japan - the funny Category Archives
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The Hard Light Blowout and Nuno Napkin Extravaganza

You're probably wondering about the title of today's post. Well, I've been playing around with "hard lighting" in some of my photos to give them a darker, more atmospheric feeling. I've accumulated a few over the past couple of months, and decided to post them all in one big entry so I can clear the deck for new photos in future posts. Hence the "hard light blowout".</p...
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, japan - the good, main, photography, ramblings, recentnews
Tagged as: hard light, nuno napkin, photography, sanitary pad, tokyo, video blog
10.14.08

Of cicadas and summer

Yes, I suppose it is time once again for more pictures of more blue, blue skies. What can I say? Summer turns out to be a good season for shooting pretty blue skies. It also turns out to be a pretty horrible season if, like me, you are the kind of person who hates cicadas. But I'm getting ahead of myself......
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, photography, ramblings, recentnews
Tagged as: air conditioning, cicadas, hot, man versus insect, michaelpanda, summer, video blog
08.07.08

Of Pandas, Pears and Home-made Butter...

Okay, it's hot outside and I'm lazy, so let's try something new here and go with the first ever panda videoblog - a rambling, laconic dissertation about pears, supermarkets and making your own butter at home (in case you ever wanted to)....
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, japan - the general, ramblings, recentnews
Tagged as: butter, cooking, food, fruit, how-to, japan, michaelpanda, milk, pears, summer, video blog
07.20.08

The Great Tohoku Road Trip - Part II

After our unsettling experience putzing around the smelly Gates of Hell, we cracked open the guide book and tried to figure out where to go next. "Hey panda, I've got an idea." piped up KC as we headed away from......
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, japan - the general, japan - the good, recentnews, travel
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
09.02.07

Panda and the Eau de Gooch

...this person - and I've had a lot of time to think about this and what metaphors to use here - is surrounded by an odoriferous vapour cloud of doom so horrible, so vomit gag inducing, it's like the stank of a sweaty salt ham stuck inside a pile of old wet moldy hard cover books....! I mean... it gets you.... gets you right in the back of the throat - it's like... as if... I dunno - like.... a thousand stanky <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?t...
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, miscellaneous, ramblings, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
04.30.07

Night Photos and Naughty E-mails

Which brings us back to the present, and this gigantic very explicit pornographic image plastered on my screen, right smack dab in the middle of a crowded Japanese office...! "EERGLPPPFFFHHH!!!!!" I squeak out an incomprehensible sound as my mind begins to register what the frick is happening. "OH MY CHRIST!!!" "OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD!!!" I stammer-yell to myself as I realise I'm on a Mac and that shortcut doesn't work. Instinctively I move to hit "window" plus "l" whic...
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, photography, recentnews, technology
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
04.17.07

Inappropriate...!

I wince at the t-word. People, I am not a "manly man". I have a hard time talking about things like this with other men. If you've ever watched the TV show Scrubs, then you'll know what I mean when I say I'm like Elliot Reed when it comes to sex: shirt on, lights off and my idea of talking dirty is substituting "bajingo" for what would normally be an awkward throat clearing and a vague gesturing of eyes towards the ground (w...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, ramblings, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
03.08.07

Setsubun - the face smashing festival

Are you imagining that phrase? Now while keeping that image in your head, slowly replace those words until it becomes "like hurling heavy beanbags at immobile foreigners trapped in a crowd about 25 feet away from you from an elevated wooden platform." And then add "oh and you're a gigantic muscular sumo wrestler." It was, as they say, all fun and games until someone got hurt, and that someone would have been the random old lady who took one to the dome with a rather sharp and alarming plas...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, japan - the good, photography, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
02.11.07

No Chicken, No Life

Sign spotted outside a downtown Izakaya (Japanese-style bar). Hard to argue with this sentiment I suppose! Speaking of chickens everlasting - (actually, this has nothing to do with eterna chickans, that was a horrible transition) - I am planning on......
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, miscellaneous, photography, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
12.21.06

Thundar Dolphan!

