SCOOTER LIBBY’S BEAR CAGE FANTASIES

It seems that some days, sex is just everywhere you turn! I had no idea that Scooter Libby had written a novel set in Japan whose focus is a girl who is kept in a cage and raped by a bear to train her to become a prostitute. Who would have thought the US vice presidential advisor and sub-traitor knew so very little about Japan, and had such a big dark side?

Perhaps the book was inspired by his own experiences at Bohemian Grove. The Apprentice, a thriller that includes references to bestiality, pedophilia and rape, shows Scooter to be eminently qualified to serve under Cheney in the house where Jeff Gannon hung out. It also shows he’s not very good at keeping secrets, even about his own fantasies. World leaders and advisors indeed. We need a lot fewer of these people in positions of power.

It seems, however, that Libby's infamy is creating new demand for the book, whose publishers are calling for a reprint, proving once again that culture has no bottom.

And now, one hopes, a return to spirit-worthy subjects.

PREPOSTEROUS SLANDER ON THE LAND OF THE RISING YOU-KNOW-WHAT

You sure couldn't prove it by me or anyone I know here in Japan, the land of eros unsurpassed in the realms of subtlety, but according to the annual nosy survey that condom maker Durex conducts every year (pardon us for interrupting at just this moment, but…), the Japanese have the least active sex life in the world, for two years in a row. Preposterous.

This in contrast to the Greeks, who according to the survey seem to have time for little else at pole position number 1, several lengths ahead of the staidly randy British, who nevertheless slightly outstroked the understandably fading Americans, who even so tower at more than double the DIP (Demographic Intercourse Proportion) of the Japanese.

That would perhaps explain the declining birth rate in Japan, but not the surge in profits from the tumescent growth of love hotels, which are often hidden away in discreet locations in keeping with the Japanese desire for privacy regarding the wanton expression of untameable passion when, for example, sequestered behind the folding screens atop the rocking motorcycle in the velvet room of the Candy Box hotel down that long road on the mountain…

I think it’s more likely, given the Japanese penchant for privacy, that the Durex folks, not being from around here, just didn’t know where to look.

Lowest DIP in the world? No way.

GOOD QUESTION

"Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are materialists with no experience of the Spirit. Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are individualists with no real experience of community." He paused for a moment and then continued: "Let's pretend that you were all Christians. If you were Christians, you would no longer accumulate. You would share everything you had. You would actually love one another. And you would treat each other as if you were family." His eyes were piercing as he asked, "Why don’t you do that? Why don't you live that way?"

Betraying Jesus at SOMA

KANSAS BOARD OF EDUCATION GIVES INTELLIGENCE A NEW MEANING

If a lack of ethics can get an incompetent elected to the White House (where it has become apparent even to the alleged president that simply blundering along unethically for five years isn't working), then a lack of intelligent discernment in a state board of education should come as no surprise.

Voting 6 to 4 (see below) to pass that mental vaccum on to their children, whose minds might otherwise be taken up with intelligent inquiry, the Kansas Board of Education has voted to minimize the troublesome childhood trait of seeking intelligent answers to rational questions, making their offspring eligible to one day sit with the majority on the Kansas Board of Education.

They're treating science the way Japan treats history.

Voted for 'intelligent' design:
Kathy Martin
Kenneth Willard
John W. Bacon
Iris Van Meter
Connie Morris
Steve Abrams

Voted for intelligence:
Janet Waugh
Sue Gamble
Carol Rupe
Bill Wagnon

Panda's Thumb
Scientific American

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Pennsylvania shines some light in the darkness

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Perils of the Unconscious Mind:
Robertson warns Pennsylvania voters of God's wrath

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"The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."

From: Greetings from Idiot America
by Charles Pierce

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"When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
-- Robert T. Pirsig

LARGE DAMP EYES ARE COMING TO YOUR NEWSPAPER

Can't get enough Pokemon? Suffering Hello Kitty withdrawal? Craving more Sailor Moon? Take heart, then: US newspapers, scrambling for readership increasingly lost to the net and to the general decline in reading (writing too; I saw a net forum member ask the other keyboarding participants "Can anybody here write cursive?"), are turning to manga, which will soon grace the comics pages in US newspapers. "Come January, the Sunday funnies of several major North American newspapers will have doe-eyed women in frilly outfits, effeminate long-haired heroes and other trademark images of the Japanese comic style."

