, we ran a story about a man who was convicted of filming women in changing rooms, and his wife rang up and begged us not to run the story. Of course, we still ran it. We’re legally entitled to. If he’s convicted then he’s fair game. And now thanks to us the sordid details are out in the public eye for all to read. What about his wife and kids? That’s a family ruined. I sometimes worry about the lack of conscience in the newspaper industry. On the other hand though, the guy is a pervert and possibly a threat to others. What can you do? Answer: shut up and do your God damn job.

I even felt a little bad about the paedophile, because he was 75 years old and so frail he couldn’t even run away when we photographed him coming out of court. He also had sad, watery eyes. He was knocked out by the 16 year old he tried to molest and couldn’t even get up to run away.

So my worry right now is: am I hard-hearted enough to do this job? I’ve always prided myself of being something of a bastard so these feelings are unusual to me. I suppose I’ll have to do some extra cruelty exercises to make up for it: I’d better go kick some puppies or something.

Die Hard 4 is so good.

Some reasons to watch Die Hard 4:
1. In Die Hard 4 there is a face-off between a fighter jet and a truck.
2. In Die Hard 4 a French guy gets chewed up in a fan.
3. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard is racist about Asians.
4. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard sustains multiple injuries but laughs them off like people did in the 80s.
5. In Die Hard 4 there is no slow-motion and very little kung fu.
6. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard beats on a woman.
7. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard is revealed to be a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
8. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard drives an SUV down a lift shaft for shits and giggles.
9. In Die Hard 4, Die Hard shoots a computer nerd on general principle.
10. At the end of Die Hard 4, Die Hard gets to be president.

Why Dr Who is great...

... because I find it reassuring that no matter where you go in time or space, everybody you meet will be British. It's a bit like going caravanning really.

The Celebrity Look-alikes Widget

I use the internet a lot, primarily for cheap thrills and to distract me from the knowledge that every moment is a step closer to Final Death. I tend to go in for those personality tests that ask you a bunch of esoteric questions and then tell you which character from "Lost" you are (Apparently I'm badass Sawyer, so screw you all). But these tests are easy to manipulate and if you know your subject matter well enough you can usually sway the results, for instance, if you want to declare yourself the ideological successor to Wolverine or the Punisher, and lets face it who wouldn't? But one thing does not lie... the face! Which is why in some kind of contrived effort to "know myself" I fed my face into the Celebrity Look-alike Widget.

I used a handsome picture of myself. My hair, dark and lustrous, stands proudly erect above my noble brow, and my eyes are glimmering with mirth. I wear my most devilishly charming smile. The picture was taken from that particular angle from which my double-chin is at its least obtrusive. It should have been perfect.

While I haven't always been pleased with my face, I feel I've really been growing into it lately and have to come to consider myself something of a handsome boy. If I had to guess which celebrities the Widget would pull out of thin air I would probably expect maybe Bill Shatner or Bruce Campbell, some lantern-jawed heroic type.

Which is why I was shocked to discover that the widget gave me as 4 of my 8 closest matches older females - bisexual author Susan Sontag, first African American Nobel literature prize winner Toni Morrison, anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel literature prize winner Nadine Gordimer, and matronly actress Kathy Bates. My main male match is Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan, who is the only one of the group I consider to look even a bit like me in that he is male, sports a pair of spectacles and has dark hair. There the resemblance ends. In addition to that, I have been somewhat insultingly matched to fat Jack Osbourne. Also weak and innefectual Aki Hakala from the band the Rasmus. Finally, there is Mark David Chapman, celebrity assassin and J.D. Salinger advocate. Many new-age hippy types believe that you can tell a person's personality from their face. So is this me? Four old women, three motherly and one terrifying half-gay spinster? Two of them are Jewish and two hold Nobel Literature prizes. Is this indicative of anything? Does this mean it is my destiny to convert to Judaism and win a Nobel Literature prize? What of the Bollywood actor, and the drummer from a lousy European rock band? And the lone, gun-weilding nutter? It's too terrifying to even think about. I hope the hippies are wrong.

To make sure I wasn't being ganked I decided to upload Kaki's photo. I had assumed the thing was on the fritz, but depressingly Kaki's matches yeilded with one exception a bunch of hot chicks. The first one is Beyonce, which of course is very complimentary, then former Neighbour Natalie Umbruglia, Dominican bombshell Maria Montez, Japanese idoru Kyoko Fukada, R & B legend Lauryn Hill, Brazilian supermodel Isabeli Fontana, hot Vulcan chick Jolene Blalock, and androgynous Canadian songstress K.D. Lang. So she's about 60% pop star, and 40% attractive actress.

