Sho Fukamachi Online

I have a Korean housemate, and last night I witnessed her doing a most astonishing thing.

She was eating Spam.

I could not have been more gobsmacked if she had placed a large turd on a plate and started eating that. In fact I would have had plenty to say about that, if and when I could stop laughing. But no. She was taking Spam out of a can, and eating it.

This has been the most incredible social, nay, existential, faux pas I have ever witnessed. There was literally nothing I could say as I watched, astounded, dumbfounded, as the pink, jelly-like substance made its triumphant journey from can, to spoon, to mouth. I sat there as fascinated as an anthropologist might find himself upon happening across a pygmy casually eating her own child. I was transfixed. I was in a zen-like trance of surreal otherworldliness. I still am.

I mean, I have certainly seen the cans in the supermarket, and seen the pictures on the web a thousand times. I guess it just never really registered with me that, somewhere, every day, people are actually eating Spam. Even more mind-blowing is that this was obviously not the first time for her. It is quite possible that a good 10% of this girl’s body is literally composed of Spam.

I just don’t know what to say or do when confronted by a revelation like this, so I just stared and stared as I watched her take spoon in hand, lovingly scooping a quivering blob of the pink, gelatinous substance from the hastily opened can and transferring it tenderly to her salivating maw, whereupon she would chomp down with great gusto, rending the meatlike agglomeration into a frothing pink spittle-paste before gulping it into her enthusiatically gurgling stomach and, thenceforth, embracing it into the very atoms of her flesh.

She bought Spam, she ate Spam. Later tonight or tomorrow, she will be excreting Spam. Her skin is made from Spam, as are her eyes and lips – when her boyfriend kisses her, he will be kissing Spam. She breathes out Carbon Spam-oxide with every breath and if I stay too long in a room with her, chances are that I, too, will become partially Spam. When she picks her nose, she is utilising Spam to extract Spam from an orifice carved from Spam – and will promptly ingest that Spam again. When she passes wind, or blows her nose, a spray of microscopic Spam molecules spray from her like an aerosol.

I still don’t know what to do or say. I am quite literally struck dumb. She … was … eating … Spam!

Scrape up your many intuition at Ito Yokado, Akabane.

I decided to try the new “Pepsi Nex” when it it appeared in my local ライフ.

I have no idea what is supposedly better or even different about this new drink, but why not give it a shot!

Anyway, it’s disgusting and you should avoid it like the plague that it probably contains.

カロリーゼロ、不味い１００％！

Check out the two japanese phrases underneath:

永遠と名づけてデイドリーム
永遠と名づけてデイドリーム

Notice anything different about them? No? They sure look the same to me. Now, try a google search with both of them.

One will get results, the other gets zero.

Now use something like SubEthaEdit to convert them both to, say, MacRoman:

永遠と名づけてデイドリーム
永遠と名づけてデイドリーム

So they are different. But they look IDENTICAL above. What is up? I only noticed because I tried a search with one, and was suspicious when I didn’t get any (expected) hits. I then retyped the damn thing and suddenly I got heaps of hits. I couldn’t see what was wrong with the original, I still can’t. It’s just different in some subtle way and I don’t know enough about unicode to say why.

The point? Always double check unicode, and if in doubt, use text processing tools to do a conversion as above to an “unfoolable” encoding scheme, just to make sure.

UPDATE: It seems these issues are Mac-specific for now.

My attempt to learn japanese is now well into its second decade, with precious little progress to show. But there are some small moments of satisfaction, like the one I just experienced!

I always run iTunes in japanese-language mode, because otherwise it screws up the japanese tags, many of which predate proper UTF encoding. So, over the years, I’ve come to operate iTunes basically from pure motor memory – I know exactly where every feature is, and can operate it despite not really knowing what all the crazy little ideographs mean. But just then, when I brought up the dock contextual menu to check the name of the song that was playing – I suddenly realised something. I could understand things I couldn’t understand before – and not just because I’d memorised their positions! And I don’t mean katakana either. Kanji! I could read the kanji!

The ones in question were 次の曲 and 前の曲. Now I’m not even sure of the damn reading of 曲 – i think it’s きょく, could be ぎょく, who knows. But they mean next song and previous song.

OK, OK, I know this is a ridiculous little thing, but it’s still a real sense of satisfaction when you realise that you understand something you didn’t understand before – and especially when it happens in such an inadvertent manner.

A rather harsh message for any mac user trying to view the CM for Asahi’s beer robot “本生ロボッ庫”, which of course I am also trying to get.

I’ll be in my room crying if anyone needs me.

Shopping in Korakuen, we saw many Shirotans.

Shirotans

Shirotansがたくさん