Yay! I Win!

That's right, folks. Last night I won a Gold Medal in the Biggest Asshole in Tokyo Competition. I'll get to that momentarily.

Yesterday I woke up at 6am, did my morning routine, went to work, and got off at 4pm.

At 4pm I headed up to Tokyo as per SOP to train at Axis Jiujitsu Academy, met a friend for coffee afterwards, and arrived back in my little room at 11:30pm, watched Conan O'Brien, and went to bed..

That's a solid day, gents. 6am to 11:30pm, on the move

Even more solid is that somewhere along the line, I picked up an award for being the Biggest Asshole in Tokyo.

This is not the first time this has happened.

Some might say my recent behavior of late has earned me this dubious title 3 or 4 times in as many months.

Or weeks.

Anyway, whenever we finish working some new techniques at Axis, we spar for about a half an hour, usually 4 x 6-minute sessions, which is really tiring. That's my favorite part, because when I train with my friend, I get my ass kicked like a little toddler, but up at Axis there are people closer to my level so I actually have a chance. I can try out moves and attacks with less worries of getting choked out or arm barred in the first 30 seconds of the session.

I noticed a fellow that really kicked my ass when I first started going there. I hadn't seen him in a while, so I asked him if he would like to spar when we started. I wanted to see if or how I'd improved.

In any case, I annihilated this guy. I was trying out everything I knew, and submitted him no fewer than 3 times with all kinds of armbars. I had him coughing violently and having to take breaks. I was pulling spider guard, scissor mounts -- everything I knew. It was a free-for-all. It was nice to do it to someone else instead of having it done to me.

I felt like a real fuckin' bad ass.

After class I was telling my friend about it. You know, the one that throws me around like a toddler. I said, "I wonder if maybe he's just rusty because he hasn't been coming for a while...but I felt pretty awesome. Kinda like when I'm laying in bed at night and having fantasies where I win the worldwide Brazilian Jiujitsu championships," to which my friend replied:

"Oh, that guy? Yeah he's been out with a broken rib."

I stopped in my tracks. Yeah. I'm a real hard ass. The poor guy probably thought he'd come back and have a light roll, just to test the waters... "I'll just take it easy today, see how I feel." And meanwhile some asshole Gaijin (me) is putting all his weight on his chest, feeling mighty proud when he's having to stop because of a coughing fit. The guy was clearly physically and mentally shot, but I just figured I got the best of him. Alas, such was not the case. Good job. Look who's an asshole. Here's your medal. Rickson would be proud.

I think the next time I go up there, I'll find the best person available and get completely owned by them while I resist with all my might and exhaust myself. I'll see how many times I can get tapped out in 6 minutes. Maybe I'll arrange for them to accidentally kick me in the face. I'll choose the smallest guy, maybe like a 150lb guy or something. The one that looks like the biggest pussy around. Those guys are always the hardest.

I could really use a beat down.

In any case, it's time to get serious. Or, more serious. I need to up the ante. Raise the stakes. What's that mean? It means training harder and playing harder. I've been being a little bit foofie lately. I need a balance; I can only work out like a banshee if I'm drinking like a banshee (on the weekends), so I think I'm going to have to start that up again. Time to open a new Chapter. Stay tuned.

In other news, Michael Vale has passed away. May he continue Making the Donuts in some cop filled shop in the sky.

I Hate Roppongi, aka I'm a Drunken Retard

Some of you might be wondering what Roppongi is. Some of you might have heard of it. Some of you might think Roppongi is the greatest place on Earth.

I'll break it down for you.

Among other things, Roppongi is an area in central Tokyo that happens to contain an enormous amount of bars of every type. It's where foreigners typically go, so it attracts every manner of scumbag you can possibly imagine. Drinks (weak drinks) typically run somewhere between 500yen to 800yen (it's like 120yen to $1), and while cover charges are rare, it's anywhere from 1000 to 3000yen (with a drink ticket or 2). Walking down the street you are accosted by Nigerians trying to get you into their bar/strip club, and if you are a guy by yourself or with other guys, Chinese masseuses trying to get you to get a massage. I ran across the street to get Tommy a few cheeseburgers at McDonalds (he's working at DMZee) and was solicited by no fewer than 3 Chinese masseuses asking me if I'd like a massage or if I "wanted to go home." I was outside for like 5 minutes.

As you can probably imagine, you can get into all types of trouble in Roppongi if you're not careful. It's really the only place in Japan that I don't feel totally safe. People are always trying to scam you, and there are tons of people from a multitude of under developed nations hoping to relieve you of some of your hard earned yen. Every time I go there, I walk away about $120 poorer. The only reason I spent just $100 last night was because I was getting free drinks at DMZee, and at a different place I had some friends buying me (or stealing me) drinks. (Sorry to the person that left that unopened Heineken on the table.)