Compare this to my 50% old woman, 12.5% murderer, 12.5% fat asshole, 12.5% rubbish drummer, 12.5% obscure Bollywood star. Actually that does actually sound like me, more or less. I do fuss like an old woman sometimes, and I am prone to assassinating recording artists. I am a fat asshole (and fiercly proud of it), and I can't hit a drum for shit. Not sure about the Bollywood star thing, but you can't be right all the time, even if you're a computer. Anyway you can see this daftness for yourself at

http://www.bebo.com/Weirzbowski
(or http://Weirzbowski.bebo.com)

There is no real point to this post.

CENTRAL COMPUTER STRIKES AGAIN

Central Computer has launched another onslaught on my home PC. He has given it his best viruses. It is being fixed. There will be no posts until then. Good luck and Godspeed.

My name is your dad.

For all you Blackwoodphiles out there (I’m sure I still have fans, right?). I’ve put a rather extensive update to my bebo account. Last Thursday I uploaded about 170 pictures of my trip around South East Asia last Christmas. It was a mammoth task, uploading five pictures at a time, but I completed it in one night. I hope you all take a look at them and enjoy them. Just remember, the time that you spend looking at my photos now is time you won’t spend watching slideshows when I get back to KDY and Aberdoom. And please, please comment.

In other news, Crabu-Sama has started a blog. And it’s in English! After two years of avoiding this crustacean menace on the streets of Gifu, you can now keep yourself up to date on his movements via the interweb. Maybe it will be useful to you, maybe not. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Crabu-Sama’s work, he’s essentially a giant crab that has been killing and maiming more or less at random for about 90 years. This blog, written by the beast himself provides some insight into his comings, goings, and butcherings. It can be found at
http://www.myspace.com/crabu_sama
Please everybody add him as a friend.

Also, this Saturday Kaki and I are off to Okinawa to reward ourselves for surviving another dour winter in cold buildings made of slabs. We are visiting Miyako-jima, an island which has a reputation for harbouring the worst drunks Japan has to offer. I hope to see if this is true. I expect to be eating a lot of swine and turning impossibly red, swimming in the ocean and attempting to instruct Kaki further in the art of not sinking like a stone to the bottom of any body of water you happen to find yourself in. Just kidding, she’s getting much better. Every time we go swimming now, I’m at least 60% sure that she isn’t going to take on water. I am, after all, in the Business of Education, at least for now.

I have hit a small snag though, my fabled Union Jack swimmies shrunk a bit in the wash, and I now have trouble pulling them up past my ample buttocks. So, at the weekend I decided to go and buy another pair. Unfortunately, it turns out that nowhere stocks them right now, because it isn’t swimming season yet. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I would say that right now it’s not yet quite warm enough for a dip in the sea, but surely, with the abundance of indoor heated swimming pools, swimming is an all-year round activity? Am I right? Do you mean to tell me that swimming shorts can only be bought from June to August every year? What if I go off the diving board wrong at the municipal pool in January, and end up dangling from my grotesquely stretched swimmies? I’d be fucked, that’s what I’d be. I mean, what if I sit down to fast and bust a hole in them? Do you mean to say I can’t replace them until it’s the official swimming season? Is this the whole of Japan or is it just the malls near me that are fucked up?

This sort of links in to something that really gets on my nerves about Japan. However, other people have told me how much they love the same phenomenon so there you go. But anyway, my particular problem is the fact that everything has its own particular season. Japan is a country that is extremely proud of its four distinct seasons (some people to the extent that they don’t believe spring and autumn exist in other countries) and has some very important traditions that rely on seasons. Cherry blossom viewing or Hanami parties, for instance can only take place for one week in springtime when the cherry blossoms are blooming. This of course is a beautiful tradition. But there are other things that I don’t think need to be seasonal, take fruit for instance. Japan doesn’t import much fruit, and relies largely on domestic stock which costs a bomb, and is largely seasonal. This means that you will eat persimmons in autumn and oranges in winter, because that’s when they are plentiful. What if I want to do this in summer? You can’t, or at any rate you can’t without paying through the nose. There are even seasonal menus in restaurants. For instance, what would happen if I wanted a summer vegetable curry from Coco Ichibanya in February? OK, not that I ever would while there is still a manly beef katsu curry on offer, but what if? Answer: I couldn’t do it. I would ask, and the waiter would smile benevolently and think “Silly foreigner! February isn’t for summer vegetables!” Well get this asshole, buy the vegetables from somewhere it is summer or just freeze the motherfuckers in July. We have the technology. In Japan, beer gardens close on pretty much the first of September. It doesn’t matter if it’s roasting and people are still thirsty, it’s just what is done. It’s what they call “atarimae”. I’ve heard it translated as “common sense” but it really means doing things in the manner that they have always been done and sticking to routine at all costs.

