I'm comfy. Finally!

It seems that I am comfortable now. We just got back from this “fashion store” (think Value Village, except everything is new or close to it) called Shimamura. Rachel has a new futon, so that's 4 total for us – the brown one that came with the room, the brown one we got from Jesse (tallish vegan New Zealand dude, works with Rachel) in exchange for the air mattress, the white-and-flowery one we got from Lacey+Kyle (neighbors on the first floor), and the new green one. Also picked up another comforter, because it's been kinda cold around here for a couple of days, and a couple of food-based pillows. And for me? Sweat pants and actual pajamas, the kind that look like something you'd get in a 3-star hotel. Oh, and because I spend so much time sitting in front of the computer, on a low table you sit cross-legged at, I got a “seat”. It's comfy, it's finally comfy to sit here.

Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).

I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.

Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)

Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.

And that's about it. G'night.

Woot. Employment.

Well well, what have we here? An actual post? Oooh, golly gumdrops and rainbow razzmatazz. Hm. I should just start saying that, in monotone. I think I'm good at it. Or maybe not.

Anyway. Postpostpostpost... I got the job, the English teacher one. (The bookstore one went well, but when the manager ran it by their head office I got rejected. Oh well.) Paid training starts on the 6th, in Okayama – it's four hours away by regular trains, so they'll be paying for a hotel room. The train fare to Hiroshima might also be cheaper than I originally thought, as a) the trains don't all run to Yoshidaguchi Station (one of those little backyard stations) so it'd be easier to take it from Mukaihara Station (a bit more like what you'd expect a station to look like), and b) I found out during the interview that they would pay out an extra 100 yen per hour to cover commuting costs. 1640 yen round-trip makes more sense, barely. I hope everything works out with it. I still have to get my hair cut for it – that he asked me if I was willing to do so during the interview was a good sign. Also, I have to get a Hiroshima Bank account if I want to get paid, which I need to do soon.

Rachel and I finally went down to Hiroshima together Sunday. I bought 6 booster packs of Metal Hero cards, a set of little 350 yen rubber robots, Kamen Rider Spirits #14, assorted foodstuffs and dinner. Total cost: around 5000 yen. Worth it. Part of my mission was to go and finally have a MOS Burger, something I'd had before on vacation here 10, 15 years ago. It was good. Really good. Worth whatever I paid for it. Then there was the strawberry milkshake at McDonald's – that took me back and erased any homesickness I had (none, actually, so even a bag of miso might do the trick). Dinner, because we stayed later than I expected, was a katsudon with soba noodles (breaded chicken + egg over rice, wheat noodles). It was okay but the taste was missing something – I've never had such a lightly-flavored don before. I got a bottle of Coke with it, which turned out to be an actual bottle with a little cup you might otherwise use to sip an alcoholic beverage from (they wouldn't let me take the bottle home, something about it costing 30 yen extra). It was okay overall.

Of all the things I miss from home, the one thing I can't find no matter where I go is hot dogs, eight in a bag. Sure, the little bakery in the local super sells hot dogs in a wrap with onion sauce/powder, and it's not bad, but it's really not the same. Also, McDonald's. Didn't really think I'd be craving it, but it was the first thing I did when I got to Hiroshima for the interview. They taste exactly the same, by the way. And while I couldn't find what they call a quarter pounder with cheese here, they have Big Macs.

While the free unprotected wi-fi is active, we have to cram around the open balcony door to use it. Our best guess is, it's a neighbor living in the immediate southern building (in this little complex, it's our building and two smaller, 4-room buildings, with our building at the north end). So, we're trying to negotiate with Yahoo BB/SoftBank/AT&T for internets, but they want to come in on the first day of my training. Or wanted to, since they called and we rescheduled, but the letter they sent wasn't updated. Not sure what's going to happen, since they haven't returned my call yet. We have time, I think.

Oh, and I finally found the first and second OSTs to Xabungle. “Walker Gallier” is such a cool song, but there's this weird timpani thing in the right speaker for part of it – nothing wrong with that, since they never actually used it for Walker Gallier itself.

I'm still unemployed, for the moment

(Quick note: I wrote this during a dull moment last weekend, and I'll have more up soon.)

Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.

This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.

But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...

The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.

There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.

The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?

(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)

I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.

I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.

Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).

More soon.

I'm still unemployed

Our unauthorized use of a password-free WiFi connection has either been discovered... or someone unplugged the router. Seeing as how it takes no time or effort to set up a password, I'm going to guess the latter there. But yeah. Not much has happened in the last couple of days. Did a lot of shopping yesterday, blew through 5000 yen or so, but the apartment is much more livable now. Finished putting together the SD V2 Assualt Buster Gundam this morning – fully combined, it's a good sized hunk of plastic that can't move its limbs. But the head has this cool setup where the targeting eyepatch will actually slide down over the left eye (the Mega Beam Cannon is mounted on the right shoulder blade). It's a brick, no posing and not much fun other than as a decoration. Still, at 100 yen, it's a pretty good deal for a brick.

Today, though, I went ahead and did a little shopping for myself. There's a complex of three stores nearby – one's a bookstore/video rental, the smallest goods-wise is a toy store, and there's the used book/game/music store. The bookstore/video rental had the newest Kamen Rider Spirits and enough of the pre-2000 stuff to keep me happy for a year or two. The toy store was a slight letdown, but what I was expecting in this town's economy (more on this below). The used fun store (my new name for it, and yes, it does have porn) has stacks and stacks of old manga, with some games and cds, all priced to own. I limited myself and only got the first Akazukin Cha-Cha (it's a pun – 'Akazukin-chan' is the Japanese version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', Cha-Cha is fittingly friendly with a werewolf), and the Dreamcast game 'Sunrise Eiyuu-tan' (which reminds me – Takashi: keep the Dreamcast in working order, or just make sure it works. If you're reading this, run upstairs, hook it up, and make sure it runs. Also: if you have any games or manga – I couldn't find the last Shaman King, sorry – you'd like, that's a little old, let me know). It's good stuff. I'm going to be a regular customer.

