People here at my office in Tokyo seem quite happy -- and almost none of them are Americans.
Well, as long as I had that YouTube page open, I plugged in the name "Bree Keyton" to see what would come up.
I got this.
WTF?
Also, Dick Morris of Fox News was sent to Kenya to help Odinga run his campaign! I find that unbelievable.
I find it unbelievable too.
Without in any way, shape, or form endorsing the overall fruitbattery, I should point out that that statement, at its heart, well, is kinda true.
US strategist to help Kenya presidential challenger
"NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's top presidential challenger has brought in an American political strategist, tarred by a prostitution scandal, to help defeat President Mwai Kibaki in a December 27 poll, his campaign said on Wednesday.
"As opposition candidates kicked off their official campaigns, Raila Odinga, who has a narrow lead in opinion polls, said American pollster Dick Morris had joined his team.
"'He is working as a consultant, but he is doing it pro bono. He is not charging Mr. Odinga,' said Odinga spokeswoman Rose Lukalo."
There's even video. Dick Morris really gets around.
This may deserve its own posting -- don't want to hijack this thread -- but Barbara Bauer's legal snitfit against Wikipedia is getting some publicity, as the Wikimedia Foundation has apparently recently filed a motion to dismiss. This, of course, has served to further publicize the claims she finds so libelous, which strikes me as somewhat self-defeating.
It happens to be an advertising slogan used for Effexor.
"Are these symptoms of depression interfering with your life?
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* Not involved with family and friends the way you used to be?
* Low energy, fatigue?
* Not motivated to do the things you once looked forward to doing?
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As Firedoglake points out, "Well. That was perhaps not the best possible choice. Even more so when you consider that it's been under a 'Black Box Warning' for promoting suicidal tendencies since, ahem, 2004."
Bruce Baugh in #50 speaks for me.
>Natto...very much an acquired taste.
True, even among the Japanese. I've asked Japanese people whether they've liked natto, and I've gotten about a 50/50 split. One said, firmly, "Natto is not a food."
When you buy it here, I'd like to point out, you normally get a little packet of sauce (like soy sauce) which really helps with the flavor. Really, it's not so bad, though yeah, it's an acquired taste.
#177: You'd think that if there was any basis for it (even given that it is DHS/TSA/INS), the feds would be putting out press releases justifying their actions, or at least trying to minimize the story.
Uh-huh, Reality check, from Boing Boing:
"TSA is as unpopular as the IRS
"The TSA is now tied with the IRS for least popular government agency in America, according to an AP poll. They're even less popular than FEMA -- the bunglers who brought you the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
...
"Nearly 9,000 such complaints flowed into TSA between January and October of this year, and the agency made a selection of them available at the request of The Associated Press.
"'Screeners are 'just rigid, intransigent, inflexible, unpleasant, and they always have the fact that they've got the security of the nation that they're falling back on,' said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association. Stempler said he has no way of telling whether TSA has addressed any of the hundreds of complaints it receives each month."
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/23/tsa-is-as-unpopular.html
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-12-20-tsa-survey_N.htm?csp=34
Oh yeah, people are just making things up.
#177: Argument from Incredulity? Not very convincing, especially given, you know, DHS's documented track record.
#138: As for the girl who was arrested by Immigration, I tend to call bull****. Why, Because that is not the way we were trained in Customs and border protection to handle people. (yes, I worked for that infamous organization)
Your faith in your former organization is unfortunately contradicted by the reality of multiple, long-standing stories of exactly such stupid behavior by border control personnel. Like this story from a few years back, one of a couple I read about:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1231089,00.html
Doing this in the first place: stupid.
Doing this to journalists who will go home and write about it for their readers: incredibly stupid.
In the US, I wouldn't turn in a lost wallet to the cops, because it seems like it would be a waste of the police department's time to deal with such petty matters. Like the time that a purse literally dropped in front of me early one morning (the owner'd left it on top of her car while getting gas, and it slid off the roof as she passed me. I just looked up her ID in the purse, called her, and she came by my house to pick it up. No need to involve the cops.
