badmigraine
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Posts posted by badmigraine
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Come on, Ocean, what English beers do you prefer?
I look for any excuse to go and try more new beverages. Don't make me have to dig up the "what's your favorite beer" thread.
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_freak, what I mean is, she dressed and lived as a man...she lifted weights, had a man's haircut and wardrobe,and talked/thought/acted like a man.
Then she started picking up effiminate male homosexuals, and having sex with them as if she were a tough guy and they were little ponces.
The mechanics of the physical act were not described to me, but I can imagine some of it.
Actually, I wish my wife would do some of that to me!
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The greatest view I've ever had at a ski resort was the sumptuous, silky, swelling hummocks of this exponentially, otherwordly, sexybeautiful stewardess what Mogs and I seen at Niseko.
Even in my aged and jaded circumstances, the mere thought of her still keeps me up at night.
I can truly say that it just doesn't get much better than that. Thank God!!
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Haw haw haw! Good one!
I thought you were going to put the dead roach in his coffee cup, but I like your ending better. Because you got to smarten him up, AND you got the screens.
I suppose in the great cosmic arithmetic, the sacrifice of one bug's tiny bumbling spirit saved the lives of countless others who would have flown through your open panes and met with, like, an accident.
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Cockroaches are arranged like anything in Japan. You have to understand the local way of handling things.
I lived in an apartment where 2-3 cockroaches were on the walls and counters every day, just waiting for me to come home. I'd turn on the light and make some noise, and away they'd scamper. I never killed them or tried to, I don't like to kill bugs if I can avoid it. Karma and all that you know.
After some months of this, I came home one day to find the largest cockroach I'd ever seen sitting placidly in the middle of my genkan. As large and ponderous as a toad, he showed no sign of fear or even agitation.
I flicked the light on and off, on and off, then made some noise and vibration, but he only lay there looking round as if I were nothing but a flea.
"This," I thought, "is the King of the Cockroaches for this building... I better show him the courtesy and politeness his position demands..."
I carefully ushered him into a drinking glass using a bit of paper plate as a scoot. I put him down outside near some wood, and then added a bit of water to some sugar to make a paste. I put the paste right in front of him--he hadn't left in the interim--and he slowly moved forward and put his face into it to eat.
Bowing once very politely, I returned to my apartment and continued with my normal evening routine.
Not a single roach ever visited my place again in the remaining 18 months of my lease.
I hope you people can learn a lesson from this. The smaller, quick roaches are just the chinpira gokiburi. The O-sama or Oyabun sends them to see what you will do.
If you don't molest them, he comes round himself to pay respects, and you should treat him as befits his station.
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I fancy it would be rather exciting to go gay in Japan...the "undiscovered country" if you will.
As a gay foreigner in Nippon, you could live new and free, and think out of the box...no pun intended. You could invent it all from scratch and be the star and a pioneer...much like Charisma Man was.
It's really so boring to be gay over here in North America. There's nothing new under the sun.
It's all been hashed out and done over so many times and ways. Going gay here in the US would bring the added complexity of constant monitoring of Leading Gays and Correct Gay Thoughts from San Francisco, the Village, West Hollywood and other self-appointed sanctums of homopolitical and homosocial arbiters, to make sure you were/were not doing it the correct way, whatever that may be, and I reckon it changes every few weeks.
Not strictly related to this topic, but I once knew a lesbian in L.A. who was so dyke-ish and took on the male role so deeply that she actually came around to liking men again...but as a fag.
Wow. That was some trip.
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Great point, db.
This is a sad thing because airlines are already reeling from the Sept. 11 debacle.
SARS only hastens matters...we may get cheapo tickets for awhile, but if a few more airlines go bust and the market shrinks, I suppose fares will rise considerably and this is just one facet of a bad economic wind.
It's a bit mercenary of me to think about economic effects of SARS when there are people sick and dying, but in fact the economic ripple is just another way for SARS to affect people worldwide. Not good!
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Indosnm's right! It kind of depends on what you want to get out of it.
If you want exercise and health, then maybe you should try low- or zero-impact kickboxing or Tai Bo or whatever that is. Note that the skills you learn may not help you much in a fight, but boxing is good practice to learn how to dodge, block and slip blows that ordinarily might smash into your face and body.
