Next-Gen Phones…

Click this link for another example of why the US makes me cry about the fact that I have to deal with its cell phone providers.

In Japan, my 3500 yen a month (about 28 dollars maybe?) got me unlimited e-mails, 40 minutes of calling (more than I needed in Japan – trust me), and something like 5000 text messages. There was a 3100 yen cancellation fee, a 3500 yen activation fee, and a nice new-model phone (albeit one without the “latest” features – still better than current US features) cost me 1 yen. The charger cost me 980 yen, which sucked, but they threw in an alarm clock, 2 cotton puffs, 2 packets of tissues, 2 packages of band-aids, 2 cell-phone straps, and 2 packages of Q-tips. Any thing incoming – calls, texts, e-mails, you name it – was free.

In the US, I have to pay $39.99 for 600 minutes a month (more than enough…), with some ridiculous “night and weekend” variance which activates at inconvenient times tacked on for little apparent reason, and I have to pay $4.99 a month for 400 text messages (incoming OR outgoing), and another $5.99 for the privilege to use their ridiculous “web browser”, which can’t even check my e-mail like I wanted it to. The only upshot this time is that, after 3 weeks of wrangling at them, I managed to get a nice phone for “free” with a $50 rebate. I might point out that the interface on this phone, unlike that of my Japanese phone, is ridiculously counter-intuitive, and the camera is 2nd-rate.

I miss Japan.

The next-gen phones in the link above… Especially the one that looks like a glass pebble… Wow. Just wow. I mean – I have no idea how well the interface works, but if the ease with which the iPhone seems to work is any indication, touch interfaces are the wave of the future indeed. I’m especially liking the use of a touch interface to replace the dialing pad because of the ability to swap out that pad for more useful interfaces when you’re not calling someone.

My only reservation, really, is about whether the touch pads will be resilient enough to handle the abuse people heap on their phones. The people I know who have iPhones are treating them like a new porsche – that is to say, they’re only driving them when they have to, and they’re doing their best not to scratch them – and as a consequence it’s hard to see just how resilient they really are…

Filed under “Not gonna happen…”

Dear readers,
Kudos and a shout-out to the first person to buy me one of these for a house-warming gift?

Optimus Prime, please. Always been an Autobot man…

On a related note, my cell phone will finally be arriving come (supposedly) next Thursday. Those of you who require the number will be informed.

That is all.
-E

First post from DC!

So my last post was from the Dallas Airport while my flight was delayed.

I just thought I’d post one more link before going to bed for the first time in my new house. I haven’t read this yet, but it looks interesting. My thoughts will be edited in tomorrow.

On a side note, I’m shocked and appalled at how easy it was to break into my house. The summer room-mates decided it wasn’t necessary to leave me a key under the mat – though they left several on the kitchen table. Fortunately, they’re lazy and left one of the windows over a basement light-well unlocked. I pried it open and jumped for it.

Not bad if I do say so myself. At least I got in. The window has been locked, and now I have keys to distribute! No more problems.

Commercialism at its best…

So I was cruising my favorite Transformers fan sites and ran across this gem. Setting aside the obvious objection that this item could easily be something the seller picked up at Wal-Mart, weren’t Americans only recently making fun of the Japanese for their propensity to buy used panties from vending machines? The Japanese, in the name of decency, stopped that particular practice. Do we really need to show them that we’re hypocritical in addition to our other faults?

No matter how hot Megan Fox is, personally this is a little gross…

Aids and Gay Rights – ooh, I’m getting political!

Tim appears to have been too lazy to post this gem, which is arguably the creepiest “children’s book” I’ve ever seen besides the one I posted earlier.

I’m particularly angry at this book because it appears to be a book that exists entirely to serve the “nurture” end of the “why are some people attracted to the same sex?” argument. Seriously – are they trying to indoctrinate young children now? Oh – that attraction you’re feeling? Yeah, you’re just not right in the head. Go see a therapist and get some drugs; they’ll fix you right up!

Seriously people, this is not the solution. Shouldn’t we be trying to teach our children to be more open-minded rather than closed-minded? Sometimes I feel like the government should just take all children at birth and raise them in a government-sponsored institute. I mean, sure – we’d never be able to create a government responsible enough to raise them without bias, but the idea of ridding the world of prejudice once and for all seems wonderfully tempting.