The first thing it did out of the gate was skyrocket right into the eye of the furious storm far up above us at a sharp degree angle towards what we later learned was a height of 262 feet, the 5th tallest in the world. It was a dark and stormy night, much like Snoopy used to write, but unlike a Peanuts cartoon, the sky took on increasingly darker and more menacing shades as we were ratcheted into the heavens. The flimsy orange low sidewalls of the car suddenly felt incredibly inadequate and...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
11.14.06

The Great Bike Theft of 2006

[In My Head]:: "Somehow, Scotland Yard, I'm not holding out much hope you're gonna find my bike next week, let alone in 4 or 5 years given that your investigative technique to date seems to consist of drawing a map in crayon on a crumpled piece of paper and measuring the distance to random buildings. Not exactly C.S.I. up in this motherfucker, is it?" [Out Loud]::"...ummm, if you find my bike in 6 years, you can just keep it as I'll probably have bought a new one by th...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the bad, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
10.28.06

Nice n Easy Sign Language

Part of the ease, I suppose, is that sign language isn't like "regular" language - you don't make sentences proper, you just sign the most "important" parts: subject, objects, main verb, etc. You don't need to worry about all those other bothersome parts of language that make you sound like a retarded 3 year old monkey when you speak (what natives refer to as "particles", "adverbs", "tenses", etc.), and given that my spoken Japanese basically goes something along the lines of "Me. Hungry...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
09.22.06

Jumbo the giant panda

And while it's not the most inappropriate comment I've ever been subjected to in Japan (that dubious honor going to the intrepid junior high school boy who caught me off guard once with "hey panda-sensei, how big is your cock?" in perfect English (my snarky-yet-simultaneously-pathetic (insofar as I'm comparing penis size with a 12 year old) reply: "bigger than yours will ever be", greeted with tremendous "oohs" and what I can only assume is the Japanese middle school equivalent of "snap!!!" a...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the bad, japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
08.29.06

Bicycle Misadventures

So I'm back in Japan. Whoo-hoo. Actually a lot of things have been going on here recently which have contributed to me not posting much of anything. Let's start with my bike. The piece of crap I have to ride......
Category Info: featured entry, general, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
08.16.06

From the mouths of babes...

A while back, some local first year high school students were given an assignment that required them to write a short story that started with the phrase "once upon a time" or "a long long ago". Oh, and it had......
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, miscellaneous
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
06.20.06

Snow Tires

"AAAARRRGHHH!!!" I curse, frustrated by both my failure to stop my car's backward careening slide and inability to figure out what the hell "a vague deception of a dying day" means. I'm getting desperate - any second another car is going to come around the bend below me and I'm going to crash straight backwards into them. Or worse yet, I'm going to slide right into the living room of the house at the bottom of the hill. I struggle to remember the chapter in my driver's ed book en...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
12.20.05

The Cliffs of Death

WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE MOTHERF-ING BLACK JESUS WAS THAT!?" I bellow as my car starts to spin out of control, mud splashing up on my windshield, shocks creaking to absorb foot deep slime-filled potholes, the sound of ten thousand tiny gravel meteors flung up by spinning wheels at 70kph streaking through the air and denting the hell out of the car body. Tennis jolts straight upright in her seat desperately grasping for poor monkah (sent flying through the air from his vantage point on ...
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
11.20.05

The great orange hair disaster

Looking in the mirror the other day, I noticed my hair was getting pretty shaggy. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so, though, as I had heard (in the typical Japanese fashion) from a co-worker of a......
Category Info: featured entry, japan - the funny, recentnews
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
11.06.05

Pooping in Japan I - Panda and the J-toilet

So startled and shocked was I by the sudden eruption and splashing of frigid toilet water in my poor nether regions that I involuntarily started, attempting to leap up from my agonizing crouched position, only to have my by-now numb legs and knees cry out in tremendous pain before giving out completely, whereupon I found myself tumbling down in an alarmingly out of control arc at the complete mercy of the unforgiving ministries of that evil bastard gravity, arms flailing out, mouth opening in...
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
10.24.05

Emergency Button...

...Kita hands over the pizza and I pay him. He keeps glancing over at the alarm going off to the right and the senile old woman sticking her head out the door. I realize that if I don't do something right now, I'm going to have to listen to that alarm all night long. And Mistar Dominos Delivery Man is my best chance to handle this situation without getting falsely arrested. I grab his arm. "Kita is it?" I ask, looking at his nametag. I'm certain at this point that he must be no o...
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
09.27.05

The Prearranged Marriage Slip Up

My Japanese is so-so. I'll be the first to admit that considering how many years of Japanese I've had, and how long I've lived in Japan, it should be a lot better. In my defense, I humbly submit the fact......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
07.19.05

Panda fails his driving test...

