The only thing better than Devo suing McDonalds would be Devo OWNING McDonalds.

This is quite excellent: Tokyo Mango's Interview with the Dalai Lama's Youngest Brother

The money quote:

"And then, on the other side of the scale, there's Steven Seagal. Oh my god. I met him when he came here. He was wearing a funny coat, a Chinese brocade, funny trousers, and funny shoes with that ponytail. I asked him, "Why do you dress in such a peculiar manner?" He didn't say anything. He's arrogant, and pretends to be a Tibetan reincarnate. But why? He's a strange man."

Dissed by the Dalai Lama's brother. Dude...

(via cossack)

Sometimes he does this impish face that totally does NOT look like him, but is cute nonetheless.

I despise myspace, but that's where this jam is hosted: Violent and Crazy

Is this the Femmes' answer to this?

When setting the first foundation of a Thai house, it is a common practice to hire a Brahman priest and hold a blessing ceremony. Enter Ajarn Chachawan (Ajarn is an honorific title equivalent to sensei in Japanese and pretty much nothing in English), pictured on the left in the photo below. He was also the announcer/master of ceremonies who did the morning ceremony for our wedding two years ago. He will also be supervising the installation of an animistic "spirit house" on our property this month or next. Truth be told, he's pretty much our go-to guy for all our Brahman needs.

Clockwise from Ajarn Chachawan: Mother-in-law, yours truly, worker, Nam, worker in red shirt, worker in OSHA-approved safety flip flops (standard worker footwear here; they even weld and walk on roof support beams in them).

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The shot below was taken from the rear of our property (marked with wooden border) toward the pond and front of the (then future) house.

You can see the two foundations we just planted held in place with tripodal wooden supports. Tied to those foundations with holy-ish string are items of various significance such as banana tree branches and a woven reed fish trap with coins (Thai Baht) in it (we were warned not to put a lot of money in the trap since it would be stolen in the night. And of course it was.). In the holes for the foundations, under the two-piece (tower in basket) wrought iron assembly, we also placed items of various significance which we purchased/gathered a day earlier. This included a specific kind of unhusked "new" rice (that I popped over the stove like popcorn), leaves of a religiously significant species of tree (from a nice old lady's yard - she also gave us seeds to plant our own trees with, but we lost them), special gold/silver/bronze painted bricks and cedarlike stakes that we purchased at a Buddhist goods store, plus a few other things that escape my memory (at one point I had the list we used for shopping but I lost this as well).

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Previous Our New House Entries:
Part 1 - Picking a Plot

I don't even have time to watch Zato anymore, but I love these graphics and wanted to continue from where I left off a couple years ago in Japan.

All my previous Zatoichi posts.

A couple of friends let me know that this site is being listed as an "attack site" in Firefox 3 and at least one antivirus program (Avast). This is not without reason. I found a hijacking script in my main index page today. I promptly deleted it, but am not sure how the script got there in the first place. I've taken steps to prevent it from happening again, but this is just another reason I'm leaving Dreamhost.

In the meantime, I apologize if this problem affected anybody, and this is NOT AN ATTACK SITE (anymore, admittedly).

I wonder how long it will take for FF3 to unlist me as an attack site now. According to this page, "The list of known attack sites is maintained by the community and updated regularly." Hope that works both ways, for removing attack site status as well as adding it. Anybody know? (hint hint)

Here is the warning message appearing in Firefox 3: View image

India is so X-TREEM, doodie!

See:

I get this strange urge to slap people who sing I am a rock out loud*... It triggers my "anti-mime" reflex on some primal level.

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* Yes, this happens with surprising regularity in both Japan and Thailand (I hear that Scarborough Fair is the more popular track in China though.

So you might have noticed that I don't talk about my job here much, and there are several reasons for that. It's mostly because I've read a lot of people blog about teaching and I personally found it less than enthralling, and that was before I was teaching. My not blogging about teaching definitely is not an indication that I don't enjoy it... (After writing the previous passage, I realize that the only thing less enthralling than reading about English teaching on a blog is reading about why an English teacher who blogs doesn't blog about work.)