Here's a list of things that were reinforced to me last night.

1) Don't go to Roppongi. There are plenty of other cool places in Tokyo to go.

2) If you go, don't go with a girl you like, cuz guys there have no respect for your relationship. They think they can "steal her" from you even though they have no game and don't know how to dress, resulting in them getting shoved/screamed at by me.

3) Apparently groping girls and forcing them into corners is an acceptable courtship ritual in this society.

4) Most Japanese guys in Roppongi are fags and have no skills with women. Their idea of picking up a woman is touching her like an animal, resulting in them getting shoved/screamed at by me. then they say "a, gomennasai.." (that means, oh, sorry)

5) Many Japanese guys there will try (most unsuccessfully) to "be the girl's friend" and be a mediator when arguing with her, and get shoved/screamed at by me. then they say "a, gomennasai.."

6) If you're a girl, don't ever say to me, "I want to see what you're like when you're really drunk!" thinking it will be funny and entertaining. It's not, and I will tell you that, and you will most likely not believe me. It will backfire on you and you will probably cry.

7) I seem pretty stable, but I'm not. It's a big facade.

8) Don't go to Roppongi.

So the whole screaming/shoving thing. I'm not a jealous type, but don't be disrespectful to a girl I'm with. That's gonna evoke a reaction from me, anywhere from getting yelled at to getting smacked. Even though I was pretty well into my cups, I didn't wanna get kicked out of a place that I spent 3000 yen to get into, and recently I've been keeping acts of violence restricted to when I'm sober for some reason.

One incident was kinda funny -- I was going to the bar with my little las, and some guy was standing with his back to the bar and started dancing like he was kinda dancing with her. I was right behind her. I looked at him and made the 'cut off' motion with my hand, and he looked really surprised and said, "Oh, sorry dude! I didn't mean to be disrespectful!" I think people are just seeing what they can get away with. I don't think he was particularly concerned about being disrespectful at all, but I appreciated the gesture. I just fucking hate it when guys will do the whole "oh I'm just trying to be friends with both of you!" while trying to pick up a chick you're with. At DMZee I went to the bathroom and when I came back some Half French/Half Japanese dude was talking to the girl. (Keep in mind, we were obviously together.) I came back and he said to me in his French accent, "I hope you don't mind if I kept your girl occupied while you were in the bathroom." Then he started chatting me up and asking me if I was a surfer cuz I was wearing a quicksilver shirt. Get some game, dude. Stay off my nuts. I know what you're doing and I don't like it.

So that's that. I might seem paranoid, but Roppongi is what it is, and being a guy, I know what guys are thinking. The girl I've been "kickin it" with is good looking, so it doesn't surprise me that guys act the way they do, but it doesn't make it any less irritating.

More later; Merry Christmas!!

Dragons and Monkeys and Christians, Oh My!

pwnt!

I guess ever since I had a biology teacher in high school inform me that my views on evolution would result in an eternity spent in hell, the whole evolution-creationism-"intelligent design" thing has had a special place in my heart.

As stated in the hyperlink above:
In a strongly-worded court ruling on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Jones said teaching intelligent design violated a constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

Booyah~

The article also mentions:

Intelligent design holds that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must have been the work of an unnamed creator rather than the result of random natural selection, as argued by Charles Darwin in his 1859 theory of evolution.

"Random natural selection" seems odd to me. Maybe they're using a different version than I am, but I always understood natural selection to be anything but random, because survival is anything but random. I don't see a species surviving based on luck, except for maybe Lemurs, who by all rights should be extinct as fuck. Natural selection is merely a result of creatures that are better suited in a specific environment to pass on their genes and make more better-suited offspring. If other [similar] species can't compete, they slowly die off. I dunno, I could be totally off base here, but I don't think I am. Note: I bring up Lemurs because they only reason they're still alive is 'cuz they live on Madagascar, and were cut off from other "more advanced" prosimians, simians, etc. If Madagascar were connected to the main continent, they wouldn't have been able to compete and would have died off a loooooong time ago. I like lemurs tho. They're ok with me.

I've found that the biggest opponents of "the theory of evolution" have no idea what it's about. First of all, they get caught up in semantics and say stupid shit like, "....well it's just a theory." "Scientific theory" and sitting on your couch spouting off theories about why your husband beats you are two entirely different things. In order for a scientific theory to be accepted, it must stand up to a whole bunch of other scientist trying to debunk it. Carl Sagan does an incredible job pointing out in this book that religion is the polar opposite, and people who disagree with popular religious "theories" have often times been killed. And are still being killed... His books are filled with instances throughout history where the Church has set science back centuries, and I feel that assuming that the same couldn't happen today is naive.

