Plug your iPod into your "idog" so it can dance to your Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Hey for about 3,980yen ($38.60) I?ll dance for you. Seriously, this is no better the very passe? dancing Santa doll and the the singing Big-MouthBilly-Bass?. It?s gotta be weird that this ?idog? is designed so you can jack your iPod into its leg.

Tokyo ?Japanese toy maker Sega Toys Co., Ltd.?s new pet dog robots, ?idogs,? dance in tune?. Depending on how the robot dog feels, ?idog? plays creative sounds. Owners can speak to it, sing for it, plays music for it, and it communicates back with melodies. It can also dance if connected to a music player at a jack at its leg?

Decades in Japan---How did you do it?
Topic: Me
Q: Taro, you've lived decades in Japan; how did you do it?

I'm chemically unbalanced, hee, hee.
Billions of folks' brains are pumping depression juices. Not me.
Prenatal -- I was calm and non-kicking.
As a baby, I was all smiles, gurgling and never cried.
Grade school-- I was a happy camper.
Teenage flew past me by without any angst and college was a breeze even when I was being arrested at protest marches.
Now, I live in a concrete slum with salary zombies and I'm smiling---- See. Unbalanced, hee, hee.


Ok, here's the box score on 23 gaijin that have worked for me, with me, and preceded me for the 30 years my office has existed. You do your own odds.

Escaped in less than week 3
Escaped in less than 12 months: 7
Left under heavy medication in 5 years: 8
AIDS: 2
Suicide: 3
Retired: Me, goofing off on the job right now.

I'd say the odds favor "escape" as the best option for gaijin in Japan.


_________________
モ?ベッタ...

Gorki rules!
'I PEE IN SOVIET SUPREME'S SOUP AND GIVE HIM GRIEF.'

via the soon-to-expire BBC's "Global Hits" Thursday, January 20, 2005 8:42:14 AM
...the Cuban government views rock as the quintessential artistic expression of capitalism.
And if you use rock to criticise the Cuban revolution, you may just find yourself in a heap of trouble.
That's pretty much the story of Gorki Luis Aguila Carrasco. He goes by
Gorki to the twenty and thirty-somethings of his generation.
For them his appeal is obvious.
Gorki IS a rebel.
This tune by Gorki comes from the CD he recorded just before he was
arrested in April of 2003.The track is entitled Trova Ovation.
"I don't want to be a blind king's puppet," sings Gorki. "I pee in his soup and give him grief."
....Their logo is a sickle and a
hammer, and the hammer is a penis and the sickle are the lips of a
vagina. But it's very well done...
_________________
モ?ベッタ...

Colonel Sanders, the Buddha
The New Yorker, book reviews, Jan 17, 2005
John Updike takes on a book review of the
surreal Japanese author Haruki Murakami in the latest The New Yorker:
I?ve real most o of Murakami but didn?t even know this novel. An
inportant point about Murakami is that his novels are the least
?Japaneseque? of authors?if tell a Japanese that you worship Murakami?s
work, they nod their head and say, So ka (since Murakami is the most gaijin like of modern writers).
SUBCONSCIOUS TUNNELS
Haruki Murakami?s dreamlike new novel
?Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears?.as a
fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino
about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari?s ?Tales
of Moonlight and Rain":

Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I,
rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.

?To quote Colonel Sanders once more:
?Listen, God only exists in people??s minds. Especially in Japan, Gods
always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the
war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God,
and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.?

"COUNT ME BLUE" and "I DID NOT VOTE 4 BUSH'
Anti-Bush bracelets, AP , Jan 14
....Selling blue bracelets that say "COUNT ME BLUE" ...
....Fairway, Kan., offers blue bracelets that say "HOPE" ...
... Moscow, Idaho, is even more direct; their black bracelets proclaim, "I DID NOT VOTE 4 BUSH"

The 'blank where the Japanese live'
Topic: Japanese life

Novelist Kenzaburo Oe once told journalist Patrick Smith that the West has just two images of Japan: The Japan of samurai, geisha and Zen on the one hand, and the Japan of Sony Playstation, anime and high-tech efficiency on the other. "Between the two, there is a blank where the Japanese live,"

--- Bruce Rutledge, "Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan" Chin Music Press, 2004

Yep, I am a paid Japanese transvestite.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Me
In Japan, every foreigner seem to have a side scam. I have a lucrative business consultanting job for a foreign fragrance company one evening a week.
One hard part of the work is to find Japanese people for their fragrance focus groups and product evaluations. Therefore, I am called in the "sample-n-evaluate" their new products for them. On fragrance surveys I have to emulate the responses of their marketing target, 20-something Japanese female. Yep, I am a paid transvestite.
Fragrances go into all sorts of products that I test and evaluate. Besides getting paid for sniffing their Ty-D-Bowl Man having has way with Toilet Duck in test toilets, I often get paid for testing shampoo, hee, hee.