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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Back to Japan and the Tokyo Game Show

I've never been back to TGS - this will be the first time since 2000. I'll be going with my wife this time, so it should be even more fun. Of course, we're going to do more than just TGS - we'll be there for a week. (Not 2 weeks like last year, but it's hard for me to take that much time off at once.) But so far, TGS is the one event we've definitely got planned. If you're wondering, this year's show is being held 9/20-9/23, with the last two days open to the public.
For anyone reading this who hasn't been there, I'll give you a little rundown from TGS 2000, complete with some of the pics I took at the time. I can't imagine it's changed all that much since then. I do know the crowds are even bigger.
The Tokyo Game Show is not actually held in Tokyo. It's held in Makuhari, which is about 20 miles away - sort of like having a "New York Game Show" but actually holding it in, I don't know, Trenton, NJ. Makuhari itself is a city of about 800,000 people, though it feels like a sleepy little town outside of the area right around the Makuhari Messe, which is the city's convention center.
The Makuhari Messe is an absolutely massive complex, far larger than any convention center I've ever seen in the United States. I've said it before, the Japanese build big. Surrounding the convention center is a network of hotels and shopping centers, the Chiba Marine Stadium, and one or two company buildings, making for something of a business district. One interesting thing about this part of Makuhari is that you can walk anywhere without touching street level, as the entire district is built with raised walkways. When there's no convention going on, it can really feel like a ghost town - no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. There is no residential housing in the area, although some people do come to the shopping centers for entertainment on weekends.
Both times I've stayed in Makuhari, I've been at the Makuhari Prince. It's got some great views of the surrounding area.



As a member of the press, I got to go to the official keynote and show open. A pretty dry affair, honestly.


This is what the inside of the show floor looks like:

I did wait in this:


This was my first introduction to the Japanese dance fad of the time, "para para":

Of course I bought the home release of Para Para Paradise, along with two of the special controllers.
Another random pic from the show floor - Sony's Gran Turismo 2000:




In between halls of the convention center, there is an area devoted to cosplay:



If you've made it this far through the post, I may as well wrap it up with a couple totally random photos I took that have special meaning to me:

This was also during SpaceWorld in August 2000:

They filmed this show and turned it into the Bohemian Summer 2000 concert DVD. There are several helicopter shots that show my hotel, and I swear you can see me watching from my window.
Anyway, it should be pretty obvious that I can't wait to go back.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Lombardi's and Real New York Pizza


Back in what, 1897 or something like that, an Italian immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi brought a recipe for Neapolitan Pizza from Italy to the United States. Pizza as we know it had only just been invented a few years before, as a way of showing Italian pride to Queen Margherita (the red, white and green of the Italian flag being represented by the sauce, the mozzarella and chopped basil). It's true that flat breads, sometimes slathered in garlic and herbs, had been eaten for hundreds of years prior all over Europe. But modern pizza with the sauce and cheese was not invented until the 1890's, and it was brought over here by Gennaro Lombardi just afterwards. He originally opened a grocery store, started selling pizza out of it, and eventually opened Lombardi's in 1905.

While the original family members are now long since gone, Lombardi's still makes their pizza the way they've always made it. Thin sliced (not grated) fresh mozzarella, homemade sauce, thin crust cooked in a coal oven. You see lots of pizzerias these days advertise "brick" ovens. Who the hell cares about brick? Brick doesn't cook anything. It's the coal that matters.


The problem with coal ovens are that they're dangerous and dirty. For this reason, you don't see them much anymore, even in New York. They were actually outlawed in the 1960's or 70's, but there was a provision in the law that "grandfathered in" any existing coal ovens, provided the owners did certain things to ensure safety. Only a few restaurants that I know of still have them - Lombardi's and John's pizzerias in Manhattan, Grimaldi's in Brooklyn and Sac's Place in Astoria, Queens. There may be one or two more, but I know I haven't missed many.
One funny thing about Lombardi's is that they have pictures of burning coal on the wall. When you see that, you know you're in a Real Pizzeria.
(Quick digression. Some New Yorkers say that Grimaldi's has better pizza than Lombardi's these days. Both me and my wife couldn't disagree more with this. Grimaldi's pizza is almost tasteless by comparison, with a crust that's so flat and crunchy it may as well be a cracker. I'm convinced that the people who say they like Grimaldi's better are just Brooklyn hipsters with a Manhattan inferiority complex.)
Lombardi's has expanded quite a bit in the past few years. Up until about 2003 or so, they were nothing more than a little hole in the side of a building stuffed with tiny little tables. The door opened straight into the dining room (no double door), so in the winter, you'd be eating with your heavy coat on. The original dining room still exists - we ate in it tonight - but there's also now a larger dining room adjacent to it and a smaller "wine cellar" styled dining room in the basement. Each dining room has a pretty distinct feel, with the original dining room retaining most of its authenticity and the newer ones having a little more of a tourist vibe.


