A milestone for Adamu as we approach the end of 2006 — I’m officially getting married! Mrs. Adamu and I finally let her parents know our intentions, and while Mrs. Mrs. Adamu has some issue with mixed marriages, she won’t oppose our union and Mr. Mrs. Adamu and Brother Mrs. Adamu were happy to hear the news. Yay!
Category: Personal/Blog News
Off to Penang Again
I’ll be in Penang once again (this time with Mrs. Adamu), so expect more sweet photos. I’ll be doing more of the touristy stuff and less random wandering this time around. Before I go, I’ll show you one highlight of the trip:
That’s right, they stuck a whole Kit Kat right in the middle of the ice cream cone. Genius!
I got this at the 7-11, which is a lot like the Thai 7-11 except with less sausage-related stuff, more spicy nut kind of stuff, and more Muslim stuff.
The top part tastes like cake frosting, which was kind of a surprise. It wasn’t even really ice cream on top, just frosting with a little bite of Kit Kat. The rest of it was pretty standard, except on the bottom which was full of crushed Kit Kat crumbs instead of the usual bit of solid milk chocolate. All in all, not bad, though my personal favorite is the Cookies and Cream cone available in Bangkok 7-11s.
Here’s the ad copy from Nestle Malaysia:
DRUMSTICK with KIT KAT
Discover a real “KIT KAT bar” and “KIT KAT ice cream flavour” in your favourite DRUMSTICK.
Available NOW!
Expect more of this kind of thing when I get back.
Some food from Penang
On the same day I photographed all the great old houses, I ate curry noodles for lunch:
In case you’re wondering how they taste, think curry-flavored cup noodles except 1000 times more delicious.
That left me too full to try this more…challenging delicacy:
Thankfully, it was closed for the end of Ramadan so I didn’t have to feel bad.
Blog spam update
After getting a few reports of glitches related to comments improperly flagged as spam over the past few days, I have replaced the Spam Karma plugin with Akismet, which I have heard good things about. If anyone has had trouble posting comments, please try again and if anyway posts a real comment which does not appear as it should, then please email me about it.
Shanghai and Tokyo: I wanted some comparisons, but could only come up with contrasts
I came back last night from a weekend office trip to Shanghai, my first visit to China. Curzon, who has far more China experience than I do, gave me some words of warning before I left for Narita Airport: “Just remember, you’re visiting the nicest part of China, and it’s still the world’s biggest shithole.”
Shithole? Yes. Nice? Certainly. It’s a huge cow pie with flowers growing out of it. I always figured that China and Japan would have a lot in common, but it’s almost impossible to see: I returned from Shanghai with the impression that I had just been to Mirror Universe Japan, where the only commonalities are superficial, and deep down everything is exactly the opposite.
Come to mention it, they don’t even look that much alike.
A representative image: smog and gazillions of tall buildings.
What to ask Alex Kerr?
On Nov 20, I’m going to see a lecture by Alex Kerr (pictured, bottom), a businessman in Japan and Thailand and author of Dogs and Demons, one of my favorite books on Japan. He’s giving some kind of talk at the Japan Foundation. Here‘s the promo copy:
Alex Kerr Lecture: “Lost Japan”
Alex Kerr, the East Asia scholar who was praised by Ryotaro Shiba as “a protector of Japanese culture, from America,” continues to express his melancholy at the state of affairs in which Japan’s beautiful scenery is in the process of being destroyed, as well as the need to protect traditional culture. Won’t you lend your ears to the warning bell that Kerr has sounded out of love for Japan and take another look at modern Japan from the perspective of someone who has lived abroad?
As I mentioned, Dogs and Demons is one of my favorites. It’s Kerr’s tale of woe, a follow-up to his previous love letter, Lost Japan, and it criticizes the social, economic, fiscal, and other problems facing Japan. He concludes that a runaway bureaucracy has ravaged Japan’s natural beauty and culture. The metaphor “dogs and demons” comes from this story by Chinese philosopher Han Feizi:
[T]he emperor asked a painter, “What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?” The artist replied, “Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy…. Japan suffers from a severe case of “Dogs and Demons.” In field after field, the bureaucracy dreams up lavish monuments rather than tend to long-term underlying problems. Communications centers sprout antennas from lofty towers, yet television channels and Internet usage lag. Lavish crafts halls dot the landscape while Japan’s traditional crafts are in terminal decline. And local history museums stand proud in every small town and municipal district while a sea of blighted industrial development has all but eradicated real local history.
Kerr goes on to detail initially covered-up river pollution that ended up being so bad they had to name a disease after what it did to people, nuclear reactors clumsily repaired with duct tape, massively wasteful public works spending that robs local areas of the chance to develop a real economy, unconscionable levels of government debt, and countless other examples of Japan’s “policy challenges” circa 1999.
The most effective parts of the book are where he talks about the destruction of Japan’s landscape and city planning, areas that directly affect Kerr personally as an art lover as well as his businesses in dealing artwork and urban restoration. Why are all of Japan’s rivers paved? What is the need for all the noise pollution in public areas? Why was Kyoto’s priceless architecture and urban culture allowed to be put on the chopping block? Why don’t they just tear down Kyoto tower?! OK, that last idea was my own, but he does at least call the tower “garish.”
