Oog. You know you want this.

The latest health food craze hits Japan’s shores in the form of the available at Lotteria. This bad boy will set you back just ¥160 for the simple cheeseburger, plus an extra ¥100 for each additional patty and cheese slice you add. It goes on sale on June 22, according to the article that told me about the existence of this new threat to Japan’s arteries, and if you want to go straight to the 10-story styscraper pictured here, through July 16 you can get your death fix for just ¥990, down from the ¥1,060 it will set you back thereafter.

American burger chain In ‘n’ Out ran a similar deal (not sure if they still do; I don’t spend a lot of time dining there) some time ago, which gained Internet notoriety when some kids went to Vegas and ordered a 100×100 (that’s patties and slices of cheese). The gory details of that burger, which cost nearly $100, are over here.

I’ve actually been eating hamburgers now and then over the past few weeks. Not McDonald’s, but tastier fare from places up in Yurakucho, which I mean to write about at some point. In my college days I used to spend quality time at Barney’s Hamburgers, with all those options to add avocado and salsa and bacon and who knows what else; these places a short walk from my office offer flavors along those lines. They cost a bit more than the 10-patty Tower Burger, but I think I’d still go for them instead.

UPDATE: Got alerted to another article on the Lotteria offering, with plenty of action photos. An example:

Taken a minute or so into the year 2009 . . . Just a quick post to show that the website isn’t dead. May this year see more posts from me.

In other news . . . Well, not all that much in the way of news to post here. There have been big earthquakes up north recently but I’ve managed to sleep through them all. Went to Hokkaido for the G8 summit and came back alive. Tokyo is hot hot hot now, making me want to go back to the Rusutsu hills. Sakura is tall and slender and energetic. She likes bananas, which makes this news story a troubling one to read. In September we’re going to take her back to California for her first overseas trip, first flight at all, and first time to use her two passports. Anyone in the Bay Area want to meet up around then?

This post brought to you by the letter D, the number 8, and the desire not to see this blog wither and die on the vine in the summer heat.

A few quick links to things I wrote on that other site:

One, two, three . . . (on Ryan Ginstrom’s online and downloadable word-and-character-counting utilities)

Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money (on, well, Facebook and the translation of its interface)

Guerrilla editing on the road (on the wild adventures of the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League)

In the “life” category:

Sakura is an active, active girl. She gets us up anywhere from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning, and when she is up it’s definitely time for us all to be awake, feeding her and playing with her and reading her books. She loves to spend time outside, which will be a challenge to deal with once the summer heat hits in earnest. Putting shoes on is the sign that it’s time to visit the great outdoors, and shoes are therefore among her favorite things these days.

In the “work” category:

Japan Echo lost in the bidding for a Cabinet Office publication that would have meant an extra 50 pages or so of translation and layout each month. Mixed feelings here: the job would have helped the company’s bottom line, but it would have been a brutal pace at which to write and edit, and bureaucrats in the central government aren’t known for their appreciation of finely crafted phrases. We would have had to take on more help for the project and we wouldn’t have enjoyed much of it. So . . . whew?

In place of that it looks like we’ll be busy in July, at least, doing on-site work at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. Eight years ago I went to Miyazaki and Okinawa for the G8 foreign ministers’ and leaders’ meetings. Sat in tiny, insufficiently air-conditioned rooms and translated or proofed little blurbs of text to go out on the media info system. The work should be the same this time around, more or less, but a full eight-year cycle in the G8 process brings with it a whole lot of technological advances in the meantime, so I don’t think my dim memories of how to key the press releases in that old system will help much with whatever Hakuhodo sets up this time around. Prep meetings begin next week. We’ll see.

Seems like a quarterly thing, to post here. I’ve been busy. Translating and editing and enjoying visits from family (sister pictured) and watching the little girl grow larger and larger.

Jessica has been in town for 10 days or so. She came to Tokyo to watch her Oakland As play Yomiuri, Hanshin, and the Red Sox twice. They won three of four, so that wasn’t a bad start. The best seats we had were the “Excite Seats” for the season opener against Boston. Matsuzaka started, and Okajima got his pitches in, so there was no way the As would be treated like the home team even if that’s what they were on the card. We were in the second row, down the third-base line, in seats actually on the field. They came with helmets and gloves to protect us from fouls, of which there of course were none this game. And then the As lost! Walking Ortiz to pitch to Ramirez in the tenth. Bah. They won the second game the next night, at least.

Sakura was happy to meet her aunt. They played a lot and enjoyed some books together. (Sakura’s favorites these days all have buttons and little electronic songs, and Jes usually goes to bed with an iPod on to try to drive the ditties from her skull. Not that this works.) We fed Jes big piles of food and gave her no chance to exercise, beyond walking around Kichijoji looking for trinkets to purchase, so she’ll have to hit the gym hard when she gets back to California and her own waiting baby.

Bed time now. See you again in the summer! Well, sooner than that if I go ahead and get my posting act together. I owe a lot of people email as well. Sorry about that. Plugging back in . . .

Eel on rice is one of my favorite things to eat. Right up there with chile relleno and som tam. And my mom’s tuna noodle casserole, but hey, that goes without saying.

Just got home on Monday night. Megu is in bed with Sakura—took a while to get her in the eyes-closed mode, and in the process Mom dug herself under the covers too. They’re taking care of the sleep. I’ll handle the eel.

This beer is pretty good, by the way. I bought a case the other day and stuck it in one of the unheated rooms at the far end of our apartment. In the winter we have one of the largest refrigerators I’ve ever seen. In the summer . . . ugh. Damn concrete box architecture.

So I haven’t done a thing with this place in months. In recent weeks I’ve had an excuse, which was that my hosting company blew up. Something. They’re back in existence as of today, although I can’t FTP into this server now to update the CRITICAL SECURITY HOLES that WordPress tells me it has. Oops.

My other excuses were a lengthy autumn visit from mom and dad (well, grandma and grandpa; they sure weren’t here to see me), a big freelance project I wrapped up at the end of the year, and sloth in general.

I do have a bunch of stuff lined up in MarsEdit waiting to be edited and posted, so here’s hoping I get around to some of that content before April. Hello Internet!

It’s got a dryer built in, which will be nice in the winter when we want that hot air blowing out into the apartment. It has a water heater, so we can do warm-water loads of whites (most Japanese homes only have a cold-water tap in the area where you install a washer, so having this onboard is good). It has a child lock function so we can keep inquisitive toddlers from crawling into the machine, like my brother no doubt would have tried as a youngster. It talks to us when we press the buttons, which is nice, because there sure are a lot of them. Good to have a sherpa here.
]]> http://www.durf.org/2007/09/15/getting-clean/feed/ 0 http://www.durf.org/2007/08/20/ice-cream-time/ http://www.durf.org/2007/08/20/ice-cream-time/#comments Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:25:53 +0000 Durf http://www.durf.org/2007/08/20/ice-cream-time/ For my birthday Megumi got me a BH-941 cordless ice-creamer. The thing runs on batteries that are supposed to be good for about 25 batches of ice cream. You put in the milk and cream and fruit and sugar and whatnot, close it up, press the button, and stick the whole thing in the freezer for three hours or so.

Last night we made our first batch. Since Megumi is still watching what she eats (no eggs, no dairy, not much sugar) we played with a recipe from some health-food cookbook. Soy milk and black sesame paste and a bit of maple syrup for sweetness. It turned out slightly off-balance—too much goma turned the mix a deep shade of gray—but it was still tasty. Very cold and creamy. And dark gray. We’ll be working out the kinks in the recipe as these hot days continue.
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