I know, I know I’m moaning. And I love Japan really. I should let it be known that I’m letting the whines out here so I am able to remain positive and not cripple my students, teachers and innocent passersby who invoke my ire. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE

(Pictured: the Genbaku dome; the floating torii at Miyajima at sunset; General Kuroki)
Good day to you, friends. It has been a while since I have updated you on my progress. Last week was Golden Week, the special week that people are allowed to go on holiday if they take vacation time. We have two long weekends, separated by two days of work, and if you can get those two days off, you can have a whole week to go wherever you want. This is really the best Japan has to offer, holiday-wise, the country where teachers have to stay in school all summer despite a distinct lack of work and people are too ashamed of looking like they aren’t gambarre-ing to ask for a day off. And even if they did they wouldn’t know what to use it for. None of my students, or even teachers did anything with their time. They think that traveling anywhere further away than Nagoya is hugely risky and expensive. So effectively we live in a state without vacations. What do I care? I’m leaving in two months. Then I can get a job where I’m not just pretending to work half the time, or go back to uni and do a qualification in a subject I’m interested in. But I digress:

I, David L. Blackwood, unlike the majority of my compatriots, do know how to have a good holiday. I estimate that I have seen more of the country than many Japanese have. And now I have added two new prefectures to my list of conquests: Hiroshima and Ishikawa. Now I will tell you about my delightful holiday.

I took a trip to Hiroshima, famous for having been the site of the first ever nuclear strike on a civilian population, and of course seafood. On the first day I took a trip out to the island of Miyajima, with its famous floating torii gate. The weather was clement and I took a long walk around the island which was very peaceful and had many secluded nooks and crannies away from the tourists where a body could enjoy solitude and listen to the many noises of nature. It was enough to make me feel a renewal of enjoyment of Japan. It was low tide when I arrived, so I walked out and examined the trunks of the gate. Its sides were pitted with barnacles and it loomed a bit. Later at high tide I observed that it was still looming except that I felt better now that there was a body of water between me and it. How I hate being loomed at. I took some photographs of the gate and enjoyed a light snack and a beer before getting back on the ferry. On my return to Hiroshima I went to find my capsule hotel. For those of you unaware of what a capsule hotel is, it’s a hotel where they put you in a sci-fi looking capsule which is stacked on top of other capsules. They are generally very small and cheap and no good at all for those with claustrophobia. In any case, it’s nearly possible to have a comfortable night in them. I went out for dinner with a book to read and somehow ended up getting entirely pissed on my own. This left me slightly ill-equipped to perform the important duties I had to perform the next day, notably my visit to the A-Bomb Dome and the Peace Memorial Museum. The dome itself is strange, like looking through some kind of lens at the past, untouched as it has been since 1945. The cracked concrete and the skeletal bubble of the roof give it a haunted look, and in the tidy, orderly city of Hiroshima it seems as out of place as if Dracula’s castle were somehow transported to the centre of Manhattan. After that I went to the Cenotaph, the Children’s Memorial and the Museum. The Memorials are a bit underwhelming – tiny, modern, hard to connect with the mass slaughter that went on 60 years ago - except the one that is underneath the ground with a 360 degree view of the devastation and fountain in the shape of a clock permanently frozen at 8:15 in memory of those who died begging for water. They also had a database of the victims there where people could look for their deceased relatives, which I played with for a while, discovering that not only Japanese, but Koreans, Chinese and American POWs where amongst the casualties. In the Peace Memorial Museum I was able to observe artifacts from that time, such as stopped watches, burned clothes and melted glass. I saw the stone steps which have a person’s shadow burned onto them, as well as some macabre pictures of horribly burned people. Very sobering. Slept long that night but kept worrying that when I awoke I would have somehow gone back in time to 1945 and be forced to find my way out of the conflagration to come. I think I would have run through the streets trying to explain in my bad Japanese to people and yelling あぶないよ! The next day I decided to take a trip to a different time period altogether and went to Hiroshima castle (not the original, obviously) where I learned about samurai, Japanese history and looked at ornate weapons and armour. I even was allowed to wear a suit of armour and ran around like a child with behavioural issues scaring old women.

Following that me and a few like minded individuals took a trip up the coast of Ishikawa-ken where we camped and barbequed and hung out. It was quite a fine drive, up through the remote fishing villages and past the recently earthquake-damaged Wajima. Highlights were Kaki and Shiloh being attacked by a hawk, and later being terrified of any bird-type noise that came from the treeline, the pleasant scenery on the drive along the coast, and generally socialising around the barbeque. Anyway, if anything else interesting happens I’ll be sure to update. I am aware this post is not funny. This is because it is a Monday and I am at work on the first day after my holiday and I do not feel funny. I am a broken man.

Ghost Guyz International

Another sure-as-shit hit from the degenerates who brought you Scotch Bonnet, Columboat, Bedshitter, and Escape From Bitchmeat Island. Watch and be amazed.

http://blip.tv/file/203446

The Chicken Thing

... happened again. Glory be!