I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment.

Bill Bailey

I have come to realise that a truer sentence has never been said. Having been at a fair few meals with Japanese people now, I have noticed just how enthusiastic they are when it comes to food. Every new foodstuff put in their mouths is generally finished off with them saying “Oishii!” (delicious). I’m just left sitting there thinking “Yeah, it’s nice, I suppose”. While it’s great to enjoy what you eat, the Englishman in me just wanted everyone to calm down a bit.

Something else I have noticed with the random people I meet who can’t really speak English but who I try to have a conversation with anyway, is that they always seem to comment that my Japanese is very good. I find this strange as my Japanese really isn’t good at all. The other night I was talking to someone and I was trying to explain that tempura is very similar to fish and chips, the resulting utterance was as follows:

“天ぷらは errr, SIMILAR TO” <cue putting hands together motion> “errr, に fish and chips です。”

To this she replied with “Your Japanese is very good”, probably because she didn’t understand what on earth I was trying to say. The fact that I don’t even really know how to say “No, my Japanese isn’t very good” in Japanese shows that everyone I ever speak to is just humouring me.

Now that summer is over I can breathe a sigh of relief. You see, summer for me is the season of birthdays. A good 70% of my friends have their birthdays in the summer, which leads to much money loss on my part as I try to find the perfect presents for people. Don’t get me wrong I really like giving presents, I love the search around shops and the internet trying to hunt down an item they will love, or at least, an item that I would love to give them.

In England, I always found buying a birthday card was very much an afterthought. It could be difficult to choose one but this was mainly because they were all so similar. There was just no variation, just a piece of card folded in half. Sure, sometimes they were bigger, sometimes they were smaller, sometimes they had a “humourous” picture or joke and sometimes they even had a badge but they were always just the same basic thing.

Here in Japan, greetings card manufacturers seem to have developed some creativity and imagination. Yes, there are plenty of regular cards but they have something I haven’t seen elsewhere, birthday books.

These books are awesome, each one has a sturdy hardback cover and inside are many pages of birthday inspired adventure and whimsy. Perhaps it is because they are mostly all in Japanese so I can add my own spin to the events portrayed on their pages but they are endlessly more interesting that your common-or-garden card. Examples of stories include the adventures of a girl who jets around the planet getting wished Happy Birthday in various world languages, a peeping tom who also happens to be a bear and a society girl who owns a demon cat.

That’s not all though. There are also birthday flip books. These usually tell an animated story of some animals preparing a birthday party or a rabbit and two frogs dancing on a piano. The one problem I’ve found with these though is that they tend to be printed on very cheap paper. I guess such paper is easier to flip, but it just feels very low-class.

However, the greatest birthday card (maybe I should be saying paraphernalia) I’ve seen here was one I received on my own birthday. At first it seemed like your regular musical card, but upon opening it you find a simple keyboard, which allows you to create your own music through the medium of duck quacks. Much of the day after my birthday was spent playing around with it. I even learnt When You Wish Upon A Star on it!

Recently I have been putting far to much stuff in my work bag. This is not a good thing, it’s probably mucking up my back quite a bit. Not only is it bad for my back, it’s also bad for my bag. Yesterday the inevitable happened, while walking to work, headphones on, my bag strap broke.

My bag fell to the floor, ripping my headphones out of my ears and I could only stand there, looking gormless with my headphone cable dangling out of my pocket. Seconds (which oddly seemed like minutes) pass, a helpful young lady picked up my bag for me, despite it being much closer to me than her. I said my thank yous and happily realised that the strap wasn’t broken at all and I could simply clip it back into place.

So I continued on my merry way. After walking a few steps I felt music deprived, so I started to sort out my headphones. I then found out that during my bag’s descent to the floor it had managed to snap the wire to one of the headphones. I continued walking, not wanting to miss my train, all the while staring at the rather sad piece of broken wire, when suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder.

It was another lady, this time advancing in years, who handed me the lost broken ear bud and wondered off in the other direction without uttering a single word. So I stood there for a minute with a useless piece of moulded plastic in my hand wondering quite what she expected me to do with it.

I threw it in the bin.

Look at the clock underneath this sentence, ain’t it cool? Go on, press the speaker icon in the corner to listen to the funky music.

Done that?

Good.

I discovered this cute little blog widget while reading blogs around the internet found as a result of pointless Google searches. I was instantly captivated by it. It’s so simple but so cool.

Designed by a couple of enterprising fellows at UNIQLO, a Japanese casual clothes shop, this “UNIQLOCK” is a great piece of viral marketing. I’m not surprised they won a bucket load of awards for it. One great thing about it is that the girls do different things depending on the time, while they are dancing about most of the time, at midnight there are shots of them sleeping. Bless’em, all tired out after a long day dancing around a library. If you look at it’s website it also has an interesting “World Users” view which shows the amount of blogs it is on, what country and the blog’s name. The geek in me loves that they bothered to do that. You can also look at old versions of the UNIQLOCK on that website, apparently it’s over a year old!

As always, I’ve got my finger on the pulse.

It must also be pointed out that two of the girls dancing also feature in Tokyo Jihen’s Senkou Shoujo video (check it here and they also appear in this much better quality fanvid of the English version of the song, here). ANYTHING in any way associated with Shiina Ringo instantly gets +100 cool points from me.

Please note: This was written last week literally hours before Kevin Keegan announced his resignation, I was so unhappy and disappointed that I sat on it for a week. It is still kinda relevant (maybe), so I’m publishing it anyway.

I came home on Tuesday night to get the shock of my life, I turned on my Mac and loaded up the BBC website like I had a million times before but this time I was greeted with a headline that made my heart skip a beat. It went something along the lines of “Keegan in Crisis Talks”. The moment I read this nothing else mattered, I was straight onto the forums of the internet searching for answers.

Unfortunately all I found was confusion. “I hope it’s not true”, they said. “I just can’t believe it”, others cried. It seemed that no real facts were available on the whole of the net. I could work out that the rumour began life on Sky Sports and snowballed after.

“I hope it isn’t true, I just can’t believe it!” I thought to myself.

“BREAKING NEWS: Keegan leaves Newcastle”, the BBC website had updated itself. I almost shed a tear, a friend of mine sent me the message, “It’s official KK is out. Fuck newcastle, I’m supporting Man City.” and my heart was broken for the second time in only one week.

I then read further, “Kevin Keegan has left Newcastle BBC sport understands.” Understands! What the devil do they mean ‘understands’? Well, whatever shady character made them understand this was talking out of his arse. Just before I went to bed that night, dejected and unhappy, Newcastle Utd released an official statement clearly stating that Keegan had gone nowhere.

As I write this he is still there now and while only a fool would claim that everything is rosy at St. James’ Park, media coverage was way off on this story.

I’m disappointed with the BBC, it seemed like they were just trying to beat Sky with getting the news out first only to make a major slip up. It didn’t help that inside this b.s article it stated, “Newcastle have picked up only 4 points from their first 3 games”. Considering those games included Arsenal and Manchester Utd away and don’t know what they were expecting. It’s 1 point more than I thought we would have at this point and I’m mister optimism.

I used to praise the BBC website to high heavens, now I don’t think I will ever trust them again. Presenting gossip and rumour as fact was once the domain of the likes of Sky now the BBC have seriously fallen from grace in my eyes. A shame. I was going to link to the offending article on the BBC website but they have since updated it to cover their tracks, it’s as though they are ashamed to admit their mistake.

This whole story has done more than uncover the lack of professionalism at Newcastle but also the BBC should take a long hard look at themselves.

Still bricking it over what’s going to happen to Kevin though. DON’T GO KK!