Category: Curiosities

Makiko Tanaka is amusing

I’m binging on rotten.com tonight, and came across the following brief anecdote in their profile of President Bush (scroll to bottom):

17 Jun 2001 – Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka returns to German Town High School in Philadelphia, where she studied for two years as a high school student. During a conversation with her former classmates, Tanaka gives her concise assessment of President George W Bush: “He is totally an asshole.”

I offer a cash reward to anyone who can find audio or video of this.

Koizumi takes a moment to ponder (taking magic mushrooms)

The shrooms have made Koizumi believe he can read the minds... of dead people

Last week’s Koizumi mail magazine started out like this:

[Lion Heart — Message from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi]
(Provisional Translation)

Autumn at the Prime Minister’s Office

Junichiro Koizumi here.

Yesterday morning, a clear and crisp autumn day, I was taking my usual walk from my official residence to my office when I spotted mushrooms amongst the shrubbery in front of my residence. Looking closer, I found an assortment of mushrooms scattered about, whose varieties ranged from large-capped mushrooms to small mushrooms that were nearly hidden by the shadows of the weeds. I am eager to look them up to learn whether they are edible.

A poignant moment of reflection for the PM right before his dream of postal privatization is about to be realized, right?

Well, thankfully for Koizumi he didn’t have to take time out of his busy schedule to look up what kind of mushrooms those were. According to Super News (anchored by the stunningly intense Yuko Ando — check out her awesome Fashion Calendar!), the mushrooms growing outside the Prime Minister’s official residence are actually hallucinogenic drugs that were legal in Japan until 2001 or so!

On a completely unrelated note, a friend of mine has pointed me in the direction of FNN (English explanations, Japanese videos [wtf??]), Fuji TV’s online video news site. This is the only site of its kind I have seen that offers high quality video that you can actually pause and let load so it doesn’t stop in the middle.

Frogstyle


I’ve had one of these hanging on my keychain for over three months now, but most of the green paint has been scratched off mine.

What is Frogstyle?
To people searching for happiness, to people feeling down, to people lacking something, frogs bearing a message for those sorts of people, that is FROG STYLE (furoggu sutairu). FROG STYLE has plenty of friends. When you see one on the street, please try getting a warm message from the frogs. Maybe, just maybe it will cheer you up!

Origin:
Once upon a time, the frog progenitor, the -ANCESTOR FROG- came from across the sea. (There are various stories, such as that he accidentally got stuck in ‘bottle mail’ and drifted across the waves.) Thereafter, FROG has been thriving all over the world. So far, 16 varieties have been identified. However, new types are continually being discovered. (From the book “Frog Life” by Frog researcher Kero Kaeruda)

Bandai’s Frogstyle screensaver is now the official screensaver of Mutantfrog.com.

Mac version here.

So there was this guy in my high school class…

(For those of you wondering who I am, hi! I’m Joe. You might know me from my blog. Mutantfrog invited me to come over, so you’ll see me blogging around here from time to time.)

Anyway, as I was saying, there was this guy in my high school class, back when I was on exchange at a shady municipal school in Osaka. His name was Taro (no, not really). He was an interesting fellow for a number of reasons, but the first thing that would probably strike you was his size. I was the tallest person in our school at around 185 cm (including the basketball shoes I wore around because stock school shoes wouldn’t fit me). Taro was very close to my height, but was solid muscle. He wore his uniform shirt open to drive this point home.

He was captain of the judo club and appeared in kendo club from time to time. In judo class, I was his partner. I was never sure why: maybe because we were about the same height, maybe because the teacher secretly hated me. Whenever Taro threw me into the mat, I suspected the latter.

Once you got to know him, you realized that Taro wasn’t just a brick. No, he was also certifiably insane. For one thing, he was the only person in the school who never spoke to me in Japanese: he would only speak guttural high school English. To humor him, I would speak English back.

We were standing in line one day with our shirts off, waiting for a doctor to give us a quick stethoscoping, and I couldn’t help but notice that Taro had a giant red swastika-shaped scar on his right bicep, with a solid red circle right above it. I realized that he must have dug these into his arm with a sharp object. He realized that I was looking at his body art, so I hazarded a question. “Um, do you like Hitler?”

“Yeees!” he answered, with a big smile. “I llllove Hit-la! And Yamamoto, do you know Yamamoto?”

He read books on Chinese close-combat tactics in class, and one time on a field trip, in between random sexual harrassment of our cute homeroom teacher, he turned to me and said: “I AM SAMURAI!”

To which I replied: “Samurai? So where are your swords?”

“I can’t carry!” Taro said. “There’s a law!”

