Japanese Bug Fights

I found JapaneseBugFights.com while examining a Google AdWords Placement Performance Report, which essentially lists out AdSense publisher sites where Google ads have been placed. For a client running pest-control products, I found an unusually high conversion rate here on JBF.

This site is fantastic. There are over 30 videos, pitting fierce bugs of unspeakable ugliness against each other, with frantic Japanese commentary and unexpected outcomes.

Immediate takeaways:
-Scorpions are big pussies
-Always bet on beetles, beetles are nasty like the tanks of the arthropod phylum
-Crushing mandibles are a huge advantage
-Stingers are less effective than you'd think
-Getting your head gnawed off by a giant cricket (Round the 1st) would suck

My Hooptie on Google Street View

Google Street View has some folks concerned about privacy, while others, like myself, celebrate the minimal Internet celebrity of their city, home, possessions and, in rare cases, persons that by long odds made it into the Street View shot of a given location just as Google's contracted Immersive Media Volkswagen, with its odd, satellite-tower appendage, drove by snapping pics every 30 feet.

Given that Street View originally launched in just a handful of cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Las Vegas to start), I was surprised today to first find it now includes Raleigh, NC (part of the Research Triangle Park) before experimenting with my home address and finding not just my parent's home, but my fucking car parked in front of it, meaning I defied the odds in more ways than one. Those are California plates on my hooptie and I have driven my car back from the Bay Area exactly one time... so what kind of odds did I defy? Or, was it fate? (Spooky! I'm feeling all tingly and connected with everything.)

Anyway, I think the privacy police and the tort system opportunists are way off on this one. Street View is an awesome project because it just made my car famous, among other benefits.

If you feel like peeping your own haunts, to see any lasting record of your presence made Universal on the Interwebs by Google, here is the list of areas where they are currently providing street-level imagery:

• Albany and Schenectady
• Boise
• Boston
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• Ft. Worth
• Houston
• Indianapolis
• Juneau
• Kansas City
• Las Vegas
• Los Angeles
• Manchester
• Miami
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis
• New York City
• Orlando
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Pittsburgh
• Portland
• Providence
• Research Triangle Park, NC
• Salt Lake City
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• San Francisco Bay Area
• St. Paul
• Tucson

This is way more than I expected, and you just might be pleasantly surprised too.

Blowing the Breathlayzer

Browsing through my camera-phone to clean out old pictures I'd been storing for too long, I came across this little gem which I originally took at the Oktoberfest event at Fort Mason in San Francisco back in, duh da da da, October.

It was interesting commentary that the California Highway Patrol (CHiPs) booth was second in popularity only to the Spaten dispensers, thanks to the enormous appeal of their risk-free breathalyzer service which lured every jabroni in the place to queue up and test their BAC might.

Two Spaten boots deep, I was blowing a .15%, or roughly twice the legal limit, and not having the mental wherewithal to wonder what the CHiPs were doing with this information with respect to the parking lot of cars that some of these drunks must have driven to the event.

A Thing I Know: Rod Stewart Slayed

In the classic 1999 film Office Space, actor David Herman famously referred to Michael Bolton as a 'no-talent ass clown.' The 'no-talent' part aside, I think there's plenty to explore in the taxonomy of 'ass clowns' of the world. None bigger, perhaps, than Michael Bolton predecessor Rod Stewart.

Exhibit A:


Coupling lyrics like 'she was hot, young, beautiful and I said to myself... she's destined to be mine' with dance moves so fresh they sting, it's hard to deny this talent. At the same time its hard not to see all the ass clownery that's going down and wonder how this guy's been slaying grade A poontang since the 1970s.

Blog: The Recommittment

Updates every business day for the rest of April. It's a pledge, and not because I'm trying to subvert business days (not a bad idea, when you think about it) but because I'm feeling it - the will to not be lazy and to communicate.

More than anything though, I'm doing this for me. Complete egoism, vanity blog-posting. I used to pretend people read this shit, or that I was writing for other people, but that's not sustaining. Least of all when you actually know that nobody's reading. The point of this new foray, then, is building something cool for myself.

So, any thought that has the misfortune to stray into my head in the coming weeks is going on the damned blog.