I try not to be a stupid guy. I'm fairly certain that I fail at this task more often than I succeed, but nonetheless, at least I make an attempt to keep my stupidity within the realm of plausibility -......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
06.17.05

Graffiti Bench...

I was standing at the bus stop the other day after work getting rained on and thinking of how I was going to dive into my warm waiting futon and snuggle deeply into the comfy blankets the second I got......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
05.14.05

Eterna-Bread

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I had a rather dramatic head-over-heels-over-handlebars tumble off of my bike last week, resulting in a ripped suit coat, dinged up bike and rather battered panda, who ended up hitting the ground......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
04.13.05

Truth in Advertising

Seen at a train yard up north. Does one applaud this honesty or silently groan at the prospect of spending the next two hours standing shoulder-to-shoulder with smelly obaasans coming back from a weekend at the onsen resort? In other......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
03.02.05

Panda gets run over by a car

The day started like any other day - rainy clouds covering the entirety of the sky, gloomy teachers shuffling their way around the staffroom, bored-out-of-his-mind panda desperately trying to avoid stabbing himself with a straw while playing human tape recorder......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
04.20.04

Point Cards

Japan can be a wacky place. After living here for a while, you tend to get used to a lot of it however - banners featuring topless women advertising massage parlors in the middle of the day, 85 lb. wanna-be......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
04.02.04

Gum, taxis and confused panda

This week is exam week, which means that I get to sit at my desk and do nothing all week, an arrangement that seems strikingly similar to jobs I've held in the past (save the miserable year I spent working......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
02.24.04

Mochi made with hate

Wednesday was "Kenkoku kinen no hi", or "Foundation Day", here in Japan. Foundation Day, or "Kigensetsu" as it was originally called, started out as a religious glorification of the Emperor, celebrating the fact that the original Emperor Jimmu (ostensibly directly......
Category Info: japan - the funny
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02.12.04

Diary of mistar yukipanda

Dear Mr./Mrs. JET Administrator. Hello! My name is Mr. Panda and I want to thank you for sending me to the freezing ass end of Japan. I know that on my "location request" form I wrote down such wonderfully warm......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
01.22.04

Snow falling on pandas

Snowy panda. Note super cool neck gaiter from back in the states. Wow, so it's snowing a lot tonight. This picture doesn't do it justice - this is the snow that was left on my body after I put away......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
01.21.04

Random babblings

Today was like one gigantic bad-weather hairball all rolled up in a divine kitty's throat and hacked up upon an unsuspecting populace. I mean, it snowed, rained, sleeted, hailed and practically hurricane'd all within the span of eight hours -......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
01.13.04

Students learn a naughty word

I made an interesting discovery the other day - Japanese girls love Velveeta cheese. Velveeta - "Melts better and 1/2 less Fat than Cheddar Cheese" A while back, my family sent me a big box of goodies from the states,......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
01.10.04

Another day

First of all, my deepest thanks to everyone for their words of support on my last post. I really and deeply appreciate it. Waiting for a train while watching a cold winter sunset... Things are slowly moving on here in......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
01.07.04

Back, finally

Well hello. My apologies to all the loyal panda-ites out there for my recent absence. It was just one of those weeks. To make up for my extended absence, I have for you today a story of how the forces......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
12.07.03

Strange day at the office

I had another weird experience today at work. But before that, I'm so happy to note that I'm gonna hop on over to Tokyo in a couple of weeks for some much needed "cultural furlough" (translation: "panda partying in the......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
11.26.03

Dead panda walking

I'm slowly, but surely, starting to feel better. Furthermore, through some bizarre detail of scheduling, I've somehow managed to sneak the day off today, to rest and recover (my supervisor says it's to compensate me for working on Saturday -......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
11.12.03

Back finally....

Wow, so xanga has been offline for almost an entire week.... arrrgghhh!! But its good to be back and no longer frustratedly hunching over the keyboard hitting the "F5" key to see if it would be back up this second...!......
Category Info: japan - the funny
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08.16.03

A random business trip

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Not having a computer at home is really cramping my style lol. Must... get... computer... soon. Hmm, i guess we all know what my first paycheck is going for... (that and a proper......
Category Info: japan - the funny
Tagged as: (no tags at this time).
08.08.03

Squat Toilet

anyway, if you hang around me long enough, chances are you've probably heard the deadly trilogy of my japanese toilet experiences (two washiki and one evil Toto robotoilet from hell). For those of you who've never seen a squat......
Category Info: japan - the funny
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04.24.03

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