I know the Japanese are a unique culture, but...

Being obsessed Pokemon fans, Hunter and I recently felt compelled to purchase Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, the new Pokemon games for the Game Boy Advance.

In general, the game is much improved over previous versions.

However, there's some kind of new cultural convention. When you talk to people in the game, they'll often end their conversations with a derivative of:

"Fufufufufufu"

or perhaps:

"Fuououoououooo"

What the hell is that?

I've tried to map it to some sort of natural sound - but it's not laughter, because they do it when they're upset too. It's obviously not burping, or crying...what is it?

Crazy Japanese people.

If I ever end up over there, I should just communicate using this new language of "fuu" and see what they think.

*****

On the subject of Japan, I often make light of the fact that i'd starve to death over there because I don't eat seafood.

It's one of those things - my brother is deathly allergic to seafood, so the kids in my house didn't ever get around to eating it. By the time I was an adult, the fishy smell and the ewie fish guts convinced me that I was afraikd of the stuff. I do genuinely worry that it might make me sick like my brother, although I know that's unlikely.

But the other day, when we were taping for my advisor's New York thing (I don't mention her name because I'm going to change it here, and I haven't decided...) the guy who was supposed to be my "boyfriend" insisted on feeding me some of the appetizer he ordered.

Fried calimari.

Ewwwwwwwww. Eww eww ewwwww ewwww.

I went through with it, and you know what?

Ewwwww.

Smells like fishy smell, tastes like fishy smell. If I wanted to eat something that tasted like old basement, well, I'd probably eat my socks. And this was a nice restaraunt, too.

Eww.

On the subject of "eww", I watched a Fear Factor episode which featured random Miss USA contestants. (you know, the "I want to be a professional shopper" role models?)

The second challenge:

Swim through a tank that was filled with 5,000 pounds of rotting fish scales, uncover a thermos full of raw fermented squid guts, and drink a glass of said guts.

Oh. my. god.

Judging from the looks on those girls as they downed the stringy, dribbly pink mess, it was far worse than mere humans can imagine.

Yet there was a real irony in seeing these perfectly-coiffed girls covered in rotting fish scales and drinking squid guts.

Oddly enough, none of those women involved in the Fear Factor incident won the crown.

Very fishy indeed.

*****

To add insult to injury last night, as I nursed my burn and tried to fall asleep to the drone of the television -- the cable went out.

And it stayed out for 40 minutes. Now, I'm home alone in the city, and I'm a little on edge, so I couldn't get to sleep once I started thinking this was a sign of something worse.

So I called the cable company after 40 minutes, and after digging through phone menus in an awful interface, I was presented with a recording:

"The following zip codes in the city of PFunk are experiencing cable outages: 99991, 99992, 99993...."

The voice went on to list no less than 20 zip codes in this manner, the very last one of which was my own.

They had already asked for my phone number: much easier would be to say "Your zip code is experiencing a cable outage, and we are working to fix it. Estimated time of service: 5 hours."

This fucking list just made me think they were incompetent and bad interface designers.

They're lucky the damn cable was on this morning or I would have kicked their pale white asses to zip code 00001.

Bad interfaces make me angry. So do outages of things we pay many monies for.

Fuuufufufuuuufuufuuuuufuu!