Ranting – Page 24 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Justice denied: The evil Adam Richards gets a plea bargain

Child Abuser Gets Reduced Sentence
Baby Left With Brain Damage, Skull Fractures

CINCINNATI — A woman whose son was left brain damaged by a child abuser is trying to petition Congress for stricter regulations, News 5’s Sheree Paolello reported.

Adam Richards was sentenced Monday to five years in jail as part of a plea bargain. Richards could have faced up to 20 years in jail, but he had no prior record of abusing children like Dillon Cloud.

Cloud was left in a coma, suffering skull fractures and brain damage after Richards spent two weeks baby-sitting him.

During that time, police said, Richards slammed Cloud into his crib — and even held the infant by his ankles and then dropped him.

“[Doctors] had to keep him ice cold so he didn’t have a fever so his brain wouldn’t swell,” Meghan Cloud, Dillon’s mother, said. “He was helpless. He was laying on the bed and we couldn’t do anything.”

She spent weeks in the hospital, and told Paolello she and her family prayed that they would get some closure when Richards was sentenced. Instead, she said, he was let off the hook.

“It flabbergasts me that there are so many cases of this that the prosecutor has to go this route for a plea deal,” Jay Voline, Meghan’s father, said.

Now the family is trying to get a law passed that would require child abusers to register their addresses, in an effort to stymie the type of suffering Dillon has undergone.

“He doesn’t walk — he doesn’t even try to walk,” Cloud said. “He didn’t crawl till he was 11 months old. He struggles to do everything.”

God that is sad. The poor kid!

The son of a bitch that did this really needs to change his name.

Mutant Frog Incorporated Reveals Secret Correspondence

UPDATE: Nichi Nichi also has a “sorry for not posting” post. Parallel lives!

Posts to MF have recently slowed to a trickle due partly to my increased level of employment and also the general busy-ness of others involved in this vital project. So in an effort to break of a little something for the peoples every now and again, I have decided to yank open the curtain of shame and reveal to you just what kinds of links writers from Mutant Frog Travelogue, Coming Anarchy, and Nichi Nichi (otherwise known as “Japan’s Gaijin Brain Trust”) e-mail each other back and forth:

First, a completely random picture to help broaden your horizons:

Found in an image search for “persistently.” This man is a member of the Motorcycling Amateur Radio Club. Their motto is “two great tastes that taste great together.” That guy looks really happy to have discovered a club that combines his two favorite and completely related things! It seems like it might be dangerous to take your hand off the bike to check in with your HAM radio buddies.

But what’s this? If you look closely at the photo you’ll see A GUY ON A CELL PHONE!!! This must be considered no less than blasphemy in a group of people who cling to obsolete technology, shocking beer bellies and tacky motorcycles.

But enough mean-spirited ranting. On to more links:

This was icky:

WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT (NSFW):

THE STORY:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8589349/

THE VIDEO:
http://www.jegergrim.dk/video/mrhands.mpg

I read that Kansai Electric is reporting something similar now:

Thursday, September 8, 2005

‘Cool Biz’ Saved 1 Month’s Power For 240,000 Homes: Tepco

TOKYO (Nikkei)–The Japanese government’s Cool Biz campaign, which encourages workers to dress lightly during the summer, saved the equivalent of a one-month supply of electricity for 240,000 households during the June-August period, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) said Thursday.

For Tepco, the saved 70 million kilowatt-hours translated into a 0.08% loss in the volume of power sold, or 700 million yen in lost revenue, for the three-month period. It also contributed to a 27,000-ton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions at its fossil fuel power plants.

The firm estimated that the lost revenue would have little impact on its profit, given that the cost of power generation also dropped.

Cool Biz was implemented in an estimated 40% of office buildings during the summer, according to Tepco. Men were encouraged not to wear neckties. On average, rooms were kept 1.4 C warmer than usual, the company said.

(The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Friday morning edition)

Miss Nippon!

Strange headline: 在韓日本人、１０年で倍増　半数、統一協会関係者か
“Japanese Residents of Korea Double in 10 Years, Half Are Members of [Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s] Unification Church”

Anyone know any more about this? If so, do tell!

Muneo Suzuki, internationalist politician known for A) Hiring an African Secretary (pictures included) B) Bribing voters with rice balls stuffed with 5000 yen notes and C) Getting re-elected to the Diet this year even after being convicted of accepting bribes!