If you are interested in Asian cultural history, you could study one of the traditional styles of Chinese, Korean or Japanese martial arts, with all that means...realize that the course may be very "traditional" in that some of the stuff/moves may be bad for your joints (they will tell you to "toughen up and do even MORE") and you have to swallow a lot of Confucian-type principles such as blind obedience to authority figures and old ways of doing things that you may have been brainwashed into thinking are Mystical or Magical or quintessentially Exotic. If you have a masochistic bent you can learn to love this meaningless abuse. Also, what you learn may not be "how to fight". Forms and practicing stances etc. are more like dance practice. The first time some big oaf punches you in the face, you will realize what a waste of time your forms were. If you are ever in a fight, chances are you won't have time to stretch beforehand and you won't be barefoot in pajamas. Some styles, like Tae Kwon Do/Tang Soo Do teach you high kicks and sometimes even to hold out and lock your arms/legs after a strike, so the judges can see the technique. Try that on a playground and you'll get kicked in the nuts, or grabbed and slammed. Or they teach you to hit face/head with fists, which will probably break your knuckles, or unrealistic trick defenses against knives and guns. In many ways these systems are like learning Kanji...you have to spend a huge amount of time mastering them before they are practically useful.
Meanwhile there are other ways of just cutting to the chase and spending your time and effort on health, self-defense or whatever motivates your interest in martial arts.
If you want to learn to fight, what kind of fighting do you want to learn? Gentlemanly boxing, bar brawling, defense against knives and guns? Against 1 huge person, against 3 drunk people? Wearing jeans and tennis shoes, on grass, on concrete, in a shop?
Most fights quickly become mere wrestling on the ground with playground-style punches and elbows going at faces. Not much of your beautifully balanced Karate Kid punching/kicking is going to be useful there. In fact the first move of the Gracie Jiu Jitsu players who won all those Ultimate Fighting titles is to wade in, take a blow or two and grab ahold of the opponent, pulling him to the ground where they pick him apart with tricks like continued rabbit punches to sensitive areas like kidneys, then get a joint lock or chokehold. Do you think you could do this in a bar fight, or if there were 2 opponents?
If you want to learn some self-defense, you should probably learn one of the grappling arts; take some boxing/kickboxing to learn about strikes and footwork and get used to seeing blows coming at you; learn how hockey players and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu players deal with attacks; learn how to poke eyes, break fingers, fight dirty so you can get away and escape; learn enough about guns and knives to know that if someone has one, you need to get the heck out of there; and realize that the best self-defense technique is just to Not Be There.
In the average martial arts class, you can learn a few tricks and strikes, but really. There is always someone bigger or faster or with some other advantage that will get the better of you in a real fight. So after you learn a few basic things, you are probably all done except for the exercise or cultural rewards.
There are some styles that acknowledge all this, like "Jeet Kun Do", the motto of which is "absorb what is useful". In their classes, you can study anything that seems practical, like shooting guns, stabbing hands with pencils, bone-breaking joint locks, how to box/kickbox, stick fighting, etc.
I studied several martial arts for many years, and eventually gave up formal study because in the end I saw a common thread in all of them: they destroyed all the illusions about fighting that I had built up from TV, movies and books and youthful, testosterone-driven imaginings: and they helped me to see my own physical limitations beyond which I cannot go.
As a final thought, a lot of the bad stuff that I saw in a Japanese company was very similar to what I saw in traditional martial arts dojos: blind obedience to a liver-spotted authority figure, no option to question or change history or orders from above, enforced group blindness to practical and physical realities in favor of Group and Authority, and failure to recognize handle or take advantage of individual difference and/or talents/failings...
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Thanks guys for the props!
I'm 40 now, it's almost 20 years since I had a migraine like that!
As for what I learned, as much as I may have got some inner strength from it, the practical problems these headaches caused re school and social life taught me to escape, to hide, to avoid, to procrastinate, and to be impatient and cynical and bitter about authority figures like doctors and teachers!
These are all skills that I put to good use in my job as a lawyer.
Mr. Matthews, luck to your younger cousin. Today there are lots of new effective drugs for migraines, including one-time inhalers and ear-piercing treatments (really, they are documented to work!).
