Anyone else surprised?

... that Harry Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader?

Rare Earth

Man, I saw those guys back in '74 at the California Jam in Ontario.

I was there to see Sabbath, but they rocked the house!

Peace. Out.

Swedish Cuisine in Tokyo

Today, for fun, I went to a new restaurant. Well, a restaurant that was new to me, in any case. You get the picture.

I have some fraction of Swedish ancestry, so I Googled (Googlimashita?) "tokyo swedish restaurant", and came up with the above link'd Lilla Dalarna in Roppongi. I suppose it's no surprise to find a foreign restaurant in a neighborhood like Roppongi filled with embassies, Western-style discotheques (man, that was tough to spell), and folks from all over the world. However, I guess I was a bit surprised to find a couple Swedish restaurants with my extensive Googling.

It was overcast and periodically raining, but we all had a good time and some good food. It's only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Roppongi station on the Hibiya line, or the Tokyo Subway. Just head toward Roppongi Hills or the Azabu Police Station, if you just happen to know where that is because your friend got a parking ticket at last year's Father's Day brunch in Hiroo. I had the meatball lunch, which wasn't all that different from what you get at Ikea, but it was good. The lunch menu is reasonably priced, and you get salad, bread, and either coffee or tea with the set price. Carlsberg on tap.

Enjoy!

Denver v. Chicago

I don't think there are quite enough statistics available yet to be definitive, however is anyone surprised that Jay Cutler is struggling with Chicago and Kyle Orton is flourishing in Denver?

Orton moved to Mile High and got to air it out to some legit receivers while Cutler came back down to Earth and was given left overs and rookies, as well as a general lack of separation speed. Cutler was also welcomed to the City of Broad Shoulders with 35 sacks last season after only having to endure 11 the prior season in Denver. This season, he's already been sacked 17 times through 4 games. It's only 4 games because the Giants hit him so hard he received a concussion and was knocked out of this week's contest with Carolina, another team struggling to find anyone who can play QB.

My contention would be that the offensive line is the biggest Chicago problem. With a good line, Cutler could get back to his Denver numbers, and Forte would look much better as well.

Eating Your Veggies?

One of the dietary changes I made after moving to Japan was that I began to consume more vegetables. I wouldn't say it was a conscious decision on my part. It just came with the territory.

The title linked article makes many good points about some of the basic factors that traditionally keep Americans from eating more vegetables; convenience, freshness, taste, and cost.

It seems to me that in America, most households shop for groceries maybe once a week or so, stocking up on bulk at Costco and elsewhere to save money with volume. Then, you stuff all these groceries on a Saturday morning in your SUV and bring them home to cram them in your gigantic refrigerator. You put the frozen stuff that won't fit in the main fridge in your extra freezer (which is costing you an arm and a leg in annual electricity consumption, in case you didn't know) that you keep in the garage (Generally speaking, we don't have garages in most of Japan, although I saw that they were present in Hokkaido because of the snowfall).

In Japan, households (usually the lady of the house) shop daily or almost daily. That is driven by several factors. (Or is it the factors that are driven by the historical desire to shop daily for fresh food? I don't know.) In any case, most Japanese don't drive to work, in fact many Japanese do not own cars at all if they live in a large urban area such as the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. With no car, that means you have less ability to haul a large amount of groceries home. Taking the train to work is the most popular form of commuting, and most train stations have a grocery store inside. Thus, when commuters arrive at their home station after a day's work, they pick up a few items for dinner along with toilet paper, diapers, and maybe a bottle of shochu if it's Friday or Saturday night. This allows one to buy fresh vegetables for that evening's dinner. The grocery stores sell the veggies in much smaller portions than in the U.S. as well. For example, asparagus can be purchased in bunches as small as 4 - 6 sprigs (is sprigs the right word for asparagus?). One sprig for each family member. This addresses the issue of freshness, and also makes accommodation for the relatively small refrigerators that are made to fit in relatively small Japanese apartments and homes.

Thus, the issues of convenience (right in your home train station), freshness (buy just what you need for tonight's meal), and cost (smaller portions cost more per piece, but you aren't going to have a lot of left over wasted and thrown away when it goes bad because you didn't eat that entire 40 pound bag of broccoli you got for such a great price at Costco soon enough).

