nahaman comments

Am I having hallucinations? I was just thinking that fresh produce prices are the lowest in years. There must have been bumper crops because of a long cool spring. And even though they are from cold storage, 700-ish yen for 6 apples is about the same price as they were 10 years ago, although I do get 4 for 350Y these days. I'm talking about greengrocer prices, not supermarkets where you have to pay their massive overheads and cartel transport costs.

How can the Richter Magnitude (maximum 9+) and the Japanese M scale (maximum 7) be exactly the same scale????

When we couldn't get any locals to clean our house, we tried a local language school where the (mostly) Chinese students were happy to find baito that paid more than minimum wage. We gave then 1000 yen an hour for 4 hours a week, did not abuse them verbally like most local employers, and so had pretty good results except for the expected turnover when they went off to Tokyo to work or to another school. One did steal from us, but I think that's a risk whenever a stranger works in your home. In the end though, it turned out to be easier to do it ourselves, especially as kids got older and more capable of cleaning up after themselves.

Yeah, back to the Phils. Great idea! A longtime resident of Manila told me that it's fine to pee up against a wall there but you'd damn well better cover your mouth when you use a toothpick. I hope our troops can remember that!

The civilian fine for DUI is about $5000 for a first offense on Okinawa, which ought to be pretty good punishment for the daytime drunk. That plus a quick dishonorable.

The buddy system was tried and failed, incidentally, at least during another period of incidents on Okinawa in 2005. I think the problem is an attitudinal one, and self-perpetuating: "They don't like us anyway, so screw'em for not knowing that America is the best country in the world, those ignorant J....s"..

.

There is something fundamentally wrong about stationing young, single troops in Okinawa. If you don't believe this true, I invite you to scan the "personals" in Craigslist. KAB seems to be a particularly foul sewer.

"A few angry farmers"????? Please bend over a bit farther, Mr. Prime Minister.

Previous comment on journalistic excellence aside, I think it's great that we can buy good-quality blank cassettes. I own a classic 1994 Honda Beat with a unique original sound system that has a cassette player that sounds as good as the CD changer and a lot better than MP3s. Happy to make some new tapes just to show how good they can sound.

Usually the problem is curable, mainly by correct tuning of diesels. Black smoke is normal at high altitudes, but Manila is definitely sea level. Used engines are usually not too bad, but the author doesn't seem to know much about them if he thinks an engine with a broken crankcase would be exported from Japan. I blame the vehicle owners, who probably just don't care as long as they get the fares.

As for it being a problem of the commons, it's not unusual for Japan to be enveloped in Chinese-generated soot when the winds are right (wrong?)

Definition of a No-Brainer.

Strangely, I feel myself siding with the high-pay-OK side. Ghosn has been Nissan CEO for quaite a long time, not a new bright light (think H-P). He has done a good job of improving the product line and the profits. Would that most American CEOs were as successful.

@paulinusa - isn't that true of most white-collar prosecutions? Send Bernie Madoff to prison and (maybe) deter other Ponzi-schemers.

Fortunately for us in Okinawa, the level of active policing is almost nil. Proof? Look at how many cars go around with brake and rear lights burned out. In the US, those are like honey to the bears who slap fines on drivers. We should count our blessings!

It was no big deal in Okinawa. I was expecting a sleepless night from the whistling winds but they never really resumed after about 10 pm. Still getting light rain from the tail but the satellite shows it is pretty dissipated, but still might dump a lot of rain on Kansai today.

The first typhoon is exciting but all the rest are just a drag. Okinawa had a small but nasty one last summer that blew my back gate to splinters when the wind unusually shifted around to come from the north, and it caused a lot of damage on the island. And then about 3 years before that there was one that took me a week to clean up garden debris. That one might have been a "super".

Beauty (and obscenity) is in the eye of the beholder. Nabokov's Lolita was a victim, not a perpetrator or a pervert, so there is nothing morally wrong with teenage girls dressing in the "lolita" style. I've been much more disgusted with some middle-aged male friends who put them down for "dressing like hookers". Having said that, if these girls understood better what role they could be seen as playing, maybe they would tone it down a bit.

@globalwatcher - where did you have all those LED lights? Are you maybe confusing them with low-wattage fluorescents??.Those were a lousy deal - never lasted as long as advertised and still a disposal problem.

I replaced all the lamps in my car with LEDs (except for headlights) and don't have to worry about draining the battery if I forget to turn them off.

LEDs are fairly new on the market and still only competitively priced for 20-30 watt equivalent bulbs. If you need broad spectrum illumination for your health, I suggest you leave your computer for a while and step into the sunlight.

2005 was not exactly "testing stage", and if you know how they have solved the non-autorotation problem, I'm listening. Actually I am a bit irritable today because Friday was the worst in many moons for military aircraft noise.

"The aircraft is incapable of autorotation to make a safe landing in helicopter mode if both engines fail. A director of the Pentagon's testing office in 2005 said that if the Osprey loses power while flying like a helicopter below 1,600 feet (490 m), emergency landings "are not likely to be survivable"."

Sounds like just the kind of hardware we need flying over southern Okinawa.

One, (not You (baru)), could make the case that the rich Okinawan culture is worth preserving, but will die if the American presence and the associated mainland Japanese influence continues. Of course that is too much to hope for, but still is a good reason for wanting those influences to vanish. The Okinawans were poor but content before the war. You can argue that they are better off now but I disagree. Don't dredge up the Satsuma/imperialist argument, and the fact that a few thousand landlords have been made wealthy doesn't cut the karashi either. The Japanese government would be happy to end their blood money payments for Okinawa infrastructure and the Okinawans would get along somehow.

I'm waiting to be the designated ignorant one now, but why couldn't the "mission" of Futenma be carried out in an equivalent sized corner of Kadena? The mission consists of people, activities, and facilities. Nothing sacred about not doing it somewhere there is room, excepting the unwillingness of the AF and USMC to play together. Tuff s**t, I say. So OK, the Marines are Very Important For Our Defense, but by the way what is Kadena's mission except to flatten some poor country before the Marines wade in?

Raising the price of electricity is a GREAT idea. People have no incentive to reduce consumption for the "greater good" but will respond when their individual wallets are targeted.

Beans + mustard = ammonia + bleach

sunhawk - not necessarily small quantities. I was a chemistry nerd in Jr High and remember temptingly large bottles of chemicals that were sold to schools by lab supply companies. (The school supply rooms always smelled like alcohol and copper sulphate.)

I'm impressed. The rap kids get here is for lack of initiative, which he obviously has lots of. My god, did I ever used to do that kind of stuff! Powdered zinc mixed with sulfur was my favorite - big green flash. For gunpowder++ potassium chlorate works better than niitrate. As they'd probably say now, "it's da bomb".

Hey - that's a great idea, nudge.

Agree with Johninnaha - the bases have been here too long and the US presence is an embarassment. It's a huge expense to the US, which is more to the point these days, serving basically as a little R&R for poor guys on their way to Afghanistan. The twerp in Pyongyang and his missiles are a joke, and if we or China wants to start a war I don't want to be in Okinawa when it happens.

The only possible reason to apologize is that deNiro's ironical joke was too close to the reality that people actually said we weren't ready for a black president in 2008. If you didn't get this, I feel sorry for you and maybe you need to relax and drink less.

John - how about organizing a rocket-watching party?

timeon - u reminded me.... i only did it once, but it was quite a bit more than walking.