They also hand-make their own meatballs, and they're amazing. It's hard for me not to get a meatball pie whenever I go there. Anyone from outside the New York area goes "huh?" whenever I talk about meatball pizza - let me tell you, this is probably the most popular pizza topping here.
After Lombardi's, we stopped across the street at this place Rice to Riches, which I still can't believe even exists. They moved in when I worked in the area a few years ago, and they sell nothing but rice pudding. Like almost everywhere in New York, there's a story behind the store. I don't remember all the details, but shortly after opening, local newspapers reported that the owner was using the store as a front for a major illegal gambling operation. We at my office had all wondered how any store could survive just selling rice pudding, and as soon as we read that, we all collectively slapped our foreheads and said "duh!" Even the name suddenly made more sense.


Tuesday, July 10, 2007
A Look Back - PUFFY (AmiYumi) Spike Daisakusen DVD
Post Moved!
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Please update your bookmarks.
This post now resides at my Puffy-dedicated blog amiyumidas. Please click here to be taken directly to the post. If you're interested in Puffy, you may want to browse around a bit while you're there - I've got a lot of cool stuff.
Please update your bookmarks.
Monday, July 09, 2007
PUFFY Update #2
Post Moved!
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Please update your bookmarks.
This post now resides at my Puffy-dedicated blog amiyumidas. Please click here to be taken directly to the post. If you're interested in Puffy, you may want to browse around a bit while you're there - I've got a lot of cool stuff.
Please update your bookmarks.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
July 4, New York City style

But this was our first time on a cruise, and even though we went with a "cheap" NY Waterway cruise, I've gotta say it's the way to go if you want to see the NYC fireworks. The NY Waterway cruise costs $75 per person, which is not expensive by New York standards - most of these cruises cost $200 and up and include a full dinner and comfortable seating. NY Waterway is pretty basic - their boats are commuter ferries, and they'll only sell you a hot dog and a beer (and they ran out of hot dogs). But the point is to just get a good vantage point for the fireworks without dealing with a crush of people.

Now, I'm not saying this experience was always pleasant. We arrived at 6PM for what we thought would be a 6:30PM boarding, only to be greeted by a non-air conditioned indoor pier and a long wait. The lines grew to what seemed like impossible lengths as 6:30PM came and went. We didn't board until 7PM and we immediately made a bee-line for the second deck of the boat - only to find it soaking wet from the rain we'd been having. We ended up going down to the indoor first deck where it was dry, but the view wasn't as good as we sailed down to the tip of lower Manhattan.
And yeah, it rained most of the day. As we sailed, most of those hardy enough to try the second deck moved downstairs with us, and it got a bit crowded. The snack vendor ran out of dogs and explained that the boat was oversold - not sure how that can happen, honestly, but then this is New York, city of incompetence. Still, it wasn't so crowded that we couldn't move around, and we did - we changed seats several times depending on the view, and we went upstairs to see if we could tough it out. The nice thing about being on a boat is you don't have to worry quite as much about your stuff being stolen if you leave it for a second - nobody's going anywhere. And it was kind of a party atmosphere, with everybody getting to know everybody else.


"Yeah, baby!" I laugh every time I watch that last one. That guy wouldn't stop joking about how "that was just a test, this is the grand finale!" It was sort of funny the first time, not really funny the second time, and just plain annoying the third through the thirtieth times.
If you're wondering, the NYC fireworks are actually launched from several barges in the East River. You can see there's another location up the river a bit in the background of these videos. Everywhere gets the same show, though, and it's all run by computer.
Here are a couple more photos I took with my Canon Rebel XT/350D:


After the fireworks ended, all the boats sounded their horns in appreciation (which was kinda cool) and we headed back to the pier.
For good measure, here's a photo of the inside of the boat on the way back. The DJ was doing his best to maintain the party atmosphere but most people just wanted to sit and relax:


