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AEON Soundtrack

March 19, 2008 at 12:55 AM No comments

I’m working a few days this and next week at Chiba AEON, where Blanchard works. It’s kind of fun to work at a school like this again, just for a few days. Plus I already know most of the staff and stuff at Chiba school, so it’s easy to get down to business.

Speaking of business.

This afternoon after my first class I was standing in the lobby talking to students and realized that the music playing over the speakers as background music was It’s Business Time by Flight of the Conchords. Yeah. It was playing on the radio. In Japan. Is it even really a real song, like for the radio? Pretty awesome though. I thought at first that maybe someone had their iPod hooked up to the speaker, but nope – it was directly from the satellite radio thing that all the AEON schools use. I then had the song stuck in my head all day. Oooh.

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If McDonald’s Japan didn’t kill you before…

March 17, 2008 at 2:38 AM 6 comments

Wow. You may remember me telling you about the ridiculous Mega sandwiches that McDonald’s Japan served up for a limited time. I also blogged about it, and still have regular hits from Google Image Search for that post. Anyway, apparently McDonald’s wasn’t satisfied with it’s last raid on Japanese hearts, and is now preparing another wave of attack. But they’re not just coming with their same old mega artery clogger strategies; they’ve got some new firepower this time around.

Behold, the next wave in McDonald’s Japan’s tactics to sink this island nation:

メガマフィン、メガマック、メガてりやき - Mega Muffin, Mega Mac, Mega Teriyaki

Yeah that’s right. 3 sandwiches all coming out for a limited time soon. The press release page is here all in Japanese. The official Mega Mac site is supposed to be updated tomorrow. Let me summarize the press release a bit for you. First, this purple text is a semi-translated version of the headlines at the top.

New McDonald’s Campaign
– Morning, day, and night – Mega Happiness all day –
Limited time only, from 4/4/08 (Fri) to 5/8 (Thu)
Morning (Mega Muffin), Day (Mega Mac), Night (Mega Teriyaki)
The Dream Team of 3 Megas!
~ A new Mega in the morning, and the Mega Mac finally joins the regular menu ~


Mega Happiness (メガな幸せ)?! Are we joining a cult? This sounds horrifying. Yet somehow drawing. So basically they are offering different Mega sandwiches depending on the time of day, probably with the hope that someone will be so fat and retarded that they’ll eat Mega burgers for every meal of the day, which I believe is exactly what turned the Gremlins from furry baby monsters into the huge creepy monsters singing New York New York. And since these regular but sporadic Mega Mac assaults can only do so much, they’ve also decided to add the normal Mega Mac to the regular menu after this whole campaign is over. It will probably never go away.

The bad boy that started it all, the Mega Mac is like a double Big Mac, with 4 beef patties. The Mega Teriyaki, which came out in the 2nd wave of Mega in June 2007, is two pork patties covered in teriyaki sauce. The new weaponry this time around, the Mega Muffin, is the Egg McMuffin on crack. It’s two pork patties, an egg, and bacon on an English muffin. Sure it’s not as horrible as it could have been (more egg, hash browns, patties of butter, babies), but this has got to be almost comparable to that thing Burger King tried to pull off years ago, the Ultimate Omelette Sandwich or whatever.

I love the part in the press release where they go on about this stupid campaign: This time, we’re not only reviving the Mega Mac and Mega Teriyaki, but to answer the many requests to “be able to eat Mega anytime,” we are debuting the Mega Muffin in the breakfast hours. What people are requesting these beasts? Average retail price for the Mega Muffin is 290, Mega Mac is 380, and Mega Teriyaki is 360. That’s just the sandwich, not the set. The US dollar has dropped to about 1 to 100 yen, so the conversion’s pretty self-explanatory.

I guess these aren’t quite as deadly as the Mega Tamago I ate, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be eating any of these regardless.

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Crazy old woman

March 11, 2008 at 9:35 PM No comments

I was sitting in the Dotour coffee shop this evening eating a sandwich and flipping through a rirekisho-writing guide, and I notice this old lady had sat down across from me. She had some crazy hair going on. At first it just looked like a bun, only much larger. After looking up the second time, I realized there was far too much nasty gray hair to be just a bun. It was more like a Marge Simpson beehive that had fallen backwards on its own weight, rotted, and turned into cobwebs. The size of the hair was most definitely bigger than her head, giving her an Aliens-like silhouette. So big deal, old woman with a crazy hairdo.

