Microwave Popcorn

OK new pet peeve.
You know how it’s possible to screw up coffee?
Like how hard could this be?
You put in the grounds and you pour the water in.
But no.
Sometimes you end up with yucky coffee.
Microwave popcorn, same thing.
It IS possible to screw up microwave popcorn
I should know… I just ruined an entire bag of “kettle corn” style.
Now everything smells like a fire in a cereal factory

Life in the Godzilla Universe

I was reading about the flooding in Kyushu today- Japan is made of 4 islands, the main one being Honshu, the one with the second-largest population being Kyushu- and saw a bunch of news photos of people wading through the 3-foot deep floodwaters to get to work.

Hello? The city is FLOODED. And yet people are STILL going to work. The salaryman in suits have their slacks rolled up. We were thinking that maybe the idea “you don’t have to go to work during a disaster” hadn’t come up for these people. While most Americans would be thinking “Oh my god, I wonder if there is any city left? Are we going to starve?” the Japanese are thinking “Oh man, now that the city has been destroyed, getting to work is sure going to be a pain.”

You know what this is like? The Godzilla movies. Every so often in the Godzilla universe, a random monster tries to destroy Tokyo. Why Tokyo? Why not say Beijing? San Francisco? Obviously not New York; that’s on the Atlantic, and everyone knows most of the monsters come from the South Pacific on the very edge of the Co-prosperity Sphere. But the point is, the monster shows up and wrecks most of the city.

Now what would happen if everyone stopped going to work EVERY TIME a monster arrived? Nothing would get done! You think Japan’s economy is in the toilet now, imagine if people dropped what they were doing just because something was wrecking the city. Slacker!

Periodically the government deploys the Maser Tank to shoot death-rays at Godzilla. These things are classic examples of government defense spending- obviously some lobbyist made bank over the Maser Tank because they make a piece of crap like the Bradley look like Voltron. From Michael’s Godzilla vs Destoroyah Page:

Why do they keep making those maser tanks? Those things must be prohibitively expensive, but they never hurt a monster and end up getting smashed in every movie. And yet, they keep making new ones!

Fortunately for the taxpayers, the Maser Tank isn’t all the Japanese military has up its collective sleeve. There is a whole pantheon of all the crazy-ass weapons that decades of taxes on the inflationary real estate market have paid for. My personal favorite is the Super X which is basically a giant metal bug.