That’s all for now. Must catch bus home.

Osaka Nostalgia Part 1

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:
Continue reading Osaka Nostalgia Part 1

Bahhhhh

OK, just because we need a new entry:

Yet another article condemning Japanese children’s knowledge of kanji characters — The company who runs Kanji Kentei says 1st year college students only averaged 40% correct on a kanji test using questions from old Kanji Kentei 2kyu (intended for high school students), not even close to the 80% required to pass (Thanks, kboy — I looked it up)See if you can get these:

大学１年生には、「閑古鳥」「吟味」「醜聞」の読みや「魚のクサミ」「マイゾウ文化財」「門前のコゾウ」の漢字を書かせる問題などが出題された。

Answers:

閑古鳥【かんこどり】 (n) a cuckoo
吟味【ぎんみ】 (n) testing, scrutiny, careful investigation, (P)
醜聞【しゅうぶん】 (n) scandal, (P)
臭み【くさみ】 (n) bad smell, affectation, fulsomeness
埋蔵【まいぞう】 (n) buried property, treasure trove, (P)
小僧【こぞう】 (n) (1) youngster, (2) young Buddhist priest, (P)

Guess what: I didn’t get them at all and still haven’t looked them up, though it would be cool one day to pass 2kyu myself. Let me give you my completely pedestrian and baseless opinion: the Kanji Kentei people should stop conducting surveys like this because it just shows how irrelevant they’re becoming and the precious idioms that they are trying so hard to protect are slowly but surely dying out of the Japanese language. Those conservative old guard slush-puppies (new word?) should just go cry into their bourbons at the members-only enka-only karaoke bars they came from.

www.videonews.com — Free video of news events in Japan — the current top link has the recent public debates leading up to the election in full.

Imperial Family changes car from Nissan to Toyota — not much else to say about that, really. I don’t even care what car they use. In fact, if it were up to me there would be no Imperial Family at all. It’s the height of pretentiousness! But it did show up in the Top News section of Technorati Japan.

Honestly, I haven’t felt much like blogging the last few days/weeks. I was inspired to blog mainly as a way to keep up my Japanese by translating articles. Over the year and a half or so I have spent blogging, my translation skills have improved enough to land me a few good jobs.

However, now I’m a lot busier in my new job and translating news articles is actually something I do every day — and get paid for. So the inspiration is gone a little bit.

Another thing is I have started considering who my audience is here and asking myself “what impact is what I say going to have?” and I have to answer “not all that much.” Not sure what that means to me, but it does certainly mean there’s no point in starting “Internet debate” in my posts (because, as has been said before, it’s like the Special Olympics: even if you win, you’re still retarded.)

Anyway, anonymous readers, my point is please bear with me while I consider what role blogging will have in my life.

Random picture of an Adam Richards (THIS ISN’T ME!!!!!!!!):

Baby ‘Critical,’ Man Arrested

Police say Adam Richards admitted to abusing the baby

Police say a Union Township man admitted to abusing his girlfriend’s baby boy.

Five-month-old Dillion Richards is now in critical but stable condition at Children’s Hospital, with multiple fractures.

Adam Richards, 23, was behind bars Thursday night, charged with felony child endangerment.

The baby and suspect have the same last name but are not related.

Police say Richards beat the child at his home in Union Township.

The child’s mother is Megan Cloud, and she has not been charged.

Shit, he’s my age and everything. Stay away from my unborn kids.

Guns, Germs, and Steel- a reader’s exercise

At the moment I am about 2/3 of the way through Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Basically it’s a history of human civilization written by a scientist, trying to uncover root the root causes for the success and failure of civilizations around the world while attempting to destroy the racist and culturalist theories behind the common ‘rise of the west’ narrative. With this rolling around in my head, here is my off the cuff (and in true blog style, completely unedited) attempt at a response to a post over on the blog Cominganarchy.com, in which Chirol argues that Arab cultural values are responsible for their current material backwardness. I don’t normally post this sort of thing here, but it may lead to some interesting comments.

It seems to me that the failure of the Arab world is not at heart a result of their culture, but their lack of significant exploitable natural resources aside from oil. Yes, oil makes a lot of money for them, but it requires only a very, very small percentage of the population to actually exploit it to its maximum potential, creating no incentive for the rest of the population to work. One could argue that in effect, the culture is backwards because there are few good ways for them to modernize in a material fashion.