Anyhow, today I had the hardest time figuring out what a student was trying to write about for an in-class assignment on what he had done for summer vacation. The words that caught my eyes on the page were "I went home and bred my niece." Haha, I thought, and pointed out the mistake. He immediately corrected the sentence to "I went home and breed my niece."

I told him to look up the word in the dictionary, which he did, and then turned quite red with embarrassment. Great, I thought, now I'll finally figure out what he was trying to say. He corrected the sentence for the second time, and this time it said, "I went home and breeds my niece." By this time I was feeling really quite sorry for his niece and decided to drop it altogether; I corrected his sentence to "I went home and took care of my niece."

I'm still a bit unclear about what he was trying to say, though.

There - I've gone and blogged about English teaching, and the world might even be a bit better for it. Watch your nieces, though.

New Skylines at the Port of Long Beach. Someone totally needs to cut a hole in the fence and Swede another episode to the 2 FRIGGIN' FAST, 2 FARGIN' FURIOUS universe.

Is there anything more annoying than the jet set expert on (pick any foreign country)? I just read a guide to eating sushi by a self-proclaimed successful author who visited Japan a few times and was probably taken to nice places to eat, and now seems to be a full-blown master of sushi, sake, and Japanese table manners (among MANY other things).

Shabure, shabure, Mr. Roboto.

Pretty much every foreigner in Thailand on a non-immigrant visa is supposed to report into immigration every 90 days. This may be in the form of a letter, except if the immigration officer tells you to report in person (or send a representative from your organization in). Of course, all the teachers at our school got stuck with the latter method, and the girl who usually goes in for us (we have to report to immigration in Nong Khai, on the border with Laos) was busy, so a coworker and I went in a university car. Nam also came along with us to help clear any snags that might come up (none did, luckily).

(My mom came out all the way from the states yesterday to stay with us and the baby for a month and a half.)

(We have a new nanny, who just started coming over last week.)

So we had to leave the baby at home all day with my mom who speaks no Thai and our nanny who speaks no English, and it was the longest time Nam has ever spent away from the baby. So you can probably guess the recurring topic of conversation in the car, three hours there and three hours back.

Of course, we got back home and everything was fine. Mom is still mom, nanny is still nanny, and baby is still unconcerned about the rising price of oil, so all is well.

This is a cloud generated from every title of every post in my archives:

I noticed yesterday that Max's eyes are turning brown. Or maybe it was just the lighting. Until now, his eyes looked black...

Yeah, maybe it was just the lighting.

This sounds interesting.

As a sidenote, Thailand is more "green" in some ways than first world countries. For instance, they sell B5 diesel here at major gas station chains - B5 is 5% biodiesel. And Hi-octane gasoline (95) is all but gone around these parts, supplanted by its E20 (20% methanol) equivalent. Whether this is truly better for the planet in the long run or not is up for debate. It sure isn't better for some older cars!

I met a fellow who has made a small-scale biodiesel production facility in his garage; this is an area I am interested in.

I also want to try building a solar chicken barbecue array - as cheaply as possible. Maybe I'll attempt an Archimedes' death ray out of bits of broken mirror.

Events
(most recent first)

* 2008-05-12 20:48:53 : back_up
* 2008-05-12 20:26:41 : down
* 2008-05-01 08:47:43 : back_up
* 2008-05-01 08:23:32 : down
* 2008-04-23 16:44:38 : back_up
* 2008-04-23 16:23:35 : down
* 2008-04-23 11:04:06 : back_up
* 2008-04-23 09:42:43 : down
* 2008-04-23 07:25:46 : back_up
* 2008-04-23 06:22:13 : down
* 2008-04-22 21:58:23 : back_up
* 2008-04-22 21:38:37 : down
* 2008-04-15 09:32:48 : back_up
* 2008-04-15 09:07:26 : down
* 2008-04-14 20:01:38 : back_up
* 2008-04-14 19:15:55 : down
* 2008-04-13 19:27:38 : back_up
* 2008-04-13 18:33:51 : down
* 2008-04-12 10:52:25 : back_up
* 2008-04-12 10:20:14 : down
* 2008-04-09 15:04:10 : back_up
* 2008-04-09 13:55:31 : down
* 2008-04-07 07:28:48 : back_up
* 2008-04-07 04:49:12 : down
* 2008-04-06 16:21:53 : back_up
* 2008-04-06 15:56:56 : down
* 2008-04-06 12:47:18 : back_up
* 2008-04-06 12:24:23 : down
* 2008-04-03 23:34:56 : back_up
* 2008-04-03 23:13:55 : down
* 2008-04-03 16:07:12 : back_up
* 2008-04-03 15:23:11 : down
* 2008-04-03 13:44:23 : back_up
* 2008-04-03 13:21:35 : down
* 2008-04-02 16:10:30 : back_up
* 2008-04-02 15:45:28 : down
* 2008-04-02 13:13:02 : back_up
* 2008-04-02 12:46:49 : down

