Tokyo Love Hotel

With most Japanese families living in compact houses with rice paper walls, love hotels are a great way for couples to get some privacy. They are also a must for any tourist itinerary.

Ill advisedly we had ditched the guide book that told us how to get to where all the love hotels were, so based on my vague recollection we went to Shinjuku, wandered around with our heavy bags looking and tried not to get the shits with each other too badly. Eventually we found a book store and consulted a guide book in the English section which was tucked away on the seventh floor. It told us Love Hotel Hill was actually in Shibuya. Bugger!

After getting lost in Shibuya for a while we saw a lit up Pac-man above the road which we recognised from some dude’s blog. Eventually we started coming across heaps of love hotels, with their signs outside advising the prices for a “rest” or for a stay.

Sadly, we couldn’t find any over the top Hello Kitty themed rooms. Most were quite tame really. We walked through a Caribbean themed place but sadly the pictures of the rooms didn’t show any pirates, hammocks or mermaids.

Another place did however look pretty impressive. It was done in a Venetian theme and the room we selected had a big archway and a projected gondola scene on the wall. Unfortunately when we went to the window to pay, the woman behind the counter started yelling things in Japanese at us. I couldn’t translate exactly what she meant but the gist of it seemed to be “get the hell out of here you clueless fools”.

By then we were pretty much willing to stay anywhere, so at the next place we entered we just picked the flashest looking room available and hoped the woman behind the counter wouldn’t scream at us. The room was 9800 yen for a stay however for some reason the woman decided to give it to us for 8500 (around $120 AUD). Score. She also gave us a big remote control and then yelled at us when we tried to go up the stairs instead of the elevator.

The place was totally pimped out. Full marble, big flat screen, stereo system, karaoke and best of all, a spa bath with another TV above it. Sadly I couldn’t really work out the remote control all that well so we didn’t get to sing any karaoke duets like “Islands in the Stream” or “Love lifts us up where we belong”.

Another disappointing aspect of the experience was the porn. It started off fairly standard but then a show came on which involved creepy looking Japanese guys picking up girls off the street and then filming them while having sex. One particularly disturbing episode involved the back of a limo, two guys and a girl being forced to give head. It was very wrong and it totally ruined my spa bath.

Once you go inside the room you can’t leave so we stocked up on beer and snacks beforehand. There was a beer vending thing in the fridge but it looked complex and may have involved phoning reception. After pressing lots of buttons I managed to get the mood lighting going but changing the volume on the TV was beyond me. Still, it was by far the most awesome room we had in Japan and far cheaper than most standard tatami hotel rooms.

More proof that poms are useless

Jamie Neale went out for a bushwalk from Katoomba and managed to get so lost that he spent twelve days of his vacation shivering in the cold and starving when he could have being pissed on goon and attempting to lure some Swedish backpacker into his bunk. Useless.

If you get lost in the Amazon fair enough – that’s a seriously big jungle. How could you get it so wrong in the Blue Mountains though? Walk downhill for a couple of days and you’ll get to Penny Panthers where you can enjoy a steak and a spot of cable water skiing. Keep going east and you’ll get to Coogee where you can indulge in a bowl of poo ice cream. Even for a pathetic pom it shouldn’t take twelve days.

Improving Busking

Most buskers are shit and offend my ears terribly, yet while they get money I get nothing. I believe this imbalance needs to be redressed.

My proposal is simple. Allow people who don’t like the music to take money from the buskers. If you find the guy on that one stringed Chinese thing a tad monotonous take twenty cents. If you can’t stand the guy playing the didgeridoo with the techno backing track, take a dollar.

In this way it would only be profitable for really good performers to busk and we could get rid of all those seven year old violinists and gold painted freaks who just stand still with an umbrella and a stupid look frozen on their faces. I also think the standing still thing would be far cooler if you got to throw stuff at the person. For a gold coin you could choose either a tomato, a water balloon or an egg. I might do that actually. I reckon I’d make heaps of money.

Would you like spiritual guidance with that?

The other week I went in to lululemon expecting to find a normal store selling running shorts. Instead I found a weird cult selling running shorts.

This place has a manifesto which sounds like it was written by your crazy great aunt during that period where her medication wasn’t quite right. Some of the pearls of wisdom incorporated into this manifesto include:

* Children are the orgasm of life.
* Do not use cleaning chemicals on your kitchen counters.
* Take various vitamins.
* Don’t trust that an old age pension will be sufficient.
* Visualise your eventual demise.

