badmigraine

I know my limits and I will never be throwing big spins in the pipe or doing Big Airs. You'll never see me tricking on a rail or putting down a "sick" slopestyle line... In fact that seems almost like circus performance to me--like the Chinese Acrobats or the guy who rides the motorcycle in the Cage of Death. No offense to those who do it or aspire to--I'll watch till the cows come home and even buy you beers... but I'll never do it. That leaves me steeps, powder, trees, moguls, high-speed carving, and backcountry. And cat/heli-skiing if I can get rich. So I am all about im

_freak, I am on the prowl for the last thing we need to buy at this end-of-the-year stage: Flow bindings for my wife. She's wanting the stiffest possible, which are the Pro-C BX, or the FL-11 FR. All the online shops I checked are out of stock, so tomorrow I am calling the US distributor office (in Canada, oddly enough) to see what I can track down. Shopping and sleuthing are kinda fun, but I sure hope we find what we are looking for. Why are you wanting a Flow board? To be honest, I have wondered what those boards are like. I've heard nothing at all about them, good or bad

Hey _freak I just Google what I want, then work the search results until I find the best deal... I have no store loyalty at all. I did notice that many of the places I scoped out will ship internationally, though of course you have to pay a bit more for the shipping component, and may get hit with import duty. You looking for anything in particular?

Mikazooks, can you post up a few links to funky streams? One of my faves is http://www.digitallyimported.com/ In part because of the good tunes (hard trance, DJ mixes, classical), and in part because it is reliable (hardly ever down, never slow).

"Banning" guns won't do much of anything in the US. Look how well the "ban" on pot or cocaine or any other illegal drug works... They will still come in. Maybe the number would be greatly reduced but that is not going to help much right now. Why? There are millions of guns floating around all over the place in the US. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, semi-automatic and antique guns, you name it. MILLIONS of them. And most are unregistered and untraceable, so you can't officially just call them in. Banning them just prevents most ordinary people from being able to buy them,

In my CD player right now (all are collections burned from mp3s ripped off Kazaa lite!): 1. Vicente Fernandez (I think the most famous of all "rancheras" singers) 2. Red House Painters 3. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult But that is not what I am listening to right now. Right now, I am listening to the blaring sound of "Dexter's Laboratory" emanating from the living room. My wife loves watching American cartoons to help improve her English. Even worse, she sides with Dexter's stupid little sister! Sheesh.

Hey Mogs--was that konbini near my house a Lawson's or am/pm? I memorized it "on purpose" several times, but still can't remember... I remember white flourescent lights, and a sign/in-store logo paint made up of blue and orange or red lines. Erm...

Hey _freak, I knowed you weren't trying to start anything! It was a good question that got me wondering exactly what it was that had me move back here, when I could have stayed in Japan working, or loafed around Niseko all winter (!), or gone to Italy or even New Zealand to board with Mogski's olds. Since posting my reasons (a) - ©, I've come up with another one: me and my siblings live around a smallish lake, and my bro has lots of boats including a MasterCraft ski boat and an X-Star wakeboarding boat. Now for people trapped in the flat, warm and green midwest, this is a nice

My wife has tiny feet. According to the Flow catalogue, she is at the bottom of their size range (M size base, M size strap) with a 23.5 cm boot. The thing is, we couldn't find a 23.5 cm boot she liked in women's sizes, so ended up buying a youth-size boys' boot that fits her. The outer dimensions seem slightly smaller than for a woman's 23.5. Has anyone seen a 23.5 cm boot in a Flow? Does it ratchet down tight enough, or are we getting to the limit of the size chart here? Ta

I just rounded out my full gear renewal, all done at end-of-season blowout prices. First there was the $90 Flow bindings bought with Mogski's approval in Utah. Then there were the Burton Ruler boots got for about $100. And finally, a Salomon Fastback board for $270!! Not bad, not bad!! Sure this is an expensive hobby, but you can get a full kit at 40% to 50% discounts if you buy at the end of the season. My sister picked up a Salomon Ivy board for $198 online just last week. My wife got Burton Rulers too, for only $68! Her board is fine for next year, but I will b

Gero-yaki means "fried puke". I always found okonomiyaki to be unpleasant. First, I don't like restaurants where you come out with your clothes and hair stinking like fried smoky oil or the like...this is true of many poorly-ventilated yaki-niku, okonomiyaki, and some Chinese restaurants. I'll go, but I hate smelling that smell in my clothes all day long. Second, I find the ingredients of okonomiyaki, taken individually, to be nothing special. Putting them all together with some egg batter on a griddle and making a fried frisbee out of them only makes it worse. Third, this

Yeh--and get this: they call Coke and 7-Up etc. "pop" (pronounced nasally, as in "PAHHHHP" "Anybody want a pop?" Michigan. Who woulda thunk?

