(Apologies for the lateness of this post. This is due to Japan’s Golden Week, a series of holidays no one knows the names of that stretches out for a week or so. I believe one of the holidays is Gree...
His head turned slowly from side to side as he spoke, as if both neck and voice were driven by the same tiny motor, a motor that would occasionally stop, causing his head to abruptly freeze and his m...
TV is like a life raft. It keeps you out of the deep. A man wearing sagging, off-white underpants stands in front of a TV studio audience. As instructed by a fully-clothed man next to him, he climbs ...
There’s a folksy saying about the common cold that goes something like this: you can take cold medicine and get better in three days, or, if you don’t like that, you can skip the medicine and just wa...
French ventriloquists don’t make enough money. I don’t know how much these uncharacteristically steady-lipped Gauls earn at the moment, but it cannot be enough to compensate for the miracle of utteri...
After admiring a sunrise that turned out to be a petroleum fire in the neighboring town, chatting a bit with a prison guard who kept a large, mounted machine gun trained on me the entire time, and th...
(Please pardon the delay in postings to this site, but my staff was absent for much of the holiday season. Mr. Kikuchi was visiting his ancestral home in the temple-studded, gently rolling hills of N...
(Thanks to a writer’s block Mrs. Doyle claims to have encountered a page and a half into her recently begun debut novel, we are now able, with the grumbling and grudging help of the frustrated as-yet...
(There simply is no excuse for the recent delay in postings to this site. But here is one anyway. Mrs. Doyle is working on a novel. When she first told me this, I thought she was using the word “nove...
He used the kind of hand signals you see soldiers use in war movies–whirling his index finger in the air, clenching his fist, making a V with two fingers and pointing at his eyes, stuff like th...
“Whap!” “What?” “No! Whap!” he said, and hit me in the side of the head with the telephone book. “Yeah, you’re right,” I assured him so he’d stop. “That’s the sound it makes. Whap!” “And it doesn’t l...
“Anata wa nansai desuka?” I said on the outside chance the man propped up on the bench near the giant pulsating worm was still alive. How old are you? “None of your business, honky,” he replied. “And...
On our way to the massive pulsating worm, the seikeigeka receptionist and I passed several other machines either built specifically for physical rehabilitation or later adapted for the industry from ...
(Recent events have resulted in an unavoidable delay in postings to this site. I’m referring of course to the three-week leave of absence taken abruptly by Mrs. Doyle for the purpose of returning to ...
Because I have what some might consider a slightly exaggerated estimation of the power and reach of the U.S. government, believing it for instance to count among its many creeping tendrils an institu...
There was a kid in my neighborhood that definitely would have ended up in that short bar, or thin slice of the pie chart, labeled “ineffective” or “unresponsive” or sometimes just “other” in the grap...
I crouched down, leaned forward a bit, and said, “Rokubute,” immediately after which the child pulled from behind him a samurai sword as long as he was tall and struck me six times in the back of my ...
In Chicago during the winter, the TV weather guy will tell you the temperature. Then he will point at a clever graphic on his little map, and, while you are distracted by, say, a puffy cloud or a lin...
Addresses in the United States are arranged on a grid, like Battleship, that game “FOR AGES 8 TO ADULT” because attorneys for Milton Bradley decided that by the age of eight the company is not liable...
“Robbed of their childhood.” I was on a roll. “Locked up in dark, airless rooms.” I was trying to impress a pretty Canadian woman who I noticed was wearing a t-shirt asking people to save something. ...
(Mrs. Doyle and Mr. Kikuchi have combed the remaining rumpled remnants of the manuscript “Teach Yourself Japanese,” and it seems the author’s entire two-week suspension from Joyfull English, during w...
In stark contrast to my Christian and Muslim friends’ core belief in Everlasting Life After Death for the good and unwicked, I must say I have always held to the exact opposite–Everlasting Deat...
You are no longer following . Undo?
English
Suomi
Svenska