michael lambe's scrapbook

So one of my friends has become a manwhore (although he likes to call himself a “gigolo” in the erroneous belief this makes it sound cool). My friend swore me to secrecy, so let’s refer to him as “Pierrot” to preserve his good name in society (he’s a bit of a clown see). “Where do you meet these poor women?” I asked him. “In bars.” says Pierrot “Divorced women between the ages of 35 and 40 with good jobs. I’m providing a service to the community…”

Ironically (ironically?), Pierrot is also looking to start a whole new career as a part-time priest doing weddings on weekends. The Japanese really like the whole white dress, church organ, traipsing up the aisle, romantic atmos of your western-style wedding but they don’t really give two hoots for religion of any sort (generally) so there’s this huge market for western-style weddings but not enough actual priests. For this reason some enterprising (if not entirely honest) types have started to cash in on this by dressing any old white guy in some vestments and calling him a priest. You can get ￥15,000 per wedding apparently (as compared with the ￥10,000 Pierrot receives for his other – ahem! – services).

What some people will do to avoid working for a living…

Well, that’s enough filth and hypocrisy for one day. Why not click over to Rik Abel’s blog where he is starting a whole new blogging “uberniche”. What you do is you ask him to film himself rollerblading around a particular location in London or Cambridge and then he goes and does just that and puts the video on his blog! What could be marvellouser?!

Rik, after having convinced me to post our conversation yesterday was good enough to send me a link to this article.

Crikey.

I went for a walk in the rain yesterday (safely sheltered under my 80 cm wide monster-brolly) and came across this sign (left) by the canal. It amused me so I took a picture of it for you. It seems to be a depiction of the great celestial dog-turd in the sky. An inspiration for all pooches everywhere to boldly do their doo-doo whereever they do do doo-doo.

Anyway, the last week or so has been fairly relaxed because it’s time for the mid-term tests, so not much teaching. I had a nice chat with Rik Abel the other night and he told me to sign up for this National Blog Posting Month thingy but I got completely the wrong end of the stick (apparently I am “quite retarded”) and accidentally signed up for this instead…..

And then I thought, “Well, why not give it a go?” Now in order to finish a decent sized novel (first draft) in 30 days I have to write at least 4,000 words a day. Research is obviously out of the question so it has to be something very pull-out-of-arseable indeed. Anne Kobayashi writes: “i think the blog is great. you should just write a whole book about yourself”. I thought about that, but then if I did, it would be either a) very boring or b) it would be too interesting and get me into a lot of trouble. I went on a book buying splurge the other day and invested in a couple of Neil Gaiman books “Neverwhere” and “Smoke and Mirrors” and “The Years Best Fantasy and Horror” so that’s probably the sort of direction I’m going to go in… Just trying to psyche myself up for the big push now. Anyway, if you want me for anything during the month of November, forget it. I’m busy.

MUSIC!
Now for the longest time I was thinking that this cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” was by Ben Harper. “Fair play too ya, Ben,” I thought. But it’s not. It’s Jeffrey Gaines. Who the heck is Jeffrey Gaines? I don’t know but he’s quite good. As Hyon Ju nicely points out his hair makes him look like the Incredible Hulk (which only makes me like him more).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/o7WtavVdBCk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I thought someone might want to see what an autumn rice field looks like.This is in fact what an autumn rice field looks like. I took this picture with my mobile phone a couple of weeks ago in Yamashina. I’ve been teaching part-time at a company there for the last 18 months or so. Then the other day I got this (out-of-the-blue) mail:

Hello Mike,

I’ve got a bad news for you…

Eikosha will stop English lessons this month, so

25th will be the last lesson.

I hope this would not affect your income so badly.

Emi

Which, although the financial thing is no big deal, it was just a bit of pocket money really, does seem you know a little odd and sudden and, without an explanation, kind of rude. So I asked why. And after a few days of silence I asked Emi if she had received my mail asking why. Then I got this one:

Hello, Mike

The reson is …I am not sure, but

Mr. Akitsu had thought the lessons would be 1year or 1 and half

from the beginning, so may be he thought now is the time to stop lessons.

