Wanda-kun's past comments

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  Wanda-kunJul. 25, 2012 - 08:32AM JST

  This just in: A record number of Japanese out in the midday sun without proper hydration proving that it's not only "mad dogs and Englishmen" who do this!

  Posted in: Record high 5,467 people taken to hospital for heatstroke July 16-22

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  Wanda-kunJul. 25, 2012 - 08:23AM JST

  Ugh. His formative years in Bed-Stuy and later might have been interesting, but he has has nothing new to say about Japan. By all means, visit his blog and you will be underwhelmed.

  Most of the positive reviews are, guaranteed, log-rolling.

  Posted in: New memoir on racism by New Yorker living in Japan reaches #1 on Amazon

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  Wanda-kunJul. 20, 2012 - 08:51AM JST

  "48 hours in Honolulu"

  Is about 24-hours too long.

  Posted in: 48 hours in Honolulu

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  Wanda-kunJul. 17, 2012 - 08:50AM JST

  FadamorJul. 16, 2012 - 10:09PM JST I'd agree with you if we were talking about any first-world country OTHER than Japan, but Japan is losing its battle with gentrification.

  I'm pretty sure "gentrification" is not the word you were searching for there.

  Posted in: 'Non-existent children' fall through cracks because they've never been registered

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  Wanda-kunJul. 17, 2012 - 08:48AM JST

  It's not as if Spa is a particularly reliable magazine to begin with.

  What's idiotic about the Japanese system is that birth registration is not handled automatically by the hospital or clinic. Family registers? How positively medieval.

  Posted in: 'Non-existent children' fall through cracks because they've never been registered

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  Wanda-kunJul. 17, 2012 - 08:27AM JST

  VirtuosoJul. 16, 2012 - 07:54AM JST If you've got LinkedIn, be prepared for the SNS to grab the contents of your address book and spam everyone who's name is in it with invitations to join.

  This is nonsense. The only invitations I ever receive from LI are to connect with people that I may already know (due to university or employment). The program does not have the ability to tap into your e-mail address book. That's hacking and LI would have been called on that long ago if it were happening.

  Posted in: Japanese are not LinkedIn enough

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  Wanda-kunJul. 17, 2012 - 08:24AM JST

  LinkedIn? Most Japanese companies (and government agencies as well) barely know how to use the Internet let alone make use of networking sites, regardless of their value.

  Posted in: Japanese are not LinkedIn enough

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  Wanda-kunJun. 30, 2012 - 12:25PM JST

  Fairytale Hollywood couple Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes . . .

  Hardly. In fact, most people thought she needed to have her head examined.

  She's probably had enough of the Scientology nonsense and a career that's gone no where since the marriage.

  Posted in: Marriage impossible - Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes split after five years

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  Wanda-kunJun. 30, 2012 - 04:11AM JST

  basroilJun. 29, 2012 - 02:38PM JST I suggest you stop talking nonsense. (Followed by blah, blah, blah about moving dirt.) Your math about earth moving, right or wrong, is unrelated to the issue of a reactor that experienced a partial meltdown and has a crack in it's interior containment vessel and the adjacent spent fuel pool with a bulge in one wall and, most likely, damaged fuel rod canisters.

  The site simply needs to be shut down and everything left in place, an additional, wider, taller and thicker seawall built and then everything capped in concrete and lead. There is no cleaning up or decontaminating the site. If that was all that needed to be done, they'd be well under way in the process. They've done virtually nothing to date because reactor 4 and its spent fuel pond are too hot to get near for any meaningful "dis-assembly."

  Again, we do not have the technology at this point to clean that site.

  Posted in: Record radiation levels detected at Fukushima reactor

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  Wanda-kunJun. 30, 2012 - 03:47AM JST

  OssanAmericaJun. 29, 2012 - 08:59PM JST A ggod portion of these articles are often poorly translated and the usual JT Jbashing crowd always uses it to criticize Japan itself or all the Jp people.

  While this may be true sometimes, articles like this are also typical of what passes for Japanese journalism - never ask the obvious follow-up questions and Who, What, Where, When, Why and How are largely overlooked but a person's age, whether germane to the story, is always included. In fact, you may be correct in this case about shoddy translation as the article lists none of the squirrels' ages.

  Posted in: Zoo that lost 30 squirrels in typhoon 'recaptures' 38

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  Wanda-kunJun. 30, 2012 - 03:43AM JST

  Of course, only in Japan would you have squirrels, otherwise a common feral urban park dweller, in a zoo. I've never been to Ueno, but at Higashiyama in Nagoya they kept them in a cage next to house cats and they were flanked on their right by some small breed of dog.

  Posted in: Zoo that lost 30 squirrels in typhoon 'recaptures' 38

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  Wanda-kunJun. 29, 2012 - 05:59AM JST

  sfjp330Jun. 29, 2012 - 05:30AM JST If the people, who are not empowered to make decisions about a solution for Fukushima, cannot even reach agreement that something must be done. The only solution known to mankind is to put the reactor cores under water immediately by a cooperative action by international humanitarian, military, engineering and governmental communities. Drop the reactor cores and accompanying land masse into the nearby ocean without further delay.

  You're joking right? If not, how do you propose that they move the entirety of a contaminated site dozens of acres in size weighing thousands (millions?) of tonnes without releasing lethal doses of radiation? And unless you are referring to the Japan Trench, how does otherwise dropping all this "into the nearby ocean" really help?

