Unfortunate Choice of Words

99 out of 100 Japanese schools require students to wear uniforms. As I have stated in an earlier post, girls wear sailor uniforms or blazers and skirts.

As a father, I like the sailor uniforms. They tend to conceal physical features: Tall or short, wide or not, it isn't readily obvious.

Now that students are on summer break, I'm seeing some of my students in regular clothes for the first time.

One young lady came to class the other day in a tank top, and to my surprise she turns out to be quite buxom. Then I read what was printed on her shirt, and had to stick my fist in my mouth and bite my knuckles to keep me from braying like a jackass.

It said, "Boing, BOING!!"

"Where's the beef?"

Ah, the adventure continues.

Now we have 'blue' steaks which you can find even in the black of midnight under the new moon, even when the power goes out in the middle of a storm; just follow the blue radiance in the freezer. Who needs candlelight? Don't you envy our wee little radioactive beasties who glow in the dark?*

Beef cattle have been found to have 73 times the acceptable national standard of radioactive cesium (who thinks up these standards, anyways? Need to thank that anal-retentive character).

What does this mean to the consumer? Well, radioactive meat has been found in more than 10 prefectures, sent to at least 43 different outlets and restaurants. And in a few cases, served and eaten at "discount restaurants". How'd you like to wake up to that little bit of news: "Today will be partly cloudy, muggy as hell. Oh, and btw, the restaurant you ate at last night gave you the equivalent of 20 CT scans in your beef bowl."

Mmmm, now the beef's bad, fish in the east swim in radioactive goo and eat soylent green, the spinach has powers Popeye certainly never gained, and the water in the east is 'unacceptable for babies and pregnant women'. Combine that with all the tainted foods that have come in from China over the last 2 years, and it's getting hard to shop.

Can't wait until the new CostCo opens!


*too bad radioactive goods don't really glow. Just go shopping in the dark, you know your food's clean.

Parents Revolt

Read this article about the radiation level changes in Fukushima Prefecture. As a parent, wouldn't you just be looking for any way out of the area?

Fukushima children

It's the water.... again

Well, summer is here. We're hitting the low 90's with humidity in the low 90s as well. Tokyo and east Japan are even hotter. Makes you crave big glasses of ice cold water, pitchers of tea. Good thing the water's safe!

"Step right up, get'chur water here. Certified safe by the central government. Don't worry about those pesky little DNA encryption errors, your grandkids'll be perfectly happy looking like hairy octopi."

Areas outside the Fukushima evacuation zone have been certified safe for children, with radiation within all limits. "Damn!", you say. "How did they take care of that so fast? How'd they clean up hotspots so strong that they were frying the robots designed for highly-radioactive environments?"

Well, I'm glad you asked. It was really quite simple. They looked at the allowable radiation levels in the drinking water and in the soil on school grounds, then compared them to the legal limits.

Then they raised the limits TWENTY-FOLD. (2)