Listen to the Rain

thosesocks invited me over to watch more Samurai Champloo last night. We remain bad at actually watching it--in two hours we watched one episode, and I think we spent more time talking about how Japan and Germany dealt with the legacy of World War II than we did watching anime--but I noticed something in the intro of episode 8 (the one with the guy who wants to be "Big" and has his own beatboxing posse). In the Japanese, "Champloo" is spelled チャンプルー chanpurū, which is the name of a signature Okinawan stir-fry dish! It's extremely tasty, especially with bitter melon, and in Okinawan it literally means "a bunch of things all mixed together." Like, say, hip-hop and jidaigeki drama. Finally after years, that name makes sense.

She also introduced me to Japanese Doctor Who, and even though I'd never seen any Doctor Who, I recognized a bunch of tokusatsu tropes. She asked me what that was, and when I explained, she found a pilot episode for an unaired show called Jaguarman, which was definitely everything I could have hoped for in an introduction to tokusatsu YouTube clip.

thosesocks wants to have a party now where we watch tokusatsu and drink alcohol from across Asia, which sounds fantastic to me. Maybe after Pesach.

On Monday I went to the Princess Bride popup bar in Lincoln Square with lisekatevans, afschifler, britshlez and her boyfriend. Going on a Monday meant that there was almost no one else there, other than a Dread Pirate Roberts mannequin in the booth next to us that I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye and assuming someone was eavesdropping on us, but they were still out of all the drinks I tried to order and I had to get substitutions. After a long period consulting the menu (PDF warning), I went with the Humperdinck (instead of Twue Wuv) and the Miracle Pill (instead of I Don't Even Exercise). They were both good, and I'd gladly go again. When pinandstutter went, he tried the Twue Wuv and said it was great, and I really want to try it. It was the first thing I ordered only to hear that they were out of it.

Table discussion was mostly about our high school lives and how different our experiences were. afschifler described mine as a John Hughes movie, which is honestly fair. Hey, what can I say? Band kids.

Monday was also the AMA's annual meeting, which was full of good news and one boring presentation. Some guy came up on stage to talk about innovation and big ideas and coming up with a grand plan and so on, but all I could think of as he talked about self-driving cars and Google's quest for self-driving cars is the way that they don't work in rain or snow, which he didn't mention at all. Sure, the videos of Waymo's self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, were very impressive, but the whole time I was watching I was thinking, "That would never work here." I do expect there to be a self-driving taxi service in Chicago within my lifetime--assuming we don't all die in World War III before then--but B"H I still have many decades of life left, so "within my lifetime" is a long time.

Also, at one point he had misspelled impact on a slide, so of course I immediately thought:

He protecc
He attacc
But most importantly
His plans have impacc

Someone save me from fatal meme poisoning.

My life hasn't been disrupted by coronavirus yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. With all the event cancellations out there, something I want to go to will be cancelled. I'm just glad that I eventually decided not to go to Japan to catch hanami this spring because a lot of the places I would have wanted to go to would probably have been closed, to say nothing of the possibility of a quarantine either on the way there or back. I have friends who already cancelled a trip to Thailand just to avoid that possibly, and I think they were right to do so. I have friends still going to Japan--hopefully it works out for them!

Tonight is the last "Universal Truths, Jewish Roots" class, and I'm curious to see what the subject will be. It wasn't listed on the syllabus, and the rabbi never got to mention it at the end of last class, so...mystery class!