Joe Bloggs

Tired of London?

Not not me, but maybe it's just the life here. Samuel Johnson lived in an age when the traffic moved faster than it does today, and, I suspect, when aggression was reserved for resolving disputes by means of duels on London commons. I was on a bus the other day when two people got on and it was clear from the very start that neither they, nor the driver, had any time to be nice to each other. The conversation (concering whether the bus was going where they wanted to go) started off where it finished - with both parties growling. On the same journey, a young couple were talking earnestly about putting a brick through somebody's window.

I'm getting soft in my age, but the ads on the tubes advertising some pick-me-up drink for fatigued people definitely resonate. People appear to be flat out all the time and the creaking London transport system doesn't help. (One site I visited claims 'If you add up the time lost in London's traffic chaos, it would be equivalent to seven people's entire working lives every day'.) Great place to visit and I want to live here again sometime in the future, but not now.

By the way, do a search on Google for 'Tired of London' and you certainly get an interesting bunch of links.

Vocabulary

It's great being back home and yet and not being able to speak the lingo - at least the local variation of it.

Me (on the phone to my sister): I'm at Finchley Park. I've just got off the little train and on to the big one heading for Wembley.

Translation: I'm at Finchley Road. I've just transferred from the Jubilee Line to the Metropolitan Line and heading for Wembley Park.

Fortunately, allowances are made for old hands that have lost it a bit.

Kill Bill

Run. Don't walk. You have to see this one. Very silly. Violent. Very funny. Cheap. Great fun. Lots of Japanese - some more dodgy than others. Spectacular fight scenes. No love interest. No holds barred. All in all, the best movie of the year. Bar none. In fact running might not get you there fast enough. Sprint.

Reverting to type

No net connection for a week, but I'm back now! It might only be sporadic, but it should be better than the service provided by London Transport on their Northern Line - a derailment two weeks ago and they don't expect things to return to normal until next March!.

Good to be back in London though, even if after a bright start yesterday, the weather reverted to type today. Pictures and words will follow when the energy banks are repleted.

Amsterdam 2 - Quiz grate

As regular Joe Bloggs readers know, I am a bit of a fan of public radio when abroad. Even if I could find the radio in this room though, it wouldn't do me much good. So the sleeping disorders brought about by 11 hours in a large aluminium can led me to switch on the idiot box. What can I say? There is nothing like a quiz program (or four) in a language one doesn't understand to prove how idiotic TV programming really is all around the world. There are so many of them and in so many languages. Even BBC World grates after a while. Early morning walks are in order.

Amsterdam 1 - Latitudes

It's very easy to forget that Kyoto is on a latitude below that of, say, sunny Madrid. Why? Well autumn is truly well advanced here in not-sunny Holland and the evenings much cooler. First impressions? Cold. Quaint. Harsh. Is it a northern European thing or do people look more weather-beaten in Amsterdam? I think the former. Taut faces and well covered bodies bent over in an attempt to protect themselves against the stinging breeze.

Next stop

In the port of Amsterdam
There's a sailor who sings
Of the dreams that he brings
From the wide open sea
In the port of Amsterdam
There's a sailor who sleeps
While the river bank weeps
To the old willow tree

Chocolate or Cash?

I asked the Bloggs boys what they wanted from Europe. "Chocolate", came the response. They're slipping. The last time I asked that question - sometime last year - the response was "Cash".