My initial reaction was to get away really fast and avoid drinking anything which looked like Kool-Aid. However I did get mightily intrigued when I saw personal ten year plans posted around the store from various customers/cult members. Sadly most of these people just planned on having real estate, kids and a flat stomach in ten years time and hadn’t outlined anything that interesting. The five year and ten year plans did however strike me as a very communist thing to do for a commercial enterprise.

One of the other strange juxtapositions was the huge Buddha statue positioned next to the cash register. From my understanding Buddha gave away fabulous wealth to sit under a tree. I don’t think he was really in to designer fitness wear.

I think the weird jumbled together ideology really is however really smart. Obviously lululemon is cashing in on the fact that most people have abandoned mainstream religion in favour of their own jumbled together ideologies. They don’t want long drawn out parables in a cold church; they want quick advice about benchtop cleaning and strange metaphors relating children to orgasms. it all makes sense really.

Rooting Tennis Players Gives You Awesome Powers

If you want to achieve anything in life find a former female world number one tennis player and get it on with her. Apparently their pink bits are filled with some magic elixir that will transform you in to a total winner. The evidence is overwhelming.

1. Andre Agassi was completely crap when he was going out with Brooke Shields but as soon as he started doing Stephie Graff he became awesome and won all the majors.
2. When Lleyton Hewitt was engaged to Kim Clijsters he was world number one. He then stopped indulging in tennis pussy and went for soap star pussy instead. Since then he has been completely useless.
3. The Shark had pretty much done nothing in golf for ten years, then Chris Evert came along and at the age of 53 he suddenly came second in the British Open. (Sadly tennis pussy isn’t quite powerful enough to overpower the tendency to choke in the last round.)

The Shark is Adam Scott’s mentor. Years ago he gave him his caddie and I believe that recently he may well have even offered Chris Evert up. Wisely Adam Scott heeded the advice about tennis pussy but decided to go for a younger model and is now getting it on with Anna Ivanovic. Last I heard he was also leading the Scottish Open.

Fairytales for Feminists

It seems that from a very young age little girls are taught that the key to happiness is a Prince Charming or a Knight in Shining Armour. I feel this just sets unrealistic expectations and doesn’t prepare them to get ahead on their own terms.

Repunzel
Repunzel’s escape plan was entirely unfeminist. Why wait years for your hair to grow the length of the tower, then hope some dude will come by, become smitten and want to haul you down? In my version Repunzel would grow her hair to half the length of the tower, put her hair in piggy tails and chop both of them off. She’d then tie the two piggy tails together, attach the end to the window frame and scale down herself.

Cinderella
This fairytale is clearly teaching all our young girls that the best way to happiness is marrying rich. In my version Cinderella would instead use her skills to start a cleaning business which she would eventually franchise and become independently wealthy. While she may have a dalliance with the prince she would pass him over in favour of the local butcher who is pure of heart and does a fantastic sausage.

Who says Alexander was great?

I love the idea of having an adjective tacked on to the end of your name but ever since Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible disappeared there hasn’t been a whole lot of it going on. As well as being far more interesting it should help simplify things as most of the people I know are either called Dave or Kate and it gets really confusing.

From a branding perspective I feel Jamie the Awesome could be far stronger than Jamie Watson. People would say “wow, this must be good – it was written by Jamie the Awesome!” or “we should have Jamie the Awesome over for drinks” or “pick Jamie the Awesome – I hear he’s awesome.”

I’m not really sure how the whole thing works but you probably wouldn’t get to pick your own adjective. Otherwise you would have everyone calling themselves Eric the Studly, Jessica the Hot or Trevor the Sensational. If people did have adjective names they might try harder so they earn a good one. After all who wants to be known as Michael the Loathsome, Sally the Uninteresting or Danielle the Promiscuous?

One worry I have is that by summing up a person in a singular adjective we may be blinded to alternate parts of their personality. When I hear the name Alexander the Great I think he obviously must have been a top bloke. A little Wikipedia research however reveals that Alexander was a drunk bigamist warlord who spent most of his life roaming around Europe killing people. If he were coming to burn my village, rape my wife and drink all my beer I’d be inclined to call him something other than “the Great”.

I should hope that the adjective gets to change over time. In kindergarten it may be ok to be called Jamie the Pantswetter but ten years on that probably wouldn’t do much for the self image. There’s also the matter of who gets to pick it. Were it my mum I’d probably be known as Jamie the Annoying. Were it my year 12 maths teacher I’d be known as Jamie the Disinterested. If it was any of the girls I’ve ever been out with I’d probably be called Jamie the Thoughtless.

Maybe I should just change my name to Max Power like Homer did.