crime – Page 14 – Pain In The Bud

Roppongi Hills: Tokyo From Above

See Tokyo from the sixth-tallest building in the city, Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills.

Tonight we visited the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, a skyscraper with great views of the surrounding city.

The building is less than a five-minute walk from my brother’s apartment, and at 54 stories and 781 feet it’s the sixth-tallest building in Tokyo.

E51578DF-085A-4192-A631-0A0C4E97F74B — The neon blue floors of the foreground building are hotel suites with one hell of a view of the city.

Mori Tower has a 54th floor “Sky Deck” which was closed this evening due to the weather, so the observation deck on the 52nd floor was our only choice.

It doesn’t really matter — the view is spectacular and the observation deck features a 360-degree view of the city through floor-to ceiling windows. It’s even got signs pointing out the neighborhoods you’re looking at from each angle, and a section where you can pull up a chair, have a cup of tea and look over the city.

Even from this height Tokyo extends to the horizon in every direction save for the waterfront near Haneda, an endless sprawl of shops, homes, office buildings, izakayas, plazas and parks.

All photos by Big Buddy using a Canon T3. Click on the photos for higher-resolution versions. Trust me, it’s worth it. 🙂

82CD8DB6-3D4A-48C7-BCAB-9FFA1A1AAA27 — A view from Mori Tower’s observation deck. Shibuya is the bright spot to the right.

Tokyo at Night — From Roppongi, Tokyo looks like an endless sprawl disappearing into the horizon.

The CIA Thought It Could Control Cats. lol.

The CIA should have realized cats are indifferent to the petty squabbles of their lessers.

No one tells a cat where it can and cannot go.

Some nameless CIA agent came to that obvious conclusion while surveilling a Russian compound one afternoon in the mid-1960s. The site was so well-secured and heavily-guarded that Soviet officials felt comfortable discussing business in the open air, where American spies could see them from a distance but, critically, couldn’t hear what they were saying.

The Russians weren’t leaving anything to chance: No one could slip through the perimeter without them knowing about it, making infiltration impossible.

Except, the CIA officer realized, for cats. Human trespassers would be shot on sight. Any deliveries or strange pieces of equipment would become the immediate subject of suspicion. But not even grizzled KGB veterans would dream of trying to stop cats from chasing rodents or finding a sunny spot to nap.

‘No one tells a cat where it can and cannot go!’ the CIA officer thought in a flash of inspiration, envisioning the wealth of intelligence that could be gathered with a small army of felines trained in spycraft and equipped with tiny microphones hidden in their free-swiveling ears.

Two years and $20 million later the CIA abandoned Project Acoustic Kitty after realizing cats make lousy spies for precisely the same reason guards don’t try to stop them from entering secure compounds: No one tells a cat where it can and cannot go.

“Our final examination of trained cats [REDACTED] for use in the [REDACTED] convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical way to our highly specialized needs,” a recently-declassified CIA memorandum notes.

To put it in simple terms, CIA agents couldn’t get the cats to stay near their marks. The cats would get distracted or hungry or bored, which all resulted in the same thing: Wandering off and leaving the Americans with only fragments of conversations.

Imagine it: “Yes, Yuri, we have finalized the details for our strike against American interests in” (drowned out by loud MEOW) “which we will launch when…” followed by the cat taking off after seeing a bird.

The CIA should have realized cats are indifferent to the petty squabbles of their lessers, even if those petty squabbles bring humanity to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Mutually assured destruction may be a grim doctrine for students regularly participating in air raid drills or families investing in personal bomb shelters, but to cats it’s merely the regrettable loss of a species that faithfully served them for 10,000 years.

If humans nuke each other into oblivion there will still be plenty of rodents to eat, and a surviving primate species — perhaps bonobos or rhesus macaques — could serve as a suitable replacement in servitude to felines.

As for Project Acoustic Kitty, how much of that $20 million was spent on treats used as rewards for getting the cats to participate in training?

The CIA thought it was using cats. As usual, it was the other way around.

Dear Buddy : How Do I Push Kitty Crack On High-Class Felines?

Never, ever deal to Siamese. They never shut up, and before you know it they’re blabbing your name to everyone.

Dear Buddy,

Catnip is incredibly lucrative, and in one year my new operation has expanded to a 20-cat organization slinging six pounds of the green gold per week to kitties in my neighborhood. I control all the colonies and clowders, and I have connections into the shelter system who deal exclusively to cats on the inside.

Now I’m looking to expand, but I don’t know where to go. As an OG niplord who practically invented the game, what do you think?

Respect,

Niplord in New York

Dear Niplord in New York,

I’m glad the youngins know my name and know of the path I blazed slingin’ that funky feline product. My empire was vast, I ate only the finest turkey and my human was none the wiser.

Now, to the matter at paw: You need to find a way into the suburbs. That’s where the real money is, dealing high-grade nip to high-class cats like those Persians, Abyssinians, Russian Blues and Turkish Angoras.

Do not, no matter how much money you think is on the table, ever deal to Siamese. They never shut up, and before you know it they’re blabbing your name to everyone, until officers from animal control are on your tail. Don’t sling to the Siamese!

The best way to get an in to the suburbs is to attend fancy feline soirees, the kind where those dainty Burmillas mix with the Angoras and pâté is served on silver plates, not in bowls.

Notice something about that group? Yep. They’re all white, which means you can jack up the prices and Five-Oh mostly leaves their neighborhoods alone. In the white neighborhoods, the kitty crack is sold in extravagant houses, not street corners.

But remember, you can’t show up at one of those lavish dinner parties talking street, son. Work on an appropriate accent, and give yourself a credible backstory so your new clientele believe you come from meowney. During my day I spoke with a convincing British accent, and told cats I was a British shorthair. They joke’s on them, ’cause they got played by a “common” American domestic shorthair. Fools.

Just remember to play it cool and never sample your own product.

Buddy out.

Fat Tony, RIP, controlled vast amounts of territory in Queens and Brooklyn before he was taken out in a hit by Los Gatos. The nip trade is lucrative, but it’s also dangerous.