Why is the West advanced and the Arab world behind? Due to the allocation of natural resources, the industrial revolution could only have happened in Western Europe (or possibly China), and the Middle East was too far away from deposits of iron and coal necessary for industrialization to make such innovations realistic. Only in the later stages of industrialization, when we began using engines that ran on liquid fuel instead of coal did the region have anything of material worth to offer the modern world, and it is only a single raw resource destined for export, not raw materials that could become the bases of a production oriented economy.

Oil is basically the only source of wealth in the Middle East, and it is for the most part controlled and profited from exclusively by the elites. Look at the Saudi family, and the former Saddam Hussein regime. The only places where most of the population is actually well off are those such as Dubai, where oil money is redistributed through a socialist benefits system that works because there’s so damn much money they don’t even have to worry about managing the economy. It’s not even ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ everyone just gets free money without having to work at all. Sure, everyone gets a free education, even fully-subsidized study abroad if they want, but to what end? How many of the people you have met in your life would in fact work hard under such conditions, when failure presents no threat of want?

Regardless of whatever ‘cultural values’ people in the Middle East possess, I don’t see how their economies and societies can realistically modernize under the dual strangle hold of oil and autocratic government. If democracy genuinely takes hold in Iraq than we may have the opportunity to make an interesting experimental comparison, but it still remains to be seen how much the free oil money may retard genuine development there as well. Perhaps if they follow Norway’s example, and put the bulk of the money in a kind of trust fund and use some to fund contemporary development of other industries they will actually be able to succeed.

You cite above “Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure” as a trait of “failing cultures.” It seems to me that in fact success and failure are to a large degree determined by ones environment, and the current environment of the Middle East, awash in oil but no other opportunities, is one which offers precious little hope for more than a small minority to improve their personal circumstances significantly. The other conservative social and religious values on your list make more sense when you realize that religion is primarily the refuge of the weak, there is nothing like the promise of Heaven to justify one’s sorry lot on Earth, and nothing like calling those who are more successful than you infidels or heretics to sooth one’s self esteem.

Funny stuff

I am so sick and tired of reading “serious” stuff that I need to laugh. Behold Something Awful, the site that points out all the ridiculous shit on the Internet:

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3136

This is their feature, FASHION SWAT, where two clever people trade riffs on bad fashion. Read it. Funny excerpts include:

Dr. Thorpe: God, I wish I was raised with a soul. The only thing we get to weep at is particularly affecting Sprint commercials with guys calling their dads to tell them “it’s a boy” or something. There’s no mystery in the world when you’re a white, secular, liberal shithead like you and me.

Zack: I’m pretty sure our soul is composed of a series of toy commercials that ran from 1984-1988. When we die Hasbro does with us what they please.

Dr. Thorpe: I can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer, but I can remember the tune to the “My Buddy” jingle. “My buddy, my buddy, my buddy, my buddy… my buddy and me!”

Zack: Yeah, Matt from X-E will start running a series of Pop Churches for our generation. “For penance say three ‘GI Joe’ themes and one ‘Jem and the Holograms’ theme.”

Dr. Thorpe: That would be truly outrageous.

Forgive the lack of formatting. I’m too tired to think.

My personal favorite is this one.

Walmart to Open in Japan

All these history posts are making my head hurt! Now let me depress you big time:

Seiyu To Open ‘Wal-Mart’ Supercenters Next Year

TOKYO (Nikkei)–Seiyu Ltd. (8268) will in 2006 start opening stores developed with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and named after the U.S. retail giant, The Nihon Keizai Shimbun learned Tuesday.

Seiyu plans to open large outlets that combine supermarkets and discount stores. All of these so-called supercenters — Wal-Mart’s mainstay — will be developed jointly by the two companies, with some of them bearing the name “Wal-Mart Seiyu.” Candidate areas to host new supercenters include Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture.

These supercenters will offer discount prices on a regular basis under Wal-Mart’s everyday-low-prices concept. Although this marketing method is not widely popular among Japanese consumers, Seiyu will emphasize that the stores are operated under the Wal-Mart philosophy.

Personally, I am not the type to beatify Japan’s traditional culture or superior egalitarian values, but Walmart, I hope you agree, just sucks the big one. I went in there late at night the other weekend just to get soda and I was almost run over by some shitty teenager messing around on the fat-people-scooter they keep around. I mean, I go there to buy razors, but every time I’m there I silently pray that the big ugly Walmart will one day cease to exist, much as the Iraqis are friendly to American troops to their faces but secretly pray for their country to go back to normal as soon as possible.