And now there are specialty headache clinics where the docs understand these things and can help devise avoidance and pain management strategies. They won't listen blandly to your description, assume you are a fool then say "have you tried aspirin?"
Years after mine went away, I bumped into a doctor at a party who was also a migraine sufferer, and he had plenty of good ideas and leads for handling them. Hope your cuz can find somebody like that.
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My imagination comes from this great, really great thick smoky luscious coffee that my wife makes every morning!
As a child I had regular migraines every 3-5 weeks, including seeing flashing lights/auras, 8-15 hours of incapacitating pain, nausea and endless swirling ranting delusions like you get in a bad fever...and then it would all stop and give me a blissful euphoric 10 hours or so in which I felt like I was reborn clean or re-animated from the dead.
I suppose in some sense it was like being tortured regularly and then feeling blissfully thankful when the torture stopped. There was a feeling of dread when one was coming on, because after the 50th time or so, I knew very well the long course and how many hours I would be stuck in bed getting through it.
No pills worked, I would simply puke them up...puking happened every 15 minutes or so for the duration.
They gave me suppositories of ergotamine (a powerful drug found in some bread molds that gave rise to the witch-burning mass hallucinations described so well in the book "The Devils of Loudin"), but those didn't work. I found out later there was even caffeine in those suppositories, which upset me because trying to sleep was the only relief I could find to get out of the torture...thanks doc.
It definitely shaped my worldview.
Some docs prescribed aspirin or motrin. Uh yeah. Thanks for nothing, pal.
I once tried a Percodan and that sure helped. It didn't stop the pain, but it put it somewhere far, far away so that I didn't even care. When I asked a doc to give me a scrip for it, he turned white as a sheet and said "Oh no, no no. That is a highly addictive, dangerous drug!!"
OK, just scrip me one at a time. If you see me taking more than one every 3 months, stop writing the scrips.
"No! Highly addictive!! We normally recommend aspirin for headaches..."
Oh. Thanks doc. I bet if YOU had these headaches, you wouldn't be taking aspirin for it.
Once a doc told me, "I think it's all in your head..."
Good point, doc...most headaches are.
In fact every experience anybody ever had was in some sense "only in their head", because that's where the brain is.
Look at me. I am living inside of a head, and so are you.
I learned that some foods, irregular sleep patterns, air currents on the side of my face while sleeping, and sinus conditions would coalesce and trigger these headaches, so I avoided those things as best I could As I got older, the migraines thinned out and virtually stopped by the time I got through college.
I can sometimes get them back thanks to a red wine hangover, but didn't we recently cover that in the "worst hangover" thread...
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There is some controversy over the calculation of the SARS mortality rate, because many of the figures show number of cases vs. number of deaths.
The problem is that there are many people currently suffering from the disease who have not yet either recovered or died.
I read that when they run the figures as number of cases that have reached a conclusion vs. number of deaths, the mortality rate comes back around 18% to 20%.
That is a lot worse.
On the bright side, it is said that children appear to have a far lower mortality rate.
In fact, the docs are saying that many more people may well have contracted SARS, but recovered fully and never had symptoms worthy of a hospital visit.
Until they perfect a reliable and quick SARS test and start testing everyone who has flu symptoms, nobody will ever know the true SARS mortality rate.
The current speculation is that elderly or respiratory-compromised people are the ones who face the higher mortality percentages. Furthermore, the SARS mortality rate for such people is not too different from the rate at which such people die from other flus every year. And SARS appears significantly less contagious than most flus and the common cold.
Here's a good source of interesting info, plump with hyperlinks, about all this: The Agonist SARS Thread
Scroll down a page or two and start reading at "SARS' Mythical Mortality Rate".
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As much as I sneer at the idea of boob jobs, if there was a male member modification surgery that was fairly cheap and reliable, I might consider it.
Actually, I think such a procedure would be more popular and well-received by the women of planet earth if it focused less on size, and more on shape and function.
For example, add a few cartiliginous ridges to scrape the g-spot, and insert a remote-controlled vibrating pad underneath it and also in other places where vibration would be welcome.
I imagine the cartilignous ridges could be modeled after the Klingon nose of Star Trek's Lieutenant Whorf.
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When I was that age, we used to watch roller hockey...now THAT was a sport!