In any case, most bible toting mouth breathers see "Evolution" as a sort of religion, and ask stuff like, "do you believe in evolution?" because they can't see things in any other terms than "us" and "them". Believing in evolution is about the same as believing in your telephone's capacity to function. "Do you believe in cellular technology?" Durp.....to which my favorite answer is, "I believe it works.".......double durp.

People in a losing argument often cling to semantics in an attempt to convolute, confuse or "double-speak," and from what I've seen, the whole intelligent design debate is no different. As science advances and conventional religious wisdom is shown to be false (i,e. the age of the Earth, how Earth processes work, etc), conventional religious wisdom simply becomes more vague and therefore harder to disprove, which to many religious people is the same as them "proving" it, because they "just know." Again, Carl Sagan puts this down on paper better than I ever could in his The Dragon in My Garage story.

Anyway, this was on my mind this morning, so I thought I'd rant about it. I eagerly await your (all 4 or 5 of you) comments.

No lemurs were harmed in the writing of this post.

Nigerian Zombies Invade Tokyo

Quote of the weekend:
Wow, you sure know how to eat.

At 5:30am in a Ramen shop, this had a lot of comedic value to me. Anyone who's seen me eat when I'm drunk would also understand. What this girl was witnessing was what I like to call Ramennihilation. The fact that it was said by a non-native speaker of English made it all the more funny too.

I also saw Land of the Dead with the same non-native speaker of English, which gave me an interesting perspective 'cuz I had the English subtitles on. For instance, did you know that the black Zombie (African-American Zombie?) was actually called "Big Daddy"? Here's big daddy coming out of the water:

It looked like this on subtitles:

Big Daddy: [Groaning]
Big Daddy: [Screams triumphantly]

All in all, I was disappointed in the movie. It wasn't so much a movie about Zombies with some other secondary plot, it was a movie about an oppressive Big Man in a post apocalyptic scenario......which happened to contain zombies... I guess the zombies were all tired out too, cuz they didn't come charging after people in a full-on sprint like in the last one. I was thinking that if a movie is gonna be [something] Of The Dead, the zombies ought to be similar. That's what made the zombie problem so hard to deal with in Dawn of the Dead -- it was like having a horde of olympic sprinters running after you trying to eat you. Maybe they just lost their motivation after a while.

I'm a little surprised that a certain Zombie connoisseur didn't have more to say on this movie.

Oh yeah, and not wasting the Zombies at the end? "....They're just looking for somewhere to go." Oh yeah, brilliant dude, as if to say, "...Maybe we're not so different from Zombies after all." Uuuh aside from the whole eating ur flesh and turning you into a zombie thing?????? Any real zombie hunter woulda lit those fuckers up with the chaingun.

And besides, everyone knows that if you don't eradicate displaced minority groups, they become a real pain in the ass later on and try and overthrow your society. Sheesh.. In another 200 years, zombies are gonna be demanding equal rights and shit, and they're gonna be stealing jobs and scholarships from our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. There's gonna be Zombie Rights Activists running around, Zombies in the military (not a bad idea really), Zombies becoming lawyers and teachers, Zombies marrying white chicks.... So do the right thing. Wipe them off the face of the earth.

In other news, click here to read about Japan's Nigerian infestation.

My favorite quote from this news article is the following:

"We've suffered due to the civil unrest," says a Nigerian automobile broker who came to Japan 10 years ago. "We're willing to do anything to stay alive. There's no reason why we shouldn't prey upon Japanese, who lack the slightest sense of caution."

Nothing could be more dead on. I still get a kick out of his wording. "There's no reason why we shouldn't prey on the Japanese." Apparently victimizing people doesn't count as a reason not to do something. In this sense he's totally on -- Japanese people are totally unprepared for anything like what these guys are willing to do. I don't think that people who come from stable, law abiding societies can ever hope to hang with guys like Nigerians when it comes to scamming and just being general scumbags. They have more audacity than most people can imagine.

In other Nigerian news, here's a story about the Little Nigerian that Couldn't. What couldn't he do? He couldn't shop on base.

Friday turned himself in Tuesday before noon, the official said. He told police he wanted to shop on base and had bought the forged card from a Chinese person in Shibuya, police said.

Wouldn't he be surprised to discover that he couldn't pay in yen at the main store? Well, at least he could have gotten some Burger King. Cripes, if he wanted to do some shopping, I woulda happily brought him on.