Whether that will go well with coffee and donuts or inspire breakfast changes to raw egg over white rice with seaweed remains to be seen.

Analysis of Japanese reading habits

SOY IS BETTER FOR YOU

As opposed to eating a chunk of whale whenever you feel like thumbing your nose at world opinion, two servings a day of uncooked soy protein as found in tofu, soy milk or soy powder can lower your cholesterol levels by as much as 9 percent. And tofu's a lot cheaper, tastier, more nutritious and versatile than drugs that do the same thing with side effects. Way cheaper than whale meat, too. Ecologically, it's no contest.

I read somewhere once that if all the land devoted to cattle were turned instead to growing soybeans, everyone in the world could be fed.

And have time left over to go whale-watching.

JAPAN WHALE FLEET OFF TO ITS BIGGEST KILLING IN 20 YEARS


The meat is only a "by-product" of the nation's "scientific" whaling, but according to a 2002 survey, only 4% regularly ate whale meat, 53% had not touched it since school and 33% had never tasted it.

"Whaling is simply not important to the Japanese public."

MITSUBA IN RAIN

Mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica), Japanese wild parsley, is a wonderful wild herb not only because of its delicate parsley-y, celery-y, faintly lemony fragrance, which goes so good on sushi, in misoshiru and other dishes, and not only because it grows from early spring throughout the summer and into autumn, but also because when you go to gather it you have to walk around bent right over staring carefully at the ground in search of those three shy, irregular leaves down there under all the higher plants, thereby causing you to notice everything that is going on underfoot of your otherwise generally look-straight-ahead daily life.

For lunch we were having both sushi and misoshiru, so I went out into yesterday morning's rain with a double sense of purpose. Needless to say, everything down there was wet, but now the ferns are curling up, as are most of the other plants, but from here and there in the multicoloring undergrowth peeped the bright shining rainwet leaves of the mitsuba, saying "pick me!" "Pick me!" It didn't take much wandering to gather a large handful of the tiny light green leaves; just a sniff of them honed my hunger.

On the way back to the house I stopped at the oak logs stacked under the cherry tree and harvested a handful of just-emerging shiitake to round off the meal.

One cricket left -
chanting to the last
the only mantra

THE MYSTERY OF THE ANSWER

Someone googled the timeless phrase "genealogically identified as the Grandmaternal Unit (GU) with respects" and got two results, of which Pure Land Mountain was the first! Don't look at me, I've never posted anything about the Grandmaternal Unit, much as I may have thought about it. What the searcher should have typed was "genealogically identified as the Grandmaternal Unit (GU) with respects to LRRH," which makes a lot more sense as being a quote from Little Red Riding Hood and unrelated to PLM. Who could have thought otherwise? Except maybe Google.

OSUZUMEBACHI HUNTERS

Yesterday was Culture Day, a national holiday, when everyone presumably does cultural things, but we made our monthly trip to our secret spring high up in the mountain forest to get some of that really good water where it comes pouring out of a cliffside.

On our way up there along the road that curves through the cedar forest, while slowly edging by two pickup trucks parked halfway out in the road I spotted three men up the steep slope in the forest to one side of the road, not lumbering or anything, couldn’t tell what they were doing.

We got to the spring, and had filled all our jugs and bottles and watered the plants we’d bought at a farmer’s roadside stand on the way there, then headed back. Passing the two trucks again, I saw that two of the three men had come down to the road; the third, halfway down the slope, was dressed in what looked like some kind of space suit and was carrying a well-laden bag.

We stopped to look. The two men on the road were grinning from ear to ear, each holding a two-armful load of large slabs of dull brown comb, speckled with white bumps. The spacesuited one was dressed, I could see now, to ward off stings. They had just raided a nest of Osuzumebachi (suzume: sparrow; hachi: bee, wasp, hornet). Osuzumebachi (Vespa mandarinia), very fierce-looking hornets that are quite aggressive in the fall when stocking their underground nests. They get their 'sparrow' name from their size, which can reach up to two inches long. They also have very long stingers. I got stung in the foot by one of them a few years ago, in slow motion, as I recall, and it put me in the hospital--but that's another story.

