As this year’s Democrats’ Primary Race drags on and on, I have to admit that just be osmosis, I’ve become more familiar than I ever hoped to be about the candidates’ positions. And what annoys me the most is their fiscal/trade policies. Why can’t we have a pro-free-trade candidate who is believably committed [...]

Smart people avoid waiting until the 11th hour to file their taxes (or perhaps they simply ask the IRS for an extension and procrastinate until October), but I witnessed a decent number of people today still working on their hard-copy forms. And as though we can’t get enough of a good thing, there was [...]

Japan can be a tough nut for foreigners to crack — foreigners who want to go beyond the “tourist” level and actually integrate into Japanese traditional society, that is. In particular, there seems to be this overall feeling that it’s impossible for non-Japanese natives to truly understand traditional Japanese culture. That’s what makes [...]

The internet is a vast, mostly unexplored jungle that’s expanding rapidly with each passing day. Users all around the world go online to send email, chat, meet other people, watch multimedia, play games, catch up on the latest news, etc. But although the internet itself is global and its content (baring censorship) is [...]

The plethora of news stories documenting the recent disruptions to the Olympic torch relay have illustrated the various ways that Western cities has chosen to deal with the arrival of the flame. After being accosted in London and Paris and diverted in San Francisco, the torch actually received a relatively peaceful welcome in Argentina.
However, [...]

Senario: You’re walking down the streets of Tokyo without a cellphone, and you need to make a call. How do you locate one of the dying remnants of a bygone era: the public pay phone?
Well, fear no more. This website conveniently maps the location of over 17,000 pay phones in the Tokyo metropolitan [...]

You may or may not have noticed that, due to factors beyond my control, this site has been down for the better part of a month. Additionally, it is quite possible that I have lost as much as a third of its archives for good (I suppose that’s what I get for not adequately backing-up [...]