Category Archives: Travel

the four seasons

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It’s not exactly Vivaldi.

Canuckistani terroristNow, one thinks, one does, if one thinks at all well, that us Canuckistanis have some right to boast about our weather. Oh, other countries may have visible seasons; I’m sure England has snowdrops at some times but not others and maybe even snow on alternate leap years if you reserve ahead, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that no Canadian child grows to maturity without freezing his little face to a huge, immobile piece of metal at least once. And quite a number of them are familiar with the terrarium-like view of a livingroom window that looks out onto snow piled up halfway to the top; it’s a little like being Jacques Cousteau of the North in your semi-submersible split level, only without fish and sharks and other nasty, squidgy things slithering past the porthole, and thank God, I say!

Tell me about the weather.

Indonesia, a gecko's eye viewSo when I was in Indonesia, they did. Oh yes, they said, very obligingly, we have four seasons just like you. I gave them my “don’t MAKE me come over there and straighten you out” face, but they appeared to be serious.

Betel nut is a very strong drug, it seems.

Wherever I went, up and down the equator, through fields lush with banana trees, mountainsides covered in jungle and echoing with the cries of invisible monkeys, or cities of corrugated tin, thatched palm walls, and glittering skyscrapers airconditioned to the recommended storage temperature for sushi, people would insist that they had four distinct seasons.

Jacarta SkylineOne day, the oppressive and unvarying tropical sauna of heat and humidity, along with the banal and ubiquitous politeness of the people and their cruel and pointless insistence on this obvious absurd falsity finally became too much for me, and I snapped.

“WHAT FOUR SEASONS?!?!?!?!?! What four seasons do you people have, in the name of all that is holy?!?!?!?!”

They looked at me as if I’d suddenly pulled a broadsword out of my purse and was threatening babies. They kept their hands where I could see them. They moved slowly, so as not to startle me. And one of them answered my question, in a soft, calming voice:

“Mangos, pineapples, bananas and jackfruit.”
Duh.

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Too Much Coffee Man, an introduction

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TMCM, yo man! 

Reading engtech’s post on his favorite web comics reminded me of my old fave from the deepest, darkest Nineties, Too Much Coffee Man, which I find is now an opera that is packing them in like espresso in a portafilter! TMCM was one of my favorite comics, back when I had a 9-5 or actually it was with Starbucks so it was more like a 5:30am-6:30pm, but whatever, and could afford to buy dead trees.

I am reminded at this juncture of perhaps the most absurd of the various absurdities of working in a cubicle farm. I had a TMCM toque which I treasured for its hip coffeeness and relevance, and I thought it would look cute and edgy sitting on top of my filing cabinet, so that is where I put it.

And every morning it would be on my desk.

At first I thought the cleaners were moving it, although dusting the top of the cabinets every day seemed a bit extreme to me. But after awhile I realized it was happening even when the cleaners had not been in. So I began to test things.

I pinned it to my cube wall. Nothing. I put it on my chair. Nothing. I pinned it on the outside of my doorway: bingo, it was on my desk in the morning.

Turns out that the head of HR didn’t like to see anything poking up above the level of the top of the cubes, nor anything outside the cubes other than slate grey tweed: the only person who could violate this rule was the admittedly artistic and very powerful head of the training department. My boss was staying late every night just to move my toque.

There’s the title of my forthcoming business book, right there:
WHO MOVED MY TOQUE.

Back to TMCM. He would show up in some of the gimme papers in Portland cafes, but the trip to Oregon sort of offset the freebie-ness of the comics themselves, so I had to give it up and start spending fifteen minutes’ pay at the comic shop for the colour issues.

While the title character himself seems to have long since gone to that Great Compost Bucket in the Sky, the comic and the aesthetic and the dream live on.

Oh Solo Espresso!

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quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?

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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?

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Japanese poop: a phrasebook

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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!

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When Giant Pacific octopi attack

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Octopus tattoo!

Metro passes along this beauty of an installment in our ongoing series When Octopi Of Various Kinds Attack. Yes indeedy, we here on the soggy left coast of the continent sure know how to welcome tourists.

By strangling them with our tentacles.

I saw a strand of red kelp drifting by. I noticed a line of white suckers running along it. Next something heavy dumped on my head. Another tentacle with delicate suckers curled in from below and pulled my mask away from my face, flooding it. I felt other tentacles squeeze the right side of my face and pull on my hood. I’d last seen my dive buddy peering into a crevice — he didn’t appear, although I turned around a couple times hoping he might take a photo. I tried to brush the octopus off my head, but he squeezed all the tighter…

The thing I like about this post most, though, is the way the diver doesn’t seem to think the attack by a Giant Pacific Octopus merits its own blog post, or really anything more vivid than a simple “and then it did this and then I did that and it let me live and then I went back down [ed. note: WHA????] and took some more pictures and they turned out well and…” The man clearly has icewater in his veins, so he should fit right in around these parts.

You just know that tattoo is going to be all over the Drive in about three weeks!

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