Osakatomebaby

At the risk of getting unwanted searches, I have to disagree with Melbotis that you have to dig porn to appreciate this. I don't even think it's NSFW enless you work in Japan, and even then not sure.

Oh, duh, not NSFW = SFW.

Transcribed from a conversation with my mother this morning:

MOM: Austin is being attacked by worms...I mean like nature worms. They're everywhere. You'll walk out to your car in the morning and everything will be covered with netting. They'll crawl all over you. I've never experienced anything like it before.

(Aside to kids)What? No we don't have any bananas guys. We have no bananas tod-ay.

So there's these thin obscure little nettings you walk into all the time. These little guys spin their nets. They can move about...looks like they move about an inch every thirty seconds. You should see our Honda--you can hardly see the grey for the worms! The strings end up getting twisted together forming little ropes coming out of the trees.

I've talked to the locals and I don't think anything like this has ever happened before.

I was watching the TV and I thought it was the rain but I heard this sound and I think it was the worms eating. There's this itty bitty munching noise--background noise. Munch munch. It must be thousands of these little worms eating.

But what are they eating? They go to the ground but the grass is still green so one hopes...Well the animals are okay so they're not eating the animals. The green plants are still there.

It's quite frightening.

MOLLY: It's like a Hitchcock movie.

MOM: Yeah but in miniature. You can't sit out too long without one of them starting to crawl all over you or one of them hitting you.

And I totally think, aw don't worry, they won't bite you--and one of those little sucker bit me! I thought, what is this all about? Why are you biting me?

This news isn't getting out of Austin, so clearly the situation is more dire than imagined.

I didn't know that Ira Glass is Philip Glass' cousin.

Speaking of Philip Glass, I have decided to admit defeat. I believe Justin may have been right about the bet. What a powerful admission...may have been.

Nevertheless it appears that I owe him one American dollar. Now the question is--where to get one American dollar other than exchanging 106.57 yen (not to mention cutting that one last -en into .57 -en!). I am on the hunt. Gotta find one before the sk8trz catch me.

Nice link from today. Yoink...

Okay, I didn't, I linked to the link. Anyhoo, rather than jewelry I'd like to have faux irises and pupils implanted on my eyeballs to the left and right of the real ones. That way no one can tell where I'm really looking. Or just some painted contacts 'cause they're nifty.

Getting my hair cut today I felt like Dorothy. "You can even dye my eyes to match my dress?" So many people running around just to cut my hair so I don't look like a cavewoman. One to wash twice and give a massage two to blow dry, and of course one to give the cut. Wow. Makes me want to go more than once every six months. It's fun watching inches of hair drop though. So I guess I'll just have to keep getting it shorter and shorter till I have the haircut the real me has which is 1980's spiky dark red instead of nice demure framed face.

Nah, who am I kidding. I'm no punk. Sigh.

Emily Kremer if you are out there in the universe, this is your beacon. You spent 3 weeks dying your hair daily to get it the right shade of sea-foam green to match the bridesmaids dress for your sister's wedding and it was fabulous with barrettes and ribbons covered with glued-on paper cranes. You have style. Where did you go? Now you could have dyed your eyes too...

By the way, does anyone know when full color skin-tinting is going to be in? I don't mean tan. I mean like Blue Man Group only less greasy and more fleshy. I'd like to have a nice silvery hue if possible.

Spiky red-haired, blue-silver tinted and with six irises. This is how I see myself. No extra heads or arms at least.

How do you see yourself?

The League of Melbotis just turned one. Seems like only a week ago he was having a mid-blog crisis but he's still truckin.

Hip Hip, Hooray! x 3

According The Times of India Indian soldiers killed in battle are known as martyrs. Interesting to me coming from a Catholic school background. Just thought you'd like to know. And yes, this is how my mind operates. Random.

Random is also my cat.

Someone doesn't like David Sedaris.

Cloud your mind and, for a change, see some Sedaris imagery thats not comic, verbose, or self-referential.

So let me get this straight, in order to promote the sister in her own right you write about the brother you don't like? Anyway, nice bird...

Summary of the first 20 minutes after the test:

A passing train. 3...2...1...

Couldn't jump...there it goes.

And this bridge is not high enough.

20 minutes later:Oh well, it's a gorgeous day, I am finished with school early and I have an hour to kill. Yay.

Okonomiyaki time. 300-en kind. Best food ever, though the staff was a little surprised to see their regular customer randomly snap a photo without apologizing and bolt off. Precious time to myself without the weight of the world. And I confess I did the unthinkable today. I took my lunch break even though I had eaten before I went to work (shocking!). No one at my school takes lunch though, I think I'm the first. I took a whole hour. I too cool for school.

Leonard Cohen says there is a crack in everything, that's how the rain gets in. I don't know about that, but I do know there is a hole in the back of chocolate koalas where the chocolate gets in, and if I dip it in a glass of sake sometimes a little sake gets in too.

Dip dip. Munch.

I am horrified to have to say that I neglected to list the most important food group and that which is going to get me through this bloody Japanese test: pickles. Infinite varieties of pickles, but the best being any kind of diakon or cucumber although some pickled garlic is quite tasty. Naturally anything pickled in sake is heaven as well.

Today was fresh pickles, a gift from one of my students. Nothing like a heaping bowl of rice and pickles to make me want to stay in Japan and learn Japanese. If only I had been eating them everyday. Okay, henceforth. Onward!

I am staying up to study kanji and whatever else I need to know for my wretched wretched test tomorrow. If anyone out there is even mildly tempted to email, call or IM me for any reason whatsoever, I would be infinitely grateful for the distraction. Most likely I will sit here fiddling with my absurd exel spreadsheet and quizzing myself till I pass out on the sofa-thing, as usual.

Seriously tempted to quit till I'm back from India...grrrrrrr...Too many tests.

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:

(b) (pass down by inheritance) TRANSMIT, hand down

I hate quizzes.

The soundtrack to Fast Cheap & Out of Control was written by a one Caleb Sampson. That means that my $1 bet with waterunderground is off. He had argued it was Philip Glass and I was going with Danny Elfman. Morris has not worked with Elfman at all. And though I would argue the broken calliope sound is more a signature of Elfman than Glass, Glass did write the soundtracks to The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time and The Fog of War.

But you still don't get the dollar!

(I'm not sure where I was going to find a US $ in Japan anyway...)

On a related note, I find it amusing and inexplicably comforting that Errol Morris hasn't updated his website in the past couple of years except to add splash page with a couple of images from The Fog of War. He hasn't even added it to the Films section and the first thing you see on entering is still about biting the hand that feeds you.

Oh, actually he did also add an image of the Oscar and his dog. Heh heh heh...

    

Sleepy incoherence ahead...Rainy day at a rained out hanami. Went to Banpaku Koen 1970 Expo Memorial Park. Ridiculously thrilled by the massive bird tower at the front, wonderfully peculiar. Memorial, what an eerie place but what a day for it. Drizzly so everyone's parties were called off but the trees were pretty. The curious futuristic/semi-Alaskan-looking art and some truly frightening sculptures deposited around this strange plot of land. A fine Japanese garden and petals dropping, water. Petals on a wet black bough? What is a sorado? Is that right? A tower over the whole thing, very difficult to knock down, earthquake proof, quite the view...not making sense am I? Drifting off...so much walking followed by Indian food soooooo good and warm bath to wash away the rain on me. To sleep...