Why, yes, I can!

At TY Harbor (previously mentioned here). Though more than 10 times the price of the equivalent item at Mickey D's, it did come with chips (North American: fries) and salad and all-you-can-drink cold tea which I couldn't quite identify, and all things considered (like taste) is better value for money (especially when Someone Else is footing the bill).

Kthxbye.

My mother has devoted much of her retirement to ruthlessly tracking down anyone who had the temerity to be a direct blood line ancestor of myself and my brother, and disappointingly it appears I am a pure-bred Englishpenguin for at least a couple of centuries back. Not even a smidgen of Celticness, let alone any proper foreigners.

Nevertheless, as a globalized 24/7 interculturally attuned urbane metropolitanite I am keenly aware of the various sensibilities associated with Englishness, and as such instantly cringed upon witnessing this sign last night:

Attached to the entrance of a bar in trendy, urbane and sophisticated Oimachi. (I wouldn't tell you the name even if I could remember it, because the music theme seemed to be "the cheesiest hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s" and despite a collective best effort to introduce amnesia through beer consumption, I can distinctly recall hearing - in no particular order - titles from Take That, Abba, Kylie Minogue and possibly "Lady In Red" by Chris De Burgh, though that might just have been the result of hallucinations).

(For those of you not au fait with the blocky characters on the left, adjacent to "England" is written the name of a beer which when transcribed back into Latin letters reads "ginesu").

Despite my best attempts to become disgustingly multilingual, living and working in a globalized 24/7 interwebbed world means I still end up having to interact with people in places I've never heard of who would no doubt be more at home communicating in languages I've also never heard of, but restrictions on my cranial capacity mean we end up by default settling on the lowest common denominator, the language of Shakespeare and its bastard offspring.

I would thus like to take the opportunity to present to you, my faithful readers, an extract from an online "chat" I had the inestimable pleasure of participating in earlier today during the course of execution of my duties towards the furtherment of global capitalism, and inviting you to revel in the glory of the language which has clawed its way up from a minor northern European dialect of Old German to become the de facto inofficial lingua franca of this planet.

does it possible for us to make excel sheel if we listing

bcz i have copy in my excel sheet

but it show "reallocate tab

r u getting what i mean?

To which my response (somewhat paraphrased) was: "No i r not getting what u mean".

It's good to see amongst all the AJAX-powered mobile-enabled SNS hype that defines the internet of today, there are still some web sites created by good old-fashioned technologies, such as this one here spotted in the centre of Tokyo currently being crawled by a spider:

I know a lot of bloggers are very interested in web spiders, so for your convenience I have included a larger image of this particular one below.

Due to ongoing cognitive processing issues, normal service on this blog is currently suspended. Until regular operations can be resumed, please enjoy some soothing background Engrish, such as this t-shirt implying that you are too dumb to get the association between South Dakota and its popular maritime mascot character, the whale.

Well, the monkey is still out and about, most recently sighted near Kanda in the very centre of Japan's capital, where it's continuing to evade capture by the elite Monkey Capturing Squad of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. This map traces its course through the city:

Meanwhile, the noise you failed to hear last night (Monday evening) was the sound of 120 million Japanese citizens failing to be bothered to shrug their shoulders at the news that some guy with a combover (and glasses which would make former British Prime Minister John Major cringe with shame) suddenly resigned. The hunt for a replacement is now on, and surely it is no coincidence that the aforementioned primate is now apparently circling the centre of Japanese political power (number 6 on the map is pretty close to the Parliament Building, and the green patch is the Imperial Palace).

Anything further I say should be construed only as pure speculation, but do not be surprised to hear an announcement regarding a major shift on banana taxation policy in the next few days.

Tsk tsk Keikyu Railway. You'd think that operating part of the line which runs between Tokyo's major airports would encourage you to do more than just run your translations through some automatic translator. I know you probably don't read my blog, but just to show I care, here's a saner suggestion:

"The air conditioning in this car is set to a higher temperature".

(Most railway companies provide at least one carriage on each train where the air conditioning is not quite as vicious for passengers who prefer it, though it's very rarely signposted in English come to think of it - usually there will be a sign in blue above the doors on reading 弱冷房車 jaku reibosha)