More Reviews of Stuff

I know that you guys love to read about stuff that I eat, drink, watch, and listen to, so here goes. I've had a couple of different drinks over the last few weeks:



I found this beer, which is from Kirin and called something like Brau Master, in a little convenience store that I stopped at on the way home from out of town because I was hungry and wanted something I could eat in the car (not the beer). Anyway, it actually has German on it, which is both the first time I've ever seen German anything in Japan and a sure mark of quality in a beer, or so I am led to believe. It was pretty good.



This is Kirin something or other. It's a premium beer that I only found in a supermarket about 40 minutes from here. It was a little pricer than other Kirin, but totally worth it for one bottle. Delicious.



Here's a new version of a beer I'd already had. The old version was alright, and this version was pretty much the same, as I recall. I don't actually know what is different. I took all these pictures over the course of a couple weeks, and I don't feel like going through the bottles and cans (I can only recycle these things once a month) to read the names. Also, I don't remember how they really tasted, just kind of vaguely if they were good or not.



That bottle of orange crap, if you can't read it, says Campari. The front of the bottle leads me to believe it is some sort of Italian stuff because it says Milan and Italy on it. The back label, which is in Japanese, claims that it was made in France, though, and imported via Osaka. Nowhere does it say what it is supposed to taste like. There are two suggestions on the back for cocktails, however. One is Campari and soda, one is Campari and orange juice. Of course, both recipes just say 30 ml of Campari and a suitable amount, 適量, of the other ingredient. Incredibly helpful. After experimentation, I found that the suitable amount is "as much as possible" in order to kill the atrocious taste of Campari. It basically tastes like nothing at first, but leaves a distinct bitter, unpleasant aftertaste.

Since soda water has no flavor, that made for a particularly bad cocktail. I tried Coke Zero (to watch my girlish figure), which did an ok job of masking the aftertaste, but still left me feeling like I had been drinking New Coke with Rust. That metal bottle/can with the little blue dude on it should be familiar to people who frequent Japanese vending machines and/or McDonald's. It's the orange version of Qoo (pronounced ku-), which is some sort of partial juice concoction that would no doubt fail in markets not comprised of people who like yogurt and chunks of aloe in their drinks. I basically didn't want to buy 1.5 liters of orange juice, so I settled for this, instead. It actually worked the best, so if I ever mistakenly buy Campari again, I will be sure to wash it down with 20% actual fruit juice goodness.

I was at a kindergarten today, and we made some Japanese food, but when I have pictures of that, I'll post more about it.

Fun Stuff

Fun stuff that I did this week:

On Thursday, we planted Shiitake mushrooms. How do you plant mushrooms, you may ask. Well, you drill holes into logs and then hammer in these weird little peg looking things. All the kids at the school I was at did it (all sixteen of them), in addition to most of the teachers and me. I have pictures, but they're not conveniently on my computer yet, so I won't post them, at least not right now.

On Friday, the school I was at went with a bunch of the other schools to watch a play. It was a very Japanese thing, with the performers carrying big origami animals, but still conveying the motions and emotions of the animals with their movement and facial expressions. They also had very novel ways of making animal sounds. The story was really a lot of short stories about various animals put together, telling the story of a mountain through the four seasons. Also, the obsession with four seasons is a very Japanese thing. It was excellent.

That's all I've got right now.

Coldplay

Who buys this crap? I just watched them appear on The Daily Show. Do people not eat protein in the UK or something? Why are anemic British bands so popular? Are people using this crap to replace white noise machines? Seriously the most boring music ever, excepting possibly some bleep bleep bloop nonsense from Radiohead. Also, they were wearing some kind of ridiculous jackets with strips of color on the sleeves, and of course hats despite being inside. It was hilarious when their first song got to its solo section, at which point they "picked it up" from using a keyboard as a metronome to playing the same two notes over and over again on a guitar and getting really into it despite it being maybe the dullest instrumental section created by man since the time his only instrument was hitting a log with a rock. Good Lord, they are terrible.

Hosting, Toasting, and Coasting

I roll and I tumble, I sleep the whole day long.

Seriously, I just woke up after a nap. It's so weird waking up at times that aren't the morning. It's about 7:30 here and the frogs are out. Crazy.

Anyway, last night I went up to Matsue to be one of the hosts at a bar. It's a bar that is owned by a foreigner and a lot of the people who patronize it are foreigners. Last night they had a host night, which is where ladies pay an extra fee for the chance to talk to dudes who actually dress up. They also buy the hosts' drinks. I can't for the life of me understand why someone would want to do this, but whatever, it works for me. I think at this bar it is mostly Japanese women who want to practice their English, so I guess that makes sense. It was fun.

Today I basically didn't do anything but managed to fall asleep from it anyway. So there's that. I'm done.

A Lazy Saturday

I'm just chilling today. Did some weeding and then had an enkai last night. Things here are consistently weird. I had an undoukai, which is basically just a track meet last week. I was just watching and cheering, not running. I've got another one coming up tomorrow, too. It should be fun.

What is not fun kafunshou, which we call hayfever. Some days I basically can't even see because my eyes itch and hurt so bad. I think I'm allergic to cedar pollen, because that's been suggested a couple of times as the culprit. I don't know, but there's really nothing I can do, regardless of what particular flower is causing the problems.

