Pictures of Drinks

The promised picture of beer. This is Kirin W (?), which seems to have just been introduced with little fanfare. It is pretty much the worst beer I have had here, very light on flavor.


You know how on cereal commercials, they always say, "part of a complete breakfast," and then show a picture of the cereal with other breakfast foods, with the pure sugar cereals needing a whole other meal to complete them? Without fail, part of the breakfast is a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice. I always thought that was ridiculous because who does that, and why would you need to drink milk along with cereal IN MILK? Anyway, I actually had both milk and this kind of orange juice substitute (10% juice!) for once, so I thought I would take a picture in memory of all the junk cereals out there.

Comments

Seriously, that last post was good and you people aren't commenting at all. I know you don't like seeing posts that are just pictures of beer or links to YouTube garbage, but that is what is going to happen if you don't comment on posts about crazy cultural stuff I have done. I know there were no pictures, but it is not possible to carry a camera around in a loincloth while you are fighting a thousand other dudes for some chopsticks stuck together.

Naked Man Festival

On Saturday, I took a train down to the beautiful city of Okayama, home to the legendary Momotarou. That night there was a festival at a temple that I was participating in, with a group of foreigners from all over Japan. There were tons of Japanese people there, too, of course. This festival involves around a thousand men (I think, I don't know, really) wearing only fundoshi and tabi, which are a piece of cloth wrapped around one like a diaper and cloth shoes, respectively, pushing each other in a giant mass, trying to get one of a few shingi, which are some kind of stick. It's absolutely unbelievable. There's a temple building at the top of some stairs where dudes are just packed in and fighting to get these little sticks. If you manage to get a stick, the goal is to get it down the steps and out the front gate to the temple. A couple of the bigger sticks are worth about a thousand dollars if you can get them out the front. Keep in mind that you are so packed in that you can't really move at all. It's a bit dangerous and these people are actually trying very hard to get the sticks, but they're also generally looking to make sure nobody gets really hurt and are generally friendly. Before the match, if that's what you can even call it, all the men participating run around the temple grounds and the surrounding streets in fundoshi and tabi, including running through a pool of freezing cold water, generally in groups, arms across shoulders, chanting. It's crazy, but crazy fun. Two of the guys in our foreigner group managed to get sticks, which is basically unprecedented. This is the first time that a foreigner has gotten one, I think, though they weren't worth any money. Too bad. For the record, I didn't even get to see the sticks until it was all over and we were back on the bus. It is that insane. Sorry for the unorganized paragraph style.

"People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people."

-Peep Show

The Wicker Man Revisited

I think I may have mentioned The Wicker Man on here before. It's an awesome thriller/horror movie from 1973 about a police officer who goes to investigate the disappearance of a little girl on an isolated little island and discovers a crazy cult. There's all this stuff about religion and authority and whatnot and it's a very clever little movie and creepy as can be. Then in 2006 somebody went and remade it, cast Nicholas Cage as the police dude, and changed the setting from Britain to the Pacific Northwest, replacing the weirdo pagans and all the accompanying religious stuff that made the original interesting with some sort of generic feminist cult, messing up the continuity of the story in the process. Anyway, the remake is sort of legendarily bad, I guess, and I finally got to see it last night. Here's a clip I think I linked to before of Cage dressed in a bear suit punching a woman in the face. The music is added. And another funny edited clip. Anyway, it's ridiculous and you should see it. The whole first half of the movie or so is really just boring and completely lacking in the atmosphere of the original, but once he starts punching women in the face, it really picks up. The writers also clearly didn't think through their changing of the setting at the ending because it no longer makes sense. Also, bees!

Big ol' muroaji!

Up to Me

:(

建国記念日の随感

I'm just sitting back enjoying National Foundation day, weighing the pros and cons of not moving holidays to the ends of the week and browsing around the internet. I'm sure that the bush fires in Australia are news even in America. I can only guess that media coverage these days is 90% covering the economy, which really only fuels a problem that essentially stems from people not being confident in the economy, but I don't really know. Anyway, I came across some incredible pictures from the brush fires here. And to prove that there's no limit to the stupid stuff jerks will say to get attention, here's a story about some moron who blames the fires on abortion. I probably shouldn't even post it since he just wants attention, but whatever.