  Posted in: Record radiation levels detected at Fukushima reactor

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  Wanda-kunJun. 29, 2012 - 04:42AM JST

  FadamorJun. 29, 2012 - 02:34AM JST And ANOTHER person offering their "expert" assessment of a highly technical engineering problem. It makes me wonder where were you people when all your "expertise" was REALLY needed and why you have to offer it here rather than where it would have done the most good?

  Fadamor, I guess you don't understand that most of the Daiichi facility is now so "hot" that you can't even do the make-work "clean-up" that is supposedly happening. It's not a "engineering" problem at this point. We aren't trying to bridge a river or erect a cantilevered building. There is no science or engineering for cleaning up a reactor meltdown, which is what happened. It simply must be contained for hundreds of years or until, as someone mentioned up thread, we miraculously discover a way to neutralize the radiation. The longer the mess around with it, the greater potential for widespread contamination.

  Posted in: Record radiation levels detected at Fukushima reactor

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  Wanda-kunJun. 29, 2012 - 04:35AM JST

  JoshuYakiJun. 29, 2012 - 01:02AM JST This doesn't mean that only Fukushima is in danger but this is also a report that Tokyo and area is also being showerd (sic) with the possibility of deadly skyshine radiation.

  Not likely at this time of year. The predominate weather flow from now until October is SW to NE. In fact, most fallout from "leaks" at Fukushima Daiichi will be out over the Pacific.

  Posted in: Record radiation levels detected at Fukushima reactor

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  Wanda-kunJun. 29, 2012 - 12:22AM JST

  There is no cleaning up this mess at this point. They lost that option on 3/11/2011. The only thing that can be done now is concrete and lead containment. They need to bury the thing a la Chernobyl. They no longer control anything happening there.

  Posted in: Record radiation levels detected at Fukushima reactor

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  Wanda-kunJun. 28, 2012 - 01:34AM JST

  Christina O'NeillJun. 27, 2012 - 09:24PM JST If Face book advertising is the real basis for the changes, Im afraid its lost on me, i choose not to achknowledge any of the adverts, it is soley a product on my PC to communicate with other users of my own choice

  And that, Christina, is exactly why the FB IPO was such a disaster - next to no one reads the ads and they've already determined that, in the long run, there is no real way to monetize the site beyond selling your information and they can really only sell this once.

  I know probably a half-dozen people who use false names and otherwise provide no personal data. These people, though being an infinitesimal minority of FB users, are of no monetary value to FB.

  The ads they run on my page, by-and-large, seem to be for places and products that I am already familiar with, so why would I click on them? Instead, I click the block option giving the reason that most of the ads are offensive, racist or sexual. No need to help them.

  I think FB gets most of it's information from teens and 20-somethings too dumb to protect their privacy, but also lacking any real income and, therefore, of little value to FB advertisers or to people who buy their information from FB.

  Posted in: Facebook email switch prompts outcry

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  Wanda-kunJun. 22, 2012 - 05:36AM JST

  motytrahJun. 22, 2012 - 05:15AM JST I think we would have seen this happen sooner, but there was a bit of a downturn post 9/11. A number of craft brewers went under because they depended on keg sales to bars and restaurants. Now, American beers are being imported into Europe.

  Where do you live? Are you taking about the U.S. or Japan?

  Craft brewing pretty much started in the Pacific Northwest with Redhook in 1981, quickly followed by Grants, Hale's, Widmer, Pyramid, Full Sail, Big Time, Deschuttes, Pike, Rogue, Maritime Pacific and Fish by 1993. These are just the better known regionally and nationally distributed beers/ales etc. made in Washington and Oregon.

  The only thing that took time, as I noted above, is for the author to notice.

  Posted in: Craft beer finds growing U.S. fan base

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  Wanda-kunJun. 22, 2012 - 01:12AM JST

  Craft beer finds growing U.S. fan base

  Isn't this article about 10 years late?

  As with teaching the world to appreciate good coffee, the U.S., hell, the state of Oregon alone, has reawakened the world to good beer. I think Oregon now has more breweries than are found in Germany and the UK combined.

  Posted in: Craft beer finds growing U.S. fan base

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  Wanda-kunJun. 22, 2012 - 01:07AM JST

  Hell, the question ought to be is Bob Woodward heeding the . . .

  Since he decided to become the stenographer for the Bush administration, even one of the reporters who "uncovered" the scandals (they were getting nowhere until Deep Throat started feeding them leads) no longer speaks truth to power.

  As the cliche goes, nothing and everything changed after 9/11.

  Posted in: Is U.S. heeding Watergate's lessons, 40 years on?

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  Wanda-kunJun. 20, 2012 - 01:09AM JST

  HansNFranzJun. 19, 2012 - 01:44PM JST Yet, compared to Japan and China, the ceiling for Asians in the "Western world" is much less impenetrable. If anything, Japan and China must open their companies for foreigners first, then we'll see about the West

  Actually, the lack of opportunities for Japanese returning from stints abroad, either in business with a non-Japanese firm or for an advanced degree, is much worse than the supposed "bamboo ceiling" in the U.S. for Asian-Americans. And because of this problem, fewer Japanese are studying abroad and are less interested in taking a position abroad.

  Posted in: Brilliant Asian-Americans face 'bamboo ceiling' in U.S.