The Best Zombie Show You’ll See This Year

To fresh eyes, Japanese television appears to be about 80% food shows and 20% watching celebrities watch videos. Over time, the percentages improve as you discover the hidden treasures of Japanese TV, including some pretty decent detective/crime shows and, of course, the comedy. In the latter category, a YouTube channel called Funny Japan has done the English speaking world a great favor by subtitling the best 13 minutes of comedy you’ll see in any language.

The show sets it up nicely. Children have been practicing for the zombie apocalypse and their mom asks Knight Scoop (the show) to give them the real test. The accommodating zombie gives a written warning before showing up and falls prey to their carefully set traps, including Tabasco sauce and packing tape. Well worth the watch - and a possible parenting strategy for all of us with kids to encourage them to cooperate more.

Thailand: You’re Going to Ride an Elephant, Just Accept It.

Like a great many tourists, I sometimes feel at odds with myself when I take the easy path and do the touristy thing in a given situation. I feel like there is some authentic experience I am missing out on - maybe apprenticing under some ancient looking master of glass blowing as the mists roll over the mountains behind us.

I am, however, a tourist. So even if an authentic experience presented itself to me, I would spend most of the time trying to get a picture of it rather than actually engaging. “Look at this picture,” I would tell my friends back home (none of whom really want to see a picture of me, whether it is of me blowing glass or even me on fire), “Isn’t it great?” And they’d be guilted into asking me how it was. To which, of course, my honest response would be “I guess it was ok. It was really hard to get the picture while holding the tube, so I actually just watched this old guy do it most of the time.”

I have come to terms with this essential flaw in my character and I accept that, if I am going to have any real connection with anything, I need time to steep it in. I am a bitter tea type of personality, I guess. This is why it took me over six years to properly wrap my head around one small city in Japan.

So when it came time for my trip to Thailand in 2004, I knew I was going to ride an elephant. It is one of those things tourists do in Thailand. I accepted it. And you should too.

I met my particular elephant on the island of Koh Samui in the south of Thailand. I was staying on Chaweng beach and had planned to make the full moon party (another tourist staple), but I’d failed to account for a Buddhist holiday. Koh Samui itself was beautiful, with jungles, beaches and an above 30 Celsius temperature during my entire stay. Of course, being of Scottish, Irish and German descent, I reacted to the sun like a hermit leaving his cave after 40 years of darkness.

So when it came time to visit the elephant show, I was resplendent in my wide-brim hat and well lubricated with several litres of sunscreen. The elephant show consisted of the mahout (a.k.a. elephant rider) taking the elephant through a workout regime similar to an early afternoon aerobics show on 80s television. The elephant backed up, lifted feet, stood up, shuffled and lifted logs with its trunk.

Elephants have a special way of doing this that conveys that shows they are still confused as to how these hairless primates ended up riding them, but they can’t be bothered enough to give a shit. After watching the elephant show, which bizarrely ends with the opportunity to shake hands with a monkey, we were finally allowed to fulfill our tourist dreams and ride the elephants.

Unlike the mahouts, who rode behind the ears of the big beasts, we got to sit in relatively comfortable seats tied to the elephant’s backs. We also mounted by walking up the steps to the loading platform rather than scrambling up the neck as the elephant kneeled before us. This was probably for the best, as many of us in the group were far beyond the age or body type needed to scramble up anything steeper than an ottoman.

I was travelling solo at this point, so I got the single seater elephant (better mileage, but more road noise). The first thing that hit me is that riding an elephant was actually kind of fun. The roll of the motion and the sense of the size of the animal carrying you is unique in my experience. The second thing that hit me was that elephants smell pretty much what you’d expect a very large animal to smell like. And they do everything large. One elephant in front of us in the tourist train stopped to piss and, by a modest estimate, released an entire lake’s worth of fluid.

So go ahead and ride that elephant when you have a chance. It isn’t going to change your life like learning to blow glass from a 100 year old monk on a mountain peak, but it is a genuinely satisfying experience that will make for a picture that no one but you actually wants to see. And, after all, isn’t that what travelling is all about?

