I cook once a year, on Ami’s birthday. Last night was Italian.

Actually, I enjoy cooking. It’s artistic and practical at the same time and has a complexity and variability to it that is very much like music. Everyone has their own unique style and whether the starting point is a recipe or sheet music, no two people will produce exactly the same result.

I barely have time for my music these days. If I started cooking, I would not have time for the rest of my life. Ah, another 364 days and I’ll be in the kitchen again.

Hong Kong is going nuts with this swine flu scare.

I went to dinner last night and the buttons in the elevator were covered with a plastic sheet and a sign saying “Disinfected every two hours”. But if you walked around the corner and took a look down the alley you could see they had raw meat sitting out in the open for hours.

Someone really needs to get their priorities straight.

I tried yoga for the first time the other day. I walked into the studio and saw three guys warming up by doing the splits. My way-too-perky instructor confirmed that this was, in fact, Introduction to Yoga, I grabbed a mat from the pile, stretched what muscles I could, and prepared myself for the inevitable upcoming groin-pull.

Fortunately, the next 45 minutes did not involve any strianed muscles or dislocated joints, but turned out to be physically exhausting. I never imagined that not moving could be so tiring. I’m going back again next week.

I definitely have to invite three or four of these girls over for a game of Twister.

After conclusively proving that water is wet and grass is green, researchers at Oklahoma State University demonstrated that single women are more attracted to married men then to single men. Scientists told 200 students they were participating in a study on online dating, but their “match” was fictitious. He was perfectly crafted to match their interests. All girls were shown the same picture and told the same name, job description, etc. The only difference was that half the group was told their perfect match was single and half were told he was married.

Of the girls who thought Mr. Right was singe, 59% wanted to meet him, but when the girls were told he was married 90% wanted to pursue a relationship.

I grew up Catholic, and today I attended the the Buddhist one-year anniversary funeral rites for my grandfather-in-law. The Catholic and Buddhist approaches to life and death could not be more starkly different.

The Catholics are up front with you. While you are alive, the Catholics endeavor to make you feel as guilty as possible. Not feeling guilty enough is actually considered a sin. They then leverage this guilt to extract the maximum financial return from you in the brief time they have. After you die, however, you are fully amortized, and the Earthly church is done with you. You are considered to be, no matter how long the odds, “with God”.

The Japanese Buddhists play the game in reverse. You can do what you want to in life without guilt. I’ve been out drinking (and more) with a number of priests here in Japan and believe me, they are pros. Aside from the isolated blessing of a building site here and the occasional festival there, the Buddhists don’t demand much in the way of contributions.

After you die, however, the extortion begins. The assumption seems to be that your loved one has screwed up and will be waiting for reincarnation for quite some time. If you want to avoid problems, the priests need to intervene on your behalf. You need to pay up or the dearly beloved will suffer for it.

First, the deceased needs to be given a new name, and “good” names cost millions of yen. The priesthood is not too specific about what happens if they decide to give the soul a “bad” name, but I’m assured it’s something horrible. Not that the priests want to give anyone a bad name, you understand, but a lack of sufficient cash upfront can affect their concentration and, hey, they obviously can’t be held responsible for what happens if the family is preventing them from concentrating.

The shakedown doesn’t stop there, of course. The family needs to come up with additional protection money on the 7, 49 and 100-day anniversaries of the funeral as well as the 1, 3, 5, 7 and 13-year anniversaries to ensure that the now wandering soul does not “have an unfortunate accident” while waiting for their next incarnation.

Back in college I had one an original Mac. You know, the one that looked like a toaster and that Burke Brethard made come to life and torture a penguin. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are too young. Your loss!) The one where you could fit the Mac OS, MS Word, and a few dozen Word documents on a 400k floppy disk.

Seems some enterprising chap pitted an old MacPlus against a dual-core 64-bit AMD machine. It’s a very fair test in that the benchmarks he set up are realistic and meaningful. It’s interesting much much things improved over 20 years.

