Category Archives: random

My New Orleans

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The day before I went back home, I jammed my camera and broke it. I was distressed about it for the first few days of my trip – I really wanted to capture some of New Orleans – but I decided to take it as a sign from the universe that I should enjoy Jazzfest intoxicated and totally unencumbered. Which I did. And I can now say that unencumbered is bar far the most preferable way to enjoy Jazzfest. Some folks will bring loads of equipment and camp at the Acura Stage or the Gentilly Stage, but I prefer to roam here and there, catch little bits of different acts, do lots of people watching. Let me repeat myself: skip Mardi Gras, go to Jazzfest.

In the end my buddy Vasu let me borrow his camera for a couple days. I took some video all over my neighborhood. I’ve lived in four houses in New Orleans, and they’re all within 3-4 blocks of each other. I meant to post something like this while I was back home, so forgive the fact that it’s unrelated to Japan. (Also, camera has been fixed, so hopefully new Japan-related videos in the not too distant future.)

My New Orleans from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.

号外 – How to Watermelon Sacrifice

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Screw Mardi Gras. Jazzfest is the time to visit New Orleans. The city is still overrun with tourists, but there isn’t a total shutdown of roads and buildup of trash during Jazzfest (except for in/around the Fairgrounds).

Yesterday, I witnessed the Watermelon Sacrifice near the Fais Do-Do Stage:

Madness. Love the kid’s face plant into the watermelon at the 1:24 mark. Read more here and here.

I’ll leave you with some crazy locals. This house is a block from the Fairgrounds, and this is at around 7pm, right when everything was finishing. It’s hard to make out in the video, but there are bubbles coming from near the door.

号外 – How to NBA Playoffs

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Don’t forget that the NBA playoffs start tomorrow morning (1:30AM Japan time)! The NBA International League Pass packages are priced like so:

ilpplayoffs

I’ll be waking up to partake in the games all night/morning long. I don’t have much hope for my Spurs, but it’s hard not to love the first round of the NBA playoffs where there are 4 games on everyday.

How to Export a Blogsome Blog to WordPress (With Crazy Characters)

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Since there’s so little information on the internet about exporting Blogsome blogs to WordPress, I thought I’d write up a quick guide based on my experience. (Regular readers, feel free to hit the eject button here.) This guide is specifically for people who are working with Japanese (or other funky languages). It might be useful for people who are trying to move their blogs but are having trouble getting their characters to look right. When I first imported my SQL, all the Japanese text had been replaced with question marks. Yikes. The problem it seems was that while the input on Blogsome (and WordPress) is UTF8, the databases themselves are automatically set to Latin1 for some reason. (In my case, Swedish Latin1, I might add!) Mixing these character sets will garble all your kanjis. Here’s how you move your blog and fix garbled chars: Continue reading →

号外 – Booze in the News

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This Japan Times piece about 第三ビール features none other than Chris Chuwy, the guy who runs the boozelist I’ve linked to several times. Chuwy is in fine form:

"Feels like I’ve just woken up and need to brush my teeth" (Chuwy on Reisei, a dai-san brewed from yellow-pea protein, 5 percent, ¥139)

And this non sequitur:

Chuwy opined that champagne was like a gassier version of Asahi’s Style Free (dai-san, 4 percent, ¥159), which he meant as a criticism, describing champagne as "unnecessary". 

号外 – Supplementary Income

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Hooray, the green envelope finally arrived. The only curious thing is that my four Japanese roommates got their envelopes a few days, maybe a week, earlier. My Korean roommate and I got ours today.

MacGyver, That Adventurous Bastard

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Nishiaizu has a small cable television station. Their basic cable package is a mix of different channels – the basic network stations, one J Sports channel, its own station, and a station that used to be called the SUPERCHANNEL. Now, apparently, it’s called Super!dramaTV. Yes, you can check that capitalization and punctuation yourself:
http://www.superdramatv.com/

They have a variety of foreign shows, including MacGyver, which translates into Japanese as 冒険野郎マクガイバー. Put that back into English and you get (and I have to warn you that this is painfully literal) "Adventure Bastard MacGyver." Here’s the page:
http://www.superdramatv.com/line/bouken/index.html

Hence, the subject line of this entry. That fuggin bastard.

Originally posted December 5th, 2006

Ay yay yay!

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A few weeks ago the cafeteria in my town made Chili con Carne. There’s one junior high school and five elementary schools and they all eat the same thing every day. I’m not sure about the high school. I was at one of the elementary schools. They couldn’t get tortillas so they served it with pita bread instead.

Anyway, in Japanese Chili con Carne gets called チリコンカン (chirikonkan). They shorten the carne to kan and say the word incredibly fast, so it sounds hilarious, almost like a strange Japanese compound word.

Which inspired me to create this compound:

チリコンカン化 (chirikonkan-ka) – become Chili con Carne

For example:

部屋でのんびりしていて、急にテレビがチリコンカン化しちゃった！
I was just putzing around my room and all of a sudden my TV just fucking turned into Chili con Carne!

Originally posted July 14th, 2006

Have you violated your another person’s rights today?

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The office lady at the junior high school gave me a set of school supplies when I got here last fall. Scissors, white out, tape, pens, pencil, notepad. I didn’t really notice it until recently, but the mechanical pencil had something written on it in Japanese.

あなたは、他人の人権を侵害していませんか？

福島県

This translates to:

Aren’t you violating another person’s rights?

Fukushima Prefecture

What a GREAT fucking prefectural motto.

P.S. I guess the translation could also be something like, "Are you sure you aren’t violating someone’s rights?" Still, strange enough.

Originally posted June 23rd, 2006