I don’t really know enough about the issue to be able to say that attraction to the same sex is definitively an issue of nature OR nurture, but I do know that what the friends I have who are gay feel is real enough and that those of us who aren’t gay have no right belittling their feelings because it doesn’t fit our narrow conception of correct gender roles. Teaching children that it’s “all nature” or “all nurture” is not the way to go – kids should be taught to examine the facts and view these things with an open mind (My how Post-Modern of me!)… Of course, I’m not really sure if that’s even possible. It seems natural to believe that you need to teach kids SOMETHING for sure so they have a frame of reference… If you must teach something, then, doesn’t the more open and accepting idea seem the better one to teach?

Just to end the night on the same note it started on, here’s an interesting pro-safe sex (really anti-AIDS) commercial I found on Stage6. Fair warning, this commercial is NSFW.

Booya – Safe Sex

If anyone wants to see it full sized, the original can be found here.

Oddly, the ending makes this commercial seem to be promoting abstinence as the best option, but the commercial doesn’t really show any consequences of pre-marital sex (other than it being boring or just not the right “fit”), and the ending just really seems to flow as a natural consequences of having found the right fit at last… It’s kinda hard to tell what they’re trying to say, actually, except for the final frame’s blatant “fight aides” message.

Werewolf

I can’t help but feel bad for laughing at this, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. What the hell is with the woman who hides in the corner and keeps freaking them all out? Why is there a little kid in the middle? What’s up with the woman to the left who only says “Werewolves are boys. Naked!”? These are some of life’s great mysteries. For now, I’m just laughing my ass off and I can’t stop.

I thought Cheney was the puppetmaster?

Wait a minute – wasn’t Cheney supposed to be the one secretly in charge? So why was he the one that did the about-face on Iraq policy? Maybe it WAS Rove after all… For those of you who’re not history buffs, Cheney is speaking in past tense because he’s talking about the Gulf War. In all fairness to him, it could be argued that this war is “different circumstances”; what I’m curious about is why Saddam Husein went from “not worth very many… dead Americans” then to suddenly being worth thousands now…

I’m not really pro or anti the Iraq War, but I’m no fan of Cheney, and I’d be curious to see his reaction to being confronted with this video…

Advertisements That Piss Me Off

These days, there are so many asinine ads on TV, the radio, and in movies that I think I’m beginning to develop a nervous twitch. I find myself actually yelling at spokesmen, narrators, or cartoon characters that their methods are nonsensical or their arguments fallacious, and I drive my friends mad doing it. There are eight main things that annoy me about today’s common advertisements: fallaciousness or chicanery, excessive puns and shitty dialog, ludicrous events, impossible situations, dubious offerings or disclaimers, poorly-conceived jingles, misplaced metaphors, and complete bullshit.

Let’s examine some of the worst of each:

This is a perfect example of both fallacious logic and disingenuous advertising. The ad, in this case, is not actually making an argument that their product is better than their competition’s similar offering, but instead argues that their competitor’s product is flawed, and that by extension theirs must be better. This is like if I were to say that a hundred thousand gallons of liquid human waste smells worse than anything else in the universe, therefore I must smell better. They neglect not only to prove that the premise (shit smells like shit) is true, but also that it then follows that the result (I smell better than a huge pile of shit) is therefore true. Whether or not the assertion that I smell better is accurate is beside the point, because it’s not the point Apple is actually making in their ad; Macs having fewer viruses is a secondary claim to the original, unfounded premise. This is a staple of Apple’s current ad campaign: PCs suck. As much as I hate to say it, Pepsi’s advertising is actually much better in this regard, though similar in goal; a lesser competitor in a market can most easily gain customers by showing that their product is better than the name-brand, but Pepsi’s method of performing tests and reporting results is actually comparing Pepsi and Coke directly and supporting claims with evidence, as opposed to making statements like “Coke is legally permitted to contain a certain weight of small animal parts and waste per can” like Apple does. On a side note, there is nothing to say that either their tests or their stats are performed fairly.

Youtube (can’t embed)
Here we have excessive puns and shitty dialog. “CODE GREEN!” the commercial begins. A pun that should have been aborted like a prostitute’s pregnancy is our introduction to this inexcusable SNAFU of commercialism. While the reason for the dialog to begin is believable, the continuation is clunky and unnecessary. Then, interjections like “Quick! Get in the hybrid!” characterize the pompous and vainglorious nature of the ad. They are so confident that their service is better than their competition that they not only neglect but even decline to offer substantiating evidence. Why would anyone say “Get in the hybrid” anyway? Why does that line even exist, and who decided it would be a good addition to the commercial? The only thing I can come up with to answer this is that maybe they want to give the impression (like everything else they say) that they actively protect the environment. Then they cause enormous explosions in forests, and cut mountains in half with lasers, negating their ridiculous assertions of environmentalism. Overall, my least-favorite commercials of all time.

