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  • Fucked Up Shit

    This is f#cked up.  Article from the Times Online:

    "More than 120 people fled their homes yesterday when a 14-year-old Japanese schoolgirl took her own life by mixing a deadly cocktail of household products and creating clouds of highly toxic gas.

    Her death, just a few days into the new school year, was the latest tragedy in what some in Japan see as an epidemic of copycat suicides among the young and internet-obsessed.

    The girl’s death brought to 70 the number of young people in Japan who have brewed the fatal concoction and killed themselves with hydrogen sulphide gas this year.

    Police fear that worse is to come: one of the products used to generate the gas has sold out in many stores in the past few weeks.

    Pinned outside the bathroom where the girl died was a poster that has begun to appear with grim regularity across the country: “Do not open! Poison gas being generated on the other side of this door!” The poster, always in the same vocabulary and typeface, is available for download on the most visited suicide sites – an apparent effort by the website creators to make the process easier.

    Japan has been an unhappy leader of so-called internet suicides. Four years ago a spate of suicide pacts began that had been forged online between strangers who would arrange to meet and end their lives together."

    What the hell?!  This sounds like the plot to some J-horror movie.

  • Homemade Rice Curry

    Today we tried making rice curry from scratch.  Usually we buy the ready-made Japanese curry blocks that you just throw into the hot water, but today we wanted to mix our own powder from scratch using cumin, coriander, tumeric, and cardamon as a base:

    IMG_1300

    Next, we added some yogurt:

    IMG_1301

    I like beef curry so we prepared the beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions:

    IMG_1305

    We added bullion and water to the powder:

    IMG_1307

    The end result:

    IMG_1309

     

    The spices were ok, but it seemed a little bland.  This was our first time making this (off an Internet recipe) so I'm not sure what we might have missed.  Any suggestions?

  • Old Music

    I downloaded a bunch of stuff from iTunes in order to make a CD for my car.  I found that I naturally gravitated towards music from the 80's - the stuff I listened to in high school.  I used to wonder why my parents and others of their generation can't remember what they had for dinner the night before, but they remember lyrics from 40 years ago.  It's an interesting phenomenon that will probably happen to me also. 

    Listening to music in high school seemed to be more than just entertainment.  I think me, and I suspect many other of my peers, placed more importance on music than warranted.  My radio was on constantly and every new lyric seemed to hold the key to finding the meaning of life hahaha.  We were probably very impressionable when we were younger and music was probably woven deep into our psyche, only to pop up 20 years later when we are searching iTunes one day.

    Looking back, a lot of the songs I loved are, um, not so good.  But I still downloaded them the other night because they are fun to listen to again.  I can still remember where and when I listened to some of the songs.  Luka by Suzanne Vega in the car on the way to a high school field trip, my now deceased friend introducing me to Inbetween Days by the Cure in the hallway at school, and Invisible Touch by Genesis on the school bus to school.  I could probably go on and write 100 posts about all the other songs too.  Ah well, it appears I'm stuck in Memory Lane right now.  Just call me Old Man Sammy from now on.

  • Taxes

    FRACK!  I have to do my taxes!

     

    Edit:  WTF! I actually owe them this year!?!? (usually it's zero or I get a refund, then again, I've been a student the last few years).

  • The Greatest American Hero

     

    Does anyone else remember this TV series?  It was about a normal, everyday school teacher who one day is given a superhero suit that gives him powers...but he lost the instructions so he has to learn how to use his powers by trial and error.  I don't know how long this was on the air, but I used to watch this every week.

  • If you had to limit your internet usage to only three websites,what three websites would you choose?

    This is a tough one, like one of those "which book would you take to you to a desert island" questions.  I think I would go with: (1) YouTube, because of the endless of variety of things you could watch - movies, clips, songs, sports, etc; (2) CNN.com or some other news website so I could keep up with the news; and, (3) Xanga, of course, because you can keep up to date with what others are doing and get a different, personal perspective of what's going on in the world.   


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  • "It's a Coincidence!"

    In order to cheer on Japanese player Kosuke Fukudome at Wrigley Field in Chicago, some fans are holding up signs in Japanese that are supposed to display the Cubs' slogan "It's Gonna Happen," ("it" being the Cubs winning the World Series, which is in itself a topic for another day).  But, as the exerpt below from MLB.com states, something is lost in translation:

    "Fans are holding up signs in the Wrigley Field bleachers that appear to be an attempt to say, "It's going to happen" in Japanese. But whatever dictionary or phrase book they are using has converted the message instead to: "It's an accident."

    Fukudome and the Japanese media have spotted the mistakes. Ryuji Araki, Fukudome's interpreter, said the problem is that there is no Japanese equivalent to, "It's going to happen." He suggested, kotoshi koso, which means, "They will win this year.""

    Here is a video clip from a Japanese news show which also explains the situation:

     

    The article above says that the mistaken signs (which say in Japanese "Guzen da zou") say "It's an accident."  But I think the phrase is more accurately translated as "It's a Coincidence."  So basically what's happening is that everytime Fukudome steps up to the plate, he sees fans waving signs reminding him that "It's a coincidence!"  I suppose someone used a dictionary and picked out the first definition listed.  hahaha.

  • Long Day

    This is one of those long days where I'm still waiting at 11:00 pm at night for a call from my boss so I can start a new assignment to be turned in by tomorrow morning.  I'll be really pissed off I wait all night and he ends up not calling. Thankfully, days like today are not the norm.  In the meantime, I can surf the web and catch up on Xanga and other sites. 

    Speaking of Xanga, things have really changed here since when I first started blogging here.  I think I've had a 50% turn-over in my subscribers (meaning 50% of my current readers have replaced others who have disappeared).  I, myself, don't have the same passion for blogging that I once did.  Maybe it's time to start writing the truth again, even at the risk of alienating readers (or creeping them out).  I have a few issues right now that may disappoint and surprise those who read about them.  Good Night.  Don't let the bedbugs bite.