OK, other than that, nothing too new to report... I know this is a short post, but hopefully in the comments section I'll get some good zombie knowledge / some excuses for such a shitty zombie movie... I also realized that this post probably makes me sound like a huge racist, so maybe someone will take everything I wrote seriously and post a nasty response.

Iranimania, aka "Holocaust Schmolocaust!!"

Today is Friday, and for some reason I'm really tired. It's hard to get anything done, so I take care of little odds and ends here and there, and spend some time catching up on world events (i,e. reading blogs).

That's OK though, because part of my job requires that I stay current on international stuff. Cool job eh?

Now, to the matter at hand.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a huge fan of racist jokes, particularly holocaust jokes. I remember guys on my second team in Oki used to tell me that I needed to lighten up 'cuz I didn't find it uproariously funny to drop N Bombs all the time. My response was simply, "Do I need to lighten up? Should I? Why?" then I would scold them for falling for the Eminem-esque "I don't give a fuck about anything!!!!!" deal. Then they followed up with, "it's just a word," which I followed up with, "I wanna violate your little sister", to which they said, "what?" to which I said, "what, they're just words," yadda yadda yadda. Been through it a million times. It's all old hat, and I've talked about it before.

Racism is a funny (funny weird, not funny ha ha) thing, and people really seem to get a kick out of accusing people of being racist. Mr. Troff was highly amused by my "you're a racist!" game, which is where you twist words around and accuse someone of being a racist. Today I was reading an article that kind've reminded me of that. The article's title is Holocaust may not be true, move Israel to Europe: Ahmadinejad.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm a retard. I totally misread this article and thought it said something else, so now I've deleted a huge portion of my post cuz, yeah, I'm an idiot. It's ok tho, cuz above I said I was really tired, which I was. I dunno what's wrong with me.

Thank you for pointing that out to me, Brando. It must have seemed a little bit strange.

In any case, the President of Iran is a whackjob, doesn't accept that the holocaust happened, and if it did, seems to think that's it's not a really good reason to wanna get the fuck out of dodge. I thought for a long time that if we just left Iran alone, it would eventually move towards democracy, but who knows now. I'm going to reserve my right not to have an opinion on this one, because I'm simply not educated enough to have a good one, and I really have no idea how the 'common person' feels.....

Still, I am a bit tired of such a blatent anti-Iranian drive coming from the USA. I feel like someone is trying really hard to sell me something I don't want, don't need, and don't particularly wanna hear about. It's like being harrassed by street kids in Kabul, only everytime I read or watch the news. It kind've bums me out that there really isn't any objective reporting, and I'm pretty much resigned to the fact such a thing is impossible anyway. While there are a lot of really hot Iranian women, it's not like I'm an Iranophile or have some kind of love for them or their country. I'm just a little sword-rattling'd out, and wish news could be something other than some assmonkey trying to push his agenda on me. Nice pipedream eh?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand in other news, it appears that crazy mothers aren't found only in the US of A. I say old chap, this seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Here's a picture of the mother from the link above:


Look familiar...?



It's the Afghan girl from National Geographic!!

I smell a conspiracy.

...but, like, we're cool, right?

.....No, we are NOT cool, said the terrorists.

Newsflash: Just because you "support" the terrorists' cause, doesn't give you a Baghdad ghetto pass.

So four peace activists got kidnapped in Iraq, and they've got until Thursday to live. As saddening as it is, I wonder if these people live on the same planet as me. Their friends were quoted as saying the following in this article:

Please, we appeal to your humanity to show mercy on our brothers and let them come back safely to us to continue our work. May God spare our friends and all the people of Iraq any further suffering.

Call me a cynic, but I'm not sure these guys have a really good track record for humanity, so maybe you should appeal to one of their other qualities (if available).

That's a little bit like appealing to Michael Moore's sense of dietary self restraint.

Also, when you're a Christian group and you throw stuff like God in there, it doesn't help things. Negotiating with terrorists rarely wins, especially when they make up outlandish conditions. Even if all Islamic Army members in Iraq were freed, do you think they'd give a shit? These people are not looking for money or negotiation.

I wrote about this before, and have thrown around the crazy idea of "personal responsibility" a few times in some other stuff I've written.

I feel bad for these people and their families, but seriously. I don't really know what else to say on this. I'm just shocked at how careless people can be with their lives, then act all surprised when what [I'm sure] everyone told them comes true. "Oh, they won't hurt us! We're there to help them!" It's amazing that such peaceniks wouldn't know better than to impose their own values on another group of people, and I use the term "people" loosely.

I hope it was worth it. Now you and your friends get to find out first hand why the planet it better off without terrorists.

In other news, Elian Gonzales is 12 years old!