This song came up while I was listening to music in the background. I hadn't heard it in a while, and since most of the people who read this blog aren't probably as rabid Dylan fans as I am, you probably haven't heard it in a while either, if ever. The video also has some nice pictures of a young Bob and his then girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. This version is interesting.

To close on a happier note, enjoy this classic.

Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, Either

I was flipping through a book at a friend's house recently which blamed the Beatles and Bob Dylan (!) for the downfall of society. Conservatives hate the 60's so much that it is hard to understand. I think they genuinely think that everything was better in the 50's and before then. It is really hard to imagine how they come to this conclusion, but it no doubt has to do with a combination of nostalgia, confirmation bias, a fear of women, and a healthy dose of repressed racism. I don't, of course, wish for the deaths of these sticks in the mud, but it is happy to think that when they are gone, their particular brand of backwards thinking will be gone with them. However, seeing these books strewn about on the beds and bookshelves of my contemporaries makes me fear that the faulty and harmful ideas of the past will never really stop hampering us. This is just temporary gloom, though, and dwelling on it is just the kind of thinking these people love. Whether they can see it or not, whether they believe it or not, the world is actually a better place in a lot of ways than it was even decades ago. Of course there is no convincing people whose arguments are based on fuzzy memories of when people were just nicer, but a look at history assures us that man will continue to stumble towards the future and that we shall, indeed, overcome. It is just so depressing that there are people who refuse to pick up the pace, or, rather, let people with more brains in their heads pick up the pace for them. The point is that the son of The Man often grows up to be The Man, but we gotta keep on keepin' on.

Mixmaster

Sitting on a shelf in my kitchen is a bottle of shouchuu 焼酎, a kind of alcoholic beverage that has its roots in Korea, but Japanese people drink it, too. I think mostly old men drink it, but I'm not totally sure. It generally has a ABV of around 25% and there are a few kinds, mugi 麦(wheat) and imo 芋([sweet] potato), being the chief kinds. I've also had kuri 栗(chestnut) and seen but never tried goma 胡麻(sesame seed) varieties of shouchuu. It is colorless like vodka, and it doesn't have much flavor besides alcohol, but can have a very powerful smell. As a result, it is almost always mixed with something else.

A traditional drink is shouchuu oyuwari 焼酎お湯割り, which just means mixing it with hot water. That's great for making it smell and taste less strong and also great for the cold winter months spent under a kotatsu. But, as you can imagine, it isn't that great because hot water isn't exactly flavorful. So, I just invented (I have never heard of anyone doing this) a new drink, replacing the hot water with tea, in this case bancha 番茶. I think it is fantastic.

On an unrelated note, I think the light in this room is broken. It went out a couple days ago. After opening it up, I found that it has five fluorescent tubes in it, which I have tried both switching around and replacing with new ones, but it still won't turn on. It seems odd that they would all burn out at the same time, as well. So, I am in a dark room using only my computer screen for light. 残念！

I went snowboarding yesterday for the second time. I am slowly getting it, but I have to say that skiing is much easier and more fun, but I'm not willing to give up on snowboarding until I can do it somewhat properly. It is very frustrating because the means of changing direction seems very inconsistent. Even if I get the front end of the board pointing right, and regardless of how I dig the board into the snow, sometimes it simply refuses to stop moving left. I have no explanation for that. But it is fairly fun, except for the one time when I fell over backwards pretty hard and I think all the force got transferred up my spine to my head because I got a terrible headache right then and it didn't go away for hours. But, winter is almost over, so I probably won't get another chance to try snowboarding again for a while. For the record, skiing is very easy as I recall (I tried it for the first time last year and got it in a couple hours) but I haven't gotten a chance to do that again.

Today I went to school and they were surprised because for some reason, it wasn't on their schedule. So, I have "work" today at the Board of Education. I was reading about Hangeul on Wikipedia. That's pretty awesome right there.

I often wear track suits to work. In fact, I wear track suits pretty much every day, often more than one because wearing more than one layer is the key to staying warm and heavy coats are really awkward. Today I am wearing three track suits:　a lightweight one with shorts, a medium weight one with pants, and a heavy one that is sort of water-proof. I always feel like a gangster wearing them because that is what modern gangsters have replaced the pin-striped suit with. But now my hair and beard are kind of long, and since they aren't black light an Italian mobster's would be, I don't think I really look like one at all. Just hanging out eating instant noodles.