me on the Joba

Hey all-

So hopefully I should be seeing a bunch of you back at home soon enough, but in the meantime here's a video of pure Dougitude for you:



I've also uploaded some pics, including those from a brochure I picked up that was riddled with copious amounts of Engrish at the Tokyo Motor Show.

Ok, see you soon!

Go Speed Racer??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQyYPP9zR7M

Have you guys seen this?? I feel like I have been defiled and violated... the guys from the Matrix bring you - Speed Racer: the Movie. It looks like a cross between the Matrix and that Johnny Depp acid-trip remake of Willy Wonka. I would post pictures, but the homepage won't let you, so you'll have to go search them out for yourself, if you dare.

Now excuse me while I go search for a filthy stray dog to lick and get this nasty taste out of my mouth. Bleh.

Here lies: Hip-hop - R.I.P.

I've been saying it for years now, and it looks like there's a growing voice in the hip-hop community that agrees with me... or maybe we're all just getting old and waxing nostalgic about what I would argue were the golden days of rap.

So I ran across this album rather late considering it came out more than a year ago now, but that would be because it's usually too much hassle to sift through the 50 Cents, Lil' Jons and bad samples of Daft Punk songs of the world to find any rap worth listening to these days. I normally resort to recommendations of others and random stuff I run across from random sources, which have ranged from internet searches to tv/commercials and clubs.

Which recently brought me across this album by Nas - Hip Hop is Dead. Now it seems that in addition to the "Hip-pop" that 50, P-Diddy and all the Dirty Souf peeps come out with (to be fair, I can tolerate some Ludacris and Mystical, but that's about it) I'm starting to hear some more poetic/preachy rap like Mos Def... and finally downright condescending rap with this by Nas.

I like that he's trying to put some meaning back into things and get back to the roots of rap by putting a message in the lyrics, but I have a feeling that his delivery will fall on deaf ears with the intended audience. This album is him looking directly down his nose at pretty much everyone that's come out within the past 5 years or so and only giving props to those who've been around since he came out back in the early 90's. He wreaks of old man with songs about how bling is retarded, and I love him for it. I'm guessing the thought is that he's high profile enough and has paid his dues, so you really have no choice but to listen to him or get blasted. He certainly gets preachy, as he has in a couple other albums, but he can flow with the best of them so I'll let it slide. Besides, the roots of rap were all about giving the people on the streets a voice since they'd rather rap than vote - " The black vote mean nathan, who you gonna elect Satan or Satan?" He's a self-educated man, and even with the things I can't agree with I can see where he's coming from and don't doubt his intelligence.

So is hip hop dead, or dying? This album begs the question, since if it's good (which it is) then it basically proves itself wrong, right? Pretty much anything loses it's soul when it gets commercialized... I think the mainstream is only going to stay bad with the rare exception, with all the good stuff sticking to the shadows only to pop it's head out every now and then. So you keep the Diddy family and Kanye West, your bling and Rocawear, and I'll stick with Nas, Pharcyde, Outkast, Tribe, and Del.

Time to check out what others are saying on the topic....
here, and here

And here's looking forward to his next release, which I'm sure will get people talking just as much, if not more.

Oh.My.God.

Worst commute EVAR.

So I get up on the early side today, rather pleased that I'm in line to make the early train which is ever so slightly less crowded and affords me the room necessary to read my book in peace (currently reading Battle Royale (with cheese) in Japanese btw - 2x the gore of the movie!!). I get to the station with a good 2 minutes to spare and gaze up to the time ticker and see... nothing! Absolutely not a damn thing.

All the times were blanked out, and in their place was a message at the bottom - some jerkoff decided his life sucked, and he needed to end it while making millions of people's lives a little bit worse in the process, so he jumped in front of a train. I know it's sad that a suicide can be reduced in the minds of so many as a nuisance and delay to their daily lives, but when you don't know the guy and it doesn't happen right in front of you, that's reality. After the shit I went through this morning, I feel like going down to the morgue to stab dude in the face with a fork... I'd kill him if he wasn't already dead, and if you read on you'll know exactly why.

So anyway, I get up to the platform and it looks like what I imagine it'd be like if Lenny DiCaprio and Justin Timberlake base-jumped into an all girls high school campus. Wall-to-wall people as far as the eye can see. No express trains, just normal trains and delays as far as I could imagine. A guy actually came up to me and said he was taking pictures to send people back home. We got on the train and had a nice little chat... er, as nice as chats can be in such circumstances.

This was, for the record, THE busiest train I have ever been on, EVER. I'm talking like this was worse than the time that I pushed all the way up to the front of the moshpit at a Foo Fighters performance at the end of the HFStival a couple years ago... nothing but a sea of people everywhere you look breathing all your air and leaving you with naught but the fiery anger swelling in your bellows to keep you going. There were so many people that the guys on the platform who are normally there to help push people onto the train and make sure luggage doesn't get stuck in the doors were actually telling people to wait for the next train. Inside the train, not only was movement not possible, but there were actually people pushed to the point that they were sitting on the people sitting on the benches with another person hunched over their backs. It was the first time I've ever heard a Japanese person yell out in the train for someone to get off because it was too much to take and the person next to him was about to pass out from the pressure!

This went on for 2 frickin' hours... over twice as long as I'm normally on the train. I would've seriously considered just going back home if I didn't know that it'd take just as long and be just as painful to get back. It's really no wonder that at the end of the day on the way home I noticed that on the exact same line there was yet another jumper that afternoon - probably depressed from the shitty day he had thanks to people like the morning guy. I hear that this is the heavy season for suicides in this country whose citizens kill themselves more than just about all other civilized countries. And that is why I want to impale a corpse's skull with an icepick right now.

But hey, I'll get over it. On the bright side of things, I got my camera fixed under warranty the other day, so I'll be able to take some pictures again soon! Gotta get on that... I hear there's lots of Christmas lights displays that I'd just love to check out before coming home in a couple weeks. Ok, off to bed to do it all over again tomorrow.

Japanese pizza

What is this filthy excuse for a pizza that defiles my vision? Why, it's none other than the newest concoction from Pizza Hut Japan - the "winter double king" pizza.

Some of the toppings included on this pizza:

• mayonnaise
• king crab
• shrimp
• beef w/ demigras sauce
• broccoli
• onion
• corn
• egg
• potato

Now I like Pizza Hut out here, but that's because I don't even bother to look at their menu of "special" (like in the Forrest Gump sense I'm guessing) pizzas, except for a laugh. Corn and mayonnaise simply do not belong on a pizza anywhere, anytime, for any reason or under any circumstance.

And eggs! Ohhh, don't get me started on the eggs... I still look up to the sky and say a silent little "thank you" to the Big Man every time I find a sandwich not desecrated with the vile stench of eggs, with the noteworthy examples of breakfast sandwiches and egg salad.

For more check the original here with video - I like his poll options for whether you want this pizza or not: I went with option #3 - "I cannot answer this question because I'm too busy throwing up".