Archive for December, 2004


Yep, this is New Year time and a few gaijin got together for a fight. One bullet – yes, just one – was fired in the altercation, with fragments of that one bullet hurting three passers-by. From the Mainichi article:

“I really can’t believe that people were attacked in the middle of Shibuya in this bright year-end atmosphere,” a 24-year-old female store employee in the area said.

Yeah, my PC is toast. The hard drive has failed about a million times over the past week and I only got half my wares hobbling along. And that’s with my specialized HDD massage (industry term ;-) ) – smacking the machine against the desk a couple of times and seeing what happens.

The part that really ticks me off is that the little home-made database I made to spit out Journal and Event pages for easy upload to the site is in stasis. Hmmm. I’m gonna have to investigate PostNuke or some other content ware so I don’t have to rely on an aging PC with a dickey drive.

Another apparent suicide pact with two ladies aged around 30 dying of asphyxiation after burning briquettes in a rented car just off an expressway (Mainichi article).

In another story a mother and two girls drowned after their car dove into the sea at a port in Hokkaido. Police are looking into whether this is an accident or a murder-suicide by the mother (Mainichi article).

According to a Mainichi report, two high-school boys leapt to their death from an apartment block on Tuesday afternoon. There is no obvious connection between the boys as they lived in different areas and went to different schools. Is this another Internet suicide pact?

The scene….
You slept in and are five hours late. Hell, you better call the police and make something up. You have got to think quick, and come up with an excuse in the next five seconds!! It needs to be good, damned good or it’s your job. Your brain freezes and you grasp at the first thought that comes into your head. Then the fateful words escape…. “Four foreigners abducted me….”

Bwahahahahahahahaha!

Read the whole sorry story on Mainichi – the best source for dross in Japan.

It is amazing how you can turn your computer into a cash-machine – literally. Read the article on Mainichi – it should get a wry smile out of you.

First day madness and 200,000 have been snapped up and it wasn’t enough!! Sony says they’ll ship out another 500,000 units by year end. If you think that’s big Nintendo expects to have 2.8 million DS units shipped by year end.

Yes, we’re all going mad for mobile gaming. You can Google News “PSP” here.

Whatever you do, don’t complain about the gyudon

I love a good beef bowl. There’s a place ten minutes walk from my house that I hook into when I’m off to the Internet cafe to do some midnight work on this site. A tender boiled beef and onion mix with some soy on rice…. mmmm, mmmm! Almost all the customers are guys and it looks like they’re doing the same thing – getting fueled up for some night work. I’ve seen hosts, taxi-drivers, programmers and all sorts.

Anyway, according to a recent Mainichi article, back in September, some guy who whined about the service at one beef bowl place, received some personal service from the management. The boss went to the guy’s home and stabbed him to death! The boss was arrested yesterday.

It’s macabre and reminds me of such films as Eat the Rich.

This is one of those things that can just be described as weird. A man burns his house down, then goes off to rob a convenience store. The piece de resistance must be his final comment to the store clerk at the end of the robber, “My house is on fire. Call the police.” Check out the article on Mainichi.

Actually, I do know a guy, who once met another guy who burnt his house down after an argument with his son. Go figure.

Okay, I went wild over PSP, but I would also like to state for the record that Nintendo DS is also something to go wild about. Coming in at 15,000 yen the Nintendo offers a really freaky (i.e. new and cool) double screen system with touch-screen capability and a lot of power.

I think this system is hot with a serious funkability factor (i.e. different and cool), simply because the multiple displays and touch-screen will encourage designers to think creatively about how to implement the gaming system. Sorry, no pix, but you can have a look at the Japanese Nintendo DS page, which lets you click on for a few different views.