I thought I had something to say but I lost my train of thought completely

1) Hip Hop Gospel Mimes — The best in the business. (Thanks SA)

2) Link to DPJ Candidate’s Website Goes to Porn Site Instead — Remember last year’s vice presidential debate? NO?! Well in it Cheney kept repeating some site name, and I thought it would be totally within the realm of possibility for the link he gave out to automatically forward you to goatse.cx.. You know, since he’s so evil and all. Well anyway, Hiroko Mizushima, an opposition party member running for office in Japan’s upcoming election, came close to fulfilling my fantasies. A link to her site posted on the Osaka Prefectural Chapter of the Democratic Party of Japan’s website mistakenly pointed instead to German site “Porn Diamonds” (LINK NOT SAFE FOR WORK). According to Mizushima’s staff, she had changed her site’s address after her provider went out of business, but the Prefectural Chapter just never updated it. Oops!

3) U.S. Targets Sex Abuse of Exchange Students — Think of it as a little like that scene in American Pie, only instead of an American supermodel faking an accent and stripping in front of a camera it’s a pathetic biology teacher (pictured above) sneaking into a girl’s bedroom and begging for head. Or it’s a fat Asian man feeding booze to Scandinavian boys and then trying to grab their ding-ding-dongs.

I wasn’t molested when I spent my senior year of high school in Japan, but I easily could have been, as the article explains:

Foreign students are among the most vulnerable minors because they usually do not know U.S. laws, are unfamiliar with customs, are dependent on host families or sponsors, don’t know what to do when abused or are afraid to act, according to Lt. Frank Baker of the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office…

“For a predator, this is the ideal situation,” Baker said.

Continue reading I thought I had something to say but I lost my train of thought completely

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance
By GEORGE JAMES

A Rutgers University task force is recommending creation of a college of arts and sciences that would standardize admissions criteria, graduation requirements and other procedures. Under the proposal, some Rutgers colleges would function as campuses, but no longer by name as colleges.

The suggestion, which is part of a 175-page report that is scheduled for release on Monday, was criticized yesterday by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College, which introduced a Web site earlier in the day, savedouglasscollege.org, calling for the measure’s defeat. The group said the proposal would mean the end of Douglass College.

The university president, Richard L. McCormick, said in a telephone interview last night that the report would undergo months of discussion. He noted that the plan was not calling for a merger; the colleges would retain their distinct qualities.

“It recommends creating something that every other research university has, a college of arts and sciences,” Dr. McCormick said. “And it recommends calling our residential campuses what they are: residential campuses.”

He created the 75-member Task Force on Undergraduate Education in April 2004 to guarantee that in emphasizing research, Rutgers does not shortchange undergraduates on courses and access to faculty members. In addition, Dr. McCormick said, he wanted to bring unity to what he called “a patchwork quilt” of schools and programs situated in New Brunswick and Piscataway.

Besides Douglass, which is an all-women’s college, Rutgers College, Livingston College and University College would all be affected.

“What it does, it effectively ends Douglass College,” said Sheila Kelly Hampton, class of ’70, who is president of the Douglass alumnae group. “By calling it a campus, they just are talking about where someone happens to live. They don’t address many of the student life issues and program issues.”

Dr. McCormick disagreed. “Douglass will be as it is now, a women’s-only campus, and will continue to have its signature courses on women, retain its distinctive mission and continue to reflect its unique history,” he said.

Each individual college now sets its own criteria in certain areas, including admissions, honors programs and graduation requirements, and none have faculties of their own; they are served by a general faculty of arts and sciences, he said. A new college of arts and sciences, under a unified structure, would simplify standards for students, faculty and administrators, and get faculty members more involved with students, he added.

But the executive director of the alumnae, Rachel Ingber, class of ’83, said: “Eliminating colleges does not bring faculty closer to students. It creates one huge university where undergraduates don’t have small colleges where they can get academic advice on curriculum programs and the unique mission that Douglass College provides for women.”

This may be removed from our usual topics, but since I am a Rutgers graduate, and I know a number of other Rutgers alumni read this blog, I just wanted to point out this important development concerning the school.

