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  11.20.01
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I've decided that I love business travel.
Check out the new photo gallery from my trip.
The Blue Martini Summit (Internet software
company) was a huge success. Four days of
great food in great hotels with great people
-- what more could you ask for?
The Summit was held in a mountain top conference
hotel in Santa Cruz. It was my first time
in California, and some of the people who
work for Blue Martini were kind enough to
show me and my manager around town.
I always wanted to go to California, and
it was just like I imagined. San Francisco
was as hip as they say, but appeared to have
that intermingling of poverty and affluence
that you only seem to get in big American
cities, especially ones with warm climates.
I'm thinking specifically of the neighborhood
we had dinner in on Saturday night, the inner
Mission -- an area where a lot of old industry
is slowly being converted into high-end apartments
and lofts. We went to a great restaurant,
urban style oozed off the walls as we ordered
our organic field greens with warm goat cheese
and made eyes at the wives of yuppie lawyers,
but right outside the restuarant, junkies
and homeless Vietnam vets lived in big early-80's
sedans and dirty tents on the side walk --
not as bad as it sounds, but definitely an
interesting contrast.
While in Santa Cruz we also had time to go
to the Boardwalk amusement park, and I have
some great pictures from that which I'll
be posting in a separate gallery in a couple
of days.
11.12.01
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I'm leaving tomorrow for my business trip
to San Francisco/Santa Cruz and I have far
too many things left to do.
So, today I'll leave you with this:
How punk are you? Why don't you take the
test.
But I'll bet you're not as punk as these brothers. And this kid wasn't even trying to be punk
when he wore his mother's vagina costume to his school's Halloween party.
 11.09.01
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Lately at work I've been cracking my coworkers
up by reading out words from a book of Japanese
street slang that I keep on my desk. Most
of it is pretty crude stuff. It's funny because
I don't speak Japanese very well, so it's
strange for them to hear me use colloquialisms
and idioms, which are usually the last thing
that you learn how to use in a new language.
These kind of slang books are really necessary
because, for some reason, Japanese people
are reticent to tell you their swear words,
at least in the company that I keep.
Today my coworkers went out to lunch
with
a visiting American colleague and asked
him
if he had ever eaten dog. Japanese
people
don't eat dog, but one of my coworkers
is
Korean and he was trying to explain
how eating
dog "flesh" gave you a certain
kind of power, or strength, that he
didn't
know how to explain in English.
When they got back to the office they consulted
a dictionary. It turns out what he was trying
to say was that dog meat is good for "making
erections."
I suggested he use the phrase "makes
you virile."
Of course this whole conversation eventually
lead to a discussion of Japanese phrases
and euphemisms for erections and genitals.
I consulted my handy slang dictionary. It
turns out the Japanese language has a vast
array of humorous terms and euphemisms for
the 'male member.' It's much more nuanced
and fine grained than English with its 'boner'
and 'woody'.
Most of the words where based on vegetable
comparisons to express the exact look of
a particular penis, a Chinese cucumber versus
a forest mushroom, for example.
The most common euphemism, in classic Japanese
vagueness, is asoko, which literally means 'over there'. This
can be used for both male and female genitals.
So, in relatively polite Japanese you might
say something like:
"She kicked him in the over there"
My absolute favorite however is the
Japanese
expression for a man's fly (i.e., his
pant's
zipper). In Japanese they call it 'the
window
on society.'
Do the Japanese know something that we don't?
 11.07.01
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Jack is really starting to show a lot
of
personality lately. He's losing that
infant
quality, and you can kind of see what
he's
going to look like as a young child,
if not
an adult.
Pretty damn handsome if I do say so!
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