Uh oh. You woke up the >Censored<.

"Last week there was a small meeting at Mozilla to discuss SOPA, the Internet Censorship Bill.

It was eerie.  The DC groups were practically screaming, "this bill is the worst we've ever seen and we can't stop it" -- while everyone else had barely heard of it.  The consensus?  We needed to wake people up.

Well, yesterday the Internet woke up.  *You* woke the internet up.

Check out these numbers and screenshots.

To everyone who wrote their rep, made calls, posted to Twitter and Facebooks -- and especially to everyone who ran the modal and blacked out their logos, you are courageous and you made history yesterday.  You just took the first step to combine the web's largest sites, its strongest communities, its staunchest defenders and billions of users into and unbeatable force for stopping censorship.

The scary part?  We still might lose.   Though growing fast, our coalition still isn't strong enough.

The bill is backed by an unholy alliance of Hollywood, its unions, drug companies, and the Chamber of Commerce.  They are pouring money into it, and they've been working on this for years.   Yesterday, big players like Tumblr, Mozilla, Reddit, BoingBoing, and even 4chan came out strong on our side.  Now it's your turn.  We've got to dig in and go viral.

Can you add a "Stop Censorship" message to your blog, Tumblr, Facebook, or Youtube pages?  Click here for the code.

If you ran "Stop Censorship" or the "Contact Congress" splash on your page yesterday, we humbly ask you to keep it running until this bill is dead, and to find more people who can.  We understand if you can't, but the bill is just as bad as it was yesterday -- so we've got to ask.

Click here to get the code to add to your page.  It's easy.

Yesterday was amazing.  There will be more, we promise."

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. 

                         --Robert M. Hutchins 

Cat Sandwich

This is my sister's demon spawned cat Cheetoh. He pretends to be the undead and rattles my bedroom door at ungodly hours in an attempt to break into my room and steal my space heater. He also pukes all over the house and blames it on Hazel.

Fluffy creamy fruity cakey amazingness.

Chocolate goo.

Orange crème brûlée tart thing.

Goooooooooo.

Chocolate.

Cafe latte and cake goodness. When ordering a cafe latte in Japanese it's pronounced, "Cafe ra-te". L's and R's are interchangeable here apparently.

Spring water? I'm hoping this design spreads to US water fountains. 

Wandering around town on during a festival.

Hand washing area. Not to be confused with drinking water.

Korean BBQ in town. Soooooooo good!

This is my cat Hazel. She is the most cross-eyed "best lap-cat of the year" award winner of the past decade. She likes to pee in my sister's closet. 

Let's Partyi

I stumbled across an awesome Thai place in downtown Osaka today called Mai-Thai. Unfortunately I can't connect to their website, but pertinent info is above if you want to visit the same restaurant.

Initially I was a little worried about the place. It looked nice enough.

Their food pictures seemed tasty.

 But the question mark plate through me off, and when I arrived there was only one other person in the restaurant.

I ordered the pad thai, mostly out of fear, but was pleasantly surprised. The waitress was very nice, and the chef greeted me on my way into the restaurant and as I left. Lunch included soup and drink costing only 818¥. While I was there the restaurant started filling up and a crew of office workers livened the place up.

Around the corner from Mai-Thai is a department store called Parco.

A store inside called Thank You Mart 390 sells discounted: t-shirts, iphone covers, stickers, lens-less glasses, key chains, croc shoes, croc belts, dresses, mini-skirts, and assorted toys with random English phrases on them. :)

When  I stepped off the plane in Kansai the first thing I thought of was how natural Arkansas is.

Forget the trees. 

This dog should know better than to ask for a home when it already has an uber comfy looking coffee can to live in. 

 ???

The Japanese are Republicans? 

Really? 

Uh huh. Well alright then.

My last big splurge of the day was on a taiyaki snack. Most traditional taiyaki are made with pancake batter and filled with adzuki, red bean, paste. I found white taiyaki, so named because it's made with tapioca flour instead of pancake batter, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The one I got was custard filled, and the batter tasted like a cross between a crepe and mochi. 

YUM!