The Eternal Gaijin

Sigh. Sky News just had a story onthe "choking game," a new internet driven craze where school kids choke each other until unconscious, for shits and giggles. There were any number of BS markers. First, the first victim died of autoerotic asphyxiation - not really the same thing. The second victim died 16 years ago. The tone of the piece was to give the impression that millions of kids were doing this, but they only had four clips to run in the background. I smell the sweet smell of complete media bullshit scare stories. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

I can hardly believe how much crap gets spouted on a daily basis. We're gearing up for an election sometime before mid-May here in the UK, and as we all cynically know that will cause the bullshit-o-meter to hit the redline. Tories, Labour and Lib-Dems, Oh my! So there's only a few moments before my brain explodes talking about politics so let's skip to making fun of god-botherers for a minute. It's 2010 and the Irish have their new blasphemy law; read about it here . The War at Home: There was a big controversy last week about a group called Islam4UK wanting to make an antiwar protest through a town improbably called Wootton Bassett. Because they've got some dodgy ties, they've made inflammatory statements in the past, and they hold as a basic principle that life is not shit enough for most folks, this caused some controversy. Or con-TROV-ersy. There was a lot of back and forth in the press about whether they should be allowed to have their march. Eventually th...

Yay . Sorry. Premature . Never mind.

50 reasons why Tokyo is the greatest city in the world | CNNGo.com

Kobe as a city has a significant Christian population, largely due to its extended history of foreign settlement and trading. Over the time we lived in its burbs I found a small, but larger than expected, number of churches in our neighbourhood. We had Japanese neighbours who were various stripes of Christian and had free Japanese language copies of the Watchtower off our next-door neighbours. But a bit beyond that there were these black signs around the neighbourhood and on various walls around Kobe and Osaka. They always had some form of Bible sounding thing on them. Occasionally there was somebody with a megaphone standing outside Sannomiya or Umeda stations banging on like the rightwingers outside Yasukuni, the noise pounding out something or other about Kami-sama this and Kami-sama that. Recently there's been a trend in Japan for somebody possessed of a sense of humour and a black paint marker to make a few alterations to the signs, changing the character for God to the kataka...

Or not ... Just another great moment in Canadian relations....