Today pop star Ayed broke out of the confines of banal obscurity and into the hearts and wallets of millions of screaming Japanese girls everywhere, by the proxy of the fifty or so at his concert today. Thanks to our miracle-working, fun-loving yakuza professor, Ayed got to participate in a little multi-band concert on campus today, and completely stole the show. The rest of the bands deserve credit for appearing in public with no talent at all, but deserve to be flogged for afflicting my ears with that travesty they called music. Rarely have I felt more like Ignatius than I did today.
Much good came out of the concert in terms of Japanese contacts, and I had a great evening out with thirty or so Japanese and the other Americans. It's hilarious that the Japanese love them some liquor but hold it worse than a leaky sieve on International Leaky Sieve Day; There was a girl there who got about halfway through one drink before she turned beat red and incoherent, and stayed that way the whole night off of that one drink. Aar, me mateys, no pirate rum for her.
I sort of assumed that the love of pirates was international, but it turns out to be rather localized to America, and possibly the Fifty-First State as well. Outside of that, no one knows what they say and no one particularly cares what piratey jigs and reels they sing when doing their dastardly deeds and ultimately revealing that they all have hearts of gold and pine for a lost love who may or may not be the fair maiden who they rescued as she was going down for the last time, the trials and struggles of which revelation may or may not expand into a sequel and, God willing, a trilogy. This is an interational crisis and deserves to be addressed by a UN committee; even though that is a fate I would not usually wish on anything I actually cared about, I would enjoy listening to bureaucrats debate the best way to translate "avast, ye scalliwags" into Swahili.
Speaking of Swahili, a friend e-mailed me about a Japanese Christmas celebration she heard about in New York - in a fit of multi-culti ignorance, a group of Japanese were asked to make a traditionally Japanese Christmas display, and within moments Santa ended up nailed to a cross. But what's strange about that? First you say that Santa didn't die on the cross for our sins a millenium and a half before his birth, then what? Will someone have the audacity to doubt that the Easter Bunny was born out of the side of his virgin mother to redeem mankind and save Tokyo from Godzilla? I ask you, some people just have no respect for other people's cultures.
I played Hyaku Nin Isshu today, that Hundred Poets, One Line game with the cards and the slapping and the memorization and the hoy flaven. Anyway, much to my surprise it was more fun than, say, snipe hunting, or being chased by wolverines. But wait, those aren't fun at all! Well played, Mr. Analogy, well played; you win this round, but just wait until my flying monkeys come in from back order.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