Another great advantage I believe Japan has is the variety of vegetables available and regularly used in recipes. I have eaten a lot of vegetables here that I never saw for sale back in the U.S. There are a wide variety of mushrooms here that are consumed on a regular basis in everything from soups, to ramen, to battered and served tempura style. In the U.S., you usually have the garden variety white mushroom (which you can't find here normally), and maybe some "exotic" shitake mushrooms that you don't know how to prepare anyway. In Japan, we eat a lot of seasonal vegetables as well, so you intrinsically achieve variety through the changing of the seasons. In Japan, seasonal foods are practically celebrated. They are consumed with joy and vigor and gone in weeks, to be anticipated for the next year. It's part of what makes each season or holiday time special. In the U.S., with the popularity of bulk to save time and money and the addition of lots of preservative agents and large refrigeration units, this may have an affect on the variety ultimately available to the consumer. There may not be an efficient way to distribute such a variety of vegetables across all the States, so it's more efficient for the producers and distributors to deal in only a few, hardy items that will last longer.

The societal factors of less cars per family and smaller living spaces, hence smaller refrigerators make it more practical to consume products like vegetables that rely on freshness. The variety of types and preparations make the vegetables here palatable and enjoyable, which leads to a healthier diet, less national obesity and less diabetes. This contributes to lowering the cost of national health care. So, pitch in and eat your veggies!

Happy Monday

Happy Monday!

I wanted to start the day on a positive note. It's raining here in Yokohama. Nice, cool sleeping weather. In Japan, after about the 20th of September, the weather takes a hard turn from hot to cool. It's pretty amazing how predictable the weather here seems to be. It's a relatively small piece of the Earth to predict on, however it's at least as large as California, and the TV weather there was always pretty far off the mark. If you watch the weather for L.A. on TV, but you live outside the immediate city, your weather was not all that similar to what was reported. Chicago produced similar results for suburban forecasts versus downtown forecasts. Perhaps lake effects and all, but considering the relative proximity you'd think the "professionals" would get it down pretty close to accurate. Living here, all I have to really do is ask my mother-in-law who seems to always know exactly what will happen the next day and which days of the week it will rain, etc.

The title link is to the website I use. It seems to do a fairly good job. The TV weather is kind of fun, tracking the typhoons as they roll in from the South / Southeast. We get maybe 20 typhoons each year, noted by numbers rather than names. Most hit Okinawa, the coast of China and southern Korea, but some do make it up to Kyushu, Honshu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido.

If I'm lucky, I can maybe find somewhere to watch the Monday Night Football game tomorrow morning. Bears - Packers this week, so Go Bears!

Have a great week!

Well, we're coming to the end of yet another baseball season, and things are cruising along as usual; the Yankees are in first (although with their schedule, they may end up as the wild-card), the White Sox choked up the stretch against perennial foe the Twins, and the Yokohama Baystars are still the worst team on Planet Earth. Their bullpen could simply not get any worse. They should fire all of them and pick the top 6 high school pitchers from the latest koshien tournament for next season. Bad, bad, bad.

Bust the Trusts

And then there was one...

So, United and Continental are now one company, as are Delta and Northwest. It is a reality of 2010 America that there are fewer and fewer companies for consumers to choose from. Not exactly a capitalist wonderland of choice, but perhaps the logical consequence of unregulated capitalism where survival of the fittest destroys all competition. Theoretically, the best company got the business it earned and thrived where competitors failed, right?

I would like to know what kind of position that leaves American taxpayers in as a result. It seems to me that in an industry that has been prone to catastrophic failure due to incompetent management, bankruptcy, destruction of retirement plans for its employees, and overall crappy service, we now have very few companies to choose from that are essentially "Too Big to Fail", in the parlance of the day. What happens when the new United or Delta manages themselves into the toilet, AGAIN? Does the government allow them to catastrophically fail as did Lehman Bros., indefinitely crippling air travel in the U.S. and elsewhere? Or does the American taxpayer once again get stuck with the bill for bailing out another huge multinational corporation that fucked up on its own?