Mt friend Stuart pointed me towards this article on how the British Government is now recognizing McDonald’s shift manager training as formal educational credits.

The article is full of quotes as to how this will provide greater eductionial oportunitys by allowing more people to get degrees and increase intentional competitiveness and result in a more skilled workforce, presumably because more people earn degrees.

It’s all nonsense, of course, giving more workers progressively more meaningless pieces of paper does not make the workforce more skilled any more than (as the US is finding out) printing more money makes the population any richer.

Last week China’s Administration for Religious Affairs announced that starting next month it will be illegal for Tibetian monks to reincarnate without the government approval.

Of course, once all the amusement wears off, you can see this for what it is. China’s latest attempt to exterminate Tibetan Buddhism once and for all. The whole leadership structure of the religion is based on monks reincarnating. The Chinese government how has the legal pretext to dictate the next generation of leaders and arrest those chosen by traditional means. With the Dali Lama getting on in years, the legislation is rather timely.

Yeah, yeah. I have not posted in months. But I have a good excuse. The dog ate my keyboard! The token fell out of my network cable and I could not log in.

The truth is I’ve just been too busy traveling and working to take the time to update this blog like the disciplined barbarian I strive to be.

I’m in Sofia right now and its Friday evening. I know there is something going on in this city I just have to find it. OK. I’m off in search of a cool club full of hot Bulgarian girls. I’ll let you know how it goes. If you don’t hear back from me in three days, send reinforcements!

It’s kind of a heavy topic today, but for the last few days a stray thought about the nature of free will has been stuck in my head like a 70s disco tune.

While we may be free to do whatever we want, we are obviously not free to want whatever we want. We can choose our actions, but we don’t choose the desires and values that form the basis for those actions.

In one area my respect for Japanese society has been in freefall recently. Until rather recently, Japanese have always had rather healthy diets. They tend to drink unsweetened drinks, have a national aversion to GM foods, and eat a lot of raw or lightly processed foods.

Things are changing. I made fun of the US consumers for actually putting McGriddles in their bodies, but they are here in Japan as well now. Worse still, McDonalds Japan recently introduced the MegaMac. A 900-calorie four-beef-like patty burger guaranteed to provide the USDA daily allowance of grease for a family of twelve. McDonalds, literally, can’t keep them in stock.

Pizza Hut, however, has now caused me to abandon all hope. The other night I ordered a pizza. (Hey, I take care of myself, but it’s not like I’m a granola-munching hippie!) They now offer a new crust that improves on their thick-and-greasy cheese-filled crust. The outside of the crust is actually made of dozens of little pig-in-a-blanket like rolls. Each gingerly containing a slice of bacon wrapping a piece of sausage suspended in grease. The pizza also comes with a honey-maple syrup which you are supposed to pour over the crust before eating it.

I’m not even sure you could get Americans to eat that slop, but it’s so popular here in Japan you have to reserve it in advance.

I learned an important life lesson today.

It is an extremely bad idea to open an electric coffee grinder when it’s running. Good thing I like the aroma of freshly-ground coffee. That’s what my whole kitchen smells like right now.

The other day, my friend was bemoaning the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet. (Yeah, my friend needs to get out more. He knows that.)

Over the past few months I read a bit of the nonsensical debate over whether “Pluto is a planet” with amusement. In fact, the debate has nothing whatsoever to do with Pluto. Neither the final decision nor any of the arguments put forth have the slightest effect on Pluto which will keep orbiting the sun as it has done for billions of years. Pluto doesn’t even know the debate exists. The debate was not about whether Pluto is a planet. It was about whether we should all call Pluto a planet. It’s an arbitrary label that people take far too seriously.

It reminds me of the duck-billed platypus. The platypus is a favorite of high-school biology teachers who explain that it is a freakish animal since it lays eggs, but nurses its young and does all kinds of things that make it difficult to classify. The platypus, of course, is blissfully unaware of this “problem” and continutes to eat, sleep, mate and make lots of baby platypuses just as it always has.

