my.bicycle

the problem with mash-ups... is that once you get past both “oh, that’s unexpected” and “that must have been difficult,” what you”re left with is a dj with really fucking terrible taste in music.
— jwz blog entry

Wikipedia on Mash-ups.

Labels: mashup

Paul Anka covers music that the young people will like. (thanks, the Other Michael)

Labels: music

It’s here.

I left Japan on-time at 15:25 Sunday afternoon, flew 9 hours to SFO, landing at about 08:30... at which point United Airlines had their typical domestic service string of incidents by changing the departure gate no less than three times, then slipping the listed departure time from 10:25 to 10:50, to 11:05, then 11:10. The joke was on us though: once we boarded the plane, a telltale light had to be investigated, keeping us at the gate and seatbelted until nearly 13:00. At no point during any of this trip was I able to sleep, though I had a brief, alarm-controlled nap after I finally got to the Miyako Inn. I've had two hours sleep in the last 30 hours, so I'm a bit punchy. This may be amplifying some of the effect of what I've experienced today, but there is also the nature of the seriously weird, cultural flip-flop I've had being here less than 10 hours.

Pulling into d/t Los Angeles in a cab, the view is really stark. There are vagrants asleep on streets that smell strongly of old piss. Some are on cardboard boxes, some have camping tents (arrayed in a row, blue, looking more temporary than their Osaka improvised shelter counterparts, but similarly tragic), and some people are just on the concrete sidewalks. Most of them don't look dirty, but they don't look clean. They look like they were walking home from a job, and didn't quite make it, laid down, and now the grime of Los Angeles is drifting, accumulating on them.

The interior of a car I saw looked strange. The steering wheel was in the wrong spot, and I thought, "Oh, how weird. This one's an import." But it wasn't; it was a typical, American, left-side drive vehicle, and I had double-juxtaposed which side the steering wheel "should" be on.

Japan town in Los Angeles is called "Little Tokyo," and is on the edge of the bad area, bordering on urban nothingness. Pretty much everything was closed when I went to go grab dinner, including the place the front desk recommended. There is an open air mall that has been around since 1980; I remember coming there in 1985 or so and buying a lot of imagawayaki (kinda like pancake batter that has been cooked in a two-sided grill with red bean paste in-between). The whole place is pretty run down feeling; Los Angeles' restaurants are required to show their A, B, C, or F grade for cleanliness/hygeine in the front window of their shop. Oddly all the restaurants have a "B" rating, though there is an image of fastidiousness in Japanese culture that would seem to make this unthinkable. The truth is most of the places I eat in Osaka would probably get a "C" even though they're immaculately clean in the preparation area. It's a different way of thinking, and I wonder if that's what has struck so many of these places into that grade.

I ended up eating at a little Chinese place stuck between a Starbucks and a Schlotsky's. Dinner was sauteed cod and veggies with rice, ordered from a flirty waitress who was dancing all over the place. She was bamboozled by my Japanese cell phone, which is really strange; it's not a particularly tricky phone, but I guess it still kicks most American phones butts. She asked if she could see it, then she wanted to open it and play with it, which of course was no problem, but it was weird, culturally. The differences between service in the USA and Japan continue to amaze me; while the Japanese version of waitressing is consumately professional, it is sometimes nice to see some life and individuality in people with whom you're interacting, even briefly. The place had Anchor Steam and Newcastle Brown on tap, and she said that drinks were half price, so would I like the "bigboomersomethingorother... It's about 'yay' high," she said, gesturing about 20cm from the tabletop — sure.

A LOT of food arrived. As in, I could have fed two people easily, possibly three. One large plate piled with fish and veggies, a full container on the side of rice (I kind of miss that style of longer grain white rice, even though I know it's cheap as hell in comparison to regular Japanese pearl grain). But the real disconnect happened when the beer arrived: it was about as tall as she'd described, but twice the diameter I'd expected. Good grief. Not surprisingly, the 2nd half was easier going down than the 1st half. I took my time, and watched the laker game on TV. Brooke Shields is now shilling for Ford, and looks kinda plastic-surgery creepy now. Darth Vader is trotted out in Burger King commercials. Charles Barclay has become quite large. By the end of the beer, none of this seemed too weird anymore.

On the way back to the hotel, a guy asked me for change. He'd been hitting up people who were sitting outside the restaurant. It always bothers me when someone is asking for handouts from someone who can't easily get away. I know that's the point, but it seems really rude, so I don't ever cave in that case. I got almost to the hotel when a well dressed guy started asking me something, so he caught me. He gave me some story about how he'd just got out of jail and needed to get home -- ack. Trapped. I had a single dollar, so I gave him that; my resistance to panhandlers has weakened from my time in Japan, where there are none. There are plenty of homeless in Japan - too many - but they don't ever ask for money. As soon as I had put the dollar bill in the first guy's hand, the first guy appeared out of nowhere, apparently having followed me. Now that he saw I had given some money out, he got all weird and desperate. "Hey, watch this!" he said, and started trying to breakdance in front of me. I mouthed apologies and tried to keep walking, but finally ended up giving him the remainder of my change. Some of it was Japanese; I wonder what he'll do with it.

