Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

I am thinking about going to Japan for my next vacation. Time to tally my knowledge of Japanese. Let’s see…

Nippon – Japan
Sushi – Raw fish with rice
Sashimi – Raw fish
Sake – Alcoholic drink. Some call it Japanese vodka or rice wine, but what do they know. It’s technically a rice beer.
Yakitori – Kebab
Tempura – Stuff fried in batter
Nori – Seaweed for sushi
Wasabi – Pickled radish
Agari – Green tea (in sushi restaurants)
Miso – Soy paste soup
Mochi – Ice-cream (or other stuff) in a dough shell
Arigato – Thank you
So Des – So it is
Godzilla – Big radioactive lizard
Sumo – Along with competitive eation, one of the few sports involving a lot of fat people
Yokozuna – A champion wrestler. Tend to be overweight
Sarariman – Office worker, formerely a Samurai. Probably.
Samurai – A Shogun’s report
Shogun – Samurai’s supervisor
Bushido – Samurai’s Rules and Regulations Manual
Geisha – A woman who entertains Yokozunas, Samurais and Shoguns. As well as Sararimen with a good sarary.
Sensei – Teacher
Kohai – What Wall Street types call a Rabbi. One who helps out somebody less experienced.
Sempai – Someone who has a Kohai.
Karate – Pronounced Kara-tey.
Something-do – Way of something.
Kendo – Way of the sword. Somehow really means fencing dressed skirts with bamboo sticks.
Robot-san – Mechanical human being. Some take Samurai or Geisha form.
Kinokuniya – Japanese bookstore chain
Ringo – Apple
Ringu – Ring
Waifu – Wife
Chambara – Japanese movies about Samurai
Manga – What Americans call Anime
Jedi – Another word for Chambara; also a person with high midiclorian count
Terevision – A device for watching Chambara
Harakiri – A suicide method very popular in Chambara
Kamikaze – A suicide method not very popular in Chambara. Also a drink
Kohee – 8 dollar coffee
Yakuza – Legitimate businessmen with a lot of tattoos and missing pinkies.
Meiwaku – Trouble, disturbance.
Kawai – Cute
Pokemon – A very kawai little critter
Makdonurado – A fast food place where sometimes you get a toy Pokemon with you meal and your food tastes like it’s made out of Pokemons.
Katana – A type of Samurai’s cutting sword. Also name of Larry Ellison’s giant boat.
Katakana – One of sets of Japanese characters. Either the one used for foreign words, or the other one.
Hiragana – Same as Katakana.
Hai – Yes
Beero – Beer.
Ebisu – God of something good, maybe beer. Also a type of beer.
Kappa – Demon of some kind, I think lives in water. Also a character in Mario Bros. games.
Tanuki – A smart shape shifting demon with huge balls.
Futon – Bed
Tatami – Rug

Uh… Yeah, I think I am done.

The World Is Your Spitoon

BoingBoing writers don’t seem to be able to shut up about betel lately. This reminded me of a 4th or 5th grade report on India (great friend of the Soviet Union, emerging economy, blah, blah) that I had to do in school back in the Soviet times.

I remember the teacher get very interested about betel chewing and prematurely praise it as a great habit. Then I reminded her that importing such a thing would mean having to deal with bright red spit all over. It’s not like the Soviet Union did not have its own share of hygienically questionable customs.

Back then Soviet sci-fi writers promised us Communism with goods being teleported right into our crystal palaces for free from anywhere on the globe. I guess that (and my flying car) did not work out, but today Capitalism brings us the ability to order almost anything from almost anywhere through electronic computers.

So, if I want to try some betel all I need to do is pick between The Basement Shaman and Shaman Palace or many other fine merchants.

Who knew that there are so many stores catering to shamans. At leats now I know where the Suburban Shaman.

Hmm, I guess I could get one of these and try to rid my cubicle of the sick building syndrome.