To say that the platypus is a mammal is not a statement about the platypus. It is a statement about our system of labels. Most people cannot separate the labels we apply to something from what that something actually is, and therefore think there is something odd about the platypus, because it does not fit cleanly into our labels.

Personally, I blame Aristotle for all of this, but I’ll save that for another post.

I just got back from another trip to the US.

When I travel, especially to places where I obviously stand out as a tourist, I generally get into the front seat of taxis. Although it tends to surprise the driver at first, they will generally assume that this is the custom where ever you come from and then drop into a much more talkative mood than if you had been sitting in the back.

I’m convinced that if you do this enough in Latin America, you will learn Spanish rather quickly. The drivers, being Latino, simply cannot sit next a person for more than five minutes without starting a conversation, and the fact that you don’t speak a word of their language is not going to stop them.

When I was in Peru a while back, I received hours of free Spanish instruction from taxi drivers while stuck in traffic. “OK. This is a bridge. A bridge. That’s a truck. A green truck. A brown truck.” Yeah, I know. Not exactly scintillating conversation, but it helped pass the time for both of us.

The only place I can’t really do this is in America where the passenger’s side door is always locked and the drivers and passengers are separated by an inch of bullet-proof glass. Of course, I understand why this is necessary, but it makes me a bit sad.

Greetings from a beach in somewhere in southern Vietnam. I’m here swimming, scuba diving and just generally hanging out. Although the waves on this particular beach are tiny, it seems that surfing is catching on among the younger Vietnamese.

Oh, those wacky Christians!

A man jumped into the lion cage in the Kiev zoo, walked over to the lions and shouted “God will save me, if he exists.”

He didn’t. A lioness immediately pounced on him and ripped open his carotid artery. The king of kings could not be reached for comment.

Now, what I want to know is why this chump thought he was a special snowflake. I mean, the Romans threw thousands of Christians to the lions,  and the Big Guy didn’t feel compelled to intervene on their behalf despite the obvious PR value of such a move. So what made this guy think divine intervention would protect him from his own stupidity and arrogance.

It’s the Circle of Life.

Cowards never view themselves as cowards. In fact, cowards tend to view themselves as brave and virtuous. They have an astounding ability to delude themselves into thinking that their fear of confrontation is actually an demonstration of their virtue. After all, it is easy to fake compassion towards one’s adversary, and it caries little risk.

Likewise, every obnoxious insecure asshole, be it the domineering boss, the suffocating father or the violent husband, seems to have convinced themselves that their abuse is actually an expression of caring. The assholes justify their actions in terms of teaching lessons, efficiency or tough love.

These people are just plain creepy. Check out this video about a group that claims the “cure gayness”. Talk about the the cure being worse than the disease! This would be wicked satire if it weren’t real.

We barbarians are doing a bit or redecorating. Over the next few days I hope to complete the modifications to BigheaD‘s ChinaRed theme.

I’ve lived a sheltered life. I always thought that “putting on my dancing shoes” was some kind of metaphor. I now not only know that there really is such a thing as dancing shoes, but I am the proud owner of my very own pair.

The spins in salsa were getting a bit too difficult to do in street shoes, so I decided more appropriate footwear was in order. The main problem here in Japan (other than finding a pair consisting of two lefts) was fitting my size-eleven feet.

I headed to a huge four-story dance emporium in Shibuya that claimed on the phone to stock my size. Two things struck me about the place. First, I was probably the only straight male to have set foot in the store this month. Second, the place was pure “Capitalism at Work.”

While I stood there with the female clerks staring at my feet and the male shoppers staring at my ass, I was amazed at how much money people were spending on dance accessories. Some of these people were dropping hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Teaching people to dance is one thing, but the real money is made in selling them a whole lifestyle.