So does the guy playing "Roberto" on the morning drama show always have a crazy accent like that or does he exaggerate it for the show?

Still he speaks Italian so from my view he's cool either way :D

/able to order an espresso
//barely
///heaven forbid they ask about change

Current Mood: curious

I must admit I like watching TV shows set in the countryside with trains as it has old style trains that I remember from small kid time in the city that are now long gone from there. All the trains had the whole thing painted one color (not silver with a stripe) and there wasn't any sort of air conditioning.

You open the window, your hair gets sucked out flapping, and it kinda feels weird but nice too...

There was a time I thought it'd be awesome to be the guy who punched tickets at the ticket wicket, bouncing the puncher along with the precise rhythm, that job is long since expired.

...along with the nixie tube ticket vending machines.

Elevator girl, also, was short-lived.

やっぱ子供のあたしにとってはカッコよかったけどなぁ…

/beer status: > 1

Current Mood: 懐かしい思いに耽って

I went to a cow orker's computer and made the same file open error, apparently the English version says "clean up" so I presume someone made a typo going for 整理、otherwise, well... lolwut?

Current Mood: amused

Rawr!

Current Mood: 張り切っている

The lizard brain had what to say about this.

Current Mood: nervous

まだ一インチ積もっていないから正式には White X'mas にはならないかも知れないけど全体が白く見える程度に降ったから一応満足かな？　まだ少しは降っているし…

Current Mood: satisfied

こんな動画見ているとさすがに酔うな…

Current Mood: nerdy

...yet another reason I feel not the slightest twinge of guilt ripping off their stuff from the usual free places. Problem is, people don't tend to rip the news.

They've changed out the usual radio news from 7, too, used to be audio of the regular TV program, but now it's all slow, shorter program, and "NHK国際放送です" where we can be sure to receive the appropriate daily dose of propaganda about North Korea and the 拉致被害者. While doing that though, they make sure that you can just click download the news in .mp3 format, UNLESS of course you want it in Japanese, then you have to stream. (Happily it's trivial to record to .mp3, making whatever paranoia they have completely pointless.)

I understand their "ZOMG you didn't pay 受信料 issues" but since you have to set up an ACCOUNT to watch the damn video stuff anyway, it's not like they couldn't make me PAY. Other websites are more than happy to let me do that and charge to my "ISP," where I maintain an expat account for charging purposes only.

I'm thinking I need to look into getting a proxy from somewhere.

At least it's looking like the international iStore issue might be solved for me soon...

Yarrrrr, mateys. That is all.

/still 篤姫 was a good show
//if you get my drift

ETA: Looks like Uncle Google might be coming through...

Current Mood: annoyed with damn region crap

フロントガラス越しに撮ったんで空のとこに見える汚れはつぶれた虫です ><;

Current Mood: anorak tendencies perhaps

...crossing the Montreal River, mile marker[1] 92 on the Algoma Central Railroad (on our way south from Hearst, ON to Sault Ste. Marie, ON). 130 feet up, w00t.

12 hours of traaaaaaaiiiiiiiiins. :D

[1]. Yes. It's miles.

Current Mood: enjoying the view

So I'm getting married (!!) next Friday, a week from today, in the park down the street from my house, to my best friend, after work, after WHICH, there will be a par-tay.

SRSLY.

I will be busting out The Dress. The same The Dress, that gets dragged out for job interviews, other people's weddings, speeches before Various and Sundry August Bodies. 1987 Ito Yokado special, flowered, cotton, A-line, by this point I suppose it's legitimately Vintage. It's not so often I do the Drag Thing, so it's a big deal. I will also wear the matching shoes, namely the brown suede All Stars.

Yes, I am gonna wear trainers to my own wedding. People always told me I could never do that, eventually I would conform and such, but, well, didn't happen. C'est la vie.

It's gonna be good :D

We will be ML^2 :D

Current Mood: happy

Lately I saw two instances of characters that made me laugh.

First was some Asian-looking university student was wearing a shirt that was black with white writing saying 「白人看不懂」on. It's "white people don't understand (looking at this)" in Chinese, I dimly recall maybe it's a reference to a (funny!) online skit made at the Fifth College international apartments that I saw online once ages ago, but anyway... made me think of saying "hey nice shirt!" but we were passing so quick, so, no chance.


Second is, at Cafe Kopi where I spend lots of time, by the bathroom they have a shelf with the extra fruits on it for restocking, in the shipping boxes. It's cardboard boxes with "Florida Lemons" or whatever and some art, but lots of the boxes say 「日本向け特選」prominently on the side. It means "Chosen specially for (export to) Japan" in Japanese. I suspect that of course they just print that on all the boxes for the same reason your boxes of mass-processed cookies say "REG PENNA DEPT AGR" on but I can't help but chuckling. It's all the saaaaame, guys!

Current Mood: amused

Standing on top of Etna, we are above the clouds. Nothing but lava and snow and steam coming out. Some of this landscape used to have pizza stands and ski lifts on it until 2003 when it was all wiped flat in an explosion.

If you dig even a little hole in the lava shards, the rocks are so hot you can't hold them for long. The field where it erupted in 2007, we can't go, because it's too hot to even travel on.

How did I get up there? Just as always, ( I took the bus. )

If you look closely you will notice that ( the bus is a Unimog. )
The passenger part of the bus is hooked to the business end by a flexible rubber gasket type thing, so the parts can bump around rather independently on the road. The bus also has huge chains on the wheels.

The roads are pretty much like off-roading up the passes of the Rockies in Colorado, except that instead of regular dirt, it's all lava shards. Currently toward the top, the snow is higher than the bus on both sides of the road for a lot of the way.

Coming back, half of the journey was by that same bus and the final part by ( funicular. )

I have read a lot about volcanoes recently and so it was quite an enjoyable time to see it.

Current Mood: chill of mountains

The city bus I took this morning.

Current Mood: 周りの話が何もわからん

It's almost like a real city in there.

Current Mood: geeky

That's right, the Unix timestamp (seconds since the epoch start, 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970) will roll over to 1234567890 today at precisely 17:31:30 Chicago time.

I have to admit I did sit in my office and see the timestamp roll over to start with a 9, and then later when it rolled over to 10 and added a digit.

You know you want to see the thing change. You can! At the
Cool Epoch Countdown Page!

Current Mood: enthralled

As it turns out, I am going to Italy in the springtime for a holiday. I'm hoping to see some volcanoes now that I'm reading about them (in fact reading about ones I visited on my high school trip to Kyushu I wish I could do that trip again now that I'm more knowing and serious AND having watched 「篤姫」 on TV AND read 「死都日本」 but it's a digression...)

Because I don't know any Italian language at all I've started looking up information on the internet. I honestly don't know word one, but as I'm starting from the beginning with the pronunciations and what, I realize... so many of the example words make sense when I see the meaning, because... they SHARE things with the basic gut parts of words I know from English or learned for the SAT, way back in the mists of time.

"ape" is bee and "api" is bees, but... of course, because "apiary" is where you keep your bees in English (a coworker of mine is a beekeeper and we talk of such things).

"porta" is door but of course there is "portal" in English. "facile" and "faciliate," etc. "mare" the sea, just like the "seas" on the moon... "alto" and "altitude"...

I'm used to it with characters but it's cool to see it in syllables from English.

Current Mood: curious