Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | All Posts
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11:00 a.m. Here I sit in my rental car, mere yards from the water. I'm waiting for the Bainbridge Island Ferry in Seattle -- I missed the last one by just seconds and the next one leaves in an hour. Bainbridge Island is the place captured poetically in the book and movie, "Snow Falling on Cedars" (which means, come to think of it, that it snows in Seattle, at least sometimes).

Sometimes, you just gotta have comfort food -- you know, meat loaf, mac and cheese, a nice chicken fried steak. Real mashed potatoes, not the just-add-water kind. And when it comes to comfort food, you can't beat a great diner. So I welcomed my lunch date today at the Rocky Mountain Diner, even though it's a bit on the high-end side of diner cuisine.

I just heard one of the most gawdawful songs of the rock and roll era -- or any era, for that matter -- on CNN. I was working away, and the TV outside my office door started playing Joe Cocker's 1973 Top 40 hit, "You Are So Beautiful." The sound stopped me cold, and I got all shakey and felt like vomiting.

I never got the attraction of cigarette smokers who roll their own smokes. Looks like a pain in the butt to me -- har, I made a punny! But then, I never got the attraction of cigarette smoking anyway. But these days I'm into "rolling my own" when it comes to tea... green tea, that is.

I went shopping with my 17-year-old niece Joann, who’s a music fan with typical contemporary tastes. Except…. When we were shopping, she bought “Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Greatest Hits, “ a compilation of guitar-driven ‘70s rock that had been part of my generation’s high school and college years.

We're making great headway in the United States in getting public names changed when they are reflections of an older era when racially charged terms were considered acceptable, or at least, not controversial.

Thank you very much, Michelle Malkin. Thanks a bunch for writing your book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror." Thanks for trying to prove that not only was putting Japanese Americans into U.S. concentration camps during World War II the right thing to do, but also urging that the United States use racial profiling as a tool today, against Muslims.