Continue reading What to ask Alex Kerr?
Your seatmate is NOT your psychologist
This NYT article struck a chord with me:
WHAT is it about flying in an airplane that seems to remind some passengers of a church confessional?
I remember flying overnight from New York to London next to a dour-looking middle-aged man who kept his peace until his second Scotch. Which is when he revealed that he was a civil engineer. A very, very unhappy civil engineer.
“My profession gets no respect,” he griped. “We design all your bridges and roads, but when do you hear anything about a civil engineer?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
“That’s right,” he continued, “only when a bridge collapses! And why should I be blamed when the contractor probably chose the lowest bidder?”
…
Another seatmate, a young Navy enlisted man, spent the first several hours of a transcontinental flight studying a book whose pages contained all kinds of triangles, arrows and symbols. He closed the book as our plane began descending to land and spoke to me for the first time.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he confided in a low voice, “but I am actually flying the plane.”
It all had something to do with an arcane kind of witchcraft, the key to which was in the book he held closely, he said. I hoped his job in the Navy involved a desk, not weapons.
I don’t fly nearly as much as the author, but I must be a magnet for this kind of behavior. I’ve had a 13 year old girl brag to me about making out with restaurant valets, a Japanese emigrant to America tell me about her 50 year long marriage to an Army officer, a half-Japanese chemist talk of suing to protect his farmland near Narita Airport, and several others who for some reason thought I was just the right person to tell about their problems. It would be one thing if I actually made friends with someone on a flight, but in these cases I always end up feeling used like the proverbial hole in the ground. Sometimes it is marginally interesting to hear some random person’s whole life story, but it almost never cancels out what I lose in reading or sleep time. People should really just keep their mouths shut unless they actually know how to have a conversation.
Bollywood posters taken in Little India, George Town, Penang
Some are for movies, some are for music. All cry out for the Fashion SWAT treatment!
Continue reading Bollywood posters taken in Little India, George Town, Penang
USJ’s Xmas tree almost certainly pissing off KWBB workers
Nikkei gives shameless free promotion to Universal Studios Japan’s Christmas festivities. This year, like most others, the park has an enormous Christmas tree as the centerpiece of its nightly Christmas-themed fireworks jamboree:
Ah, memories… I used to work as a hamburger cook at the KWBB hamburger restaurant at USJ, which was located right next to the big tree at Christmastime. Though I was explicitly banned from criticizing the theme park when I was an employee, I feel that 3 years is sufficient leeway for me to complain about how annoying it was for us to listen to the ultra-perky Disneyland ripoff that passed for a Christmas show every night as I toasted buns and burned myself on the industrial-strength hamburger grill. Occasionally, the closing shift would end just as the Xmas show (and non-xmas park-closing shows) reached its finale, allowing me to catch the tail end- lots of explosions, lots of jetskiing, lots of loud lipsynching to 50s doo-wop standards as hundreds of Japanese middle class families looked on in ultra-earnest wonder.
Now don’t get me wrong – your average visitor will no doubt find USJ an enthralling thrill of Hollywood cinema come to life, and the Christmas fireworks show at closing time can be an excellent end-cap to a day filled with ET rides and Terminator 2 action shows.
It’s just that for me, hearing the same bit every day got to be excruciating, just like hearing the same 20 American pop songs (“Happy Ending” by Avril Lavigne and “In da club” by 50 Cent in addition to standard 80s songs like Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”) over and over can get tiring, as in any job. One song that I never got tired of for some reason was “Magnet and Steel” by Walter Egan, a song used as “atmosphere” music just outside the restaurant.
My all-time favorite USJ attraction was the Universal Monsters Live Rock And Roll Show™, the ultimate in high-concept irony in which the famous “Universal Monsters” led by none other than a wisecracking Beetlejuice, croon topical pop songs (as of 2003 featuring “Smooth” by Carlos Santana feat. Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas). Quoth the corporate literature:
Beetlejuice cranks up Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein for a mega-monster rock show filled with screamin’ demons and wailin’ guitars.
\m/ !!! Watch these video clips of the rockin’ monsters covering Bon Jovi and Kiss to see how awesome it really is. This clip of the Orlando version of the show is a bit more topical (Outkast’s “Hey Ya” makes an appearance – rock!).
Aso in the mist
So tonight I was at a huge party at the Imperial Hotel welcoming one of the international bigwigs of PricewaterhouseCoopers to town. It was a major affair. They booked an enormous banquet room, and provided foreign guests with earphones so they could listen to simultaneous translations of Japanese speeches from the major partners in the tax and advisory wings of PwC. Then the bigwig came up to speak, and he had a Japanese interpreter copying each sentence of his English speech. A slightly more stilted performance.
Finally came the guest of honor: the Foreign Minister himself. He wandered out onto the podium, looking slightly drunk, and proceeded with his speech… in English. Now, Aso doesn’t exactly speak perfect English to begin with, and being red-faced didn’t help too much either. He stumbled around a talk about international business for a couple of minutes, then turned to the interpreter (who was still hanging around from the last speech) and shouted “All right, now translate it!”
One of my companions looked down at his simultrans earpiece and said “I wonder if he’ll get the message if I put this on?”