And Batman of course. Julie Newmar in that shiny black skintight catsuit was one of my formative childhood experiences, it has shaped my entire sexuality.
MEOW!!
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How big did she go?
Do you know whether she had any complications?
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I was never into the WWF or any of the foreign iterations thereof (Lucha Libre, European, Japanese)... Maybe I was too old to appreciate it, but it always seemed crushingly, utterly insipid and boring... I can't even praise it as cartoonish, because it lacks any of the redeeming features of cartoons...it is like a media fart.
Grownups don't watch pro wrestling. Grownups enjoy grownup things, like THIS.
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This is just like in Jr. High biology class, where we studied colonies of bugs or rats that grew beyond their maximal population size versus their environment.
As the world's population of humans continues to grow, things like plagues and environmental changes will conspire to return it to some state of equilibrium.
Human activities greatly increase the numeric effects of these population limiters. Mad cow disease is a great example of disease resulting from unnatural changes brought about by humans, albeit the death toll is not high. Steers/cows naturally eat grasses, not ground up brains and offal as supplements.
We devote vast acreage and water to producing grain because grain-fed beef supposedly tastes better. The amount of water and grain used could sustainably feed hundreds of people, but only produce one animal for slaughter, making a few steak meals and burgers for a very few people. The diverted water causes dustbowls and ghost villages, famine and unemployment. Watch for water wars and dustbowl disasters in places like China in the future.
International distribution of foodstuffs is like international travel of people...it spreads diseases very effectively. AIDS, Ebola, West Nile Virus, SARS...even the common cold and milder flus take their toll.
Yes, SARS is a great example of yet another disease that should/would have remained an animal disease, with maybe one person in some small village every 50 years getting bitten or infected by such animal, but now it is spread like a FedEx virus for everyone to risk.
Our little Walled Lake is overrun by zebra mussels . They choke the life out of the lake ecosystem...they came over from the Black Sea decades ago on international freighters, slowly made their way into the Great Lakes, and now are steadily taking over the inland lakes and waterways through recreational boat use. They cut my feet like razors any time I step into the lake...used to be soft sand and muck.
I too am something of a virus or cross-pollinator, as I have successfully stolen a fine example of Japanese DNA and brought it back to propagate here in Michigan, in the form of my wife.
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Re the BBC's detection vans etc., I wonder to what extent modern innovations allow one to avoid detection?
For example, watching TV on an LCD screen via cable or Net.
I feel like Googling this to find out what their detection equipment actually detects...
TAXATION IS THEFT.
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Actually, snowboard_freak, I didn't want to show people up, but... I would have a couple of inches REMOVED from my member, so the ladies could handle all of me.
Heh.
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I'm in pretty good physical shape, but if I had just come into a small fortune and could get unlimited cosmetic procedures done, here's what I'd do:
1. Chemical or laser peels or whatever is best to give 20-year-old skin again.
2. Remove all moles, scars and blemishes from my entire body.
3. Remove hair from some places I wish it didn't grow (I'm no ape man, but I have a few spots that I would prefer hairless! And No, Mogs, I do not mean my tongue.)
4. Get perfect teeth, either using braces or bonding.
5. Have a bubble-butt installed at a Swiss clinic...I was cursed with a white man's bony little butt.
6. Have that web of skin under my tongue snipped--I read lesbians do this to increase their tongue length by a few centimeters. This I would do for the womon of planet Earth.
Well? What about YOU?
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EYES:
It's a beauty myth in Asia that big eyes look better. Outpatient eye enlargement surgery is hugely popular in Korea. Many Japanese women actually fly there to do it because it's cheaper and the Korean doctors specialize in it. (Cosmetic surgery for the masses is not yet as popular in Japan as in Korea.) How can you spot it? It's not so easy because some people naturally have big eyes...but beware of big almond or round eyes with no trace of the epicanthic fold. Example: Ayumi Hamasaki. And ever wonder why so many female J Pop stars all have big luscious eyes? Hmmm... NO! Do you really think it is POSSIBLE that they would have COSMETIC SURGERY? I really doubt it, don't you? I mean, WHY? WHY would they do it? I can't imagine them having any free time at all to do anything like that. And they surely couldn't afford the $2000 or so that it costs. No way would their record label pay for it, right? What would be the point.
