THU 15 JUL 99

Beer Garden in the Big Udon

Beer Garden—Advance tickets required.

Booze: Malt whiskey, Singapore slings, automated beer tilters—small and large, lager and dark, red wine in a keg

Food: Pepperoni pizza for show—a lot slower than Shakey’s Bunch-a-Lunch, cold spaghetti and marinara

First Station

Meatballs

Deep fried soybeans and batter

Kimchi

Second Station

Edamame

Entertainment: Ferris wheel over our shoulders and rainbow guy in toilet with mike

Companions: Emer, Fergus, Patrice, Greg, Su-Fei, Quillain, Mike, Hiro, Emer’s sister

Interesting evening. Yeah.

* * * * *

My favorite (and only) morning paper, The Mainichi News, carries this to further prove that some among the Japanese do strike out:

Condom machine gives Dane the clamp

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP-Jiji) – A 20-year-old Danish man spent two hours with his finger stuck inside a con-dom vending machine at a bar before finally giving up and tak-ing the machine with him to a repair center to be freed, Danish radio said.

He attempted to purchase a condom from the machine at a bar in Thisted in northwestern Denmark late on Saturday night, but the distributor suddenly clamped down on his finger before he could get his hand out.

Two bar patrons tried to help the man, but without success.

The man was finally taken – machine and all – to a Thisted emergency repair center where he was separated from the machine.

UK tabloid saves squaddies sphincters

LONDON (AFP-Jiji) – The top-selling British newspaper The Sun on Tuesday announced that it was sending 2,000 rolls of soft toilet paper to the country’s troops in Macedonia after complaints that army paper was too hard.

The paper said it had learned from a British army magazine that the 1,250 troops in Skopje, Yugoslavia, to join a possible NATO peacekeeping force for Kosovo, had said that the recycled paper issued to them was “like corrugated cardboard.”

Teaming up with manufacturer Andrew, The Sun said it had launched “Operation Loo Roll” to help “Our Boys in the Balkans.”

German man flushes savings away

HANOVER, Germany  (AFP-Jiji) – A German man who hid 23,000 marks (12,900 dollars) in his underpants during a train journey for safety’s sake lost the money while going to the toilet, police said.

Police from this northern German town managed to find the money on the rail line after the passenger told them how he had lost his savings, with which he had planned to buy a car.

The 36-year-old man hid the money in his underpants fear-ing pickpockets but forgot it was there when he went to the toi-let, where he flushed the stash away and onto the track.