Trends in the States
been putting this post off for awhile, so here goes. One thing that I wanted to see when I went away to Japan was what kind of trends would develop when I wasn't there. And while I'm still not all back in the swing of things, I have noticed a few pretty big trends (or fads, as they may be) pop up while I was gone.

The first thing that I saw was the Carb Craze has gone all out. Seriously, every other commercial on adult TV is some sort of low-carb something. There's even low-carb milk for some reason. The other thing that I saw is the rapid rise of the popularity of poker. It's on ESPN for crying out loud- I generally turn the channel when I see it on, but somebody's got to be watching it. A thing that I noticed was that both of these were around before I left and were still pretty popular- people had been doing the Atkins thing for at least a couple of months and there's always some guys up for Poker somewhere. But somehow they both reached a sort of critical mass while I was gone, and are truly mainstream. There might be an interesting study on US Society in there somewhere. Or not. I'm not getting into these, taking a wait-and-see on the carb thing (still got an iffy feeling about it), and staying away from poker- I always lose money. I'm just too nice of a guy for that game I think. Don't quite have the killer poker instinct. Dodgeball on the other hand...

The other thing that I saw pop up was this "Orange County Choppers" thing. This was completely new to me, but then I hadn't had cable for quite a while even before I left. It's the name of the company in the show "American Choppers" on one of the "learning" channels, where they make bikes. I saw it once, and I gotta say I was impressed. There's some real creativity and technique in the bikes, and the people on the show are certainly intersting enough. So I give this trend some credit, even though I can't sit through hour long TV shows for some reason without getting bored (but watching a 3-hr long movie is no problem).