Surviving In The Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Economy

Between AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and more movies than you can fit on a hard-drive, most of us feel well-educated when it comes to surviving ravenous hordes of flesh-eating undead. This article, however, won’t focus on how to get through those frightening moments when your chainsaw runs out of gas or you’re down to your last bullet. Instead, we’ll look at how to make the best choices, both for survival and your future career path in the zombie economy.

Welcome to the True Knowledge Economy

One thing that will help you thrive in the zombie economy – aside from quick legs and a strong stomach – is a longer term perspective. This will be vital in the first months when people are hoarding, rioting and looting. Very likely, someone bigger and stronger than you is going to get most of the good guns. The problem with guns, is that bullets are bound to be scarce one day. Instead of following the crowd to the gun shops, take a moment and analyze the situation according to the utility and scarcity of items. The wisest decision is to focus on items that are common enough to be carried by many stores and give the maximum utility for their weight.

Everyone’s list will be a little different, but here are some items that are likely to come in handy and that you won’t have to kill anyone to collect:

• Camping gear, including a tent, sleeping bag, crank-up lights and warm, durable clothing. Most people will be fortifying their homes, you need to be ready for when gas and electricity service no longer works.
• Tools, including axes and knives. Guns and bullets are great if you can get them, but it is harder to make your own bullets than it is to sharpen and mend basic tools. 
• Books on gardening, medicine (especially herbs), basic carpentry and trapping or hunting. Society is likely going to slip back a few centuries as zombies take their toll on the infrastructure, so it is best to bone up on how things used to be done whenever you have a spare moment. 

Now that you have what you need, it is time to run for your life.

Real Estate Tips during the Zombie Plague

People equal zombies and then more zombies as they bite people. So rather than joining massive groups that are bound to form around people with weapons, it is a good idea to look for an area with few people, fertile land and perhaps a mid-sized town nearby. If you can find an unoccupied farm with a well and a fence, then you can attempt to bunker down, but tying yourself to real estate will likely be a very dangerous decision in the short-term because the groups with guns will quickly realize that large groups need more food. And food is easier to take than grow.

The best location may be the one that is most difficult to stumble upon. Then you can set about building a minimal dwelling and securing food, supplies and seeds to bring back. Once you have an isolated area set-up, you can start looking into getting some tenants and establishing a new career beyond foraging for food and braining adventurous zombies with a hand-axe.

Building a Post-Apocalyptic Career

The key to any successful business is people – preferably people who will not murder you in your sleep for a laugh. By scouting out into the surrounding areas, you’ll likely find pockets of escapees like yourself. You can start rebuilding and securing a human settlement by smart recruiting of smaller groups. At this point, although still a threat, the zombie hordes are probably less of a threat than your hideout in the mountains being discovered and overrun.

Once you start building up a community, however, you’ll have to put some thought into what your role in this mini-society will be. You two basic choices:

• Install yourself as a ruler. This has some attractions, such as absolute power, but it comes with risks. You’ll always have to promote people in trios – two can conspire easily, but a third will usually taddle – and you will always face the chance of a shift in the political situation proving to be fatal.
• Avoid real power, but become indispensable. Using your secret stashes of knowledge and the fact you were a founder of the settlement, you can probably establish yourself as a village elder. This means you can act as an adviser to the ruler, president, council or whatever decision making apparatus is established.

Beyond the Zombie Plague

Hopefully a couple winters will clear out or at least confine zombies to the more southern climates, so a time will come when you’ll have to consider whether it is time for your settlement to establish a fiefdom or build up defenses against raiders or even try to reclaim an abandoned city. Although it may take awhile, with luck you’ll be putting down your axe and settling into a home with electricity and running water to enjoy your retirement.

Is Anpanman Going to Be Ok?

I worry about Anpanman a lot these days. Anpanman is a popular show for children that we get on the TV Japan channel and I get to see a lot of it because my son is currently a fan. All I can say is that Japanese children’s television is deeply concerning.

With Anpanman, my concerns are largely metaphysical. Anpanman is a bit like Superman, if Superman had a removable head made of pastries and sweet bean filling. Anpanman can fly, he is incredibly strong and he goes around helping people and punching out bad guys. This is all great stuff. I hope that Aito grows up incredibly strong with the ability to fly, help people and punch out bad guys, so there are many lessons that he can pick up from Anpanman.