Five years later, I went back to Osaka and met some of my classmates, as well as the aforementioned cute teacher. There were stories about kids who had become truck drivers and graduate students, and one five-foot-tall girl from the art club who had joined the Self-Defense Forces (!). But no mention of Taro. And I’m disappointed, because I want to know if he’s off driving a speaker truck somewhere.

“Endless Rain” by X Japan is 500 times better than THE ENTIRE BIBLE


OMG it’s true. Anyway, all hail guard dogs:

Panty Thief Forgets Bag, Gets Self Arrested because of Dog that “Wasn’t there before”

The Fukuoka Pref. police, Kasuya Precinct arrested a part-time factory worker of Koga City on suspicion of theft for stealing a woman’s underwear. They confiscated 220 pairs of women’s underwear that were scattered about his apartment.

According to the Fukuoka police’s investigations, the man is suspected of entering the female company employee (25)’s apartment through the unlocked front door, upon which he stole one pair of underwear.

The man ran off in a hurry after being barked at by the woman’s pet canine. The woman, who was in the bath at the time, dialed 110 (Japan’s 911) after she noticed the trouble. It became clear that the crime was the suspect’s doing after receipts for public utilities were found in a bag left at the scene.

According to police, the suspect had infiltrated the woman’s home a few times before since she was the man’s type. He was surprised at the presence of the dog, which had not been there before.

Thanks again ZAKZAK for making me feel better about myself.

6% of Japanese men EXPECT to be homeless in 10 years!

Do you expect to end up like this Korean man?

The subject of where I see myself in 20 years has been a recent topic of discussion (still thinking about it, I blame a society that offers too many choices, not enough guidance). So I found it an odd coincidence that Japan Today has recently printed, with no sense of journalistic responsibility, a shady survey done by weekly magazine SPA! measuring where Japanese men see themselves in 10 years. Go ahead and read for yourself, but I ound this part to be the most interesting:

A generation ago, notes Spa!, a survey like this would have been pointless. Life ran on the rails then; people knew what was in store for them. If you were entry-level in 1975, by 1985 you’d be a “kacho” or section head, making so-much a year, married, living in a house you could visualize as clearly as you could the company dorm you’d be going home to that night — and so on. The predictability was dull but secure. Almost no one would have said, as 30% do now, that they expect to be unemployed in 10 years, surviving on occasional jobs. Still less would anyone have foreseen — as 6% do today — homelessness.

WTF? I’ll admit this is the first survey I’ve seen that asks such a question, who in the hell actually “expects” to be homeless?! I mean, if that was actually a concern of yours, wouldn’t you try and at least DO something about it? Just asking.

A survey of frog odorous secretions, their possible functions and phylogenetic significance

That, my gentle reader, is the title of a scientific paper that was yesterday awarded the 2005 Ig Noble Prize in Biology. And what better place to announce it than here on Mutantfrog.com?

Here’s what the abstract has to say about this fascinating inquiry:

This study provides a survey of frog odour (with particular reference to Australian species) and discusses the human perception and classification of frog volatile secretions. Professional and amateur herpetologists were solicited for information on the frogs they perceived as odorous. In addition, volunteers were asked to smell stressed frogs and describe the odour that they perceived. A total of 131 species, representing 30 genera (14 Australian and 16 other) and 11 families were assessed for odour. Odours ranged from pleasant floral aromas (e. g. Notaden spp. and Neobatrachus spp.) through to acrid, repulsive odours (e. g. Litoria alboguttata). The systematic relationships of these odours and their potential biological roles are discussed.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go check it out!

McSalothsar’s – I’m not luvin’ it

Ran across a crazy story in today’s Asahi(print edition, so sorry there’s no link) about a restaurant in Phnom Penh that was recently shut down by local authorities for it’s Pol Pot era themed decor and cuisine!

I ran a Google search in English and managed to find a Reuters report from last week that wasn’t quite as good as the Asahi story, but good enough to suffice for the purposes of this post. From Reuters:

Faithful to the Khmer Rouge era… the waitresses are barefoot and clad in the black pyjamas and red-white scarves of the guerrillas.

Speakers blare out tunes celebrating the 1975 toppling of U.S.-backed president General Lon Nol and the walls are adorned with the baskets, hoes and spades Pol Pot hoped would power his jungle-clad south-east Asian homeland to communist prosperity.

PPC

And it gets worse… Having adapted a move that sounds like it came straight out of Robert Mugabe’s playbook (hat tip to Curzon for that one), the owners are actually plugging their cafe’s appetizing menu of “rice water and leaves” as a way to lose weight!

Recognising that many tourists might not be able to stomach such a close brush with the Killing Fields, the “Khmer Rouge Experience Cafe” is also promoting itself to those wishing to shed a few pounds.

“It’s good for me to slim down,” said Tan, a 40-year-old Malaysian visitor.