Right?
NOSE:
Look for a nose that is exceptionally small for the face, or a nose of normal width that appears somehow scraped-out from inside, low, sunken, hollow or flat on the sides but with a rather more pointy peak from top to bottom (this is the original cartilage left in place like a tent pole). Look for the skin below the nose but above the lip to be tight or unusually shaped during smiling or other open-mouth expressions, especially where the bottom sides of the nose go into the facial skin. Look for a slightly odd upper lip. Example: Norika-chan, whose surgery fails in that her upper lip and the skin above it are oddly tight, giving her a strange, lipless smile. WEIRD. Another sad example: Hamasaki again...notice how her face only works when completely blank and relaxed. Ever seen her smile or make other faces? The skin on the lower corners of her nose puckers and sinks in, and the lower half of her face collapses and doesn't move right...it looks like a freaky, different person. The price of Ayumi's surgical beauty and fame is permanent disfigurement...the needle swings into Jacko territory folks. YUCK!
BOOBS:
This is the easiest one to spot, but oddly, the most difficult to convice newbies about. A lot of people--men--actually need to cling to the belief that giant firm standup breasts occur extremely often in nature, usually to women who are blonde or dye their hair blonde. In fact, they have grown up seeing such fake boobs as a rule, and have no concept of what is fake about them. "What are you talking about, they always look that way!!" they say. So when you tell them that almost all the women in Playboy or Penthouse have obvious boob jobs, they resist the assertion most heatedly. This used to bother me until I remembered the way I felt when Dad told me Santa Claus was a fake...so now to save men's feelings, I may point out fake boobs in passing, but after that I just leave it alone.
The first clue to fake boobs is abnormally large size and firm round gravity-defying shape. "Abnormally large" is of course a relative term and depends on the size, age, race and physical condition/body type of the woman. But the giveaway is the unnatural shape and behavior of the mammaries...almost all naturally large breasts on women older than 18 rest downward somewhat, and settle or flatten somewhat when lying down. Now look at the breats. Do they remain stiff and upthrust, holding an artificial, round shape even when the woman lies on her back? Do they fail to bobble and sway when the woman is walking or running? In a push-up bra, do the tops of the implants ride up the rib cage past where normal boobs would stop, yet keep a perfectly round, firm subcutaneous edge shape like a couple of small frisbees under there? If you can get a naked view, are the nipples skewed ("kani-ppai"), has one of the implant bags shifted like when your pillow comes half out of its case, does the position of the nipples seem overly centered like the cherry on top of a cream puff? Can you palpate the breast? A silicon bag feels like a child's foam ball, a saline bag is somewhat more natural-feeling. Example: The Kanno sisters--these are standard heavy-gauge Big implants. Norika-chan (hers are large, but not tell-tale giant...however, they didn't flatten out a single centimeter when she lay on her back in "China Strike Force", and there were the sad tell-tale frisbees when she had on a push-up bra. You can see this in other pics too, but she usually covers her boobs fairly well. Well, I guess she let someone cut open her chest with a razor and he slid two plastic balls inside her living flesh. Would YOU do that? Yuck.
Ever read how Courtney Love had her giant implants replaced with smaller ones (the big silicon ones kept getting infected or leaking, and there was scar tissue buildup--very common with boob implants). Courtney kept the old implants on a shelf at home and one day came back to find her dog had eaten one of them.
I lived in L.A. for almost 6 years and saw so much cosmetic surgery there that I consider myself something of an expert on it.
First, in Los Angeles everywhere you go you are bombarded with ads and invitations to try it. It is cheap. It is easy. Everyone is doing it. They have extended payment plans, free consultations, before-and-after sample books, computer simulations so you can see the new you before you even go under the knife.
Your dentist tries to sell you on overlays, bonding, caps, veneers, porcelain crowns, braces, whitening treatments.
Your dermatologist has stacks of brochures in the lobby about dermabrasion, chemical and laser peels, laser resurfacing, mole and scar removal.
Newspapers have pages and pages of ads from nose jobbers, wrinkle-lifters, hair replacers, tattoo- and scar-removers, boob job salons...that horrible hard boob-job look becomes the norm to which women aspire. "When I get a raise, I am going to go and get my cleavage!!" A D-cup is spoken of like a birthright.