The current president of Rutgers University previously managed to scuttle a recent plan proposed by our former governor James McGreevey to merge Rutgers university with the states other medical and research oriented universities. This plan would have done little to improve the quality of medical education or research, while confusing the organization of the university as a whole. The previous plan was entirely based around the medical and research divisions of the universities involved, which included Rutgers, UMDNJ, NJIT and possibly others, while providing no reasonable plan for the administration of liberal arts and undergraduate departments. This current report seems to be a response to that, confirming that undergraduate education must be a priority at public universities.

I haven’t yet read the actual report (although I intend to), but after spending four years at Rutgers, New Brunswick I’m rather familiar with the organizational structure of the university. As it currently stands, Rutgers New Brunswick is actually a network of several nearby campuses in the neighboring towns of New Brunswick and Piscataway, linked through a system of free buses. As a large university, Rutgers consists of several different colleges, and each college is associated with a different campus. Each college has a unique history and origin, and today there are five liberal arts colleges, which share a common faculty of arts and sciences, and a number of specialty schools, each of which has their own faculty for their specialized programs. Students in specialty schools (such as Engineering, Pharmacy, Mason Gross School of the Arts etc.) also take at least a basic number of liberal arts classes as well, which are the same classes that members of the five liberal arts colleges take.

Here is a brief summary of the history, characteristics, and my thoughts on the future of the four liberal arts colleges, in chronological order of their founding:

Continue reading Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Minomonta’s Broadcast Boo-boo

To many Americans, Japanese television has a reputation for being free of the ludicrous broadcast restrictions of American television, thanks in part to violent/sexually explicit anime and shows like “Banzai!” and “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” (and not to mention the infamous “Chris Farley on a Japanese game show” sketch from Saturday Night Live).

However, one should not be misled. While Japanese and American mores differ (e.g.: talking about/depicting excrement is not nearly as taboo as it is in America), Japanese television, just like its counterparts in the United States and elsewhere, has a myriad of groups influencing programming choices, including pressure groups, politicians, and (most importantly) sponsors. The various pressures exerting on television in Japan have produced a regime of voluntary censorship. A list of “forbidden words” can be found here.

It is with that in mind that I present to you a report on the puzzling remarks of famous Japanese TV host Minomonta (host of the Japanese version of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” among many other things):

Minomonta’s painful misstatement — Sponsors furious, drop their support

“If you want a good digestive medicine I suggest you drink beer instead.”

Beer-loving Mino-san, who has appeared in beer commercials, lets his true thoughts slip out

It was found on June 23 that sponsors of TBS’ “Minomonta’s Morning Thwack!” (tr: My creative translation) pulled out of the show after host Minomonta (60), one of Japan’s most famous, made a grievously bad statement during the June 3 live broadcast.

The slip of the tongue occurred while discussing the article “A Doctor-Invented ‘Healthy’ Beer Garden” during a segment reviewing the day’s newspapers.

In a back-and-forth with a female announcer, Mino-san made one of his usual health-related comments, “The yeast in beer improves your immune system.” He then admitted to viewers that every morning he drinks a 50-50 mixture of beer and tomato juice every morning to stay healthy.

That by itself would have been fine, but Mino-san went on: “Everyone, you’re drinking that digestive drink, Biofermine, aren’t you? If so you should really just drink beer!”

Unfortunately, he was too late in realizing that, in fact, Biofermine (Headquartered in Kobe) is a sponsor of the show!

A frantic TBS apologized on the air 3 days later and even put apologies and corrections on its homepage: “Comparing beer, a luxury product, and drugs or quasi-drugs is a ridiculous proposition,” “(the concept of a beer health drink is) a mistake not based on the facts,” and “We are truly sorry.”

But eventually, they said, the company saw the statement as a problem and pulled their support on June 8.

On weekdays, Minomonta currently serves as host of both “Morning Thwack!” from 5am, and Nippon TV’s “Omoikkiri TV” from noon.

Since health-related comments on TV can have a profound effect on the sales of fruits, vegetables, and supplements, the sponsor simply could not let the comment slide.

Comment: Likely due to aggressive marketing, consumers in Japan are obsessed with healthy eating and the homeopathic effects of foods they eat. So in that context it is somewhat easier to understand Mino-san’s unpalatable choice of health drink and also the sponsor’s stern reaction to the misstatement. Thanks for letting me share!