Daily Archives: February 3, 2007

5 reasons why I blog

Posted on by

Kid Blogger! The kid has promise. 

I got tagged for the 5 Reasons Why I Blog meme by Jeremy Jacobs, and answering it will be my entry in the engtech Blog Contest #1.

Do you remember when you were in elementary school and in English class once a week they would write five topics on the board and you would have to pick one of the topics and write a story about it? (oh, and also how they would give you lists of all kinds of different words you were supposed to learn {although I always wondered and worried, secretly, that if they knew I already knew those words they would penalize me in some way, so I played dumb. I would rule in a concentration camp!} and then use in a sentence? Well being literalminded-like, I used to use them all in one gargantumungous sentence, the Sentence That Wouldn’t Die!, the Energizer Bunny of sentences, and that used to piss my teachers off no end but they never did tighten up the wording of the assignment, so what’s with that, eh? I ask you) But quite a lot of the time I wouldn’t like any of the story subjects listed and even might have had a story or two that I wanted to write anyway and thought, like any good, lazy person, why should I write two including one I don’t want when I can write one that I do want instead? Indeed.

So, inevitably after every writing-the-titles-on-the-blackboard moment, the teacher would sit at his desk and brace himself for my approach.

“Do you mind if…” I’d always start, and usually it would go smoothly from there.

“What would happen if I said no?” asked Mr. Lindsay once, in a sudden and inexplicable fit of empowerment.

del.icio.us: 5 reasons why I blog
blinklist: 5 reasons why I blog
furl: 5 reasons why I blog
Digg it: 5 reasons why I blog
ma.gnolia: 5 reasons why I blog
Stumble it: 5 reasons why I blog
simpy: 5 reasons why I blog
newsvine: 5 reasons why I blog
reddit: 5 reasons why I blog
fark: 5 reasons why I blog
Technorati Favorite me!

quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?

Posted on by

This looks encouraging. All the more reason to save my pennies and/or look for tips on stowing away on Toyota cargo ships.


You Are a Henna Gaijin!


You’re not Japanese, but you wish you were!

You can use chopsticks with your eyes closed, and you’ve memorized hundreds of Kanji.

You even answer your phone “moshi moshi.”

While the number of anime videos you’ve seen is way higher than the number of dates you’ve been on, there’s hope.

Play the sexy, mysterous gaijin, and you’ll have plenty of Japanese meat.

What’s Your Japanese Subculture?

del.icio.us: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
blinklist: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
furl: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
Digg it: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
ma.gnolia: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
Stumble it: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
simpy: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
newsvine: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
reddit: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
fark: Quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?
Technorati Favorite me!

Never Forget!

Posted on by

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Protesters. First they came for the milkshake...

del.icio.us: never forget!
blinklist: never forget!
furl: never forget!
Digg it: never forget!
ma.gnolia: never forget!
Stumble it: never forget!
simpy: never forget!
newsvine: never forget!
reddit: never forget!
fark: never forget!
Technorati Favorite me!

Japanese poop: a phrasebook

Posted on by

ungo, yo!How many times have you been caught, tongue-tied and groping blindly in the darkest corners of your vocabulary for exactly the right word, only to have it scuttle away out of reach, leaving you with only the vaguest sense of its outline and the lingering shame of having failed?

We here at the ol’ raincoaster blog feel your pain. As a public service, from time to time we provide a roundup of obscure-yet-universally-applicable terms for our readers to file in their heads, ready to flash dazzlingly on just the right occasion.

This should be handy for those of you whose friends have recently given birth. Lord knows, they don’t talk about anything else. As the Inuit are said to have fifty words for snow, so the Japanese have coined a surprisingly robust number of terms for what we would simply call “poop”. #2. Doo-doo. Crap. Shit. Turds. Shizzola.

Here, from Japanprobe, is an in-depth dictionary of dung.

  1. unpi 「うんぴ」 : Diarrheal stool. Could be connected to overeating, having a cold, or stress. It is usually a yellowish-color and it has a very strong smell.
  2. unnyo 「うんにょ」 : Soft and tender poop, but not diarrehea. It comes out when you are feel some indigestion. Yellow-ish or light brown in color.
  3. unchi 「うんち」 : Nice poop. It comes out when you’ve been eating healthy balanced meals. It has a clean brown color and doesn’t smell very much.
  4. ungo 「うんご」 : Comes out when you’ve not been eating enough vegetables, and you’re probably constipated when you squeeze out an ungo. Ungo is dark black and really stinky.

So the next time your new-parent friends are yammering on about how your creamed corn looks adorably like Junior‘s last bowel movement, you can bring that conversation to a screeching, juddering halt while simultaneously flashing a glimpse of your own, more cosmopolitan worldview: Just leap to your feet and yell UNKO!

del.icio.us: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
blinklist: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
furl: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
Digg it: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
ma.gnolia: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
Stumble it: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
simpy: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
newsvine: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
reddit: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
fark: Japanese Poop: a phrasebook
Technorati Favorite me!

le grand content

Posted on by

le grand debate, le grand question, le grand video. Powerpoint solves the meaning of life, via Eurotrash-accented art.

I live for this shit.

A Film by Clemens Kogler together with Karo Szmit. Voice by Andre Tschinder.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

del.icio.us: le grand content
blinklist: le grand content
furl: le grand content
Digg it: le grand content
ma.gnolia: le grand content
Stumble it: le grand content
simpy: le grand content
newsvine: le grand content
reddit: le grand content
fark: le grand content
Technorati Favorite me!