Osuzumebachi larvae are a highly prized delicacy and reputedly magic tonic, so are very valuable, given the risk one undertakes in harvesting them. One of the tree-tending fellows had probably noted the nest site during his labors and waited till the larvae would be just right (they were the white bumps on the comb) - about the size of small shrimp - and came up to harvest them.

Another trick hornet hunters use to find Osuzumebachi nests is to bait a stick with the hornet’s preferred insect prey, then while the hornet is busy eating they tie a long strip of white cloth around its thorax and follow its flight (often a very long way) back to the nest.

The surviving hornet hunters then take out all the larvae and soak them in sake and do other secret tonic things with them I haven’t been able to find out yet.

Related article added later:
Killer wasps threaten farmers in Shaanxi

JET LAG VS. SCIENCE LAG

Veteran travelers have known about the melatonin/light solution to jet lag for at least a decade (I myself prefer the hallucinatory qualities of jet lag, late into the night!). I can't understand why it took The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism so long to find out about it, though. "Both bright light and melatonin have successfully been used in laboratory and field settings to 'phase advance' (resetting the circadian clock earlier in time so that all the circadian rhythms of the body occur earlier) thereby helping people adapt to night shift work or to a new time zone following rapid transmeridian jet travel." But then travelers move at jet speed, while science prefers to plod.

R U RFID'd?

I got my new low-tech passport a few months ago, so I'm good for the next ten years. But if you're about to get one of those RFID'd ones, or have even bought an RFID'd item using a credit card, here are some things you should know about this intrusive technology.

WILD BREAKFAST

This morning on our usual mountainside walk we came across a yellow-leafed niche of mukago, which surprised us because this seems to be a bad year for them - I guess we found the mother lode. We picked a good handful to have with lunch.

A kilometer or so later we came across a couple of very heavily bearing wild kaki (persimmon) trees of the kind whose fruit, being small and very sweet, is usually dried for winter eating; so since these were wild and there was clearly too much for the birds and the monkeys before it all spoiled, and being myself of ancient simian lineage I just stood beneath that golden cascade of heavy-bent branches and plucked and began eating the ones at the summit of ripeness, golden orbs that were almost translucent, like the kaki in that famous old painting Six Persimmons by Mu Ch’i (above), as though a light were shining from within them…

Eating those persimmons beneath their tree, surrounded by its pendant branches, was like eating the way you eat in a dream, the way you do anything wonderful in a dream, your being filled to the breath with every reach of the experience, in this case the taste and texture and sweetness and lifeglow of a wild persimmon just plucked from its tree, its orange parchment skin peeled away to reveal amber flesh like solidified honey, and as I was ecstasizing over the savor of each bite, Echo found some ripe akebi just hanging there on their vine in the forest shadows, voluptuously open, revealing their pale white fruit ready to eat and so we dined al fresco the rest of the way on handfuls of fruit, our mouths reveling, when we found the last of the blueberries, swollen to their essence... what a magical breakfast, and all on nature's tab...

GALL BLADDER SOLILOQUY

No doubt the blogosphere is on tenterhooks (interesting word, that) regarding how at my age I am so quickly overcoming the insidious attack of the giant gall bladder without resorting to physicians or hospitals, surgery or conventional drugs.

My progress toward normalcy is thanks in no small part to a strict M&Mless diet (no Snickers either, though I still steal a cookie or two when Echo isn't looking) along with the usual vitamin/antioxidant supplements, but the main factor in my turnaround is the big gun that Echo dragged out of her cornucopia of alternative therapies, an ancient Chinese panacea: a horse-pill-sized ball covered in genuine gold leaf that costs 30 dollars a pop and consists largely of cow gallstone. Did you know that only one in 2000 cows has a gallstone? You learn something new every illness.

On the first day of the attack of the bladder from another galaxy, Echo took one of these golden cherry bombs out of its special box and wrapper and cut it into four pieces; I was to take one piece after each meal (she has a supply of them for medical emergencies). It looks and tastes like a chewy gold-plated caramel containing licorice, ginseng, powdered deerhorn etc., with the scent-flavor of exquisite temple incense, a bizarrely sensual combo that right away takes your mind off of any illness you might have had in what just a moment ago was your entire body, and has your very existence puzzled in your mouth.

