"Working on a Saturday:

...about as much fun as a dutch oven from your sister."

Japanese people apologize. A lot. The other night, feeling lazy, I switched on my "ignorant asshole gaijin" mode, and wandered into a big box sports store by the train station to buy some cycling pants that were so expensive, they would have been better off lined with bald eagle feathers. Or stolen. Anyway, the cute little girl who worked in cycling pants world spoke Japanese, and I spoke "only" English. How liberating it felt to place her at the mercy of my idiotic foreign blathering. Over and over, she apologized for everything: I spoke "only" English, she apologized. I wore my shoes into the changing room, she apologized. They didn't have the pants I wanted in gray, she apologized. Another pair that had potential didn't have draw-close legs, she apologized. The pants didn't have "Huge in Japan" stitched in leopard print over the crotch, she apologized. The women's pants were made of better materials, she apologized. And then came the grand-daddy: all the pants were too short, she apologized. Actually, she didn't directly apologize for the pants being short; more specifically, without knowing I knew what she was saying, she actually apologized for all Japanese men, whose legs are too short. Beautiful. Casually sauntering back out after the cash-register beast raping, I realized that I could have walked into that store, ordered an ice cream wedding cake, broken a beer bottle over my head and threatened the floor manager with it, and then taken a shit in their North Face backpack display, and she would have apologized for them not having cakes, for the poor quality of the bottle and the manager being a pussy, and then once more for the men's bathroom being on a different floor. Anyway, it's not an immature character flaw, or a nationwide lapse in confidence, it's just a little cultural thing that's been going on here for centuries. A little cultural thing that drives me positively batshit insane.

News In Briefs...
* I refuse to add $30 to a "good luck/yakitori slush fund" for this guy, just because the principal said so. Oh yeah--and just for that, the principal isn't my 'pal' anymore. Todai grad, my ass.

* What the hell kind of a name is Horatio? Actually, I already know. It's Spanish. But David Caruso is a shitty actor, and he's not Spanish.

* My new bike costed a "a great big pile of goofy coins with holes in them."
But it's smooth. And fast. Daddy like.

* If "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," what does a box of instant yakisoba noodles keep away? It keeps your stools away, that's what.