date	URL	japan stuff	other
10.20.99	the cherokee alphabet - - - - - - - armenian fonts for sale many are cool, but Astghik is my favorite. oh, Azat is good too. And Asya. - - - - - - - how to build a language a good overview of human-made languages by Mister Donald J. Harlow. - - - - - - - klingon-speaking daddy a short wired article about a Klingon linguist who was trying to raise his toddler to be fluent in Klingon.	a phone conversation where the spelling of something is being explained to a native-english speaker by a native-japanese speaker nihonjin: X as in Christmas. amerikajin: What? nihonjin: X as in Christmas. amerikajin: S? nihonjin: X as in Christmas. amerikajin: C? nihonjin: X as in Christmas. amerikajin: Oh. X as in Christmas.
10.19.99	Blissymbolics made up languages are the best. Charles Bliss tried to make a more logical language using symbols. he was even nominated for a Nobel Peace prize for his efforts. Blissymbolics hasn't exactly caught on like Furbys, but it is still used for teaching people with learning difficulties. here's a Blissymbolic home page from symbols.net which has some other interesting stuff. here's BlissWorld, a "monthly" Blissymbolics e-zine. (last updated in april.) Download the true type Blissymbolic font and then you can see this Judds song in Blissymbolic. finally, here's a directory full of GIFs of Bliss' symbols themselves. oh, and here's some Blissymbolic phrases from the bliss bucket. i hope they know how awesome and insane the name Bliss Bucket sounds. - - - - - - - Flame Broiled: The Disgruntled Ex- Burger King Employee Site caustic and funny and sad and true. how to deal with the 'evil customer': "... Well, you can tell them to stick a chicken tender in their butt, or you can do it for them!" - - - - - - - Tammi Porter's Home Page "Don, I'd like to know what your car is doing in that t**ty bar parking lot every day at 12:30 when you're supposedly on your lunch break at the Honda dealership!" funny. wait, i meant: funny! it's from the pages of someone named Bryan, where there's a fair amount of funny stuff. such as his cherished mementos like a receipt for repairs done to his car. also, scroll down and check out 'the many sides of me' in which the serious side is the actually the funniest stuff. plus, please see his rejection slip gallery. [which i found via Phreaky Phriday Phun Links.]
10.13.99	the dark side of scooby doo "Here's the real Scooby Doo Gang... And here are their evil counterparts..." - - - - - - - La Playa del Carmen Spend a little time here. It's fairly subtle, but it's worth taking a while to figure out what they're doing. At first glance, it looks and reads like any cheesey tourist site, but then it has paragraphs like this: "Shoppers who want to fully experience the excitement of shopping in Playa del Carmen should ask the homegrown staff at these newer stores whether they can afford to buy any of the products they sell. You will both laugh. Of course, the answer is '¡Claro qué no, señorita!'" - - - - - - - ribbit pita this is a pitas pages that i still read a lot. it's one of those sites that they're calling a newslog nowadays. the author finds tons of good weird news stories. i just noticed that he also links to misterpants, but that link is new i think. we don't know each other or anything. this wasn't arranged by some complex e-bartering link-arrangement agreement or anything. in this way, the above link is unlike most of the links on misterpants, which are of course the result of months of committee meetings and negotiations, every syllable labored over by a team of experts. Why, each misterpants hyperlink represents billions of dollars, milli of shares, or tens of thousands of jobs lost. Sometimes all three at once. etc. - - - - - - - thisisnews pita another interesting news pita. i also like this one. because i babbled so much in the above entry, i won't babble in this one.	shoelaces i think i'm the only person in japan who walks around with their shoelaces undone. a lot of people wisely do without shoelaces entirely because there's so much shoe-taking-off and shoe-putting-on that needs to happen here. anyway, i do it for my own entertainment because it seems to stress everyone out so much. and strangers sitting across from me on the train have been kind enough to point the untied shoelaces out to me on occasion.	belt-broom combine a belt and broom. the broom attaches to the back of the belt. that way when you're just walking around, you're also sweeping, thanks to the belt-broom.
10.12.99	bird pants "Upland bird hunters must all love that sweaty-butt feeling you can only get in oiled, cotton-duck bird pants." oh god, and check out all the big game these sporting folks have killed, featured on both their home page and "the hunt" page.	la vida loca if you thought that you could travel all the way around the world to get away from a stupid pop song, you'd be wrong. i hear that Ricky Martin La Vida Loca thing all the time here. In fact, I think I timed the whole Japan move badly--as I left, America seemed to be recovering nicely from the La Vida Loca infliction. But Japan caught it just around the time of my arrival. (and no I was not the carrier.) Now, I hear it everywhere here--in the supermarket, on TV. There's a Japanese version that I actually hear more often than the Spanglish version. (the j-pop version is worse.)