After taking it I couldn't exactly pitch 100mph fastballs while rehearsing Riverdance, but why quibble? It was close enough for someone my age. Soon I'll be 25 years old again. On second thought, I think I'll just go back to when I could still eat M&Ms.

TOBOGGANING IN MEMORY

Looking through the LL Bean winter catalog this morning (I'm a big fan of LL Bean boots and moccasins, used to visit the old store in Freeport Maine every time I went camping up around there back in the 60s and early 70s) I came across a photo of a toboggan, of which there are none in Japan and that I had tried to describe to Echo at some point in the past (it's not easy to describe a toboggan to one of a tobogganless culture) so pointed this one out to her in detail.

This naturally segued into various tobogganing tales of my youth on the snowy hills of upper New York State, back when there was no tv and every decent slope for miles around was full of children in squealing bunches sliding down and climbing up, steaming hot in the freezing cold, and how what a big hit was a toboggan, a long toboggan, when ten kids could go down at once in a roiling scream of instant camaraderie that tumbled all together at the end, those vivid memories leading inevitably to the final derring-do toboggan ride of my brother and myself and our friends Marty and Mac during our college days when we went to New Hampshire for a long winter party weekend and at some point one evening decided to toboggan down the empty ski slope before the sun set.

We'd had a few beers and a lot of tobogganing experience under our belts, so we scrambled way up the empty icy slope, arranged ourselves on the toboggan and started off, very quickly reaching about 400 miles an hour – my memory recalls something about the sound barrier, but that may be spurious – at which speed we couldn't turn or stop as the big building at the bottom with all its concrete stanchions loomed closer and closer in the dimming light, so in desperation we leeaaannnneeeeeddddd as far as we could but despite all our expertise we hit one of those concrete stanchions in mental slow motion like live crash test dummies.

Actually, the back of my left thigh hit the stanchion, and my knee broke one of my brother's ribs; the other two guys went on tumbling for some time. My brother got taped up and I had to use a cane for weeks as I hobbled from class to class. We were young, we were insane, what can I say; that’s part of what college is for. But tobogganing remains golden in memory, since we survived. Even now, we survive. The toboggan, though, was not notably damaged. They made things to last, in those days.

ROUGH SEAS, SMALL BOAT

Lately I've been a bit short-tempered gruff brusque moody edgy sarcastic churlish testy cynical surly grumpy scathing etc. what have you and whatever pick a word, use your thesaurus, don't interrupt, it's not my natural inclination certainly which is kind and gentle, indeed often basely altruistic, to the point where I am perfectly willing to give an arm and a leg to a friend if need be. Ask me later.

Anyway, it's not really me it's not my fault it's all those M&Ms. The candy kind not my granddaughters (Mitsuki and Miasa, aka M&M). Because of all those M&Ms my gall bladder hurts, though not directly; nature moves in many devious ways but one of the most devious is called 'referred pain.' Which in the present case is not justly referred to the gall bladder lying sinisterly there beneath the liver, whence one might get a clue as to an appropriate rate and volume of M&M consumption but noooo, instead this bizarre right shoulder/back pain shows up one day out of nowhere and radiates thobbingly down my right arm like the leggy sciatica, thereby rendering me unfit for coherent gardening firewooding typing shaving toothbrushing punctuation M&M consumption you name it.

Maybe those Snickers bars had a hand in it too who knows, the scientists tell us nothing specific about the things that really matter at the personal level, it's all DNA and string theory, statistics and generalizations. But this sciatica of the arm (I’m sure there’s a proper scientific term for it you can look it up if you want to I’m gonna let my arm just hang here for a while) also makes my thought processes kind of rough, like this choppy effort - to say nothing of spelling with a game arm - since I can only effectively think between throbs which makes for rough creative seas in such a small boat as mine is.

You see already the metaphors are flying all over the place out of control (can creativity be wanton?) and all I can do is watch and wait for the current nerve-as-firehose to pass then leap one-armed back into the tempestuous text from a newly vacuous perspective, who has time for editing when you have to write a sort of desperate morse code as it is? Enough. I’m going to lay my arm on the desk.

Needless to say I've had my last ten bags of M&Ms. Maybe if I ate just one M&M at a time...