Emi

Thing is, though he may have thought that, he never mentioned it to me. Which I think qualifies him as a rude bastard, don’t you?

Well, I don’t feel like blogging today. But my mate Rik Abel has started blogging again, and he’s wildly intelligent and stuff, so read his instead until I pull my socks up again. The link is to the right of this page under the aptly named “Links”.

First thing today; there’s a link here to a rather swish “greenmyapple” campaign for making compootas a bit more enviroment/children-friendly. They are full of nasty chemicals see. Click here to see what it’s about:　http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/about.html

They have a bunch of fun-looking activities there like designing your own T-shirts and making videos and what-not, but for those of us with less time to kill you can just do the 2-minute-send-a-campaign-letter-thing.

The same goes for this stop illegal logging campaign: http://write-a-letter.greenpeace.org/70

Rik Abel has requested more pictures of “food and bars”, so here’s where I went last night. Very cheap and very tasty 将月　(Shougetsu) which sits on Mikage Doori just east of Higashioji Doori and is super popular with University Students (it’s that cheap/tasty combo see). What do they serve there? お好み焼き (okonomiyaki – “stuff you liked fried”). Watch out for those kanji if you are in Japan – could be the most important kanji you get to learn. Here’s a reminiscence. A long time ago, in Fukushima I bumped into two aquaintances on the street one night. One was a large, loud, obnoxious American ( and thus very popular with the ladies… why is that always so?) named Thad and the other was a disenchanted (and vaguely-fancying-Thad) artistic type named Carrie Van Horn, and I said “Where are you two off to then?” And they said “We are going to eat “Japanese Pizza”. Wanna come?” and I thought: “Great! Pizza!” and got all excited (I love pizza see) and went with them and found to my intense disappointment I was eating this weird eggy thing covered in mayonnaise and fishflakes. With Americans.

The moral of this story is: don’t be close minded about food. Okonomiyaki is egg heaven on the tongue. There all kinds and varieties; Hiroshima-style, Osaka-style, Kyoto-style, Tokyo’s モダン焼き　(Modern Yaki) – it doesn’t matter, they’re all good. If you can – eat it. Here’s a site where you can get a recipe: http://www.japan-guide.com/r/e100.html but basically, it’s just eggs, flour and chopped cabbage and whatever else you feel like sticking in there (hence the name).

A couple of years ago I took my sister, Christina, to Hiroshima and ordered three servings of Hiroshima-yaki for myself, herself, and John ( herself’s better half) and as I was getting a bit miffed about doing all of the ordering all of the time, I decided to get my revenge by having my sister’s version stuffed with natto (basically rotten beans). And she loved it. But she didn’t like tofu… or sushi… What’s with that?

This is what we had last night, the hand of the waiter is ladling liberal servings of okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise on top. I had いか (“ika” – squid) in mine.

The final touch, a topping of dried bonito fish flakes. They come alive in the heat and wave around suggestively at you…

Finally, (because we fat pigs) we tried something new. The menu read オムのっけそば (Omnokkesoba), what could this mean? I surmised it might be a sort of オムライス (“Om-rice” – basically an omlette stuffed with stir-fried rice and usually topped with ketchup) style thing, only instead of rice inside the omlette, fried soba noodles! And I was right. And was it good?

Yep.

First off: my mate Rik is officially a genius. Click here:
http://rik.typepad.com/blog/2004/04/norwegian_bluet.html

Also if you haven’t seen Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride” yet, you should. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/corpse_bride/
It’s a lot of fun. I especially liked the puppets with the voices of Christopher Lee (Christopher Lee! – What a chap!) and Albert Finney. But I shan’t tell you which ones they are, ‘cos half the fun is in the guessing.

Here, we’ve finally had some nice weather. So I took the opportunity to take a stroll down to the river yesterday evening and take pictures of some spring flowers along the way.

There’s something very calming about looking at flowers…


These pictures aren’t half bad considering they were taken with my phone in fading light.

See more below…