Genghis Kong vs. Jimmy Van Halen

Japanese television is, without exception, utterly crap. Every aspect of Japanese TV production is indescribably woeful in every possible way. However, sometimes it manages to be such utter, utter crap that it accidentally becomes genius.

Terebi dorama (Television drama) are extremely popular in Japan. These are more-or-less like soap operas, except that they're utterly farcical. None of the actors have a shred of talent, the plots are retarded, the production values are low and everything is so over-acted, over-dramatised and generally overdone that it becomes laughable. In fact, they can become hilarious.

I've just been watching a wonderful dorama entitled Yamaonna, Kabeonna (mountain woman, wall woman), in which a flat-chested saleswoman (wall woman) gets a new employee on her salesteam who has enormous breasts (mountain woman). Wall Woman is envious of mountain woman's rack, and hilarity ensues. In todays episode the department chief of the department store where they work didn't feel like eating his potato croquettes, so Mountain Woman had some. Unfortunately, Department Chief suffers from erectile dysfunction so his wife had laced his croquettes with some kind of drug to encourage his libido (I didn't quite catch what it was that she put in the croquettes, but it sounded like "spong", so I'm going to go with that). Mountain Woman reacted strangely to the spong, going into a super-hard-working frenzy of smiles, enthusiasm and efficiency, and was so impressed with them that she shared them with her section chief. He also went into a berserk spong-fury, and at the end of the day he charged off to some classy hostess bar with his colleagues to exercise his love muscle. There he bumped into limp-dicked Department Chief (his boss) with much embarassment but they end up sitting together with their girls for a while. Later on, who should appear on the stage dressed as Elvis but their company president (!) to much embarassment/amusement all round.

Meanwhile, Wall Woman has been invited to Mountain Woman's house for dinner, and Wall Woman is trying to work out how to make her boobs bigger. She is surprised to discover that Mountain Woman's mother has tiny breasts, so she decides that it must be something dietary. Mountain Woman eats a lot of pickles, so Wall Woman starts gorging on mama's special pickles in an effort to grow her breasts. Later on, Mountain Woman's grandmother comes home. Grandmother also has enormous great big boobs, and when she sits down to eat with them she has to lift her breasts up and rest them on the table. Cue slow-motion soft-focus close up of old lady boobs as Wall Woman gazes transfixed by them.

Wall woman offers Gran some pickles, but Gran declines, saying she never eats them. Damn, thinks Wall Woman, if its not the pickles, then what is it? I transpires that Mother (flat-chest) never drinks, but Wall Woman and Granny both drink like fish, so Wall Woman decides that the only way for her to get bigger boobs is to get amazingly drunk.

Oh, and at some point Mountain Woman was hospitalised by falling objects. I don't quite know how that fits in with the rest of it.

I can't quite tell whether the show ended there or whether I got bored and changed the channel, but that's about as far as I got.

Here's a little picture (that's Wall Woman and the left, Mountain Woman on the right):
And if you found my plot synopsis a little confusing, here's a handy chart to explain things more easily:
Does that make it a little clearer? Good.

I'll try and watch it regularly and keep you all up-to-date with the fascinating goings-on. I'm sure you're all desperate to find out what happens next.

Guess who I met last night?

JIMMY VAN HALEN! There he is, looking sexy. What a god. He's like a walking chunk of sex. He's like a little fleck of sex wee stuck to the bedhead in a love hotel. He is the worlds tallest sperm and the most fertile man in all of Asia.

For those of you who don't already know him, this is my friend Jimmy. We lived together last year and throughout first year we terrorised many karaoke events. We're karaoke terrorists. We turn up and we blow everyone away, but most of the time we also get killed in the blast.

Unfortunately, there were too many of us last night to all fit in one karaoke room, and we decided that it was only fair that we share the love evenly, so Jimmy was in one room and I was in the other. I was in this room:

That's right. All-you-can-drink karaoke with women dressed as Pikachu. Isn't Japan an awesome country? I don't even know who these women are, but I think one of them was called Ashley. Perhaps. (The chick in the middle was cute. Dude, I totally should have banged her.)

So me and Jimmy were in separate rooms, but we were able to get together for an absolutely storming, foot-stamping, screaming shouting rendition of that Karaoke classic, Dschinghis Khan (by Dschinghis Khan), to rapturous applause and wide-eyed terror. I'm also pretty chuffed with myself because I totally out-karaokeed a Japanese host guy at a Japanese song. Hosts (like a hostess, but a man) are pretty much trained to be good at karaoke. It's part of their job. And yet I Karaoke Blasted him right out of the water, even singing in Japanese.

Incidentally, the hosts that were there last night were off-duty. They weren't getting paid to hang out with us, they wanted to hang out with us because we're cool. Actually, they wanted to hang out with Lisa because they think she's cool, and I just happened to be in the same place at the same time.

We also met up with Rachel and Lisa from Sheffield so it was almost like a mini-reunion. Tomorrow, though, I think we're having a much larger-scale Sheffo get-together, possibly in fancy dress ('tis Hallowe'en, after all), which should be jolly.

Last weekend I went to 'camp'. I don't know whether I've already mentioned the IFL, but I feel I ought to. The International Friendly Lunch is a very camply-named club at Rikkyo University which aims to befriend and make welcome foreign exchange students, and they organise loads of stuff (mostly drinking parties). They also organised a camp for us, which involved booking a lodge near a river and then doing a barbecue and drinking party. They picked a very beautiful spot out in Saitama, about an hour and a half away from where I live:

You can just see the first hints of Autumn on the leaves. You can also see that there's a river.
River + Drunkeness =
Male nudity! Yay!

I, unfortunately, was not on top form for this event. I had exhausted myself from getting excessively wasted the night before and having spent the night telling a racist to stop being so racist at great length, I had slept very little. Thus I was sleepy and hungover and grumpy, so I wimped out and went to bed around midnight, although I believe the party continued until the very weeest and smalles of the wee small hours.

It was this episode - where I somehow managed to fuck up getting drunk at a drinking party by drinking - that caused me to pause and reconsider my lifestyle, and ultimately to decide to "detox".

On the subject of the detox, I am not doing too badly. My not-drinking lasted precisely as long as I thought it would (3 days), but I have been out drinking twice, surrounded by smoking people and still have not smoked, which I guess is a good thing. I have also not drunk any coffee, although I have had one or two cups of green tea. So I'm still a drunk, but I don't seem to be a smoker any more, which is strange. Strange in a good way, I suppose, but definitely strange.

To follow up on another point from my last post: I asked her out. She said no.

D'oh!

(Notice the new picture at the top of the blog)

I've got a week's holiday now - no school until Thursday next, although I believe I have mid-term exams on Thursday, which sucks a bit. A lot of people have gone off travelling to exciting places, but I decided to stay around and not do a great deal. This way I can conserve money, study lots and I've also got a chance to meet up with the Sheffield crew which is nice. On Tuesday I'm going to Disneysea, too, which should be fun.

I'm going to leave you with this delicious song by MGMT, because I think its awesome and I've slightly fallen in love with the weird face-painty girl in the video.



Hugzzzz
Genghis xx