I found this essay, written by this guy for a miltary essay contest over a decade ago, quite an interesting read. Disguised as a science fictional story about the ‘US military coupe of 2012,’ it’s actually an analysis of everything he feels is wrong (or likely to go wrong with) the organization of the US military.

I haven’t thought enough about it to know if I agree with all of his points, but there were a couple of arguments that I found surprisingly convincing.

Unusual frogs found

By LAURA KIRBY, Gazette Writer

SOUTH RANGE - They’ve been “critter catching” for the last three years, but they’ve never seen anything like it.
Brothers Cameron and Christopher Lystila each caught themselves a “mutant frog” at Lake Perrault within a week.

“We’ve been catching frogs here for three years, we’ve never come across anything that’s mutant,” said the boys’ mother, Sherri.

Nine-year-old Christopher was enjoying Labor Day when he grabbed the one-eyed green leopard frog from the lake near South Range.

Later last week, brother Cameron, 7, found a similar oddity while creature hunting in the same spot. Both eyes intact, the second mutant frog had an extra leg.

“To see it first hand is actually quite a unique experience,” said Duane Pangrazzi, the boys’ science teacher. Pangrazzi said the one-eyed frog, under student observation for the past week in his South Range Elementary classroom, has been a hot topic of conversation, giving students a real-life scientific example, and even prompting some personal research.

When I was an exchange student in 1999, I spent a lot of time hanging out with the other exchange students in Osaka. Led by a wily and hep raver pimp who shall remain nameless, we galavanted about town, club-hopping, flirting, complaining about our high schools, practicing Japanese with our entourage of official groupies, and drinking a lot. Given its convenient location, the Osaka/Umeda station was our hangout of choice. In particular, we spent lots of time waiting for each other in front of Big Man, a giant TV in front of Umeda station, pictured here:

For the year we spent on the exchange , Umeda station was something of a playground, or more of a launching pad for our numerous antics and mayhem. Safe from the watchful eyes of our parents and tossed into a society too polite to tell us no, we exchangers (who mostly hailed from Europe, Canada, and the US but included souls from such exotic places as Brazil and Australia as well) scammed the trains big time (more on that later), took advantage of Japan’s strange legal loopholes, sat around for hours nursing one cup of Mr. Donuts coffee, went on violent drunken rampages, hooked up with each other, hooked up with kids from the schools, hooked up with host sisters, got people pregnant (or “took it to the house” as one of my Swedish friends put it) and that’s just scratching the surface. I didn’t perpetrate all of the above myself, mind you, but I just want to emphasize that Umeda station was the launch site for all this madness. (Go to this Flickr site or this awesome site for more of an idea of what I’m talking about).

That is why I am saddened to hear that, according to the latest eyewitness reports, the beautiful Hankyu Umeda station in Osaka is being torn apart as part of area renovation plans. Hankyu is planning a full-scale revitalization of its flagship store in Umeda, and in the process developers have scaffolded off the entire station. This story tells of people saying their last goodbyes to the Old Umeda Concourse:

Anticipating the loss of the station they knew so well, Osakans capture the final moments of the Umeda Concourse in Kita-ku.

Saying Goodbye to Old Hankyu Umeda Station Concourse Walls

Sept. 13, Asahi Shimbun

Starting Sept. 14, the old Hankyu Railways Umeda Station Concourse will see a construction fence go up around it as part of the renovation project of Hankyu’s Umeda flagship department store. That means that the mosaic murals that line the tall walls and ceilings of the station will no longer be visible. Those who came to say goodbye brought their cameras to “capture the elegant form” of the station.

The fence will go up directly over the 6-meter wide walking path. The ceiling will be removed within the fiscal year, but Hankyu Railways is considering saving the murals and chandeliers.

