TheLeong.com

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

I guess winter’s almost ready to end here in Japan. About time. Last week it was pretty warm for a few days, then the weekend had mad crazy wind. It was cold again, then today we had some of the heaviest rainstorms I’ve seen in a while – and they lasted only a few hours. And I think the super winds are back now. The rest of the week is supposed to have highs in the 50’s.

I feel like I started this entry with a bunch of ideas, but they’re all gone now. Uhh… Well I guess that’s all for now.

Oh but one thing! This year’s かなまら祭り(Iron Penis Festival) is on April 6th. Anyone going? I thought for some reason it was in late March, but I checked and it’s officially on the first Sunday of April every year. Also checked this site. Steve Cochrane will be in Japan that week, and Macie is coming as well, so those two will probably enjoy seeing the weirdest freaking event on the planet. Need I remind you of last year? I’ll have to think of some other weird stuff to show those two while they’re here. They’ll probably be here right as the sakura bloom, which is perfect. And of course Namja Town is on the menu.

Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I really want to go back to the Kanamara Festival, since the old Confederate guy with the dog might attack me or something.

Japanese food was for centuries renowned for its beautiful aesthetic values and sensitive emphasis on the four seasons. The heavy use of fresh fish, vegetables, and tofu made it a truly healthy cuisine. With the introduction of various Western fast foods, such as McDonald’s, over the past few decades, the diet and eating culture of the Japanese has changed dramatically. Last year, McDonald’s Japan introduced a sandwich called the Mega Mac, which had double the meat of the classic Big Mac. This sandwich was not sold throughout the US, but it because somewhat popular in Japan, perhaps due in part to the novelty of eating a “huge-ass sandwich.”

And my god, McDonald’s Japan is at it again.

This time, they didn’t bring back the Mega Mac, but its two cousins -the Mega Tamago (egg) and the Mega Tomato. While they have only three beef patties compared to the Mega Mac’s ridiculous 4, they are still massive sandwiches in their own right. The Tamago has a fried egg, like what they have on the Egg McMuffin. The Tomato has, obviously, a slice of tomato, which seems like a step down from another piece of meat, but who knows. And the Tomato costs more than the Tamago! And did I mention that both sandwiches also have two strips of bacon? I’m pretty sure that if you wanted to have a heart attack immediately, you could probably eat two Mega Tamago burgers and call it a day.

That’s from the official website. The sandwiches were just released today, and just like the Mega Mac, are a limited menu item. I was going to blog about these yesterday after seeing the huge posters, but it was pointed out to me by former blogger Nick Roberts that it wouldn’t be a real blog without first-hand experience. I’d never even tried the Mega Mac, but I had to try one of these new beasts. I took the challenge. Behold tonight’s dinner:

You can clearly see the beef, egg, cheese, and bacon all piled up in what is disguised as a sandwich but is really a big tower of grease. It doesn’t taste that bad, but the volume is killer. All I had eaten today was a stale blueberry bagel, then had this monstrosity for dinner. I ate it all, but couldn’t finish my drink. It was also pretty impossible to keep the entire thing together after two or three bites. They need like a skewer or something to keep it all stacked right. Now, I can eat a lot, but I think the density of this burger and the fact that I ate it in less than 10 minutes did me in. I felt like death walking out of McDonald’s. I may have defeated the Mega Tamago, but it definitely did it’s damage.

Oh yeah, instead of the thousand island dressing, they use spicy mayonnaise-kind of stuff like they used to use on the McChicken here. That part was good.