In Tokyo, I probably would turn it into the cops, because I know they have an infrastructure to deal with it: I've managed to lose TWO mobile phones (oops), and both times I got a postcard shortly after from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police saying, hey, we have your mobile phone, come on down to our central lost-and-found office in Iidabashi and get it.
218: Close. It was Pizarro and the Inca Empire. "Despoilers of the Golden Empire", by Randall Garrett.
Huh, That's what I originally remembered, but when I looked up a historical detail I remembered from the story (the leader of the invaders burning their ships so they couldn't turn back), Google pulled up Cortez, not Pizarro, so I went with that.
I am suddenly reminded of something I once read in Analog umpty-ump years ago which was kind of the opposite of the game being played here. It was the story about a small band of technologically advanced soldiers invading and conquering a strange new world with their superior weapons. Standard, straightforward space adventure fare, it seemed at first reading.
Except that, in a twist revealed at the end, it turns out the story is the true and literal (albeit lightly obfuscated) retelling of the history of Cortes conquering the Aztecs.
I was born in 1961, and the earliest historical event I'm crystal-clear on was the 1968 US election; especially election night, since I was at the Bay County Fair in Panama City, Florida, that night, where they had set up big TVs showing the TV news coverage of the election. This being the South, George Wallace figured big in the coverage as a third-party candidate seemingly equal to McGovern and Nixon. I have a vague idea that I remember Johnson announcing that he wouldn't be running for re-election (March 1968), but that's not a reliable memory.
(I also clearly remember Nixon's resignation, since I watched it on TV during my birthday party on August 8th.)
Huh, it looks like the bar next to the Nixon re-election poster features Grain Belt Beer. Was that ever available in New York?
#717: Can't we pick someone more, well, famous as an anchor for the five degrees of separation thing?
I assume that the original choice of Kevin Bacon was not fame, but assonance (as a play on "Six degrees of separation/Kevin Bacon"). And my own Bacon number is 3, if you count my friend Charlie (who was an extra in an Ed Harris movie). I don't, unfortunately, know anyone famous or anyone who really knows anyone famous, though if you stretched things you could count my college-radio-show interview with Douglas Adams as "knowing" him.
And as a lurker and (currently) a non-science fiction fan utterly uninvolved in fandom, I doubt I could prove to anyone here that I exist, though I've no doubt I'm only a few connections away, as I have a photograph of me holding Frank Wu's Hugo*, making it: all y'all --> Frank Wu --> Frank Wu's Hugo --> me.
*I happened to be walking around Yokohama that day, when some people I passed said to me, "Here, you want to hold this Hugo?" Honest.
The hard one is where we postulate that those cow farts do in fact matter
Cow burps, not cow farts. Facts do in fact matter, you know.
...imagine the mess the streets will be when drivers are watching their phones instead of listening to them
They don't have to: GPS navigation systems are wildly popular here, and yes, they double as TV sets/DVD players. I've certainly seen taxi drivers watching TV while waiting in taxi ranks and even seen the occasional MOVING vehicle with the TV on.
(Slightly apropos aside: a few years ago, I saw a TV commercial for a car GPS system which depicted a gloomy family, parked in their car across from a closed amusement park as the rain pours down. What to do? The mother, brightly, holds up a DVD, and they watch -- "Star Trek: The Next Generation".)
#29: I've never been to What the Dickens! -- though, coincidentally, I was in a sister pub called the Town Cryer [sic] last night -- but I'm not sure I see the point of traveling all the way up to Ebisu for Yet Another Pseudo-English Pub, which Tokyo is lousy with. If you DO head up that way, though, take a sidetrip to poke your nose into the nearby Yebisu Garden Place mall to take a look at the Robuchon restaurant there -- you'll know what I mean when you see it -- or visit the Beer Museum.
Of course, one more stop north of Ebisu on the Yamanote Line is Shibuya (home of the Blade-Runner-esque Hachiko Square and possibly the world's busiest Starbucks) and one more stop brings you to Harajuku, and two more after THAT brings you to Shinjuku (home of the world's busiest railway station),,,
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| 2007 | 25 |
| 2006 | 3 |
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