The (Drive)way of a Samurai

Larry Ellison’s Japanese fetish is well known. He owned at different times yachts named “Ronin”, “Katana” and “The Rising Sun”. According to “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison” Larry often flies to Japan for Sakura Matsuri. And now he is building himself a $60 million 3000 sq. foot replica of a 16th century Japanese warlord’s mansion.

The house will be built using traditional materials and without nails (good idea earthquake-wise), but I doubt that any warlord had a house that big, especially with an amazing master bath that will include “.. boulder that will be part of the master bathroom shower. The 30-ton stone (yes, that’s 60,000 pounds) was recently moved into place with a rented high-rise crane that was brought to the site expressly to move the “shower rock.” ”

A house like that needs a driveway to match. Larry wants it paved with natural hand cut stone. The stone is quarried in Japan and China (Larry chose China because the labor is cheaper there) and for some reason needs to be cut on site. This means that the architect needs to provide a template for each and every stone. It would take months to do this by hand, but luckily a CIS student helped him, making Larry’s driveway his CS270 Project. Random, but not too random, concave and convex, angles not too sharp, 5 to 9 sides to a stone – this is not as simple as it seems :

By the way, is it just me or does Mr. Scorpio from “The Simpsons” look very much like the samurai in question?

Deadprogrammerbashi

I have many role models. But when I was writing that post I forgot about a few people. One of them is Saparmurat Turkmenbashi.

Saparmurat Niyazov is the fearless leader of Turkmenistan, aka First and Lifetime President of Turkmenistan High Commander of the Army Saparmurat Turkmenbashi. Turkmenbashi is a honorific, meaning Father Of All Turkmen. Few leaders in the history of mankind can come even close to achievements of Turkmenbashi:

  • Ordered all statues of Themis to be remade in the image of his mother.
  • Ordered the horse on the coat of arms of Turkmenistan to be replaced with the likeness of his favorite horse
  • Renamed the month of January into Turkmenbashi, April into Kurban Saltan Edje (Turkmenbashi’s mother), September into Runham (Title of Turkmenbashi’s book)
  • Renamed the city of Krasnovodsk into Turkmenbashi.
  • Changed names of the streets in Ashabad into numbers, starting with 2000 “to symbolize a new era in the life of Turkmen People”. Some streets kept ther names though. Those were Turkmenbashi Street, Turmenbashi’s Mother’s street and Tukmenbashi’s Father’s street.
  • Disbanded Ballet Theater of Turkmenistan because ballet “is not in Turkmen’s blood”.
  • Prohibited sitizens of Ashbad from having more than one cat or dog, thus eliminating the problem of cat ladies.
  • Turkmenbashi is a master detective. After he was told that he survived an assassination attempt from some people in a KAMAZ truck who were armed with an assault rifle, he immediately named the perpetrators. They were VP Boris Shihmuradov, Agriculture Minister Imamberdi Yklymov and the President of Central Bank Hudayberdi Orazov. Overall about 100 people were arrested and most of them convicted.

    Turkmenbashi is probably the most important writer and philosopher ever, comparable maybe only to . He wrote an amazing book called Holy Ruhnama (Book of the Soul). Revel in the genius of Turkmenbashi:

  • “Length of beard is a sign of stupidity. This is because beard grows from the brain. The longer the beard – the less brain matter a person has. Less brain matter – less wisdom. Less wisdom – stupidity.”
  • “Market economy – we are approaching it”
  • “Don’t commit a crime! Change your mind! Change your mind!”
  • “Only a Turkmen can make a Turkmen out of a Turkmen.”
    (I translated these quotes from a post in )

    Ruhnama is compulsory reading for all students in Turkmenistan. In fact, Ruhnama is it’s own subject.

    One day I want to be known as Deadprogrammerbashi. That will be so sweet! But for now I will probably undertake a deep study of Holy Ruhnama and Turkmenbashi’s poetry. I should also start writing poems in honor of Turkmenbashi. I wonder, if I write him a letter with a poem, will he answer?

  • Can He Build It? Yes He Can!

    Livejournal user gornev led me to a most excellent meme in his comment to my post about wooden NYC water tanks. You see, there is this humongous wooden skyscraper in the Russian city of Archangelsk.