You want random shit happening every ten seconds?! Holy flaming BALLS, look at this! It’s not bad enough that each and every one of these furniture outlet and specialty store commercials involves clown costumes and statements that don’t actually mean anything in English, but the dude in the costume (who has a ~50% chance of throwing something at the camera) either speaks slowly and in disjointed sentence fragments, or spews out words like he’s trying to break a record. The Norton Furniture ads are especially ridiculous because the owner sounds just like Senor Cargage.

Impossible situations? You mean like every male-enhancement/birth control/mortgage advertisement in the history of mankind? Indeed. Every so often, an ad comes along that features a casual meeting of people who choose, for no apparent reason, to discuss embarrassing or outlandish topics at incredible length and in minute detail. I see one of these and I think to myself – who the hell tells their neighbor about possible side effects and who to contact in case of emergency while standing around at their mailbox? I can almost get behind the first sentence or two of this commercial, in that one friend gives another shit about never coming to parties, but around the time that the woman tells her friends that she doesn’t show up because she has ISSUES once a month is where they lose me. That’s sentence number two, by the way, a full FOUR SECONDS into the ad. A few seconds later, the suspiciously attractive girl in the middle chimes in with what she, presumably, has memorized off of a pamphlet and has decided to spout, parrot-like, in what can only be an attempt at showing off how fucking smart she is. A couple of half-assed lines about her being a doctor is neither convincing nor even necessary; if you’re going to make a commercial where people open their mouths and horse shit flies out, don’t try to tell me that it makes sense because they’re cowboys. People do not talk like that, and if your commercial has a big enough budget to hire three attractive young women and dozens of extras and rent out a nightclub or a set for a full day, why can’t you find a monkey with a typewriter who can bang out 10 lines of believable dialog?

Beside the fact that this campaign marks the beginning of the end of Antonio Banderas’ career, these commercials advertise a product that no one in their right mind would actually wish to use. Notwithstanding spraying saline into your nose, at the very end of the ad, during the list of side-effects, viral infection is mentioned among the lesser maladies. It’s slipped in almost at the end as though attempting to get it in under the radar of anyone who has stopped paying attention. It does make you think, though: why would you use a medication that relieves minor symptoms, only to replace them with much more dire (albeit identical) ones? I’ve stopped sneezing every few minutes, but now I have a fever of 104 and I’m in danger of contracting pneumonia! Thanks Nasonex!

This ad, run at least once prior to every movie, is the same xtreme advertising that Scion has been trying to distract young people with since the creation of the brand. Originally they ran an ad rarely before movies and involving a giant robotic dog that inexplicably turns into an ugly-ass boxy car, and from there they moved on to similarly transforming cars except on a smaller scale; now it was only parts of the car that transformed, repeatedly, to demonstrate how xtreme you could make your car short of factory-installed hydraulics. It really hasn’t gotten any better than that, except that despite the fact that I thought their last batch of transformer-wetdream-inspired ads couldn’t be made any worse, they proved me terribly wrong. I almost wish they would bring back the silly giant wolf-thing commercials; at least they were quiet. Alas, now they perform mock mother-goose fables with their poorly cel-shaded marionettes while a man who is one tracheotomy away from talking like a robot performs limerick s written on an elementary-school level. All of this to attempt to get across, in as round-about a way as possible, that Scion is the “bad boy” of car manufacturers. I guess I can understand their marketing strategy of “stupid people buy shitty cars and pay twice what they’re actually worth for little more than painted bondo,” but I don’t have to agree with it.

Scott says it better than I ever could.

Hair care ads are the epitome of bullshit in advertising. Hair is most analogous to your fingernails in terms of structure and toughness. It is a polymer chain of great strength that is produced within the skin but is not comprised of skin cells or even parts of skin cells. Any difference in the texture of hair, human or otherwise, is based on chemicals applied to the exterior of the polymer, and not due to “moisturization” or “vitamins” or (god forbid) “sea mineral essence.” I really wish I could have found the old Pantene ads that talk about their new amino-protein formula or the Head and Shoulders ads for an “infusion of sea mineral essence,” because they are comedy gold in a non-intentional sort of way. None of the things that these people advertise exist in real life. They can get away with it legally because when they make claims like vitamin E infusions it means that there is a trace amount of tocopherol in the bottle and no one can prove that it doesn’t do anything. The ingredients of every bottle of shampoo produced in the last twenty years or more are the same; any differences between one or another is a different emulsifier and doesn’t really count. Seriously, look at a bottle of shampoo and you will see Sodium (or Ammonium) Lauryl Sulphate, Sodium Laureth Sulphate, Methylisothiazolinone, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, and a handful of other chemicals that I can’t remember off the top of my head. everything that you see on that list other than things ending in Sulphate are really just there to make it more pleasant to use the shampoo.