I had originally thought that this was talking about this gigantic hallway:

To get to any subway station from Hankyu trains you have to pass through this area, one of the few expansive, open areas that I encountered in the “beautiful urban jungle” of Osaka. I think the Old Concouse actually refers to an old area of the station located away from any trains or foot traffic. It has cool little murals like this:

But to tell you the truth I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER!! This makes me even sadder than hearing it’s getting redone!

More than anything, thinking back on all this reminds me that I can never go back to my salad days as an exchange student.

As my own way of saying goodbye, Here are some random pictures of Umeda station that I culled from Google Image search:
Read the rest of this entry »

The cartoon figure of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has finally been granted permission to appear in the exhibition to celebrate the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, South Korea, thanks to the efforts of officials from the Taipei Mission in South Korea and the Busan Cartoon Club.

The cartoon figure of Chen was put on display yesterday at the APEC Summit Cartoon Figure Exhibition in Busan City—the venue of this year’s annual event—along with those of other heads of state slated to attend the APEC summit in November.

Looks like Japan isn’t the last country to figure out asbestos is bad for you after all:

Friday, September 9, 2005

Japanese Labor Unions Ask Canada To Stop Exporting Asbestos

TOKYO (Kyodo)—Three Japanese labor unions including one comprising construction workers requested in a joint action on Friday that Canada, the biggest single supplier of asbestos to Japan, stop exporting the carcinogenic mineral, union officials said.

Representatives of the unions delivered a letter of request to the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo saying that ‘’60 percent of asbestos used in Japan is imported from Canada. We would like the export promotion policy to be terminated, given the hazardous nature of white asbestos has been confirmed.’’

Canada is the third biggest producer in the world of white asbestos, a type of the mineral known to be relatively less carcinogenic than other types.

The request was made by the All Japan Construction, Transport and General Workers Union, National Confederation of Trade Unions and the Liaison Conference of Public Promotion of Public Works Related to People’s Life.

The embassy told the unions that they will refer the matter to Ottawa and promised to offer a reply in writing, according to the union officials.

The move was part of a global action by labor unions belonging to the Trade Unions International of Building, Woods and Building Materials Industries. Similar requests have also been filed with Canadian diplomatic missions in 12 countries including Australia and Colombia.

The All Japan Construction, Transport and General Workers Union, which led the action on Friday, has 46,900 members. It is affiliated with the two other unions.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral used in buildings, among other things, which is known to cause diseases such as mesothelioma and lung cancer even many years after being inhaled.

If you live in the Washington, DC area and are looking to share a furnished 1BR with someone starting in October, maybe you should give this guy a call.

Before you read this, remember the Osaka Expo in 1970 attracted a whopping 64.2 million people, so comparatively this one is a big flop!

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Number Of Visitors To Aichi Expo Tops Targeted 15mn

NAGOYA (Kyodo)—The number of visitors to the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi Prefecture on Thursday surpassed the 15 million mark, the target set by the Expo organizers, 40 days before the event’s closing Sept. 25.

According to the Japan Association for World Exposition 2005, the 15 millionth visitor entered the gate at around 10:15 a.m. on the 147th day of the 185-day expo, which began March 25.

‘’We believe we were able to achieve the goal more than a month earlier than the event closes because many people highly valued the exposition’s unique exhibits and a variety of events,’’ Shoichiro Toyoda, the association’s chairman, said in a statement. Toyoda is also honorary chairman of Toyota Motor Corp. (7203).

An association official said the number of visitors is likely to reach 18 million by the closing day of the expo and may even top 19 million.

Shortly after opening, the expo saw low turnout, blamed mainly on poor weather, but it began getting crowded after Japan’s Golden Week holidays in early May. The number of visitors each day has often topped 100,000.

About 216,000 people visited the expo July 17, a single-day record.

Five indicted for making porno video on Expo cable car

NAGOYA — Police sent papers Friday to prosecutors on five people on suspicion of shooting pornographic video footage on a cable car at the site of the World Exposition in Aichi Prefecture, in violation of the Minor Offenses Law, police officials said.