Unfortunately, like Superman and kryptonite, Anpanman has a weakness - the fact that his head is basically dough and sweet beans. If his head gets dented, dirty, wet, or fed to hungry animals (as sometimes happens), Anpanman’s power wanes. The solution for Anpanman is to replace his head with an entirely new head. This brings him back to full power and allows him to “An-punch” his enemies so hard that they disappear over the horizon.

What I wonder, though, is whether or not Anpanman is actually Anpanman anymore after switching heads. Sure, we think that Anpanman is the same person because he does and says the same things, but isn’t it also possible that Jam Ojisan, Anpanman’s creator, is baking a new individual with each head? Could we be seeing the death of a hero every time Anpanman’s head gets changed?

Besides the existentially terrifying question of the disposable hero heads, there is the change that would have on the show itself. If each head is a different hero, then Anpanman’s nemesis, Baikinman, doesn’t actually fail each episode. In fact, he’s slowly working his way through all of the potential Anpanmans until the day when Jam Ojisan runs out of sweet beans and flour.

Of course, it would be easy to chalk up my worries about Anpanman to Japanese cartoons being quirky, but I’ve realized that it has nothing to do with Japan. Thomas the Tank Engine, another of my son’s favorites, also contains some big questions. Sir Topham Hat can’t go one episode without mentioning that all the train’s should be “really useful engines.” In fact, most of the episodes are about the trains competing to be more useful or agonizing about not being useful enough. The question I have is what exactly are the engines so scared of? What did Sir Topham Hat do to inspire that kind of fear? What happens to the engines that don’t measure up?

Now, you might say I am reading too much into both these shows - and you’d be right. I have a lot of spare time to think while watching these shows. Anpanman and Thomas tend to be a bit formulaic in the plot department. It’s almost like they were written for kids. As a person in an international marriage, I am all for understanding and appreciation between cultures. And one thing I think we can agree on is that children’s shows are crazy in any culture.

The Challenges of Flying With Children: Babies Are Just As Bad As Pipebombs

When you have a child, you become part of a tribe of sorts. There are things that you discuss only with other parents – and usually only after the two beers you can fit in after your children's bedtime at 8pm and your own at 9:45pm (wild times, I know). These are things that seem frankly criminal when you write them down, like how sleepless nights you fantasized about leaving your screaming and crying child on a stranger's porch (I am not a monster - I would have at least rang the doorbell.). I've now added another story to this cache of dark humor: air travel.

Flying with a child of any age is challenging. Hell, flying as an adult is no great shakes. It seems like planes are being designed to pack the maximum amount of people in the minimum amount of comfort. The economics of airlines dictates that planes are not airworthy until passengers are skin-to-skin with the strangers sitting next to them. This type of thing, plus the fact that a plane is really a metal tube held up by a suspension of belief in gravity, used to make me dread flying.

Now, I have so many more things dread as a parent flying with my child. The first major change between your old travel habits and your family travel habits is the amount of baggage you require. Aito is around 20 pounds and, if packed properly, fits on my lap. Despite the relatively compact nature of my son, he requires another 80 pounds of luggage, not including the baby carry on with diapers, wipes, snacks and clothes, as well as the significant portion of our own carry on given over to his books, toys and eating utensils. My wife and I must have looked like especially put upon pack animals pushing the six check in bags, the three carry on, and our son through the airport.

Thankfully, we were able to check everything and then quickly breeze through security riding on the backs of understanding unicorns. I am, of course, joking. The Edmonton Airport Security – the alert and tireless force that let a passenger fly after taking away his pipe bomb in 2014  – were very concerned about the baby bag. As well they should be.

After all, how could they be sure that the baby we had with us was in fact ours? More importantly, did he pack that bag himself? So the stalwarts of airport security had my wife – who I suspect has radicalized over the course of our marriage – rummage through the bag to pull out the suspicious object. This was, of course, wipes. After opening the potentially lethal package for the security officer, we were allowed to keep our wipes. We cackled manically. Our plan worked. We were now free to commit acts of extreme hygiene at 30,000 feet.

Although we did not, in fact, have a bomb or any act of terror planned for the long flight to Japan, we did feel like terrorists. People boarding the plane flinched at the sight of an infant, anticipating 10 hours of uninterrupted crying. It was my first time flying with a child and, aside from the metric ton of luggage, I had prepared as I usually did – I brought a book.