FROM "NO WAR" TO "YES WAR"

Well the only major nation in the world without a standing army just couldn't stand it anymore, being so solitarily peaceful (it's boring and unmanly; what good is power if you can't wield it however you want to, like other bastions of freedom?) and wants to have armed forces that can legally invade other countries and stuff at the whim of some fraudulently elected incompetent, like the big guys are doing… not that they will, of course, they say, nothing of the kind, that's the furthest thing from our minds they say, until one cannot but think they protest too much...

But the LDP – I mean Japan, the one-party democracy – clearly wants to do more than just some inyerface war shrine visiting once a year, more than just refuse compensation to comfort women, more than just deny in high school history books that the Nanjing Massacre ever happened with the last army Japan had, and all that stuff you're reduced to doing when you've had no army for so long you can't even remember what war is like, so they've come up with a draft of a new constitution that drops the famous 'no war' clause in favor of what must logically be a 'yes war' clause, so if the draft is approved by the still largely group-think populace, in a few years the politicos can just import a few of those handy Diebold voting machines and Japan too can elect some cryptovicious undergrowth who just loves having an army with other people's children it it; who knows where that will take the world?

I'm so old I can still remember when "We the people" used to mean something...

GRANNY D ASKS A FAVOR

Hello Friends,

Doris Granny D Haddock would like us all to do what we can to help the reform community in Connecticut get some traction on their effort to pass a Clean Elections bill this coming week. There is a critical window of opportunity. If you live in Connecticut, please see the link at the bottom of http://NewEnglandReformSchool.org (Granny's new project). If you can send this message (or that link) along to any friends in Connecticut (including students!), please, please do!

Your friends may have friends in Connecticut, so please send this out as widely as possible.

Very sincerely,

Dennis Burke

NewEnglandReformSchool.org
http://newenglandreformschool.org
Cobb Meadow Road
Dublin, NH 03444
USA

"Students! Maybe you should take over the world a little early
---while there's still some ice at the North Pole and some fish in the sea..."

Granny D on NPR

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Election-related matter:

"The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage."

The Free Press

HAVING AN EMPEROR IS NO PIECE OF CAKE

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always gotten along very well without an emperor. Just sort of a personal quirk I have. Of course living here in Japan I am covered, I suppose, by the imperial umbrella, but somehow I don’t really feel that it’s raining.

There are frequent signs of quotidian imperial activity in the newspapers and on tv, some member of the imperial family waving stiffly through a limo window at an emperor-dependent crowd or giving an archaic speech and cutting a ribbon to open a canning plant, but personally I don’t see the need for an emperor in my own life.

Still it is of curious interest that the long male imperial line (which goes back only a few thousand years to some fairly recent gods, in comparison to everyone else’s genealogy, which stretches much further back, to the first humans) has reached a royal cul-de-sac: the next kids in line are all female. So the unthinkable has been proposed by a committee: let the Crown Prince’s little girl (gasp!) become emperor after him! She’s three years old at the moment, which gives all the stodges time to seek an alternative.

In a kind of imperial desperation, one scholarly panel has already suggested a way to avoid having a female on the Crysanthemum throne, but something tells me that the Japanese people themselves, comprising a majority of women, would welcome such a change after a millennia of male monotony, though the issue is not as simple as people without emperors might think.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

According to the McDonald's PR, out of sheer integrity (we can't stand keeping the consumer in the dark even one second longer than 50 years!) the burgermonger is at last going to tell its customers exactly what they're eating, right on the wrapper. I kind of doubt it, though.

Surely they're not going to say that this very quarter-pounder you're about to add to your body comes from cattle raised on factory farms where the animals have been weaned on cow blood, injected or medicated with antibiotics and growth and other hormones and fed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton seeds laced with slaughterhouse waste and tainted animal fats while standing and sleeping in their own waste for two years?

I don't think that'll wrap the Mac. The wrapper will say in tiny letters (that no hungry scarfer will ever pause to read) scientific-sounding stuff like: Big Mac Calories: 560, Carbohydrate: 47g, Total fat: 30g, Saturated fat: 10g, Salt: 1.3g...

What the labels should say in big red letters all over the place is simply "Believe us, you don't want to know."

OCA