It just seems to me that we are allowing this to happen again and again by not enforcing anti-trust laws and not disapproving mergers that leave consumers with no choice and taxpayers holding the bag.

Oh, and if you read the UK Guardian portion of the title link, you can also worry along with shareholders about whether or not United's tulip logo will be lost to history. Oh yeah, and if you have time to care, maybe more job losses. You know, whatever.

Jason Linkins

I do enjoy Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post quite a bit. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from this past weekend's liveblog of the Sunday morning talking heads:

"He also thinks reconciliation would be a ruinous tactic, but I'll point out once again: PASSING BILLS THROUGH RECONCILIATION HAS NEVER EVER PROVEN TO BE A RUINOUS TACTIC! Laws have been passed through reconciliation plenty of times. I made note of four in this here liveblog. The laws may have led to to someone's political ruin, but the reconciliation process did not. Know why? Because only Beltway wonks and media types take that point of view of reconciliation. Out in the real United States of America, if you tell a person that a bill passed 51 to 49, they say, "YEP. THAT'S EXACTLY HOW THE SENATE WORKS, LEARNED IT IN JUNIOR HIGH."

"Rendell and Schwarzenegger say that the GOP will have to compromise at the health care summit, because otherwise the ancient Celts will come over Hadrian's Wall and impose a single payer system on the Gauls, or something."

"And seriously, why is Tiger Woods apologizing to me? I don't care if he wants to plow every IHOP waitress from here to Saskatoon! This is a free country! He can do what he likes. His wife should probably leave him, but if she doesn't want to, that's fine too. I guess what I am saying is that I have lived a full and rich life of not giving a tinned shit about what Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren do in their homes and in their lives, and I think that Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren should, with all deliberate haste, retreat to their previous state of not requiring me to have to confront their private lives."

Too funny.

Why Indeed.

This is an article about a subject that I have spent some time thinking about in recent months/years. I cannot fathom the American voting public at times. They are a mystery to me, and I do not imagine anyone will be hiring me to run their political campaign any time soon.

Not Exactly How I Would Have Advertised

If I Had a Hammer...

Dateline Riverside...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: Monday, January 11, 2010
Contact: Lt. Chuck Griffitts, Dayshift Watch Commander
Phone: (951) 353-7900

Home Invasion ends with suspect arrested
Juvenile Male subdued by victim’s roommate

Riverside, CA -- On Monday January 10, 2010, a little before 1 o’clock in the morning, Officers responded to the 11100 block of Norwood Ave in the City of Riverside answering a phone call reporting a home invasion robbery.

At the scene, Officers learned that a juvenile male tried to steal a car that was parked in the driveway of a single family residence. The lone juvenile male could not get the car started so he broke into the residence through a window and woke up the sleeping homeowner at knife point.

The suspect ordered the victim into the kitchen and demanded car keys and money while threatening him with a knife. The victim told the juvenile male that he did not have and money and as a result received a cut on the hand by the male juvenile. The victim sustained a minor wound and was eventually treated and released.

The victim’s roommate, a carpenter, heard the commotion and came out of his bedroom. Seeing what was going on and fearing for the victim’s safety, he hit the male juvenile in the back of the head with a hammer. The male juvenile was detained by the victim and his roommate until Police arrived on scene. The knife was recovered at the scene. The male juvenile was transported to Riverside Community Hospital for treatment of the head wound, was treated and released for booking. Officers booked the male juvenile into Riverside Juvenile Hall for home invasion robbery.

The arrested male's identification is being withheld due to his age; he is described only as a male juvenile, 17 years from the City of Riverside.

There is no further information available at this time.

Happy New Year

This is a typical front door decoration (o-kazari) for the New Year 2010 or Heisei 22, as the Japanese have traditionally recorded the year of the current Emperor.


As I have previously blogged, the Colonel's KFC is a frequent Christmas Eve meal, and our family was no exception getting a bucket to go this year. Inside were some fun stickers with which we decorated the calendar appropriately, I think:


Yeah, I don't think I'm going in there.

Me and my sister assembling the kagami mochi decoration for the front entrance. Looks more like a Dalek or a mochi helmet to me, but who am I to say?


Happy New Year!