A fleeting shirt

As we were driving along a country road today I saw a man putting on his shirt. One arm was in the sleeve while the other sleeve billowed in the cool breeze that was the reason for him putting on the extra layer of clothing. His shoes and knapsack suggested he was a hiker and it had been a perfect day for a walk on the nearby trails. A typical autumn day of a warm sun and deep blue skies. The trees are just beginning to turn colour and nature really appears to be on her best behaviour. By now, though, the sinking sun was applying a dark and even shadow over the mountains and thoughts were turning to home. Seeing this man reminded me of another shirt and another man making his way home. It is one of my strongest memories from my trip on the Trans-Siberian railway some 21 years ago. It was also autumn then, though the Russian countryside was a little further advanced in its season and the trees had lost their verdancy with the leaves in varying shades of gold, red, yellow, crimson and orange. Our train was whizzing along, if not at the speeds I'm used to now certainly at a good rate, and Soviet trains ran on time in those days! As we passed a crossing I saw a man in a dark red shirt that was stained in what appeared to be coal dust waiting for our train to pass. His pickaxe also added credence to my hunch that he was a miner. Swarthy in build, hirsute in appearance with unkempt hair on a large head, this man seemed to represent the Soviet Russia I was travelling through. I have a picture (somewhere) of me in Red Square in Moscow and images in my head of the serene Lake Baikal and the wondrous colours of the trees around it, but it is the image of that worker in his red shirt with sleeves rolled up and axe in hand that has remained the most vivid. A man waiting patiently somewhere in the Soviet far east for a train to pass so that he could get home and eat supper. A supper, which if our meals on the train were anything to go by, would have been simple, not particularly nourishing but probably substantial. It was, by its very nature, a fleeting glimpse of a person I will never meet and can know nothing about, but it is, I think, out of those blurred images of our past that we build the pictures of our lives.

Northern Hemisphere Thang

"Britons think they are the only ones who talk about the weather, but it is a northern hemisphere thing."

So says a Danish born Olafur Eliasson who has an installation at the Tate Modern dealing with the weather. Mr. Eliasson is certainly correct when he dismisses the suggestion that the topic of weather is solely a British pastime, the Japanese are equal masters. I'm looking forward to checking this installation out the week after next.

Here's the Beeb article that prompted the entry.

Eat. Drink. Talk. Be Happy.

Eat Lots of Meat.
Drink lots of alcohol.
Talk lots too.
A happy time. A Gyu-Kaku time.

Gyu-Kaku (a literal translation might be 'beef squared') being the name of an excellent BBQ restaurant in the outskirts of Yokohama. Got to agree with the title of this entry!

(Click on the photo for slightly larger detail.)

Start of an Affair?

I did something today I've been meaning to do ever since I got my notebook computer with a DVD player, and that is watch one on the bullet train from Kyoto to Toyko. I wouldn't go as far as to say it was surreal, but it was getting there. We've all seen films on long-haul flights, but being in a darkened aluminium tube is not so different from sitting in a cinema. Here though (I'm writing this on the train) I have rural and urban Japan speeding past outside my window, and wartime London on my screen. I think it was the music of the melancholy love story I was watching that really fuddled my brain though. It seemed to match the melancholy mood of the inclement weather enveloping Japan today, but wartime London and peacetime Japan are two very different sets. That's where films have it over books. They both have the power to transport you to places, but flims do it quicker. As for The End of the Affair, it was passable. The main character is a writer and while at the cinema watching the dramatization of a book he wrote, he complains "I didn't write that". I wonder if Graham Greene would have said the same? They certainly didn't mention the line I remember best from the reading the book over 20 years ago about not wishing to have children for fear of passing on mediocrity. Or something like that. Still haunts me now.

Questions

A recent (English) guest asked me why the British have such a terrible reputation for food?

As I was drying the dishes, I also wondered why it is that the English don't thoroughly rinse their pots, pans and plates when doing the washing up?

Back to nature

Here's an example of a house being reclaimed by nature. The house was abandoned about 30 years ago (in a hurry by the looks of it - notice the bedding still in the cupboard in the photo top-right) and became a hazard to shintaku almost straight away. Without the attention and maintenance these houses require, the ground beneath it caved in and the ensuing landslide demolished one of the outhouses belonging to shintaku. You can see where the face of the mountain had to shored up with concrete. The concretization of Japan is something for a later entry, but in this case the council paid for the work to be done and the old stonework wall as visible on the right-hand side of the photo on bottom-right is no longer feasible financially.