Labels: games

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!
This lad is off to E3 for a week of geekcentric carnivale. I’ll be leaving this site alone for the duration, most likely, and will leave it to the Gamespots and Kotakus and Joystiqs of the world to deliver any related news you'll need. Actually, considering how many meetings I’m going to attend, it’s likely I’ll have to check all those sites afterward to figure out what I missed.

In the meantime, in the interest of getting the blog un-broke, I’ve reverted to the base template and activated the Comments via Blogger’s default, instead of trying to get HaloScan to work nicely. The previous Comments, the main victim in this case, will be played by Tony Danza in the feature film version. Unless I find an RSS feed for Blogger Comments, I plan to eventually go back to HaloScan.

Jon Stewart's Daily Show - Gay Watch 05/12/05: Impossibly, even funnier than the last one, because an anti-gay-rights politician is (wait for it) taking it in the shorts.

New footage for Rise of Legends is up, apparently what will be shown at E3. Very, very cool looking.

“ALAN MOORE vs BRIAN ENO” (thanks, Monty!)

AM:
Brian, I mean, given that you described yourself as a non-musician and then went on to completely transform music in the late 20th, early 21st century, should we be glad that you didn't decide that you were going to be a non-serial killer or non-dictator or...?

BE:
[Laughing]

I’ve just removed a book from my Amazon cart/wishlist based on a rant.

Excellent clip: Dr. Who End Of The World Episode 2. Makes me want to see the show, even though Christopher Eccelston apparently jumps ship after only the first season. (waxy)

National Enquirer's change in format too upscale for you? Weekly World News' weekly publication model too few and far between for you? Now you can check Gawker's Sploid for free, repeatedly, daily.

Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, lovecraftian pop-rock-funk elder gods, are now offered through iTunes Music Store (iTMS)

Overcompensating: JED 0001: Jedi Fundamentals

Comedy Central said yesterday that it was giving Mr. Colbert his own show: a half-hour that is expected to follow The Daily Show on weeknights and will lampoon those cable-news shows that are dominated by the personality and sensibility of a single host. Think, he said, of Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity.
Stephen Colbert’s show will spoof the personality-type news shows.

Where The Daily Show and its host, Jon Stewart, generally spoof the headlines of the day (and the anchors and reporters who deliver them), Mr. Colbert’s program will send up those hosts who have become household names doing interviews and offering analyses each night on the 24-hour cable news channels. The program, which is expected to begin appearing on Comedy Central as soon as early fall, is being produced by Mr. Stewart’s production company, Busboy Productions.
New York Times: Daily Show Personality Gets His Own Platform

Life After Darth: George Lucas was born to make underground films. Then a little movie called Star Wars lured him to the dark side. Can the father of the blockbuster really rediscover his avant-garde soul?
Wired 13.05: Life After Darth

Now that Google is offering their own Web Accelerator, I wonder if Google Viagra or Google Home Mortgage or Google Punch-the-Monkey is far behind.

Is this current layout, as I see locally, entirely fuX0red in Internet Explorer on Windows? It looks fine on Firefox, and really messed up in IE on my current machine.

We all know Britney Spears isn’t particularly original, but have you heard Oops I Did It Again: The Original? (thanks, The Other Michael)

Tastes vary. Here is one person’s ideal version of Lost in Translation.
(sdemory)

This clip of a recent Daily Show “Gaywatch” segment is pure genious. I need to get back to bittorrenting this show, since it doesn’t air anywhere in Japan. (chris glass)

There has been nothing except the JR West Japan train wreck on the news for the past five days. Any time the news is on, it is about the train wreck.

There was an interesting story the other day, written by a man who’d narrowly avoided the accident. He’d been on that train, but had been holding his pee for a few stops, and when the train overshot its mark at last station prior to its accident, he had to wait an extra minute for it to back up and open its doors. Even though it wasn't his stop, he couldn’t hold out much longer, so he got off at the current station after the train finished backing up to where it should be. As he left, he was going to leave his sports page on the overhead rack for anyone else to read, but another passenger was eyeing it, so he handed it to him. He avoided that train wreck, and was wondering what happened to the fellow passenger that he had only just handed off the reading material.

The media, as usual, is looking for a scapegoat. Rather than blame it on the young and inexperienced conductor, the current push is instead to blame JR itself for its stress-inducing policies for its employees, and questioning the generally incredibly safe record of JR. News shows are dragging out train timetables and showing how the time from one place to another has decreased, and how this means that trains are now speeding, going too fast... Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like trains have been safe this whole time, and that this accident was the fault of the conductor and the veteran who was supposed to be watching over him, not covering his ass.

This was a horrible accident; apparently it’s the worst train accident in Japan’s history. The death-count is well over a hundred people now, and pretty much everybody else was injured. If I had lost someone on it, I’d likely be looking for someone or something on which I could vent my spleen. Dead conductors are not a satisfying receptacle for anger. However I recognize this as an emotional need, and not one that might not be rational. What bothers me is the media taking this emotional ball and running with it, rather than reporting the facts as they are discovered by the ongoing police investigation. Well, that and the fact that really obnoxious train otaku are being strutted around on every channel as experts, and its clear from their attitude that they’re just fanboys, and they love the attention too much.