The Queen from Virginia and Wayne's stache

Once again there are many many thanks to be said! The first is to Katy, whose movie was shown at the Vietnamese Film Festival here at UTA this weekend. Katy produced a fantastic documentary on Jackie Bong Wright, the first Asian-American woman to enter into the Ms. Senior America contest. My personal favorite moment of the film? When Ms. Maryland reads Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Women" whilst doing the electric slide in a tuxedo jacket and leotard. I am obviously going to have to work in more dance numbers into my own poetry just to keep up.

The second thanks (chronologically) go out to Merriweather for inviting me along to see the Flaming Lips with Matisyahu this weekend. Matisyahu was like the icing on a cake I hadn't even tasted yet! What a badass he was, skanking around in his little yarmulke! And then, there they were, the Flaming Lips, complete with dancing aliens, santa clauses, confetti, and about thirty balloons launched into the audience. WOW! It's been a long time since a concert experience made me so instantly happy! The whole atmosphere was cheerful, giggly, and lighthearted. Complete with loads of singalongs! Not that there weren't some freaky moments added in for fun too. Oddly enough, the close-up video of Wayne Coyne singing the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song wigged me a little. I think it was the fact that each hair of his moustache became about three feet long, adding to my love-hate with facial hair.

McSweeney's

I'm having troubles putting links up on my blog. This is probably due to the fact that my computer at home is a five-year-old Mac that prefers long walks on the beach over opening up the CD drive. Anyways, I've been cracking up for days over the silly goodness that is on www.mcsweeneys.net and encourage everyone to go check it out. I particularly recommend "An Extremely Patient Producer Works With an Aspiring Pornography Scriptwriter" and "Refreshingly Honest Crate and Barrel Catalog Descriptions."

Englanese

I've spent the last four years or so enjoying Chinglish and Japlish and any kind of Asian inconsistencies in spelling, grammar or sentence structure (only to come back to the US and find its horrible effect on my own speaking abilities). But today, on the drive home from community college, I was delighted to see that somebody here in Texas had fucked up some Japanese, creating what I'd like to call Englanese.

I'm completely intrigued by this restaurant, that probably wanted to call itself AOYAMA or AOHYAMA. AO means blue, green, or sometimes new or fresh. YAMA means mountain. AOHYAMA can mean blue or fresh mountain, and is also the name of a really upscale area of Tokyo with lots of shopping and jazz clubs. It's a very common name in Japan.

But the problem is, this restuarant didn't call itself AOHYAMA, it has called itself AHOYAMA. New meaning entirely. AHO in Japanese means asshole or dumbass. In certain parts of Japan, it's a fighting word, and if you say it to someone, you'd better be prepared to fuck some shit up. Now YAMA still means mountain here, but the whole meaning of the restaurant's name has now changed to "mountain of dumbasses." I'm still intrigued by the restaurant, but much less likely to eat the food there.

Community College Blues

Okay, it all started when my professor was preparing us for the test we have on Thursday by telling us we needed to bring our scientific calculators and a Scantron sheet. Bring a Scantron?? That right there started my mind spinning. So when class was over, I asked said professor, where do we get these Scantrons? Why, the Scantron vending machine at the end of the hall, of course! Now, I've seen some odd vending machines in Japan: beer vending machines, residential condom vending machines, porn vending machines...but none have inspired such depression as the Scantron-and-bluebook-vending machine in the Math and Technology Building. Have we really nickel-and-dimed education so badly so that my tuition fees don't cover the cost of taking a test by multiple choice anymore??

And while I was down over the $1.40 I had to shell out for a Scantron882, those other ridiculous things about community college, which on some days strike me as kitschy, started to fucking piss me off. The fact that outside of my classroom there are decorations suited for an elementary school, like pictures of Mount Rushmore with the words "Mount Rushmore" written in dot letters; a "Happy Birthday" poster written for someone, but written as "Happy Brithday!", also in dot letters; Print Shop banners decorating classrooms saying cool catch phrases such as "What's up?", potentially but not necessarily in dot letters. Then it hit me: these people are in COMMUNITY COLLEGE. They have (almost) all come here straight from high school and taken their high school values right with them. Wearing your high school colorguard t-shirt is prefectly acceptable. Loitering to smoke cigarettes in the parking lot carries a certain meaning. And do not even get me started on the amount of bass in that parking lot. Just waiting to turn onto the street that goes to that stupid parking lot means that I will inevitably be in front of (or behind or both) some car with bass loud enough to make my windshield vibrate. These doods are not joking. They are all still stuck in permanent senioritis.

All these thoughts were swirling in my head, and I was getting more and more irritado. I walked back to my car through a sea of loiterers, bass, and fire ant piles. I hopped into the sanctuary of my car, ready to vacate these losers stuck in high school. Plugged in my i-pod, and the first song to come on was "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes. Hmmmm...now who's stuck in high school??

Sphinka Flinka

I've got some friends who went to Norway this weekend during a well-deserved European vacation and I'm so curious to hear how it was. Not just for the fact that they are visiting a friend who I haven't heard from in some time, but to hear about Norway! I have no idea about that country or culture, aside from the fact that it seems cold and I hear there is much vodka and vacation time. Sounds good, especially if you've got your cuddlduds on.

But I have another reason for my curiosity about Norway. Back in the days of being underage, some genius-type friends of mine (known to many as being a part of Q, Goddammit) came up with the brilliant idea of posing as foreign-exchange students in order to get beer. A brilliant plot, it was. And everyone loved them as beer-drinking, quirky, Swedish Exchange students that they posed to be. By the time that I was interested in joining in the fun, they had decided that Sweden was overused, and created a student ID for me as Inga Dootsmort, studying for a year at UT from Oslo, Norway (or the Republic of Norwelij). It worked like a charm! When entering a bar or club, we all just looked about 6 inches beyond whoever was questioning our ids, smiled, said something clever like, "Yah, Havelun goot schmorgas," and we were in like flynn. The Q fellas even invented our own drinking song to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"...

Sphinka Flinka,
Sphinka Flinka,
Ex ma Krieg,
Ex ma Krieg,
Havelun Goot Schmorgus,
Havelun Goot Schmorgus,
Llif ym Reeb,
Llif ym Reeb!

Most of it was pure brilliance in jibberish, but those last two lines were Backlish for "fill my beer." Looking back, I'm impressed with the subliminal qualities of our drinking song, and I'm also thinking there was a lot of Monty Python-watching going on. This is pretty damn reminiscent of all those Scandanavian credits in the Holy Grail.

I owe many thanks to the Q boys. The Dootsmort-alter-ego is just the tip of the iceberg. But I will be anxious to hear about a real trip to Oslo from Letma and DQ (Dancing Queen, not Dairy Queen) and to see how the real Nordic version of Twinkle Twinkle sounds.

Ujano the Ujanobu

Okay, either this guy is looking for a fight, or he's the lonliest dood in Tokyo. And proud of it.

Look Out Andre

For those of you that keep up with my personal life, you know I was back in Tokyo last month. It was a pretty major trip, and in the few moments I was able to escape the Executive Lounge and its free beer, I thought about this: Does Andre the Giant really need that posse?


rip crikey