Yes, I'm a smoker. I've tried many times to give up cigarettes, but I can't do it. I'm weak. I'm a slave to an evil, filthy habit. Living in Japan, it's even more difficult to quit, because Japan is, well, smoker's heaven! A pack of smokes costs just 320 yen (about 3-4 dollars, depending on where you live), and that's after a recent tax hike, which resulted in Japan Tobacco, the world's third largest cigarette company, recording a 60 percent rise in profits in the most recent quarter. Of course the government (like all governments) pays careful lip service to educating people about the dangers of smoking, but the fact is that smokes are a major money cow for governments. Heh, the Japanese government is actually the biggest shareholder in Japan Tobacco (it holds 67.77 percent of issued stock).Anyway, the Japanese are nothing if not polite, so I've included a couple of nifty graphics from a series sponsored by Japan Tobacco on smoking etiquette. [Very odd. I originally had a link to the Japan Tobacco site here, but just after posting this it went down...]
Hi Rick (of course your real name was never Kyklops!!!)
ReplyDeleteI can't believe you smoke! Okay get on that nicotine patch/gum whatever now!
I have a friend in med school that smokes...could never understand that!
caffeine and sugar are my babies...ah well...we all kill ourselves in different ways.
About browser:
ReplyDeleteThat's a big problem. I think you have to manually do something to the IE browser under "view" then "encoding" maybe?? I seem to see most Japanese pages ok, also Arabic and Hebrew. "Auto-select" is checked and the next thing is "Unicode UTF-8" has a little "on" bullet.
Have you tried looking at an Arabic newspaper like "Al-Ahram" to see what happens? It should "auto-select" right-to-left if all is well. Smokes? Well, among other things, the top message is silly. As far as I know no one is addicted to inhaling "gas". And ... I don't quite follow the lesson of the second one. What do you burn and inhale other than cigarettes? Are you supposed to keep butts in your pocket?
Heh, simple. The "Unicode Utf-8" thingie was all I needed. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteShit (er, may I call you 'Shit'? heh...), as well as the demon nicotine, I too have a fondness for the devil alcohol. Whether or not I 'abuse' said substance is, shall we say, purely a matter of perspective...
ReplyDeletePierre, did you see that? Shit Sandwich called you dr no because that's how it appears on many browsers (SS: it's supposed to be drano with one o' those strange accent thingies over the 'a'. That's what we were talking about with the unicode stuff--try it!!).
ReplyDeleteBy the way SS: you must have posted your secomd comment seconds before I posted my reply to your first. The word you're looking for might be 'animism', and it just so happens that Shintoism is an animistic religion, so good spot!
Heh, yeah, "I aim when I harpoon a whale, but I don't when I flick my smoke out the window of my car into your eye..."
Or, "harpooned, cut up, and eaten. If it were anything but a whale, it would surely come to your house, have sex with your wife, and have a smoke before killing you".
ReplyDelete