Tom Waits has still been rocking my world musically. His Small Change is pretty darned good, especially Tom Traubert's Blues, which seems like it should be titled Waltzing Matilda, but that's just how Tom rolls, I guess. I've been reading comic books lately. Specifically, the Marvel Ultimate stuff. It's basically just an alternate universe in the Marvel multiverse which is modern and edgy or something. There are four main books, I think, and I've been reading three of them: The Ultimates, Ultimate Spiderman, and Ultimate Fantastic Four. I haven't been reading Ultimate X-Men because I tried reading that before when I saw it sitting around a friend's room, and it was so terrible I couldn't continue. While the others are obvious, I suppose I should explain that The Ultimates is basically Ultimate Avengers, but with a better name. Ultimate Fantastic Four is a hilariously stupid name, I think.

The Ultimates is awesome, but I've only been able to read the first volume and a little more. I'm addicted to it now, so I need my fix. I just got to the point where Captain America gets arrested, if anybody else out there has read this stuff. It's pretty awesome overall, but I think it's kind of weird how I find myself rooting for Hank Pym (aka Giant Man aka Ant Man) even though he is a terrible person, really, and I can't get behind Captain America despite being the really good guy (this isn't a case of a perfect character being boring or anything, he's just not likeable, but in a good way).

Ultimate Spiderman is good for what it is. I think it was really aimed at getting new young readers. It makes sense to use Spiderman for this, since he's the awkward teenager of the Marvel Universe, and they really do play up that angle in the book. He's basically a moron when it comes to a lot of things, and he almost gets himself killed multiple times by doing stuff that is just idiotic. It's nice to see that he didn't immediately become awesome when bitten by a spider. There are some annoying things, and I kind of wish the art were more like that of The Ultimates because it's supposedly the same universe and that kind of thing annoys me, but the art's not bad. It's just done in a way that really makes it obvious the book is for kids.

Ultimate Fantastic Four is just kind of meh. I never cared that much for the original four, so making them younger and changing their origin a bit doesn't really fascinate me.

Alright, that's enough blathering.

Mule Variations

I've been listening to Tom Waits's Mule Variations quite a bit over the last few days, and it is quite excellent. What's really nice about it is that it has quite a bit of variety. Tom started out his career basically as a lounge singer, trying to capture the essence of Saturday night, with somewhat limited success. The early albums are rather hit and miss, with an occasional great ballad or amusing bit like The Piano Has Been Drinking, but with a lot of filler tracks. I think he either got bored with doing that or he just realized that since his voice is pretty much terrible, he couldn't really make it as a crooner. He started doing more and more crazy stuff, and eventually came out with Mule Variations. I should also mention that Bone Machine is pretty out there, too, but I think it's kind of overrated and MV is much better.

Some tracks of special interest:

Big in Japan - features Primus and Tom doing some kind of weird beatboxing or something. It's also a lot of him basically yelling out somewhat ridiculous lines. His evil gruff voice really works for this one.

Hold On - Very poppy by Tom Waits standards, but very good. The first lines are the best; "They put a sign up in our town/If you live it up, you won't live it down."

Get Behind the Mule - Tom does blues right.

Cold Water - Tom sounds right as a hobo, sleeping with the snakes and the bugs, happy to find an old dog.

What's He Building? - I don't usually like spoken word stuff, but this one's rather amusing and has a lot of bizarre sounds. However, like most spoken word stuff, it gets boring after a listen or two, so I end up skipping it all the time.

Picture in a Frame - Sometimes he really hits the mark with a ballad, and this is one of those times.

Filipino Box Spring Hog - Bizarre and wonderful in a way that only he can do.

Take It with Me - Another nice love song from Tom.

Come On Up to the House - A scenic march through Tom's old world, cracked and broken vagrant spirituality that ends the album on a perfect up and down note.

Some Stuff I Did

Sorry that there haven't been any updates in a while. I've been busy and tired when I've not been busy. A few days ago, at the turtle school, they were having a club day. In elementary school, they have clubs, but they only meet something like once a month, whereas junior high kids meet every day, as far as I can tell, and stay at school until around 21:00 playing tennis or arranging flowers or whatever it is that they do.

So, anyway, they asked me to come to the kateika club, which is like the home ec. club. They were doing chatsumi,茶摘, which is picking tea. So, we went out to somebody's garden with the leader of the community center and some old woman (?) and picked tea for a few minutes. Then we came back and made tea, which basically just meant microwaving the leaves, smashing them, microwaving them a second time, smashing them again, and then putting them into teapots with hot water. It was very good tea. It was ocha,お茶, or green tea, but supposedly, in the fall, the same leaves can be made into bancha,番茶, which is some other kind of tea. The vice-principal gave me the school's camera and asked me to take pictures, so I did that instead of actually making the tea. I also took pictures with my cell phone, so maybe I'll upload those soon.

And just two days ago, I got to do some taue,田植え, which is rice planting with a fifth grade class. Usually they tell me about these kinds of things weeks in advance, but this day, they just called at around 8 in the morning and asked me to bring shorts and whatnot. It was cool.

I don't have any pictures of that because I was actually doing it, and it's not really possible to work a camera and plant rice at the same time. Planting rice involves standing in shin-depth mud and putting little seedlings in the mud and water, as guided by a wooden triangle frame thing, to ensure that everything stays pretty much in line. You form a whole line of people, and take turns being in charge. It goes like this:

everyone plants rice

leader: dekita? (done?)
everyone: dekita! (done!)
leader: isseinode! (ready, go!)

everyone rolls the triangle frame over and plants next row of rice

Good times were had by all. But now, I have a track meet to get to!