A few minutes later, she starts cackling to herself. I have no idea what was happening. This was not a kindly old woman chuckle. It was an evil witch cackle. She was sitting completely alone, not reading anything, no cell phone out, nothing funny in the coffee shop to have prompted her laughing. The only things on her table were tea, toast, and an ashtray. I guess she remembered something funny? Or she was completely insane. A few minutes later, she starts doing it again, while just kind of staring forward as if listening to an invisible comedian. This random laughing happened for the next 5 or 10 minutes before I finally left. At one point I almost laughed myself, but decided it was best to keep quiet for fear of A) her putting a hex on me, since she looked like she could have had a witch license or B) there actually being an imaginary friend, who would proceed to beat me up for being insensitive to his disability.

Then to top things off, I was at the grocery store right after and saw giant tongue man again! I almost bumped right into him and was about one breath short of accidentally screaming “HOLYCRAPYOUHAVEAMASSIVEFREAKYTONGUEDUDE!” and embarrassing both him and I in the middle of the produce aisle.

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Lion-O

March 1, 2008 at 10:51 PM 14 comments

Old people are always complaining about the fashion and style of younger people. I guess I’m slowly becoming one of those old people, since such fashions and styles are increasingly annoying me. OK, that’s a lie – things like that have always annoyed me, but I didn’t have a reason to blog about them much before. I walk down the street and think to myself how mind-numbingly awful that girl’s hat is, how gyaru yamanba fashion needs to stay dead, how ugly girls with a lot of make-up and fake tans are still ugly, and how men shouldn’t ever wear pants that tight. I guess a lot of this has to do with me being in Japan, where fashion seems to be multiplied by a factor of 100, usually for the worse.

You may have heard me mention Chickenheads in the past, which is the term* for the young Japanese/Asian hairstyle that is so popular these days. It’s easily recognizable by its volume, usually brown or orange color, resemblance to a cartoon character’s hair, and the DB-ish life form hanging under it. The officially documented scientific makeup of a Chickenhead hairstyle is 15% hair, 75% hair wax or spray, and the remaining 10% being a combination of cigarette smoke, sweat, tears, small woodland creatures, and man-juice. I did a Google Image Search for “asian hairstyle” and found some examples on the first page. Rather than pollute my server with more Chickenhead pictures than absolutely necessary, here’s a link to another blog with a whole bunch of them. And here’s another page with even sadder examples.

The Chickenhead style is often used in conjunction with the Asian mullet and/or long, pointy haircicles down the side disguised as sideburns, even though upon closer inspection it’s obvious that they’re not connected to the sides of the face. I didn’t have a name for these dangling scrotums of hair, but let’s call them fakeburns from now on.

This was actually supposed to be just a quick picture post, but I got on a bit of a rant. Today I’m here to show you a picture of a slightly more rare Japanese hairstyle, called the mane or Lion-O**. It’s a distant cousin of the Chickenhead, a more horrible and evolved form. It requires many more years of hair-growing and about 20 times the amount of bad dye and product to correctly form this forest of follicles. As the name(s) imply, it can look like a lion’s mane, surrounding the entire head and even flowing down the back, as seen in today’s ridiculous example that I saw at Tsudanuma station:

津田沼駅でのライオン・オー

* I might have created this term. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. Please spread.
** Usage copyright 2008 TheLeong.com

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Lindbergh Eager Achievers Program

February 29, 2008 at 2:26 AM No comments

Question.

Think back to this day 1 year ago. What did you do? Have a vague idea? Well, if so, you’re a dirty liar because there was no this day last year. It’s Leap Day.

Happy Leap Day liar.

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Planbee

February 27, 2008 at 11:43 PM 1 comment

Found out tonight that the textbook job didn’t come through. I was definitely a little surprised when I read the e-mail, but I guess that’s how it goes. Oh well. Instead of letting myself get too disappointed about it, I’m totally kicking into full gear to find a new, real, full time job. I’m ready. If anyone has any leads, let me know.

Moving back to the US is a consideration of course, but I think I’d like to stay here if I can.

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