....

Sorry, I had to take a moment there to let the laughter pass. As you more experienced parents will know, a book is a bit ambitious for in-flight entertainment. I did not do enough reading on the plane to finish a postcard, let alone a book. What was I doing for 10 hours? My wife and I were both providing non-stop entertainment, snacks and soothing to the volatile and sleepless infant we had smuggled aboard. In retrospect, I owe an apology to the Edmonton airport security. They should have tasered us at the check-in counter.

Birthdays: We Mastered Babies, But Now We Have A Toddler

Although I’ve never quite grasped the physics of it, some very intelligent people have declared that time is relative. And I think they are onto something.

To me, it feels like a month, maybe two at most have passed since the arrival of our son. There is, however, some pretty compelling evidence that it has in fact been well over a year. This evidence is, of course, my son himself. At some point – I am guessing it was a Tuesday afternoon – he doubled in size, started walking, sprouted teeth, and mastered iOS8.

This was unfortunate news for us, his parents, as we were just starting to feel confident in our ability to take care of a baby. Now, we no longer have a baby. We have a toddler. What I am trying to say is that, when it was just my wife and I, we were two adults aging gradually enough that it was hard to notice a change year to year, let alone month to month.

Sure, my waistline has been expanded faster than the Russian border with the Ukraine, but that is at least a predictable rate of expansion. With a child as part of our lives, it seems like time is jerking backwards and forwards, much like the PVR does when he gets a hold of the remote.

My son is now over one year old. From now on, we can refer to his age in years rather than just months, although I notice a lot of parents hold onto the months (“he’s 16 months”) perhaps thinking that they can slow down the calendar that way or just not ready to admit that the leap between one year and two or three or sixteen seems a lot smaller than it did at eleven months. I’ve decided to take the opposite approach and start relatively aging myself at my son's rate, so I should be going through a midlife crisis sometime next week and starting to perfect my shuffle table and bridge game for retirement at Christmas 2018.

My thinly veiled fear of mortality aside, the last year and change has been as intense and rewarding as any I can remember. I imagine veteran parents chuckling to themselves as my wife and I struggle to express how incredibly weird and satisfying it is watching a baby go from a 7 pound mass of need and bowel movements to a 20 pound mass of need and bowel movements that also walks.

Parenting is full of milestones besides bowel movements, but it is always the bowel movements that we seem to track most carefully. That said, we did break out in applause when he mastered sitting up and I thought we would be receiving parent of the year awards as he learned to stand on his own.

We have videos and photos (so many photos) of all these important milestones from the first haircut to the first time crawling up the stairs. It is without shame - because really, what shame do I have left? - that I admit we are borderline stalkers when it comes to parenting. My son will never wonder about his childhood because he'll be able to search the metadata in the shared photo library and watch a minute by minute slideshow set to "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

One of the highlights in that photo library will be his first birthday. By a conservative estimate, we put the same amount of time into planning and preparing for his birthday as went into the completion of the Panama Canal. Like many parents, my favorite part of his birthday was the twelve hours of sleep that immediately followed it.

That's not to say it wasn't worth it. We did get a great picture -which we will digitally alter for the next five years to give us time to recover enough to plan another birthday party for him.

It's the End of the World as We Know It

Alas, for those of you caught up in hanging Christmas lights and buying presents, it turns out that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 according to the Mayan Calendar.

Yes, some may question why people living in the age of quantum physics and the Internet should worry about the scheduling habits of a people who pulled ropes with thorns through their tongues and genitals to commune with the gods, but those people clearly do not spend enough time on the Internet.

If you do a little searching – and ignore NASA’s page of lies about how the world is definitely not ending, you will find some very interesting people readying themselves for the apocalypse. There seems to be some consensus on remote villages in various parts of Europe being the only safe havens in the coming storm. So this is either the real thing or a savvy ancient Mayan marketing campaign for European vacations.

Like any reasonable person, I like to hedge my bets. That is why I have been stocking up on rifles, ammo, canned goods, generators and ropes with thorns. If the world ends on schedule, please know that it has been a pleasure sharing this earth with you - and I will shoot you if you try to steal my canned tuna.