ATTENTION MARKETING EXECUTIVES: Tom Dickson is your homeboy.

Oops?

So… I suck at blogging, apparently. I’m also trying hard to make it home alive… It will take a while, but I’m going to finish this site and get all my pics from abroad uploaded. I’m hoping to even do that before school starts (Yeah, right…).

As a peace offering, almost a month late, I present:

“My Crazy Weekend” or “Why I’ve decided never to drink again (again…)”, Part 2

So when we last left off, I was recovering from Saturday night’s (expected) hangover. Monday at school was somewhat anticlimactic after that epic a weekend, but I certainly wasn’t complaining about having some down time. I was even looking forward to the “Oishii Tenpura” that one of my bosses (Futori-san, the manager of the Tachikawa Office) had invited me for.

Just to set the situation, I have to explain in my defense that my boss told me that he and another intern who’s been living with him (Marc) were going for “Oishii Tenpura” (Tasty Tempura), and asked if I’d like to come. That’s all they told me.

So, with that expectation in mind, I trundle off to Tachikawa in a polo shirt and khakis and arrive late – ouch – meeting my other boss (Iwasaki-san, the manager of the Diet Office) and Marc at the entrance to Tachikawa Station, which is a pretty big place but still only has two exits (nice!). Once we’d found everyone, Iwasaki lead us to the restaurant where Futori was waiting…

… And that’s when I find out that we’re being taken out to dinner by an important supporter of the Representative we work for, and that he’s paying for dinner. Oh – and this tempura restaurant? This is the type of place where they serve you tempura one piece at a time, and where the five of us filled up 50% of the restaurant. Uh-oh!

Despite my being the only one not dressed in Business attire there, I did my best to provide witty and sparkling conversation. Through most of the night, the supporter – Tanaka-san – seemed to be getting along pretty well. He even defended me from Iwasaki’s attempts to make me drink as much alcohol as she could force me to drink, and sympathized with me an Futori about Japanese women and other things. Marc and I spent most of the night stealing furtive looks at each other as we tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Among the things that impressed me at this place were things like wine that was 24% alcohol, tenpura’d whole fish, tenpura’d whole clam (you scoop out the contents with your hashi – very tasty!), shrimp legs (apparently the shrimp used at places like this are such high quality that it’s okay to eat the shells too!), and tenpura’d anago (Salt-water eel? As opposed to Unagi, which are fresh-water eels?). All in all, it was probably one of the top-five meals I had in Japan.

By the end of the night, I was WASTED. Arguing with my boss, walking funny, and more… And Tanaka-san? He had decided I was a terrible person. A terrible human-being at that. He was railing against me so much as we left the restaurant that Futori and Iwasaki asked me to go ahead and head home ahead of them. Furthermore, his comments and the things he said revealed a generous helping of the typical “westerners can’t understand us” syndrome. After THAT tirade, “Japanese people who equate ‘foreigner’ with ‘two-year-old intellect’ or ‘derelict’” filled the vacancy left by the newly-redeemed “Japanese Banking System” as the “Most Annoying Thing about Japan”. He wasn’t really the worst example I’ve seen, but the other people on the train with me as I went home were enough to solidify my annoyance. They kept scooting over, as if a drunk person was something novel and new to them – they seem to do this every time I sit next to someone on the train, but the feeling is worse when I’m drunk. And they insist on speaking English to me, even when it becomes clear I can speak Japanese… Very annoying. The oddest thing about the night? Even while berating me, Tanaka-san kept asking me to go out to dinner with him again.

The Japanese have a thing about drinking: when you’re drunk, everything is excusable. No matter what you say the night before, the next morning everyone pretends nothing had been said. It’s the sort of tacit social construct that allows Japanese society to function like it does, and it helps explain why office workers drink together so much. I think Tanaka-san was doing this, but I think he also was interspersing his knowledge that westerners don’t work the same way – so maybe that’s why he was inviting me out to dinner again?

Apparently he was serious, because he extended to me an invitation to come eat Kobe Beef with him before I left. Sadly, the timing didn’t really work out. Hopefully the next time I make it to Tokyo he’ll still be feeling guilty?

I barely made it home. Caught the last train (…) and stumbled back to my room before chugging as much water as I could. Part 3? Is coming…