Brazil Day in Tokyo involves a lot of grilled meat

‘Nuff said. I’ll bet the towel comes in handy.

 

2010 in review

Thanks, WordPress and my readers!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 230,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 10 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 273 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 717 posts. There were 341 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 17mb. That’s about 7 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 5th with 3 views. The most popular post that day was Hot or not: Kobayashi Takeru?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were julieinjapan.com, greeneyedgeisha.blogspot.com, sticky.queerclick.com, blogger.com, and dontstoptiligetenough.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for yakuza, anderson cooper boyfriend, yakuza tattoo, takeru kobayashi, and narimiya hiroki.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Hot or not: Kobayashi Takeru? June 2009
7 comments

2

Yakuza skin August 2009
1 comment

3

Anderson Cooper’s boyfriend: a huge meat head? November 2009
5 comments

4

Narimiya Hiroki August 2009
8 comments

5

Fundoshi v Fujoshi April 2009
6 comments

Anderson Cooper’s boyfriend: a huge meat head?

Is Benjamin (Antoine) Maisani really Anderson Cooper’s boyfriend? Gawker claims that this co-owner of East Village bar Eastern Bloc is the closeted CNN anchor’s boyfriend. I think Andie can do better than this extreme muscle queen, but maybe he has a rare mind underneath all that meat.

Thanks to Alexander Chee for passing on this breaking news!

Online restaurant and bar

A mouth-watering website offers online dining at a Yakiniku restaurant. The sounds of the meat grilling, the hungry diner’s open mouth, the interaction where the viewer uses chopsticks to lift up the meat, and even the paper apron to protect your keyboard, they are all magnificent.

And if the online meat makes you thirsty, you can always head to the online bar, with music and small snacks.

American meat, for the holidays?

“We care” is the tag line to the American Meat campaign (americanmeat.jp). Convincing Japanese to touch American beef apparently requires extensive transit advertising and a complicated web site. The expensive multi-channel campaign also requires images of healthy white Americans, their innocent children, their cows grazing in belly-high grass in verdant valleys.

Of course, most of the American meat supply is kept artificially inexpensive by feeding animals soy and grains, confining them to small enclosures, and hopping them up with hormones and antibiotics. Not to mention the toxic waste caused by 10 meter high piles of chicken and pig manure that ends up in streams and the water supply. I guess that wouldn’t create upbeat “we care” imagery.

Does anyone know if the general Japanese meat supply is as factory-farmed and dangerous as in the United States? Has anyone in Japan been tempted by the “we care” ads to taste some American beef? Please send a comment.

(Just 42 more hours of Xmas music!)