Month: November 2002
Whoa!
It’s still a bit of a shock to see little old ladies wandering through men’s bathrooms and locker rooms on cleaning duty. I came face-to-face with one in full monty mode (me, not her) in the locker room at my gym the other day. I had to work to be nonchalant about it.
I’m No Steve Perry
This was my attempt to sing Journey’s Separate Ways. I can’t even begin to describe how bad it was. The other song I was coerced into singing is far too embarrassing to name. (It was a Disney duet.)
The evening of karaoke was last week, when a group of teachers from my school went out after work for drinks and pub food. We had a small, private room with a karaoke setup. The head teacher took this photo with her mobile phone. The other guy in the picture is Jason, one of the other two foreign teachers at the school. He was trying to provide backup.
Well, ‘Real Sex’ Is A Good Show
This is how a conversation between the C.E.O. of CBS, the president of NBC Entertainment and the chairman of HBO—imagining a perfect TV schedule—begins:
Jeff Zucker: You’re really tan.
Leslie Moonves: You know what? I haven’t gone away. I have a place in Malibu, and I tan very fast. So–.
Zucker: He’s really tan.
Moonves: Thank you. It’s that Bob Evans look.
The conversation is ultimately tragic, but has its hilarious moments. Some additional highlights:
Zucker: I might have a lot of crazy, wacky ideas, but the best ideas actually walk in the door.
– – – – – – – –
Chris Albrecht: I don’t do anything on a show. I don’t write a show. I don’t direct a show. I don’t produce a show. I don’t act in a show. I don’t edit a show. So my idea of a show is almost sort of useless. I don’t do anything.
– – – – – – – –
Zucker: You know, you never say that HBO’s most successful show is “G-String Divas.”
Albrecht: “G-String Divas” is not our most successful show.
Zucker: Oh, come on.
Albrecht: It actually didn’t get nearly the ratings I thought it would. “Real Sex” gets great ratings.
Moonves: Well, “Real Sex” is a good show.
Sunday Night On The Town
Went to a club tonight for a night of DJs and bands. It was a small hole-in-the-wall, like so many local clubs. Cover charge was ¥1500 (about $12), and included one drink, which the bartender made into a quadruple. As he was pouring, he lost his balance and fell, luckily, onto the chair behind the small bar. Exuberance or inebriation? It was hard to tell.
Seiyu Jingle
The closest grocery is just a block away from my apartment here in Nagano. Although it’s part of the large Seiyu chain, this particular store is kind of crummy. It’s small and the selection isn’t great. The atmosphere is just this side of seedy. I go there often because it’s convenient, but I’m never entirely happy about the experience.
Tops on my list of complaints is the aural cacophony one is assaulted with while shopping. There are at least three different soundtracks playing at once, on top of the constant refrains of “Irasshai mase!” (roughly translated: “welcome to our establishment”) any time you pass an employee. One soundtrack in particular—the loudest of them all—drives me crazy, and I’m including it here so you can decide for yourself whether I’m justifiably irritated or just a crank:
Seiyu Jingle (350k MP3)
Two days a week at Seiyu—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—the store has ¥100 days, where select merchandise is marked down to the low, low price of ¥100. On these days, the store turns into a sort of video game, where the object is to negotiate one’s way through swarms of tiny grandmothers erratically and veeeerrrrrry slowly pushing their carts down the isles. On these days, the Seiyu Jingle turns into a an apt accompaniment to a cousin of that classic vid game, Frogger.
Mechanical Menaces
More than a decade ago, while I was visiting Prague in what was then still Czechoslovakia, I was thrilled to find escalators that whisked people along at speeds at least twice as fast as those found in the U.S. Shooting up from the depths of the subway system, I always visualized riders being launched into the air at the top, like human cannonballs. That’s my kind of escalator.
Of course, high speed escalators don’t fly in safety-conscious (and litigious) America. Nor are they found in Japan. But other mechanized dangers do lurk in the land of the rising sun.
Take automatic sliding doors and elevator doors. In this country, the former petulantly refuse to open until you’ve come full stop about two inches from the door. The latter, on the other hand, should be nicknamed the “jaws of death.”
No elevator I’ve ever ridden on here has had an electric eye to stop the closing of the doors if a person steps between them. So the only thing stopping the doors once they’ve started closing is a warm body (or, if you’re lucky, a quick button-pusher who’s already made it safely inside).
Automatic sliding doors are a danger of another sort. There’s no walking into a building without breaking your pace, no Starship Enterprise “whooosh” as a door slides quickly open. It’s more like a border crossing where you have to stop and show your passport. I remember an incident in Japan when my family (including my grandparents) visited in 1981. My grandfather walked right into a glass door, mashing his nose in the process. Whether it was because he expected it to open or because he didn’t see the door I don’t remember. But I think of that incident every time I find my nose bushing against a door that should have opened five seconds earlier. I’ve taken to waving my hand in front of me in an effort to trigger the door just a moment earlier, which must make me look slightly batty—another crazy foreigner.
Doubleplusgood Ad Campaign
The “Secure Beneath Watchful Eyes” image is from a campaign in London that’s meant to make people feel safe while using the public bus system.
How could anyone not have known the image would be more worrying than it is comforting?
Judge Kollar-Kotelly, aka Janeway
This is a photo of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who has blessed the slap-on-the-wrist settlement between the Justice Department and Microsoft.
Something about this photo strikes me as slightly bizarre. I think she may really be Captain Janeway in one of those space-time continuum episodes, where she’s aged and returned to 21st century earth to intervene in a major legal battle that has repercussions for the future of the Federation. Okay, you’ve done your dirty deed, Janeway— to go back to the future and to the far reaches of the Delta Quadrant.
I never did like Voyager…
“It Blows”
Madonna’s publicist:
"It’s a public hanging by the critics, an assassination," an indignant Rosenberg said earlier this week. "Give the girl a break already! Stop being so mean!"