This is what public transportation looks like in San Francisco

(Photo: Marc Heustis, via SFist.com)

It’s certainly not the Tokyo Metro. Here at the 16th Street BART station, a naked man stretches beneath a huge pile of hair. Reportedly he was also peeing and sexually harassing women. Around the same time, between 5 and 6 pm, two people started walking on the tracks between stations. Needless to say, the station and the system shut down. I guess when all the high-paid people take corporate shuttles in a separate and unequal transit system, there’s very little incentive to maintain the bare minimum for the public version. What’s next, an Israeli-style separation barrier between the posh and the poor?

Is naming a high-end highrise Twin Towers in poor taste?

Nakano Twin Towers, what will be tallest and most expensive apartments in our inner suburb, is rising fast just south of the JR station. Rumor has it that owners can customize everything, and that the apartments sold out fast. Is it only me that thinks this name for the two symmetrical 30+ floor residential towers is somehow wrong?

Cougars are here to stay!?

I love the NY Times Style section. Today features a hot photo from Cougar Town with Courtney Cox and Nick Zano and an article with the pseudo-intellectual title “Rethinking the Older Woman-Younger Man Relationship.” The basic idea is that now that women over 40 are more self-sufficient, they are freer to date men who are younger (and also poorer, of different religions and races).

Cougars have been maligned as desperate and inappropriate. And many men have been known to only date younger. Who can argue with feminine liberation? Can a cougar be omniverous and multi-generational? Can queers be cougars? What do you think?

Marriage and Election Charm

On, no, he didn’t! The always gaffe-prone Prime Minister Taro Aso, one week before the election, told a group of university students that poor men are too low status to get married. This was in answer to a question about Japan’s unprecedentedly low birth rate.

Young people “better not get married with little money. .  It seems rather difficult to me that someone without any pay can be seen as an object of respect (worthy of a partner).”

To clarify matters, Aso cited his own experience. “I was late to marry even though I was not quite poor. I can’t say carelessly because I think it depends on the person.”

“Not quite poor” obliquely refers to the fact that his grandfather was prime minister, and his family is one of Japan’s richest, built in part on war-time slave labor. Despite his unfathomable wealth, he is known for his inability to read kanji.

Sadly, this walking disaster’s main challenger is another former prime minister’s grandson, with a shockingly expressionless face and what seem like dead fish eyes. No wonder there is so little excitement.