To Rock or Not To Rock
2006-05-11, 9:55 p.m.

Dear God, I love Engrish.

Our town has a large Japanese population. Wonderful people, intelligent and polite and their cleanliness puts us to SHAME and they have the most adorable toddlers on the planet, hands down. They have one other thing that rocks, too:

Japanese yard sales.

Where else for a quarter can you buy a cartload of plastic Hello Kitty shrapnel, round-eye dolls with fluorescent pink hair, and six pairs of Gap jeans? But that�s not the best part. Oh no. The big score is the steady supply of apparel emblazoned with Engrish.

This morning I went to a Japanese yard sale 4 doors down, and were I a size 2, it would have been the Engrish nirvana, the Shangri-La of fractulated grammar. There was one shirt that I tried to squeeze into, not unlike Cinderella�s bitchy stepsisters and that godawful glass slipper, because of the priceless Engrish printed across the left boob:

::::::::::Hey Beavis, you said �Wild End�. Hehehe hehehehehe::::::::::

I�m going to have that embroidered on the back pocket of my jeans. I�m going to use it as my slogan for a whole line of designer lingerie.

I�m enjoying being 12 years old with a potty brain.

Try as I might, I couldn�t make it fit. I had to satisfy my Engrish fetish with a t-shirt for Son with �DASH CHEETAH: Winning Run Project� in silver across the front. Marathons? Nooooo. They are henceforth and forever Winning Run Projects.

But what do the Japanese have that does not rock? That does not rock in the most unrockingest way? That positively stinks on ice?

CANDY.

My daughter�s friend had a birthday party not long ago and there I tried the mother of Japanese confections, this squiggly semi-sweetened phosphorescent plasticine that retained the shape of the box from whence it squelched. I once left open my container of Slime and it dried to much the same. Probably was the identical flavor, although when I was 9 I was smart enough not to nosh on anything that could double as a shock absorber. Age 38, some of the ol� brain cells have evaporated. It jiggled at me, stared me down, and I took a bite. Yes, I am that stupid. I won�t be again. My nostrils flared, I produced copious amounts of saliva, my gag reflex went into hyperdrive, but I had to swallow the alien mutant tofu because I was standing in the kitchen with a group of parents I had just met and could not make any more of a visible fool of myself than I already was for tasting the damn stuff. Weatherstrip your car doors with it, insulate plumbing, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON�T EAT IT.

Ever wonder how they stay so slender in Japan? It�s that soylent green they call dessert. Ponder no more...
and bring a sack lunch.

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