NoFakie

The Glazers spend loadsamoney and Man U go galactico! Should be fun to watch. If Falcao has buy clause like his agents say, their squad will be close to 500 million. No more Kagawa, so maybe that means its back to Southampton every week for you Japanese Sky viewers. Time to see if Welbeck can step up like Sturridge when he left Chelsea. He's nowhere near as tricky, but is still pretty quick and good in the air. I think he's a good signing because without Feo, Arsenal are a bit slow and ponderous. I think it limits what Ozil can do.

The buffet at Cortina is well nice! You can pay more for worse food in Hakuba Central very easily. Unless you insist on Burton, you can get a board/binding/boots kit for a five year old for about 25000, though that is about the youngest age they do. In terms of price, I could see you getting stung for that for 5-6 days rental. If its a name brand like Rossi, you'd get 15000 back on Yahoo Auctions easily, even after a season or two of use. Unless they skateboard already, I reckon the progression will be slower with kids on a board than on skis. On skis, the leash thing that attaches to

My missus has an old school friend who now lives up by Murakami so we might head up there sometime. I've been, but only went to an onsen.

I got some Kohaku today

The biggest change there is playing 4-3-3, not actually introducing Falcao. They could play that already, even with RVP or Welbeck. Rooney goes in front of di Maria though. He kind of pulls left anyway, so I think he could play left forward. There is talk of Man U's youth teams supposedly playing 3-5-2, so it might be here to stay.

Any recommendations on beaches in Niigata? We went to a place called Kakudahama on Saturday and it was pretty good. Its about 30km west of Niigata City. There was hardly anyone there, and it's a sandy beach with very clear water and a little lighthouse on an outcrop at the end of the bay. Lovely sunset over Sado Island too. We know the Itiogawa/Nou end of Niigata quite well, but it was much nicer than the beaches there. We went there along 402 from Niigata City and it looked like it was sandy most of the way along.

All of the hype of the deadline today and then.....another stupid break next week Newcastle have now scored!

Vote YES for the Lard! (The best fish'n'chips are fried in it. As are the best kushikatsu)

Is this a collaboration with the Lard Information Council?

I duuno if this has been mentioned before, but if you know British tv from the last thirty years or so, this is very funny. It lets rip at everyone. [media=''] [/media]

Hi Sunrise. Hope life is good! Your mobile sounds good to me! I enquired about doing the same on au with an old android phone, i.e., using wifi when available and no data when not, but the people said "oh you need the data plan because smartphones can suck lots of expensive data packets from the Net and you can't stop them! you can't!!" It was probably just the usual scaremongering, but still. Au doesn't let you just switch sims with older phones unlike docomo and softbank. You have to go to the shop and pay 2100 yen. I think the Y! Mobile thing is 300 calls of up to 10 minutes. If you

Free shipping to Japan for a 3500 order? Sounds pretty good.

After a week of "ON HOLD" at "N/A", my tent changed to "out on delivery" a few hours ago. In fact, the Sagawa guy just dropped it off! We want to use it at the weekend so all is well. From this experience, some of "ON HOLD" must mean in a Sagawa truck on the way to your house. fwiw, it came on the second day of the estimated delivery period Ebay said. For anyone shopping, its a 12kg family tent from the US which was about $30 for shipping with $15 for customs. From Amazon, the price was a couple of dollars cheaper but the shipping was $90, and I guess there'd have been a "refundable"

Worth watching if you've not seen it. It's total disarray at the back. As bad as Newcastle on a really bad day. [media='']http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPVbLMPMypc[/media]

There's no shortage of vending machines in Japan, so maybe the idea of service doesn't apply to Fanta grape and Boss coffee.

Losing 4-0 to MK Dons, there's only one word for it.

I bought a tent off an US seller on Ebay about 10 days ago. The international shipping done via Ebay is about 4000 yen cheaper than Amazon.com. Maybe more if you get stung for an import fee. However, its been stuck on hold at customs at the Ebay delivery center in Kentucky (?) since Thursday, which is day six now. I did a google on the status and apparently its pretty common with the delivery service Ebay uses. Most things off Amazon seem to clear customs in a day or two. Through Ebay you can get lots of outdoor stuff at US prices that discount sellers like backcountry.com etc aren't allow

Ozil was something like the top player in all of Europe for assists when he was at Real. He's not any more. On the subject of Arsenal, folks are saying Giroud is out for three months, so they'll have to buy a striker (or at least not sell Podolsky). They should get Remy in.

I vaguely remember something about a hot day, cold night combination being best for colours, but it might be rubbish. I've only seen photos, but Ontake looks like it has a large area of rowan trees (nanakamado) up near the alpine. They go bright red and are well spectacular. I like photos with big swathes of colour more than individual trees.

The article is talking about two different things. The main bit is about a low birthrate which if assumed to continue eventually leads to extinction. The secondary bit is about the problem of trying to support old people who require care and welfare with fewer working people, an example of a problem caused by having a low birthrate (but also longer life expectancy and other factors). For the secondary bit, Japan is in a worse situation than SK. But SK has the lower birthrate and hence you can predict its "extinction" sooner. Anyway, it's poor writing to single something out for being "part

Phil Jones should take up gurning. He's a total natural!

Wouldn't that make the problem worse in Japan then? Yes. Saying "particularly serious" and immediately following it with a worse example is slack. I guess that would have been corrected by a subeditor for a print newspaper ten years ago, but now news media don't have the revenue and they can't afford the staff. CNN do not have anyone in Japan. Its all off the wire or freelancers.

1.19 is impressively low. I think Japan's bottomed at about 1.3 and has been going back up for a few years, albeit very slowly. It's still well below the "maintain the population" level, hence the falling population. In Japan it all started in the 1970s, so it goes much deeper than the modern reasons people come up with, mobile phones, herbivore men or whatever.

On yesterday's evidence, its more a case of who don't you drop. They can just make up a formation as they go along. They have scored twice for their one point though, which is twice more than Newcastle. Looking forward to the game tonight. Pity Balotelli won't be in time for it. That would have been well tasty.

Be thankful you didn't get to sit through the Villa Newcastle game yesterday! btw, does the weekly highlight programme on Sky Perfect not include the Monday game? The one broadcast on Thursday didn't for last week's games.