voted!

I just filled out my voting ballot. A couple right-wing sites were kind enough to provide information on which candidates to vote against. They made my decisions very easy!

survival Japanese: vegetarian

I learned this word (or it stuck in my brain) a month ago.

菜食主義（さいしょくしゅぎ）sai shoku shugi: vegetarianism. If you look at the characters it's literally vegetable diet belief :D

survival Japanese: assortment

When in doubt and looking at an unreadable menu, look for the words 盛り合わせ, which means assortment.If you can understand the words following it, even better, otherwise you might get an assortment of raw liver or something ;)

Just kidding. Usually they have assortments of chicken skewers (various parts of the chicken, and I mean from all over the chicken), or assortments of sashimi (raw fish), etc. I've never seen an assortment of raw liver, as there's usually only one type of liver available.

SoftBank Ad: Cameron Diaz

The ad:
Cameron Diaz walking rapidly and talking (unheard by viewers) animatedly on the phone as "Walk this Way" plays (not the Aerosmith version, as far as I can tell).
And the end of the ad, the SoftBank logo appears. I presume they're advertising the fact that Vodafone has become SoftBank, but that's just a guess, as there are no explanations in the commercial.

It's kind of funny to see these Hollywood stars on TV and billboards.

Tommy Lee Jones is the face of Boss Coffee. If they could get Bruce Springsteen to advertise Boss Coffee, that'd be cool, but Tommy Lee Jones isn't bad either. The commercials that Demi Moore's ex-husband (what is his name?! The only thing coming to mind is Billy Joel, haha) has been doing are a bit on the cheesy side though. Angelina Jolie's commercials for Shiseido's Integrate cosmetics line are a little strange too. I don't know why, but they're a bit off.

This week, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas and Lindsay Lohan have suddenly appeared on magazine covers (separately). I assume Fergie is appearing because of her solo album, but not sure why Lindsay Lohan is making appearances.

NHK has the best documentaries

Today I caught the tail end of a new documentary from NHK called 72 hours. They continuously film a place or person for 72 hours.

I only caught 10 minutes or so, but what a brilliant 10 minutes. They filmed a popular area of Tokyo where a fireworks display was being held. A bunch of young people gathered the night before the event to stake out a place to watch the fireworks. So that morning, the camera went around and interviewed a homeless man who lives near the viewing site. He complained that he couldn't sleep at all last night, because the young people were too noisy. So the camera wandered over and said hello to the young people, who had been camped out since last night. They chatted about that, then segued into asking what the people thought of the homeless people in the area. One young man said that he'd like the homeless problem? to disappear. The country isn't being effective in fixing the problem. Another young man said that in an ideal world there wouldn't be any homeless people, but realistically it is a difficult problem. He then mentioned that it's possible for any of them (the group of young people) to become homeless at some point in their lives. The first young man said that it's not possible, but the second person insisted that it was. "You never know what could happen." The first young man repeated his assertion that he could never become homeless. But then he said, because he just made that bold statement, he's probably the most likely to become homeless.

Man, I need an English transcript of the show. I'm sure that I've made all sorts of errors in my retelling.

Tokyo Game Show

Thanks to Gamania.com I got to see the Tokyo Game Show. It was pretty interesting. Huge and lots of glittery displays. Sony's section was quite impressive. I was entertained by all the cosplay going on. Sadly I forgot my camera so I didn't take any pictures. The Wii looks like a lot of fun. I want to try the monkey darts game they have. They had girls dressed up to match the games they were demo-ing. The girls playing the sword game looked really bored, sadly. I think I'd have a lot more fun than they did. The two girls demonstrating the sports games were fun to watch though. One girl got the hang of the games a lot faster than the other girl.

There were a lot of fanboys taking pictures of the various booth girls. It was funny to see both the girls and the boys posing for pictures.