“There is no such thing as ‘safe’ Socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not Socialism. And if it’s Socialism, it’s not safe. The signposts of Socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy.”

— Margaret Thatcher, 1976

Super bad!


Today’s Japanese slang word is 激ヤバ (“gekiyaba”). 激 means violent or intense, and ヤバ comes from やばい, slang for dangerous, terrible, cool, etc. So, “really bad” or “really good”, depending on the context.

The specific context I found it in was the phrase “激ヤバ援交”, with 援交 (“enkou”) abbreviated from the well-known 援助交際 “enjo kousai” (paid dating, also known as “schoolgirl prostitution”). A quick search on Amazon Japan suggests that in sexual contexts, gekiyaba means “extreme”. So, either the young lady in question was willing to do more than usual, or the resulting video had little or no censorship, or perhaps both.

Win one for the Zipper!


Zip files are created with the user’s local character-set encoding. For most people in Japan, this means Shift-JIS. For most people outside of Japan, this means that you’ll get garbage file names when you unzip the file, unless you use a tool that supports manually overriding the encoding.

I couldn’t find a decent character-set-aware unzip for the Mac, so I installed the Archive::Zip module from CPAN and used the Encode module to do the conversion. Bare-bones Perl script follows.

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Do Berkeley next, please


Fight global warming with wolves!

"We urge Senators Udall and McCain to take immediate action to restore wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park, as part of their climate change initiative"

Nice curve ball ya got there...


...making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession

After 18 paragraphs that demonstrate that photographer Annie Liebovitz spends money (her own and other peoples’) like water, including the $24 million she hocked her work for less than a year ago, this is how the writer spins her: a victim of recession and “the bad debt crisis”. No hint that she actually lost money due to investments collapsing under the weight of someone else’s bad debt, mind you, just a firm deflection of responsibility.

The interesting question is what, precisely, she hocked, her work or her copyrights. Given that the lender (possibly slimed here as “a high-end pawn broker”) specializes in high-dollar art, probably the latter, which would pretty much cut her off from any future revenue. And with Goldman Sachs also asking for a piece of the pie, she’ll likely lose her home and equipment as well, leaving her dependent on new clients. Not fun.

"Cheer up!"


First, the video, then the explanation…

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Dear James Cameron,


After watching the Avatar trailer, I have only one thing to say: if you’re going to remake Pocahontas as a big-budget SF film, you could at least license the music from Disney.

Memory grass and naughty wives


I started out on an innocent quest: find something short and interesting to prep for the upcoming quarter’s Japanese reading class. I still have some leftovers from Spring (a song and the preface to a biography), but I wanted to try something different. I thought a short travel piece would be nice, and when I was visiting my sister in Chicago, I found a 30-year-old tourist guide in a used-book store. It’s a guide to Kyoto, and judging from the ads, it’s aimed primarily at female travelers.

It’s full of short blurbs about neighborhoods, temples, and shrines, and I picked the section on Arashiyama to scan in and prepare a vocabulary list for. At the bottom of the last page, in small, blue print, I found the following footnote:

直指庵では女の子がジッとダマッテ「想出草」を見て何時間も座っているのです。オソロシー!

Vaguely translated, “At Jikishian Temple, girls stay quiet, look at ‘omoidegusa’, and remain seated for many hours. Dreadful!”

Omoidegusa (想出草) does not appear in any of my dictionaries. Literally translated, it would be “memory grass”, but the third kanji is also used to refer to handwritten notes. Using the Japanese search engine goo.ne.jp, I found a few pages that mentioned it in the context of letters written by women, with a hint of confession.

So I searched Amazon Japan, to see where it might turn up. First thing on the list:

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Dear Ai Kago,


No, honey; just… no.

(NSFW)

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“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”