As before, click on the photos for enlargements.

Shattering the peace

We've come up to Obaachan's (grandmama's) place deep in the countryside of western Japan. I'm afraid the Bloggs have rather shattered the tranquility Obaachan is used to. A small hamlet in the mountains of Okayama, this place is going the way of many other similar places all around Japan. The young are deserting to the city or nearby towns and when the current resident generation (septuagenarians and older) pass away, the houses are abandoned and hamlets likely to be reclaimed by nature. Obaachan (77) spends her time looking after her various vegetable patches up and down the mountain and that small activity keeps her remarkably alert and healthy. An occasional visit from grandchildren also helps - or at least that's how we justify our noisy presence. The photos show Obaachan's 250-year-old house (where Mrs. Bloggs was born) on the left and the old school house further up the mountain. Obaachan's house is known locally as shintaku (the new house), because the original family house (honké) is even older. (Being squeezed on to a narrow ledge on the mountain, it is difficult to get a good picture of it.) The school house was abandoned 45 years ago from when the children in the hamlet started to go to school in a nearby town.

Click on the photos to get enlargements.

Three things

There are three things I am looking forward to at the end of this month. Having the best lasagne in the world, seeing some Renaissance art and architecture, and then something more modern.

Pynchon the Simpsons

All the Bloggs became great fans of The Simpsons this summer in Australia. Although we aren't in a totally Simpsons-free zone here in Japan, we're as good as. It is only availabe on cable here. We won't get to see the new season of shows (the 14th) until it comes out on DVD, which if previous releases are anything to go by will be in about 10 years from now, but if you are lucky enough to get to see it, you'll be able to hear JK Rowling, Tony Blair and Sir Ian McKellen playing themselves. Furthermore, and this is the real coup for the producers, you'll even hear the voice of Thomas Pynchon - one of America's most reclusive authors. Read more about the 14th season here and here's a Pynchon Portal if you're interested in the author of Gravity's Rainbow - a book, I'm ashamed to say, that has been left unread on my bookshelf for well over a decade.

Original Simpsons story via: Boing Boing

Slow Beeb site?

Am I the only one experiencing a slight slow-down on the BBC News website? I don't think it is my connection as I'm getting my usual speeds on the Guardian, New York Times, Economist, New Scientist etc., sites, but the Beeb has definitely slowed down here this past 24 hours or so.

Diligence delinquents

Following a couple of links from one blog to another (as one does) I came across these interesting statistics:

Weblogs updated less than once every two months: 66%

26% percent of weblogs created are never used more than once.

Wow! It seems diligence is not one of the qualities your average blogger has in his/her possession. I know I haven't been at this for long, but I'm off to give myself a pat on the back. ;+)

Teru Teru Bozu

Mrs Bloggs got very angry with the flippant attitude of the youngest Blogg today and his failure to put away his GameCube resulted in his controller being thrown out the door. Now, the youngest Blogg is scared of the dark and didn't have the nerve to go out and pick it up. We told him he'd better wish it didn't rain tonight. So, what do Japanese children do when they want the rain to stay away? Make a Teru Teru Bozu of course. These weather dolls are usually hung from the eaves of a house, but the best the little boy could do here was hang it on some clothes pegs.

Todaiji

First impressions last the longest and are the most difficult to erase. I first visited Nara in the summer of 1983 and the oppressive heat scarred me permanently and my memories are of a dry and sterile landscape. A great shame that, because the city of Nara ought to be commended for its considerably efforts in maintaining a city of character and Kyoto administrators could learn a lesson or two (or three hundred) in how to preserve culture without sacrificing modernity. The secret? Issue preservation certificates and uphold them. The dodgy picture above (click on it for slightly better detail) is of Todaiji, which is the largest wooden structure in the world and houses a giant Buddha.