The police allege a 33-year-old producer, a 28-year-old director and a 31-year-old video photographer for a TV program production company, a 39-year-old actor and a 26-year-old actress of shooting the video footage for about a minute May 2 on the Kikkoro Gondola cable car. The case came to light after a person who saw the video on a pornographic cable channel informed the Expo organizer, Japan Association for the 2005 World Exposition, about it, the police said. (Kyodo News)

Extra details on the porno incident from ZAKZAK:

According to investigations, the minute-long scene is of a man groping a topless woman on the Kikkoro Gondola. The gondola can seat 8, and the scene was likely visible to those outside the craft as it is mostly clear glass, designed to give a view of the scenery and activity below.

The five suspects originally planned to shoot a scene outdoors within the Expo grounds, but had to change the location to inside the gondola since the Expo was crowded with Golden Week tourists. The group also filmed a scene in which they ask foreign staff sexually explicit questions.

My jealous contempt of the Aichi Expo has been documented on this site before, so you can see why this incident steams my beans. Taken one way, this is a pretty good sign for the Expo—it was so crowded the porn directors had to change their location to someplace quieter! Curses…

I have been wondering for several days, ever since the appalling announcement that President Bush had not decided to end his vacation early until after New Orleans had already been devastated, where exactly the Vice President has been. Now, Cheney is well known as an unusually secretive VP, known for avoiding the spotlight (sidenote: vampires are well known for avoiding sunlight), but this absence is going far even for him.

Even after 9/11, when Cheney was famously spirited away to an undisclosed location, presumably the underground bunker from which the shadow government* would operate in the event of the death of the President and other top officials, he still issued statements to the media to prove that he was still alive. Now, in the time immediately after 9/11/2001, when a plane had crashed into the Pentagon and another was possibly aiming for either the White House or Capital Hill, this was not an unreasonable precaution. Clearly there were people out there who wanted government officials (and other people) dead, and there was a serious expectation of followup attacks, in some form or another.

*(Keep in mind that I don’t mean ‘shadow’ in a conspiracy theory sense, just ‘backup’ as in the ‘shadow cabinet’ in some parliamentary systems.)
Why is Cheney hidden away this time? Is he scared that the terrorists will aim another hurricane at him? Is he on vacation? Is the application of artificial skin over his glowing radiated body flaking off at faster and faster rates, prohibiting him from appearing publicly?

Andrew Sullivan’s latest article in The Times points out that “The vice-president was nowhere to be seen.” confirming that I am at least not the only person on Earth to have noticed this fact.

An article from the New York Times gives what seems to be the only tantalizing speck of information regarding Cheney’s whereabouts at any time since August 18.

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

My last sentence may be surprising, but in fact, according to my search on Google News, there hasn’t been a single public appearance or statement by Vice President Dick Cheney since the 18th of August, when he appeared at a meeting of the “73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.”

There are a number of articles about that event, but they all give pretty much the same dry account of Cheney’s statements to the veteran’s group. Here is one typical example, written by a member of the American Forces Press Service.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19, 2005 – The U.S. military will not relent in its effort to track down terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, Vice President Richard Cheney said Aug. 18.

“This is not a war we can win strictly on the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to find them, to fight them and to destroy them,” he told the 73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.

“These enemies hate us, they hate our country, and they hate the liberties for which we stand,” he said.

“They have contempt for our values. They doubt our strength. And they believe that America will lose our nerve and let down our guard. They are sorely mistaken.”

Seriously, where has Cheney been? What does he actually do? How can he possibly stay invisible at a time like this? Was he being kept alive all this time by New Orleans voodoo mojo that has now been disrupted by the storm? We all know about the long connection between New Orleans and voodoo zombies after all. It’s the only scenario that makes any kind of logical sense to me. After all, the Vice President couldn’t just be on vacation during the worst natural disaster the country has seen in living memory, right?

[Edit]: An op-ed piece by a Washington Post staff writer in the September 6th edition asks:

Anybody seen Dick Cheney?