Watch your fingers. Or else!

Most of these signs have smiling cartoon raccoons or crabs or just hands. I wonder if there have been bloody finger incidents on the Keikyu line that demanded a more graphic warning.

Give up

C'mere. I'll give ya some a' this guy.

Something about this ad recruiting part time train station employees doesn't seem that welcoming.

Taepodong Breaking news

NHK just broke into a show about a very old family of farmers to report that North Korea will launch a missile "any moment."

For some reason, the visual was a static picture so blurred that it could have been a national border from a satellite or a macro of a piece of moldy toast. The voice-over that made the ominous announcement was digitally warped as they do with crime witnesses. Hm. Why?

Read over someone's shoulder at home

Look at the usual troublemaker on the right, trying to read over the poor guy's shoulder from two seats away.

Only the press release is an April Fool's joke

Most of the JR train platforms in metro Tokyo are non-smoking as of yesterday. No more clusters of smokers huddled around industrial platform ashtray installations. Nice. Would you like a few facts about this, maybe from Japan Rail? This looks like the relevant press release: "Set Areas in the Metropolitan Area to be Made Entirely No-Smoking." Let's just click on it, as suggested at the top of the press release page, and see what it says. Ha! Gotcha! Only six of the last five dozen are actually links. The rest are just unlinked headlines, often vague ("set areas?"). Several with double exclamation points.

Useful Japanese phrase #712

泥のように倒れそうだね。

Doro no yoh ni ta-o-re-soh da ne.

You are about to collapse like mud.

(Drink Aquarius.)

Seeing blue

Glasses for the "blue diet" were my silly near-purchase of the week. Hers was much better.

To lose weight, you just wear the glasses when you eat. They make food look less appealing or alter your brain chemistry or both. Nineteen bucks.

Some thing about some missiles

Yes, I feel lame that the Protein Water commercial was on during a feature about the North Korean missile launch and I'm talking about the skinny machos. I will give you a little update.

They do make news easy to understand on the morning feature shows. The reporter put up a map of the world and stuck on cardboard flags to narrate the reaction to the last time North Korea launched a missile right over Japan into the Pacific. The flag over Japan said "anger" and had a little manga anger symbol. Then America got an anger flag (over NY), and then South Korea got one, too. But wait! When NK explained that it was just for a satellite, the top layer peeled off the US flag revealing "relief," with litle "phew!" sweat drops. Ditto South Korea. Japan, still angry. (I personally was "annoyed" as I had to work late every night for ages, but that is neither here nor there.)

A reporter on the street in midtown Manhattan stopped two middle-aged white people, asking them without context what Taepodong means. One asked if it was a game, and another mixed it up with tempura over rice. (That's "ten-don." Close!) Back to the studio to ram home the point that people in other countries just don't know or care about the situation.

David Spector, the token foreigner on the panel, stepped up and said that the situation is indeed being reported overseas, but that they are using terms like "North Korean missile" more than "Taepodong" so simmer down. Thank you, David.

Incidentally, stopping people on the street in midtown Manhattan and asking them without context what Taepodong means is probably exactly what I am doing right now in the parallel universe where I stayed in New York with the Japanese media.

For you, skinny macho guy

A commercial for new Suntory Protein Water, a cloudy white drink that's packaged in a barbell-shaped bottle. A dance-off between the "skinny machos" and the "beefy machos." The final text says this drink is "for you, the skinny macho."