Kinkakuji

OK, so I haven't been for a while and my judgement might be clouded, but if you blink you could almost convince yourself this was pretty. Built originally in 1398, it was burned to cinders by a stuttering monk in 1950, who hated himself and his speech impediment so much that he felt compelled to destroy anything beautiful. Yukio Mishima's book Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) is an excellent literary dramatization of the true story of the monk and the ill-fated temple. Today the tourists throng and the owners no doubt laugh all the way to the bank.

Click on the photo just for a little more detail.

The Beeb is coming your way

The BBC wants to put its huge back catalogue on the Internet. It's going to take time and lots of legal hurdles will need to be surmounted, but the BBC has a mandate under its charter to make all its programmes available to as many people as possible. The charter is up for renewal in 2006, so it is unlikely anything will happen until then, but surely it is only a matter of time before the biggest visual and sound library in the world is available at the push of a button. Come on down!

Tsukubai at Ryoanji

In front of Zorokuan tea house in Ryoanji Temple, there is a famous stone water basin. This is for rinsing one's hands and mouth before entering the tea room. It is called "Tsukubai", which translates literally as "crouch," from the fact that one must crouch down to use it. Look closely at the water basin (click on the photo for an enlargement), it has a very unique description. There are four characters chiseled around its side.

This inscription translates as "I learn only to be contented" or "I just know satisfaction" or "The knowledge that is given is sufficient". The concept is of utmost importance in Zen philosophy. In Zen, learning and knowledge do not need to be for practical use as skills - knowledge for its own sake is sufficient unto itself. It also means that someone who learns to be contented is rich in spirit and character, whereas someone who may be materially wealthy is spiritually poor if they do not learn contentment. To be content is to be generous, and to be free from greed. Water trickles into the basin and if you are lucky enough to visit on a quiet day you will be able to hear the peaceful sound of water flowing in various locations within the grounds.

Taken in its entirety from this informative page.

What would you find if ...

... you turned a city upside down? In Life of Pi our young hero and tiger trainer extraordinaire, Piscine Molitor Patel, (gotta hand it to that boy's father!) says, "If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers". We all know he is right. Of course, in New York you don't even have to bother to turn the place upside down. In what a policeman in the city termed "an only-in-New-York story", we give you a house in Harlem that Pi Patel would have been comfortable in.

Jolted

We had an M4.5 earthquake at 00:29 hours this morning (last night). The linked page is all in Japanese, but X marks the spot of the epicenter in Gifu Prefecture (we're just to the left of the lake on the map shown in the Gifu link).

What differentiated this from other quakes we've felt recently was that it wasn't so much a shake as a heavy jolt. Also, there was no warning. Usually, and I remember this distinctly from the big 'un in 1995, there is a rattle before the actual quake hits. To me it always sounds like a rat scurrying along a rut. It doesn't matter how deep the sleep, if you feel the shake, you usually hear the rattle beforehand. This time it was a just a jolt out of the blue and although it didn't last long - just a few seconds - it was quite a strong one. Strong enough to elicit a "whoa" from me at half past midnight.

Rice by the lake

How much rice does the average 2+2 family eat a year? As rice really is a daily staple, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that we get through about 4 x 30kg bags. I went off to the neighbouring prefecture (county/state) to pick up our four bags from a friend whose father is a farmer. I can report that, due to the bad weather this rice growing season, the price has gone up this year. The picture above (click for an enlargement) is of Lake Biwa and the torii gate of Shirahige Jinja - a shrine (which is onshore) dedicated to the protection of boats on the lake. I passed it on the way to my friend's house. The lake, the biggest in Japan, has some truly expansive views and I believe is Japan's biggest tourist attraction. You can see a different sky every time you pass that mass of water and although my photo doesn't do it justice, there are times when the beauty of the place is overwhelming.

