Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan is the blog of Simon Gibson, a New Zealander living in Tokyo, Japan. Focused on New Zealand, Japan, web design and other shiny things.
A nice little collection of Goodbye Pork Pie videos courtesy of youtube. Released internationally in 1981, Goodbye Pork Pie is a classic New Zealand road movie, which is sometimes compared to Easy Rider. Here is the trailer:
It has always been one of my favourite New Zealand films. Classic Kiwiana.
Here is the Wellington car chase scene. Eat your heart out James Bond!
Now, I am wondering where I can find a mini in Tokyo. And a haircut like that (working on that one).
And here is a remake. Bet you never thought you would see a Goodbye Pork Pie Part 2.
And another homage video this time on the Kaiikanui Hill (Northland, NZ) (resplite with graphic possum carnage, but no fish’n'chips):
Classic. But I have to dash. Have a ferry to catch.
New stories about Love, Lust and Murder by Jeff Abbot, Lee Child, Jim Fusilli, Laura Lippman, Ridley Pearson, Tom Savage, R.L. Stine and 12 others.
Edited by Harlan Coben
Recently I picked up a copy of “Death do us Part” from the new books section of our local library in Azabujuban. This compilation of marriage and murder short stories features nineteen stories by contemporary United States authors, many of which have never been published before. I must admit I haven’t read many contemporary American mystery short stories, so I had never heard of any of these authors before and as a result I didn’t really have any expectations regarding this book before I got stuck in to it. But overall it was an enjoyable and recommendable read.
Highlights for me included One Shot by P.J. Parish, A Few Small Repairs by Jeff Abbot and Charles Ardai’s The Home Front. The selection as a whole had quite a consistent tone, even though the stories range a lot in the periods they covered and there was a definite Steinbeck feel to a number of the pieces.
One Shot is the story of a university professor returning to the home of his birth to face the “ghosts of his past” and has a wonderful twist at the end - as do many of the stories. A Few Small Repairs deals with the illness of the protagonist’s father, while The Home Front is a delightfully twisted play on fate. I don’t want to give away too much about this collection, as that would spoil the fun.
If you are looking for a good read with some tantalizing surprises, you couldn’t go far wrong with Death do us Part.
Hangman Cheat is quite a clever website which can pretty accurately guess the word you are thinking of. Simply tell it how many letters the word has and start playing.
I tried the word “japan” first and it found it very quickly. When I tried “blizzardboy” it didn’t have so much luck - probably because blizzardboy isn’t a dictionary word.
If you like games such as babble I think you will enjoy this.
Put this one down in the “I don’t really believe that someone made this” category - a lament about mobile phones.
It starts off as follows:
“I have had my mobile phone for 2 years,
But recently it has stopped ringing,
Therefore my mobile makes me sad,
Instead of a phone, now it’s just a clock.”
Very 2channel. The song kind of reminds me of Yoshi Ikuzo’s Inaka no Presley.
Very pretty shot of a lenticular cloud formation in the Taurarua’s (North Island, New Zealand). I remember hearing of an American painter who came to New Zealand just to paint clouds - globally New Zealand offers some of the widest variations in clouds.
A Lenticular Cloud Over New Zealand
Credit & Copyright: Chris Picking (Starry Night Skies Photography)
Explanation: What’s happening above those mountains? Several clouds are stacked up into one striking lenticular cloud. Normally, air moves much more horizontally than it does vertically. Sometimes, however, such as when wind comes off of a mountain or a hill, relatively strong vertical oscillations take place as the air stabilizes. The dry air at the top of an oscillation may be quite stratified in moisture content, and hence forms clouds at each layer where the air saturates with moisture. The result can be a lenticular cloud with a strongly layered appearance. The above picture was taken in 2002 looking southwest over the Tarurua Range mountains from North Island, New Zealand.
I found this interesting Weapons Generator at http://genzu.net/buki/. The generator is only in Japanese, but is pretty easy to use even if one can’t read Japanese. Scroll down the page to the box with the enter button beside it. Enter your name in the box and hit enter. It will render your name into the weapon that represents you. I entered “Simon” and this is what it produced:
Quite a nice piece of rendering. The final weapon that came out was some sort of dual-pronged sword.
The site also gives your name and weapon a rank out of a 100. Mine got 62 - according to the page, 25 is normal. Guess Simon is a strong name!
Found this amusing video posted on gizmodo: The Physics Behind the Insanely Dangerous Japanese Water Jetpack. Making pet bottle rockets is a rite of passage that every junior high school student in Japan goes through. And this video certainly takes the whole process to the next level!
Walking down to the gym the other night when I came across this gem of a sign:
Tamachi is a station on the Yamanote loop line in Tokyo. There are a lot of offices in the area - including the head office of NEC so there are a correspondingly large number of restaurants and bars in the area.
At the top the sign says “Motsu Dining and Global Restaurant” - with motsu being Japanese for offal. Being a global restaurant I wonder if they sell haggis?
And the real question - if they relocated, could you call that a “bowel movement”?