10.04.99	ants! these are on the website, supermanytime.com, which in addition to that great grammar-bender of a name, has some other goodness: wendell joseph comics that you might like and good ol' gasoline.	Stibi Wanda update So the Stevie Wonder song that he sings in the coffee ad here was actually written specifically for that coffee commercial and is getting some radio play. (it's way down there in the 70s. if you care, you have to wait, wait, wait for it, i guess.) anyway, ad-song-becomes-pop-hit is, to my American mind, a backwards story. [oh, but some anonymous person pointed out in the pantsbook that "i'd like to teach the world to sing" was first a Coke ad, which yes there's nothing more american than Coca-Cola, advertising, and cheesey 70s pop music. Anyway, I'd thought that it was the other way around for that one too. but i've been corrected. god bless america.]
10.01.99	sold out a nice collection of print ads from japan featuring american stars. most embarassing is this one of Arnold Schwarzenegger (note goofy grunge rock arnold, and also sho-gun arnold. ugh.) [found by Chisato. thanks!] - - - - - - - bigfoot beautiful bigfoot pictures. - - - - - - - "unlawful distribution of ammunition" a NY Times article about a gallery owner who was arrested for giving away bullets. she was giving away real bullets. they're art bullets. art, but also real working bullets. turns out you're not allowed to just give 'em away, even for art purposes. - - - - - - - po's scooter journey teletubby shockwave game. i got this link from Earl who sent it with this advice: "Be sure to get her going really fast. That's when she honks her horn. watch out for the rabbits." i don't know why that cracks me up, but it does. - - - - - - - Kyoto city bus photo album a service the Kyoto Municipal Transportation Bureau provides for people who get their jollies looking at bus photos. - - - - - - - artists don't make money from record deals Interesting article by Wendy Day on Chuck D's rapstation.com: "Who is the incredible bonehead who said rappers make mad loot? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!!"	Binsento Garo, Antoni Hopukinsu, Mego Raian, & Stibi Wanda seeing Andrew's mention of the japanese buffalo 66 page reminded about this. Vincent Gallo (writer, director, actor and song-writer for the film Buffalo 66) is relatively big in Japan right now. Not enormous huge mega-star big, but his face seems to pop up on a lot of stuff here, like national magazine covers, and ads. in fact, there's a car ad here with Vincent Gallo in it. i think he's on the beach or something. So strange. he doesn't seem like a summertime funtime beach kind of guy. Buffalo 66 opened a month or so ago in Japan. Anthony Hopkins is an a car ad too. he's a little creepy in it. of course. and Meg Ryan is in a tv ad for Camomile Tea. she's sitting in a japanese garden reading a letter and a Japanese woman asks her (in Japanese) how she is. Meg says, "okay" (also in Japanse) but that she's homesick. so she drinks camomile tea to remind her of home. Apparently, we are to think that Meg Ryan is an exchange student or something. oh yeah, another American celebrity I just remembered who's in Japanese ads right now is Stevie Wonder. He performs a little song for Kirin's new bad-tasting coffee drink, Fire.
09.30.99	bondage typeface by "Misako Aono - Illustrator - 'Eros!' 'Rock n' Roll!' 'Funny!'" for mac only, because mac people are kinkier. (or maybe because people on PCs are already being tortured enough. ha ha ha. heh. oh. eh. sigh.) - - - - - - - 04 clean pixelly design-y site. nice, especially the un section, wherein you will find change machine which is so cool. you get to play the role of evolution without all the heartbreak and mess. also, frog killer is good too. i'm not "hip" to this new frog-killing fad. But this thingamajigger also makes fun of the standard Adobe software interface, so it's worth checking out for that, if you like that sort of thing. i think you do. i do. i also like ore-topia 98: my world expo too--a parody of the 70s expos phenomenon with its geodesic domes and people-movers. so great. the world needs more expo parodies. also contributing to the overall niceness of this site: tributes to his favorite fonts. - - - - - - - elevator interface nice elevator. nice! - - - - - - - 50 cups of coffee: strange brew a referrer find. i think i'd seen this site before, too. it's a good weblog and more. much more. like the swooshy logo collection. bonus points to this site for being Canadian. (i'm not Canadian, but my point system is Canado-centric.) - - - - - - - damndirtyape another site i noticed because it was in my referrers. i like it. i like primates in general--chimps and monkeys, mostly, but apes are good too--particularly dirty apes. anyway, at first i was excited because i thought this was a weblog written by an ape. turns out it's not, so don't get your hopes up. but it's still good. again though, wouldn't it be great if there was a website that was done by a monkey? you could really get a monkey's eye view on the world from that site, the monkey perspective. it could be called "monkey musings" because damndirtyape is already taken. - - - - - - - kokoro camera nice collection of photos by "Yuuuka Ooosumi". most in japan. but some are also from trips to other parts of the world. i saw the Monopoly restaurant and thought, "ha, makes no sense. only in Japan!" but that was stupid of me because the photo was taken in las vegas. oh, and i just noticed this. check out the kanji rubik's cube. - - - - - - - gray graphics very nice. their katakana fonts are great. their romanji ones are okay, too.	a pizza topping hot dog. yes.