Okay, they got me. I don’t buy a lot of instant noodles any more, but there are a few that I have a weakness for, including Donbei’s Curry Udon and Ippeichan’s Yakisoba. The last time I was in Mitsuwa, I picked up a few of each, and saw something I hadn’t noticed before:

The curry udon is now also “beppin udon”, where most dictionaries define “beppin” as an informal term for a beautiful woman. My J-J dictionary also offers “particularly fine goods” (特別によい品物). My big J-E dictionary only offers the “babe” definition and matching kanji 別嬪; Kanji Sonomama‘s J-J offers both meanings, with goods getting the more appropriate kanji 別品 (one that’s not suggested by the Mac IME); JMdict applies both kanji to the “babe” meaning in its English version, but has both meanings in German.

Turns out Donbei is playing with both meanings while creating a third: “particularly straight”. They claim this year’s dried udon and soba rehydrate into a less tangled, better-looking product.

Indirectly, this picture comes from my sister:

(from Panoramio user とも21, who has a site devoted to taking pictures of Fuji)

How I found it:

1. Nellie called me a while back to get reacquainted.
2. I flew out to Chicago to spend some time with her.
3. She took me to a used book store.
4. In the basement, I found a Japanese paperback book with an interesting title, も一つパイプのけむり (Another 'Pipe Smoke').
5. It was written by famous composer Ikuma Dan, and contained a number of short essays.
6. Many of them looked too challenging to take to my reading class, but since I missed class this week, I'm emailing the teacher a written translation.
7. The fourth essay is titled 霧 (Fog). He writes about moving to a new house on the Miura Peninsula, along the Misaki Highway, and mentions that one of the things he can see is Mt. Fuji.
8. I looked the area up in Google Earth and clicked on some pictures. This was the fourth picture I clicked.

perl -i- -ne '$s=1 if />ASCIIFilename
Yes, I really hate pasting text into a chat window and having
something like “(bug 4558)” turn into
“(bug 455”.

From CNN, a little something for the folks who insist that paying tribute to pirates is a perfectly sensible economic transaction, and one that the recipients deserve for the hardships the West has inflicted upon them:

Piracy accelerated after the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s and began to flourish after shipping companies started paying ransoms. Those payments started out being in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

Oh, and yesterday they opened fire on the US-flagged food-aid ship that was transporting the American captain who had been held hostage by that other group of deprived, honest fishermen (who didn’t get the millions of dollars they politely requested at gunpoint).

[update 4/26: two recent data points worth noting]

Earlier Sunday, Kenyan maritime groups said Somali pirates had released another Yemeni freighter and its 15 crew members. The ship was seized in January with a cargo of petroleum products.

...

Separately Sunday, the captain of an Italian cruise ship said his security staff fought off a pirate attack in the region Saturday with pistols and a water hose. Commander Ciro Pinto told Italian media the ensuing gunfight damaged the ship, but the 1,500 passengers were unhurt.

Koharu: “Stop right there!”

more...

Your understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is seriously flawed. I’m watching the Connection Info window for the current World of Warcraft patch, and its behavior is, to be kind, pathetic.

With any halfway-rational client, this would be one of the healthiest swarms on the planet right now, but all I see is an endless stream of connections with other machines that all have data that the others want, but refuse to share. If you were doing anything right, I’d be frantically throttling my connection, because I’m sitting on a 100 megabit pipe with 99.9% of the patch. As it is, I’m occasionally uploading at 8 kbps for 30 seconds or so to a machine that then disconnects, and that’s enough to give me a 1.22 ratio.

Latest headline on Slashdot:

Mozilla Mulls Dropping Firefox For Win2K, Early XP

Took me a moment to parse that the way they intended…

#!/bin/bash
cd deferred
find . -type f | split
for i in xa*; do
    for j in $(cat $i); do
        echo -n "$j " #literal tab
        postcat $j | awk  '
            /^From: / {f=$0}
            /^To: / {t=$0}
            /^Subject: / {s=$0}
            END {printf("%s\t%s\t%s\n",f,t,s)}'
    done >> /tmp/jfoo
done

Open in Excel, sort to taste, cleanup as needed, save for later use...