so all the games pretty much played out the way i thought they would and korea is playing japan for the final game tomorrow night. me, taka and ben went to the semifinal japan v. usa tonight and while the us kept up, japan was in control of the game the entire time. echo park was freezing and windy though and i think we might watch the finals in high definition at home tomorrow night.

while korea and japan are tied at 2 games a piece for the series, i really think korea is the better team this year. i think it’s gonna take a bit of luck for japan to win the classic for the second time, but i’m definitely gonna be wearing my $40 hat cheering them on.

GO JAPAN!

i was going through some random japan photos and found this one. we were all karaokeing in the room next door and for some reason mike and i went into the wrong room and started hanging out with these guys. great random memory.

when the 2.0 firmware was released for the iphone, it included support for lots of different languages. while she could navigate the phone in english just fine, the japanese setting allows her to type and receive texts and emails in japanese. she can also send japanese text messages to my phone (which is of course in english) and i can read them just fine.

(pay no attention to my wifi network name :p)

i remember back in 2001 or 2002 when i started to get really interested in japan, i would read the mainichi daily news website every day to keep up to date on what was happening in japan. the news wasn’t only interesting, but it made for good conversation with japanese girls and the knowledge of international news made me seem more worldly (or at least i thought so).

the mainichi daily news site was supposed to be direct translations from their japanese site. for the most part the news articles were decent, although they really liked to use puns and corny headlines. i even emailed them a couple of times complaining about it, but never got a response.

along with the regular news, they’d have a weekly article from the “waiwai” section that had some pretty raunchy articles with the sleeziest headlines. they were always about crazy things like mother-daughter prostitute teams and why japanese guys don’t like to go down on girls. anyway, i always found these pretty entertaining, but i guess everyone else didn’t feel the same way, with some feeling that the site portrayed japanese as deviant sex maniacs (ummm…) the site also apparently had some strange meta tags to drive sketchy traffic like “hentai”, “japanese girls” and “ganguro” (all meta keywords for kentomatic btw =p). after some complaints and then an internal investigation, the shit hit the fan, and people got fired.

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for those of you that watch ninja warrior (sasuke) on g4, you might appreciate my feeble attempt at this mini sasuke course they have at muscle park in odaiba. these 4 components are usually in the third round of the sasuke competition.

the propeller bars were stupid easy, all upper back. the cliff hanger was easy for the first third of the stretch, but to get to that second level? you need to do a one handed pull-up with your left hand, with only an inch of space to hold on to. seems impossible. watching the video, i think i could’ve done the jumping bars, if i wasn’t so tired and used a different technique. i should’ve done a full pull up first and then just flung the bar up, instead of trying to do it all in one motion. the sliding bar was easy to get across, but if you watch the show, you know many a competitor failed where i did… i’m not sure how i should’ve handled that section. but from here on out, all my gym workouts will be back/bi’s and wrists.

ninja warrior is on g4 every day at 6p and 9p

when things are good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, things can be miserable. on tuesday, taka and i flew to sfo to catch 1 of any 6 different flights to japan or korea (which is just a hop away) to attend taka’s sister’s wedding in fukuoka. the flight from lax to sfo was uneventful, ballin’ in first class, but sfo to japan was another story. for 5 hours we continuously were bumped off of flight after flight. early in the day we started drinking a beer for every flight we missed, so after the last flight departed without us, we were feeling not only defeated, but drunk.

our backup plan had been to stay in san fransisco and try for the same set of flights the following day. however after being beaten so badly and with most flights for the next day already almost full (and being drunk), i opened my wallet. turns out a pair of roundtrip tickets to japan, 14 hours before you want to leave when most airlines are completely full is kinda expensive. in this case “kinda” is a euphemism for “are you fucking kidding me?!” but these are the things you do for family. we both hadn’t been back to japan since our wedding, so it would’ve seemed pretty disrespectful if we didn’t show, regardless of how good of an excuse we had and we’d both been looking forward to this trip for a while; lord knows taka was deserving of a vacation.

so as i sit here blogging away in the most expensive economy seat ever sold, i vow to never again fly standby to any destination where my presence is required. standby can be great if you have a few days to waste and plenty of backup destinations, but a raving, screaming bitch when she has a bad day.

(i actually wrote this in the plane about a day ago and just now found a chance to upload it here in a small internet cafe in ginza)

but i could see how it could be confusing. the otsuka group, the same fine folks that brought you pocari sweat, brings you this calcium enriched water supplement for your pets:

i pull into my carport this evening and my japanese milf next door neighbor has the hood of her ‘03 corolla propped up and is staring at her engine bay with a befuddled look on her face. she’s apparently late in picking up her jailbait daughter so being the mechanic and all around good samaritan that i am i offer my assistance. she tells me in really effed up english that she’s looking for the “coolant” so i point to the radiator cap and coolant reservoir tank. we somehow come to the conclusion that she doesn’t have any extra coolant to top off with, and not wanting to mix whatever she has with the wacky coolant i use, i tell her she can temporarily use water. so we get the hose and put about 2 cups of water into the reservoir before it’s full.

so then i bother to ask, why did you think you needed coolant? “was it over-heating” to which she says yes, and now i’m worried, because there was plenty of coolant in the system, and if it’s still over heating it’s probably the thermostat which is a trip to autozone and at least 30 minutes of wrench time. but while all this is going on in my head, she gets in the car and turns on the air conditioner and is unhappy that it’s still blowing hot air!

i guess it makes sense. coolant = cool temperature… it’s a logical conclusion… woman or japanese aside. so now i’m thinking fuck, she needs to recharge her AC compressor with R134a, and it probably has a leak, so even if i do a recharge it’s not going to last long, and the AC isn’t blowing *any* cool air, so it must have a hell of a leak and it’s going to be a costly repair for her.

then i realized she never pushed the fucking AC button.

i’ve been having dinner with my dad at least once or twice a week since i moved up here and it’s funny how everybody knows everyone. my dad and his buddies ususally meet up at this karaoke pub, and every single one of them is connected to another gardena person or place. like last night this one dude who i guess was an fencer for japan in the 1968 olympics is dating the owner of sanuki no sato, that sweet udon & tonkatsu restaurant that i’ve been to a couple of times. One of Taka’s w-2s for a company that she worked for earlier this year had her social security number messed up, so Taka called the company and told them to fix it. Last night, this Japanese dude just handed me the fixed W-2, he’s the accountant for the company and knows my dad? This other guy is the president of the publishing company for half the magazines that Taka reads, and then this other guy that was there last night was my next door neighbor, literally.

the key to rising in the ranks of gardena society though appears to be the karaoke. these guys take it seriously. my dad even has a business card with the numbers of his songs written on it so he doesn’t even have to look at that big book. lol.