    I wanted to post about this since I saw the picture of that building (which became my desktop wallpaper), but it took some time to find more information and to find the time to write it up. The sources that I used provide somewhat conflicting information, but that’s mostly because the articles were written at different points during the construction.

    First you’ve got to see it. The links keep failing, but this google search will lead you to at least some articles with pictures.

    I’ve obtained permission from Nikolai Gernet aka nixette to use this recent picture:

    Nikolai also has a nice collection of old examples of wooden buildings in Archangelsk.

    So here’s what I was able to find out about the building and the builder. The builder and architect is Nikolai Sutyagin, an owner of a lumber yard and a small construction company. He was brought up by a single mother in a crappy communal flat. At 14 years old he was sent to a youth correctional facility for “hooliganism” (probably a fight). When he came back he started working as a construction worker to help support his mother and younger brother. Turned out that he was a pathological workaholic. His supervisor advised him to try his hand at “shabashing”. “Shabashing” was a free market anomaly in a planned socialistic society. Because of the shortage of productive workers in the land of fixed salaries jeopardized the completion of five year plans, collective farms and factories were allowed to hire freelancers and offer pay based on performance. This meant that a skilled workaholic such as Sutyagin could earn about 2000 rubles a month when a college educated engineer’s salary was 200 rubles. Teams of shabashniks were universally hated by collective farmers and factory workers (as well as all other salary men and women), but were tolerated.

    When Perestroyka came about Sutyagin used his money to start a lumber and construction business which brought him a substantial fortune. Now he needed a suitable residence. At first he planned on building a huge two story wooden house. Wooden structures are limited by law to two stories for fire safety reasons. At first he built a refrigerator sized wooden mock up. He liked the scale, but didn’t like the proportion of the roof. He decided to elongate it to achieve a more pleasing proportion. Then he started building working with his team like in the old times, but using the timber from his own company. When he was about done with the roof, he decided to build it up a little higher so that he could see the White Sea from the very top. Even though his building has two stories, the roof spans 11 more (some articles estimate the structure to have 12 stories, others – 13 and even 15).

    The government and his neighbors hated Sutyagin’s masterpiece. Fire hazard or not, it stands in the middle of a rather poor village, yet it’s higher than the tallest cement building in the city of Archangelsk itself. The city government ordered the structure to be torn down, but the order was never realized as far as I know. But Sutyagin was accused by one of his employees (who supposedly stole $30,000 from Sutyagin’s company) of beating him up and imprisoning him in a shed. True or not, Sutyagin got 4 years of prison. He was let out in 2 years. While he was away his company was looted like Baghdad after the war. Now he and his wife and daughter live in the unfinished skyscraper that he built.

    Now, here are some of my thoughts. I am deeply disgusted by the messages on Russian bulletin boards. There are three most common attitudes there: mocking the unfinished structure as a glorified barn, lamenting about the “mysterious Russian Soul” and gloating about the fact that the builder was sent to jail presuming that the source of the money used to build the skyscraper is stealing. Most of the press coverage concentrates on the eccentricity of the builder rather than his genius, strength of will and work ethic.

    Sutyagin’s skyscraper takes up a very special place in my heart, right next to the AIG building, the Flatiron (Fuller Building) and all my favorite skyscrapers, remaining, gone and those that were destined never to be built.

    I’ve used a number of articles as sources, but they all went offline. You can use this google search to find new ones though.

    Japanese Grocery

    I’ve found a really nice Japanese grocery on 43d street between 6th and Broadway. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but the selection is really good. They have raw fish for sashimi, a dozen different types of umeboshi, huge selection of teas, condiments and many other things any japanophile can appreciate. They even have Japanese cigarettes. I’ve purchased the tastiest green tea ever, Kikkoman “extra fancy” soy souse ($3 for a tiny little bottle), some umeboshi, bonito flakes, bonito soup base and a few other things.

    Sam Bok Groceries
    127 West 43 Street
    New York, NY 10036
    212 221-0845
    10am – 9pm Mon-Sun