If, however - in some wild and improbable trick of fate - the earth does not become a post-apocalyptic wasteland on the twenty-first, I’d like to wish you all a merry Christmas and assure you that I would never shoot such wonderful people over canned tuna. Cans of Stagg Chilli, maybe, but never tuna. Merry Christmas!

Thailand: A Reason to Buy Speedos

During my years in Japan, I've made surprisingly few trips to the rest of Asia. It turns out that, although I love being somewhere else, I like being in the same place almost as much. That said, I am glad I did make the time for a trip to Thailand. It started out looking to be one of the worst vacations, but slowly, by dint of days and sun, became one of the best.

It is my own fault, not Thailand’s, that the trip started out badly. I went the cheap route, with an Air Egypt flight that didn’t have enough blankets for the passengers and sported the only working TV on the other side of the plane.

After landing, I headed straight for my only planned destination, one of the largest markets in Bangkok where a giant conglomeration of tented stalls contains almost every product under the sun for next to nothing. You can buy art, clothes, fighting roosters, marble carvings, any imaginable food, counterfeit Nikes that look like the real thing, real Nikes that look counterfeit, guns, knives, brass knuckles, pornographic ashtrays, DVDs of movies that haven’t hit theaters yet, and, likely hidden somewhere in the back, happiness (or at least something to simulate it).

As I wandered around in the humid Bangkok afternoon, wearing my newly bought sandals and breezy, authentic Thai fisherman pants that I only saw on other tourists, I noticed several things.

1. The populations of people and stray dogs are near equal in some parts of the city. 
2. Children under five may not actually have clothes or just opt out of wearing them. 
3. Sidewalk and road hold little distinction for vehicles or pedestrians. 
4. There are no traffic rules, merely suggestions that carry the same weight as the surgeon general’s warning to chronic smokers. 
5. It smells like flowers, rotten eggs, perfume, sweat, exhaust, mud, and grass all at the same time. 
6. It’s infested with tourists – especially of the 40 year-old man with the (hopefully) 18 year-old Thai girl variety (or boy). 
7. The food is delicious. 

Two “pleasures” I decided to try out in Thailand were traditional Thai massage and a straight blade shave at a barbershop. I started out slow, getting a foot massage at the market first and a haircut (they did shave my ears, which has left me with a complex over whether my ears are hairy or not).

I challenged the real shave first, selecting a shop run by three gorgeous women as I figured, if it had to happen, I’d rather have my jugular severed by a beautiful woman. However, when I sat down in the chair, had my temples massaged, and was lathered up, they brought Shaky out from some backroom he must hide in so that he doesn’t scare customers away.

Shaky was a ancient looking Thai man that was about as steady as a punch-drunk boxer. I pulled a deer in the headlights and went absolutely rigid watching Shaky try to steady his hands enough to wipe the four-inch razor against his apron. I honestly don’t know how I avoided wetting myself in pure terror every time he came near my neck with that blade. To add to the apprehension over what turned out to be a 20 minute shave, Shaky started by shaving my forehead – I don’t know about my ears, but I’m pretty damn certain my forehead didn’t need the shave. I seriously felt like I had survived a near death experience when I walked out with only one nick on my cheek and a profound dislike of razor-wielding old men.

The Thai massage was both better and worse as far as experiences go. I asked the hotel staff if there was a place I could get a massage that was strictly just a massage. They pointed me at a place in the same building (of course). It was very clean and had little Zen fountains and other faux-oriental decor that put me at ease, so I went for it. I had assumed that a massage could be done with a minimal removal of clothing, but I was given a small towel and told to leave everything in the change-room locker. Ah well, I figured, at least I get a towel.

So I was lead to the massage tables where two German men wearing Speedos (as, in my experience, all German men do) were getting massages. For the first time in my life, I wished I owned Speedos. My masseuse was in her fifties and she assured me that this was an above-the-belt operation, after which she whipped off my little towel to replace it with an even smaller towel – which wasn’t reassuring at all. So the two Speedo-clad Germans and I tried to relax as the Thai women set about ripping the tendons from our bodies. After the first excruciatingly painful half hour it began to feel fantastic.

After all was said and done, I actually felt really good. I went back to my hotel and had one of the most satisfying sleeps in my life. So my advice, if you find yourself in Thailand and wanting a massage, is to invest in Speedos. Oh yeah, and stay away from shaky old men with razors.