DISCLAIMER: Long hours of company work and poor study habits have enabled me to reach a level of Japanese similar to the level of the English of the Chinese cook Hop Sing on the 60s western TV show "Bonanza". That being said, I feel qualified to make field judgments about the pronunciation of certain words. --end disclaimer-- On other discussion sites like "Japan Today News" we've all heard a lot of sneery whining about "wa-sei eigo" and native Japanese speakers who ignorantly mangle and mutilate English words and generally don't even realize they were borrowed from English in the fi

Imagine--every post you ever made, from #1 until the one you made yesterday!! Some of you have been posting here for years. It sure would bring back memories to read all one's posts in chronological order!! Let's face it. E-mail outboxes are the diaries of the 21st century. I archive mine, don't you? A Ski Japan Guide + Snow Japan Guide Scrapbook... A sort of magical memory book of one of the very best places to hang out on the Net...and YOU WERE THERE!! I'd sure like to have a CD or CDs of the complete SJG posts, from incept date to the present! I wonder how much me

mikazooki, your Jan 2002 bill is ward tax due because you were registered in that ward on Jan. 1, 2002. It is calculated by taking your 2001 Japan income and multiplying it by a percentage (the actual percentage varies by ward, I believe it's around 2% to 5% or so). My information is that if you are registered in your ward on January 1, 2002, then you owe the tax. This would be true regardless of where you physically live/work, because the mere fact of being a registered inhabitant of that ward on Jan. 1 makes you liable for the tax. If you had cancelled your visa upon leaving i

Ocean, you are either at the java or the old scotch this a.m.! Sheesh!! By the way, when asking for the loan, is it rude to specify foreign currency?

Hey snowboard_freak! Good question. I presume you may be thinking about US involvement in Arab affairs? If so, I hate what the US is doing over there and even though foreign policy does not represent the sum totality of any nation's life, land or culture, if you really disagree with your country's way of doing something, that might be good motivation to think about living elsewhere. PROBLEMS WITH THIS APPROACH: There is this thing called "democracy" where people of opposing viewpionts who live in the same country can hash it out among themselves, so I am not supposed to leav

Veronica, this post is meant to be both a moral tale and a practical guide, and each reader should take what they can from it. A DOSE OF REALITY I should have paid my taxes just like I should have driven exactly the speed limit and never parked overtime at a parking meter... Would YOU voluntarily pay $6000 in taxes to a country you were leaving, just when you needed all your savings to relocate, buy a car, rent a house? Erm I doubt it. And you wouldn't be extradited, you know. I paid my Japanese income, health and retirement taxes, because those were deducted automatical

I left Japan last October, just as the bills for my Inhabitants' Tax (aka "ward tax" or "kuminzei") were starting to pile up. The total is some several thousand US$... After returning to the US, I applied for a refund of my Kokumin-nenkin. The total is around US$7000. I got a letter from the ward office in English, asking me to contact them about the unpaid ward tax. No Kokumin-nenkin refund has appeared, even after all these months (this refund only took 4 weeks when I did it in 1999!). Obviously, they are holding the Kokumin-nenkin refund until I contact them about the un

Er...don't you mean, "the last album you downloaded/ripped"?

I thought the younger, long-haired Kimutaku was better looking. My Japanese wife and I now reside in Walled Lake, Michigan. We rented the entire TV drama "Good Luck!" starring Kimutaku, and were watching an episode when some of my sisters and their friends came over. They found Kimutaku to be very a plain, even rather ugly, scrawny, bad-skinned, bad-toothed, smoky loser. In fact, they were astonished to find that not only is he famous in Japan for his "talents" (singing off-key and smoking a lot in TV dramas?), but also that many Japanese girls swoon over him. There are t

My wife is from Okayama and she says that reikin and koshinryo are pretty rare there. She also said that shikikin is usually only 1 month's rent. Often there is no agent or only a low agent fee. Rents are a fraction of Tokyo's. Compare that to Tokyo where the norm is 2 months' reikin, 2 months' shikikin, 1 month to the agent and of course, lest we forget, the first month's rent. I guess the difference is paying almost $10,000 US just to get in the door of a modern 2BR apt. in Tokyo, vs. about $2000 to do the same in Okayama. In both places I guess you need a "guarantor" to assum

Karaoke is probably the one thing that I hate most about Japan and some other Asian countries. I absolutely loathe and actively despise everything about it. I never wanted to sing to my friends, or listen to them sing to me. Even if I did, it would have to be original compositions, not crappy Casio-tone beat J-pop garbage, or drunken slurring to some Queen or Sinatra song. And what's with the ear-piercing volume, the whiskey on the rocks, the thick cigarette-smoke-in-a-box, the forced gaiety... I hate the way, after a nomikai, when all are milling around near the cash

Here's an amusing aside I got off the Net a few years ago. "TAXI DRIVER WISDOM New York cab drivers are the world's most accessible source of truth and wisdom. Where else can you have intimate discussions with someone from Bangladesh, Liberia, India, Zaire, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iran, Russia, Haiti, Lithuania, Poland and the Ivory Coast. Where else can you hear the wisdom of Taoism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Islam, Scientology, etc.. Maybe because people can only deal with limited-time intimacy, we get into a taxi and, suddenly (sometimes), we can reveal our souls. We can ask

New York cabbies are a world unto themselves. Rude, smelly, often non-English speaking with little or no knowledge of streets, addresses and traffic laws... I was on a business trip from Tokyo to New York a few years ago. We finished a dinner and I escaped the karaoke session on the excuse of "going back to the hotel to do some work" and went outside to hail a cab. Scores and scores of empty cabs drove by, but not a one stopped. I started walking toward the hotel (a LONG walk), and kept trying to hail a cab. Finally, one screeched to a stop. I walked to the door and stood