You know why they did it? To protect again waves of murderous Japanese. They might be numerous, but sugar overpowers them with its siren call.

Some of you might be annoyed at my bitch-fest, but I thought it important to note how one sees things after putting on godzilla colored glasses. So even though the relationship of those articles to Japan might be slightly tenuous be happy I didn’t decide to start bitching about something else, like politics. Not to worry; this fest-bitch is not going to congeal into a huge ball of angry loser that won’t shutup. However, there are still some irk-points that must be talked about, though these are of a different sort than the previous three posts.

Cultures tend to borrow things from other cultures. Sometimes these things aren’t actually borrowed, but fully assimilated as they were in the originating culture; other times the resulting product is a beast with 4 heads, 7 teeth, the brain of a creationist, and Alan Cummings. Sometimes these mashups are interesting and create a new movement that increases the value of R, the measure of awesomeness in the universe. So these amalgamations aren’t inherently bad and Japan and the US have both gave us some good examples. Although concoctions such as these can end up flaccid, but there are some borrowings that have taken from our Masta Killa to the east that we have, unfortunately, done dumb, and unnecessary, things to. These are their stories:

Green Tea
I take teabags from hotels and companies that naively leave them out for everyone to use. I have strangled children just so that I can find their stash of tea and devour it ever so slowly. Let’s just say that I like my tea, a lot. Now I’m not one to scoff at sugar/sweetener in tea, except sweet tea, which does not deserve to be called tea, but when a particular brand of tea does not include any sweetener why do the shitty companies that make tea, which is all the brands that you would find in a convenience store or vending machine, decide that the green tea that they sell must not only be sweet, but include two sweeteners? I shit you not. After water, the next two ingredients in all of the chilled green teas that you find in most parts of this country are HFCS and sugar.

Who thought this was a good idea? I can’t hardly tell the difference between “green tea” and any of the other teas that they sell since the actual taste of green tea is completely masked by all of the sugar. If you go buy(rent?) an asian hooker you don’t then go and find a human sized paper bag to put over her so that you can gaze at her brown, pulpy mounds and not have to worry about experiencing anything different than normal, only that your friends might think that you now have a paper bag fetish.

Japanese words in the English language
There are some and they’re generally spoken quite correctly (Ninja, Sumo, etc), but there are some that are butchered, torture porn style; consonants are changed, seemingly randomly, which disconnects how you write the word and how you say it. That’s not too bad except that I still don’t get how you can ever come up with how it’s said from how it’s wrote, it just does not compute.

Sake – pronounced Sah key – correct pronunciation Sah kay
What it means when you say it incorrectly – a bunch of different things
Are there any sounds which are written as “ke” but are pronounced “key” in English? If there are, I can’t think of them offhand. Now if it was common or a rule in English I wouldn’t have much of a problem.

Karaoke – pronounced Ker E oh key – correct pronunciation Ka rah oh kay
What it means when you say it incorrectly – jibberish (no, not the word itself)
That mysterious “key” sound comes back, which, in a way, is comforting; at least there are traces of a rule. But there’s another thing changed in this word because, apparently, having one sound that is divorced from its writing is not enough. So how exactly does one get a “ri” sound out or “ra”? I would love to know.

Kamikaze – pronounced Kah mah kah zi – correct pronunciation Kah me kah zay
What it means when you say it incorrectly – a number of things, but maybe the first thing they would think would be “boiler fire”
Ok, last one. Again with the crazy sound changes, which I don’t get.

I would like to know how all of these things got started so that I could go back and time and murder them in the womb, but I have a feeling that isn’t going to happen.