Scabby sheep shunted sideways

Having spent a part of the summer in the antipodes I still keep a look out on the news in that part of the world. One story that I only seem to read about in the Australian press is the rather depressing story of the 50,000 sheep stranded on board a transport ship and currently docked in Kuwait. Having been rejected by the Saudis way back on 20 August, after the latter claimed that 6% of sheep had scabby mouth disease (a point disputed by the Australians), the sheep, and indeed the ship, have been pushed from pillar to port (sic). Some 20 countries have refused to take the sheep - one presumes they were offered them for free - and now there is a serious possiblity that they will come back to Australia which some experts believe could be the biggest quarantine threat to Australia in 200 years. Australia's former chief veterinary officer says:

"To have those sheep come back into an Australian point-port is absolutely dicing with death, because as soon as they get into a port, they're likely to be attacked by Australian insects which would then have the chance of transmitting really serious diseases to Australian livestock."

I'm not really an animal lover (too scared by half), but the treatment of these sheep is reaching scandalous proportions and I'm surprised the subject hasn't received greater coverage in the world media.

Smile

Desire for material goods is "a happiness suppressant". This observation has obviously not filtered through to the Nigerian scammers that plague the average Internet user's email inbox, for it seems the Nigerians are the happiest people in the world; followed by the citizens of Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. Perhaps not the first five countries that would have sprung to mind, but the fact that eastern European countries occupy the bottom three places i.e. the least happy countries, is perhaps not so surprising. How do you stay happy? Well you're best chances are if you are genetically designed that way, have a good marriage with good friends and if you generally desire less. All pretty obvious really. So how happy are you?

Fourteen to the dozen

Just how fast can you talk? The answer is 'a lot faster than you think'. Apparently, speech rate isn't limited by the listener, but rather by the speaker. From an article in the New York Times:

"In normal conversation, only a small part of the brain is taxed, leaving excess processing power to be used for listening for lurking predators, filtering out background noise or simply daydreaming."

So what? Well, digitally speeded up audio would allow you to listen to radio, audio books and newspapers a lot faster, leaving you more time to listen to more or get on with other things. Digitally altered speech doesn't have the 'chipmunk' speed we all associate with fast speaking and is much easier to comprehend than humans just speaking faster. This is also one instance where having a British accent actually helps. A blind person whose interface with computers is audio-based, in the form of a synthesized voice that reads text aloud, says he prefers British English to American:

"When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650 words per minute. With the more clipped British speech, I can increase the rate even faster".

via: techdirt

Trains and trains and trains

The Japanese are the natural successors to George Stephenson. I know that a lot has happened in the world of railways since The Rocket first operated in 1831, but in the modern era there just isn't another country that puts so much emphasis and invests as heavily on its railroads. Today Japan Railways opened a new bullet train station at Shinagawa in Tokyo and it was headline news. Literally. The government is in trouble, the yen is getting stronger and an important new truck emissions law came into effect in the Tokyo region today, but NHK (the national broadcaster) led with the new station. It took six and a half years and 95 billion yen (about US$850 million) to build the place, and it will accomodate 70,000 passengers per day. Like the trains themselves, you can guarantee the station will run efficiently, but at that cost it better had!

We want a reprint

I've been trying to get hold of a number of copies of Patrick White's The Aunt's Story and even though amazon.co.uk says it is "usually dispatched within 1 to 2 working days", I have information that there is not a single copy of the book at any branch of Waterstone's (who are in league with Amazon) in the UK and that the current status of the book is "reprinting under consideration". Now, Patrick White is a Nobel Laureate and not some fly-by-night author. He's worthy of having his books kept in circulation. Wouldn't you like to see how much it takes to get a publisher to reprint a book. They do listen sometimes. If you are interested you could do one of the following:

1. Email Penguin Customer Services in the UK.

2. Call in at your local bookshop and ask them to make an enquiry for you.

3. If you work at a university, get the library or bookshop to make an enquiry.

4. Make an enquiry via your favourite on-line bookseller.

5. If you have a website or frequent forums or blogs, mention it on there and encourage others to do the above.

Give it a go. :+)