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Between this, the big Dreamhost billing escapade, and general site sluggishness, I'm thinking of jumping ship and already adjusted my billing plan to monthly payments in anticipation (when oh when will I have time to do this?)

It is such a pain in the ass to have to change webhosts again... Perhaps some company will figure out how to do it right some day...

The rest of my uptime reports are saved for posterity after the jump:

So in Japan-speak, a bunch of us ran headfirst into a cultural wall yesterday, and it was a rather bracing slap in the face after having conquered so many other challenges in the semi-distant past...

We went to the sports college next to my university, most famous for being the alma mater of the "Jackie Chan of Thailand" (Tony Jaa), in order to start a thrice-weekly regimen of swimming in their Olympic-sized pool. So we paid 40 Baht (adult price, about $1.20) admission fee, and were promptly rejected entry int o the pool for "not wearing swimming suits." But the thing is, we were wearing swimming suits. So it ended up being a huge argument with us on one side showing mesh liners and insisting that these were, indeed, pieces of swimwear, and some hick-ass PE teacher on the the other side insisting that they were not (I'm convinced this backward inaka motherfucker thinks that mesh liners are just built-in underwear.).

Anyways.

We fought the law, and the law declared that only skin-tight swimsuits are suitable for use in this particular pool, i.e., the law won. Fags. What kind of sickos want to see my fat ass in a speedo, anyway?

P.S. I must admit it feels kind of dirty cursing on the same page I post the baby's photos. I guess I'll just have to pretend he isn't looking at me.

The title basically sums it up. I think it's really stupid that Nvidia hasn't fixed the TV output issues for several years, through tens of driver upgrades. Anyway, I tore my hair out screwing around with the Nvidia Control Panel after upgrading to the newest GeForce drivers (175.16) completely killed my TV output. Downgrading to version 169.21 drivers restored output, but it was - you guessed it! - frustratingly devoid of any color.

I tried so many things to fix this, I don't even want to remember it, so to make a long story short, if you have similar problems, try the hack described on these pages:

• nVidia Graphics Card TV Out in Black and White Solution


• Nvidia Black and white TV / S-Video out Problem. Solution.

Did you know you can download PDFs for and print out your own Monopoly money from the Hasbro website?

I have no idea why just the idea of doing so appeals to me so much; I don't even own the game and haven't played for years (there is only one true way, though: Fines for Go to Jail go into the pot; free parking takes it all).

Please put the resources you are spending on stupid marketing schemes (like the special invitations in my inbox this morning) into making your web hosting more reliable.

That is all.

5/27: Japanese customs dish out free dope

5/28: Japanese customs reunited with lost dope

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I was just thinking:

1,000,000 Yen / 142 grams = 7,042 Yen / gram

Bob Marley is spinning counter-clockwise in his grave...

This is one of the stranger sites I've come across for a while: http://manbabies.com

I did, however, find a calibrated vegetable scale at the big marketplace in downtown Mahasarakham for 750 Baht (can weigh up to 15 kgs., green-colored 5 kgs. model was 500 Baht). To this I attached a baby bath chair with a couple plastic ties and some stiff Japanese cord (I know, I know this is just a step above duck taping, but it seems to be working out OK).

craigslist rocks. One of the things I miss most about Japan is Yahoo auctions. Thailand, or for that matter, most of the rest of the world simply has too fiendish a mentality for any kind of shopping/auction system employing the honor system to work.

3800 grams as of yesterday morning (it's past 1 in the morning June 1, 2008 now).