Tuesday, July 03, 2007
A real blog post, for once
I've had family visiting for the past couple weeks so I haven't had a chance to even think much about posting anything new. But I figured I'd take a few minutes and just talk about a few things I've been up to and a few things I've got coming up. I guess that's what most people use their blogs for anyway.
So shortly after finishing my last post, we embarked on a massive fix-up of our house to prepare for my mother-in-law's arrival from Japan. We had about a hundred unfinished projects around, and we got to as many as we could. As you may or may not know, we own a 1923 "Colonial Revival" house that has never really been upgraded, so we've got quite a lot still left to do. But we finally finished painting the first floor, got some curtains up to cover our patio windows, got some pictures up on the walls both in the living room and the guest bedroom, and replaced the sagging curtain "rods" in the guest bedroom. We have bay windows and I didn't know how to cover them originally, so I tried these tension wire rods because they were small and could get around corners... big mistake. You can't keep these things tight, and the wire sags... which just looks ugly. So I put up some real rods, which meant spackling and repainting the walls. Then I painted the ugly radiator for good measure.
Over the past week, we've been trying not to use our computers as much for my mother-in-law's sake. Been watching way too much TV instead. We got TV Japan, which is mostly just NHK, and my m-i-l's been watching mostly that. We got it just in time, actually, to watch a show my wife happened to be on that week - Cool Japan. (They found her through her blog.) I'm not sure yet if we'll keep TV Japan after my m-i-l leaves - it's kind of expensive. Makes me feel like I'm in Japan when I watch it, though.
Tonight, we're going out to eat at Sakagura, which is one of our favorite restaurants and a cool place that still feels a little bit like a secret. It's down in the basement of an otherwise non-descript office building, and there's only a small floor-standing sign near the front door to let you know it's there. They got a writeup in the NY Times several years ago, though, and ever since then the number of western clientele has increased quite a bit. Good for them, though - if there's one thing I hate more than crowded restaurants, it's good restaurants going out of business. And Sakagura is a really good restaurant - though they're known more for their sake selection, which is the best in the city.
Tomorrow, we're taking one of those July 4th cruises on the East River to watch the fireworks. I've gone to the fireworks before, but never on the water, so I'm looking forward to it. Usually it's so crowded you can barely even move, so it'll be cool to be in a more controlled environment where the number of tickets are limited.
This weekend, we'll have the house back to ourselves, and I'll probably start writing some new posts. I'm planning to do a July 4th post about the fireworks both in NYC and my neighborhood, then I've got a "retroview" of PUFFY's "Spike Daisakusen" DVD in the works. After that, who knows.
So shortly after finishing my last post, we embarked on a massive fix-up of our house to prepare for my mother-in-law's arrival from Japan. We had about a hundred unfinished projects around, and we got to as many as we could. As you may or may not know, we own a 1923 "Colonial Revival" house that has never really been upgraded, so we've got quite a lot still left to do. But we finally finished painting the first floor, got some curtains up to cover our patio windows, got some pictures up on the walls both in the living room and the guest bedroom, and replaced the sagging curtain "rods" in the guest bedroom. We have bay windows and I didn't know how to cover them originally, so I tried these tension wire rods because they were small and could get around corners... big mistake. You can't keep these things tight, and the wire sags... which just looks ugly. So I put up some real rods, which meant spackling and repainting the walls. Then I painted the ugly radiator for good measure.
Over the past week, we've been trying not to use our computers as much for my mother-in-law's sake. Been watching way too much TV instead. We got TV Japan, which is mostly just NHK, and my m-i-l's been watching mostly that. We got it just in time, actually, to watch a show my wife happened to be on that week - Cool Japan. (They found her through her blog.) I'm not sure yet if we'll keep TV Japan after my m-i-l leaves - it's kind of expensive. Makes me feel like I'm in Japan when I watch it, though.
Tonight, we're going out to eat at Sakagura, which is one of our favorite restaurants and a cool place that still feels a little bit like a secret. It's down in the basement of an otherwise non-descript office building, and there's only a small floor-standing sign near the front door to let you know it's there. They got a writeup in the NY Times several years ago, though, and ever since then the number of western clientele has increased quite a bit. Good for them, though - if there's one thing I hate more than crowded restaurants, it's good restaurants going out of business. And Sakagura is a really good restaurant - though they're known more for their sake selection, which is the best in the city.
Tomorrow, we're taking one of those July 4th cruises on the East River to watch the fireworks. I've gone to the fireworks before, but never on the water, so I'm looking forward to it. Usually it's so crowded you can barely even move, so it'll be cool to be in a more controlled environment where the number of tickets are limited.
This weekend, we'll have the house back to ourselves, and I'll probably start writing some new posts. I'm planning to do a July 4th post about the fireworks both in NYC and my neighborhood, then I've got a "retroview" of PUFFY's "Spike Daisakusen" DVD in the works. After that, who knows.
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