NoFakie

Portugal trying to outdo Spain there and probably succeeding! I hit fast forward after the sending off, so I didn't see the whole game. I did see that Raul Meireles now sports a magnificent beard to go with the mohawk and the tats. Some nasty playacting from the Germans, so I hope they or the Brazilians don't go on and win it.

Didn't McDonalds themselves do a video about how the photos are taken? It showed them injecting the sauces with syringes. I had another go on the Mister Donuts Cronuts at the weekend. The lemon one is too sweet but the maple caramel one with the white chocolate on the top is very good!

Tree names are weird. People call sugi cedars, but they are a different species. The famous cedar used for log cabins and decking, Western Red Cedar, isn't a cedar either. Its a cypress. People call ume plums, but Western plums are juicy and Japanese people call them "sumomo". An ume is firm and more like an apricot. I've never seen a dogwood outside Japan, so the word for me is simply what the dictionary says for yamaboushi/hanamizuki. I don't know what the right name is, but the flower is the same shape for those two, so they must be varieties of the same thing.

We bought an old country house and it came with 550 tsubo, so about 1800 sq meters. The house backs onto a wooded slope, so half our land is (former) woodland. It was all covered in sugi conifers that were 20m or so high, but we had them chopped down. There was a real risk of them falling on the house. We've made a garden around the house, but the rest of the land isn't very well kept. Lots and lots of weeds.

That's a lot for Niigata, but it sounds like its the going rate for the center of Niigata City even today. http://www.tochidai.info/niigata/ That's what you might pay for fairly close to Tokyo. I dunno, maybe 30-40 minutes out from the Yamanote line.

It was Frannyo that told me!

Well we've got lots of trees you can photograph too! If you're heading this way just say the word. On the subject of trees, all the dogwoods (yamaboushi for the white Japanese one, or hanamizuki for the pink American one) are in bloom here at the moment. There's quite a lot of them along the road.

Are the games on Sky Perfect with an English commentary? Any English commentary available elsewhere in Japan?

I don't think the 100km limit was ever scrapped for the weekday commuting time discount. Instead the change was to automatically calculate the 100km's worth of discount into all journeys of 100km or more. It was to stop people leaving the highway after just under 100km to get the discount and pulling a U-ey at the gate to get back on again. People with two cards would still do it to get the discount twice, but changing it meant that people with one card did not have to leave the highway. The fee for the distance over 100km was calculated at full price. By the looks, they've changed the com

Great goal from Honda, but that aside, Japan looked clueless up front. None of them seemed to want to take the initiative. England were pretty good on the whole. As expected, bright going forward but ropey at the back. Rooney managed to invoke the spirit of Bebe at one memorable moment.

C'mon In-gur-land! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbznA0Ml_8s

It's hard to know because I've no eye for what good stone is, but I guess second hand on the auctions, maybe 20-30,000. New, maybe up towards 100,000 for that size. My inlaws are about to rebuild their place, so we might be able to pick up some more goodies.

That reminds me of a classic pub quiz question. Name the only unbeaten team at the 1974 World Cup.

This is the stone thing I got off the old boy. I measured it and its more like 75 high and the same wide. I tried a tea light in it last week but you could barely notice it. With candles outside, you really need loads of them. One is just sabishii.

For us, its mainly for the group things we do or contacting other parents for kids' get-togethers or checking on what they need for school etc. If it was just us, I wouldn't bother with any of it.

With the background to the tournament, there's got to be a fair chance Brazilian locals would have a bit of riot if their boys went out first round. I can't see Fifa allowing that. Keeper aside, Croatia look a good team, so it was a shame for them. English people aren't supposed to say this, but I kind of hope the Argies win the whole thing. They've got lots of great players and no mad Diego to mess it up this time.

Line is a free chat app with built in Skype. Most folks just seem to use it for groups or one to one text chat/messaging. It's simpler and maybe more private than Facebook. Its cutesy because it has loads of smilies, some that you have to buy. As with Facebook, doing group stuff on it is easier than email, with the assumption that everyone has a smartphone. One to one, its just a.n.other chat program.

Never a penalty in a million years. It didn't look a foul on the keeper either. Good for the script though.

I've ended up using Google Plus unwittingly because it took over Picasa, the photo software. If you upload using it now, your photos end up on Google Plus instead of what was Picasaweb. Its pretty easy to use, so I prefer it to flickr etc. That said, its only photos of my kids for my old dear to see. I've never used Twitter. Facebook is pretty useful if you want to organise a get together and allow folks to have feedback. We do a couple of things and it would be more bother with email. There seems to be a migration to Line with the Japanese people we know, but I don't have a smartphone so

Adjusted that for you. I think I remember seeing a documentary about some food coming in from China or elsewhere, and then just being packaged in Japan --- and it was being labelled Made in Japan. Its pretty common with the eels I heard. They raise them in China, throw them in a pen for a month or two to qualify, and then sell them as Japanese.

Yeah, the reason its given to schoolkids is that there is no demand for it. One of the original forms of sukiyaki was kamoshika, but no one eats them any more. Well, not openly anyway. It is possible for Japanese people to stop eating something. There are so few people involved in whaling that its a mystery why they are allowed to embarrass the entire country for no particular gain. The whole issue is played as the patriotism card but its all bullshit. There wouldn't be freezer vaults full of the stuff if folks wanted to eat it. 100 yen sushi places are popping up all over the place as

I shall be watching! Quite a bit as well if it keeps pissing down with rain.

I don't think I've ever watched the New Statesman properly. I might have to give it another go. I've never seen Bottom either. I saw the Bambi episode of the Young Ones again on Tuesday and still thought it was really funny. It's on Youtube in three parts.

Sounds good! You had me till you mentioned the price The Spitfire etc. at Seiyu is now 2 for 360 yen, so its come down in price. Up yours Shinzo!

The People's Poet, what a total legend. I was fourteen when the Young Ones first showed, and I've never laughed as much in my life as that first episode. The two series were mindblowing at the time.Thanks Rik! (throwaway comment about standup being super trendy and big business now, but the vast majority of the comedians being nowhere near as funny)