Your girlfriend and her friends talk about collagen injections, breast implants, liposuction, nose jobs, eye jobs, nips, tucks, hair removal, facial peels, porcelain jackets for their teeth, as much as your male friends talk about sports and cars.
Well, some of your male friends that is...
Other male friends talk about a guy they know who got pectoral implants so he didn't have to bench press anymore, or shin/calf implants to get rid of "chicken legs". A guy got a chin implant to get the "Kirk Douglas" manly chin. And then there is the hair transplant thing too. Doll hair plugs, anyone?
I've seen a number of before-and-after cases of cosmetic surgery myself. I went to college with some, I went to law school with some.
In L.A., you point out surgical features the way you point out flowers or the weather in other towns. "Look at her boobs", "Oh, he had his nose done by Susan's botox doctor!", etc. After a while, you know what to look for and you start to see this stuff everywhere. EVERYWHERE. As it would have to be, to support that many docs and the huge medical technology, credit and image/lifestyle industry that has grown up around it.
Playboy goes around to talent shoots where women can get their Polaroids taken to have a go at being in the mag. Then Playboy looks at the Polaroids, selects some likely candidates, then offers them boob jobs at Playboy's expense. A year or two later, if finally selected, some of these gals appear in the magazine. Whether they appear or not, they keep the fake boobs. In fact it's hard to find a natural boob or face in Playboy or Penthouse anymore. That's why this new mag called "Natural Beauties" or whatever is selling like hotcakes.
I have a number of friends who've had cosmetic surgery. Some are men, most are women. Among the Asian women, eyes and noses predominate.
I actually ran out of a sexual encounter with a stunning Latin woman in LA because I could no longer stomach the thought of her implants, which felt like foam rubber footballs sliding up and down the gristle and bloody fluids of her rib cage. YUCK. Talk about losing the desire... I asked her, "do they feel funny?" and she answered, "not at all, I lost the sensation in my nipples because the doctor accidentally disturbed the nerve...he told me it might happen, that happens a lot with breast enlargement surgery...I'm lucky because mine aren't leaking and I have no subcutaneous scar tissue buildup..." I just had to get out of there, can you blame me?
Tabloids like the Enquirer and the Star and the Globe occasionally run before-and-after features with titles like "PLASTIC SURGERY--WHO'S GOT IT, AND WHO NEEDS IT!" There'll be a few pages of side-by-side before/after pics that really highlight who's had what done. There's usually one or two stars, like Britney Spears, who deny any surgery and claim to be sporting their real boobs. Then the tabloid gets a panel of expert cosmetic surgeons to examine detailed pics of the person and they all agree that 3-5 procedures have been done and at the end of it all you realize it is actually pretty obvious, even without the crutch of seeing the "before" pics.
None of this should really surprise anybody. It's been going on for decades all around the globe. These procedures only cost a few thousand dollars and are readily available all over the place. If you are a model or actor/actress, then you are in a job where cosmetic alteration has become the norm and the next guy or gal already has those perfect boobs, that perfect nose, those giant doe-eyes. Even a lot of people behind the camera, like producers, industry parasites and glad-handers, managers, agents etc. all have perfect teeth and their noses done.
There are some places where the general population has not been whipped into a frenzy and you don't see a lot of surgical faces walking around. Not everybody lives in L.A. There's plenty of places where you can see natural wonky noses, crooked yellow teeth, pot-bellies, acne scars and flat-chested women.
But in front of the camera doing nationally-aired commercials, dramas, movies and photo shoots is THE place where EVERYONE is under suspicion of having had something done...for good reason: because most of them did.
Now let's take this to a new thread I am about to launch, called "What would YOU have done?"
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Ya have to know what to look for!
I lived in L.A. so I know.
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What brought me to Japan?
An airplane.
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I wonder how she looked before the boob job, eye surgery, nose surgery and complete set of upper and lower caps?
I've got a crush on....
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
Two questions:
1. Why aren't people posting URLs to pics of people they have crushes on? Come, come, don't be lazy!
2. I really like that model/actress Ryo , but I wish she weren't so small and skinny. Anyone else like her?