Which brings me to the local economy. I've heard rumors that Akitakata City is close to bankrupt, and I'm beginning to believe it – every fourth storefront or so is empty, and even though it's summer vacation, just about every major-ish store has a 'now hiring' sign in it. I see many oldsters, mothers, and children when I walk about, but I might just be looking at the wrong places. My perception of Yoshida town (Akitakata city is split into a bunch of towns, which is reflected in my over-engineered address) changes from day to day – until this afternoon, I didn't know exactly where the nearest police station was, and it's a decent sized building – but overall each passing day worries me. Still, this might be normal for the sort of population center we're in, which keeps me getting up every day.

I learned what I need to do to set up a bank account (fun fact: the post offices here also double as banks), and what it takes to cash some traveller's checks. Also, my written '5' looks like a big squiggly-wiggly line and my (Irish?) last name is unpronounceable here. And after all that, I spent an hour wandering the supermarket, waiting for bento to go on sale. As it was, I didn't wait long enough. Dinner ended up being a small pile of onigiri and kappa-maki (sushi: cucumbers in rice rolled in seaweed – the first vegan dish anyone every thinks of at a sushi joint. Seriously). There's no V8 over here, and nothing to replace it. The name stands for 'Vegetable 8', and most of the veggie drinks I've been able to find go well over that number of individual vegetables – and fruits. Who puts LEMON in a vegetable drink, anyway? Milk over here is universally not non-fat, and while it tastes like really heavy cream sometimes, it's a bit much after a carton or two. So finding that the non-fat stuff (and there's only been two brands so far) is cheaper has been a very pleasant surprise. And cause for paranoia. Think about it.

Since I was out yesterday, I poked around for an air mattress for one of Rachel's coworkers. I finally found one in a furniture store nearby. It's some measure of the country when stores that sell tents don't sell inflatable mattresses.

Time for bed.

A table makes it 'home'

Today, among other things, we took a trip to a little town-within-a-town called 'Miyoshi' (for which the kanji actually looks like 'Mitsugi' – 'three-next') to buy stuff at their 'recycle shop' (essentially a thrift store, geddit?). We walked out with a SD V2 (Assault Buster) Gundam and Front Mission Gunhazard guide book for me, and assorted kimono stuff (but not the actual kimono) for Rachel. In addition, 4100 yen more got us a little table – the kind you sit on the floor for – and another 3 box bookshelf. Pretty good split, but the bookshelf only cost 100 – it's a bit emblematic of Japanese consumerism, as it's still very useful, but it's dinged up to hell and back. Dinner was a couple of Bento boxes, half off for being left at the end of the day – we ate heartily for 450 yen – bought from what the ALT living in the town called 'the elephant store' for its logo (the actual name is a bit more complicated, enough that I can't remember it). The apartment is starting to look like home.

I forgot to mention that we've been buying food since day 2, and it's almost uniformly more expensive than in the states. The fruit especially, to Rachel's consternation, comes to just about double what we've been getting it for. Except we lucked out yesterday evening, and a bunch of fruit was on sale – actually sitting in a sale pile. The thing about buying fruit here, is that they are put out based on appearance, regardless of taste. Hence, melons that go for 2980, peach-colored apples bigger than my fist going for 300 each, and fairly large grapes going for 2800 a bunch (of 20) or so. And then we come back the next day, and pick up an apple (same huge herkin' apple)/mango combo for 150. They were slightly imperfect, but were probably bumped out more due to their sell date. (That apple, by the way,

The only peanut butter we've found so far (and in all honesty we haven't looked hard) is a 200 ml container of Jiffy or something, at a place called 'YouMe' (pron. 'yume', like 'dream' – these names only get better). Instead, I bought something called 'peanut cream' (there's also 'peanut whip', with Snoopy on the container), which tastes almost exactly like the peanut butter in Reese's Pieces. It's actually not bad, but this is the first time I'll be using jam to counteract the peanut butter, when it's usually the other way around.

Rachel got her company car yesterday, and only really drove it today, to the recycle shop. It's an itty-bitty white Daihatsu, and while the pedals are on the same side (you push them with your right foot) the turn signal and windshield wiper levers are not. It has an AC at least, and a radio, but nothing else. The front seat foot space is actually pretty good; the back seats, not so much, but they fold down and gave us enough space for the table. Driving in Japan... Sigh. Maybe it's because I'm a Seattleite, but everyone here – including Rachel, once she got used to it – seems to drive like it's a street race. I'm given to understand that it's a Hiroshima thing, rather than a Japan thing, but it defeats the purpose of the one traffic camera we saw coming back from Miyoshi. We were going at least 20 kmh over the speed limit on parts of the return trip, on highway ('state-road') 54. Every car behind us kept up, and we never really caught up with anyone except at the occasional lights. And, of course, it really takes some time to get used to the fact that you hug the left wall when making a turn.

Still got more to say, just don't have the time to write it tonight.

Madness? THIS IS JAPAN! *kick*

So here's what happened: between the time that I left my family home in Lynnwood early Tuesday morning, and when we rolled into the Akitakata City apartment, we were unable to find an internet connection, wireless or otherwise, due either to time or money restraints. So I typed stuff up in OpenOffice from time to time, and here it all is. You can tell how awake I was by how I write, I think.

(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.

But...

Because the first JAL flight to Narita (the main international airport) was delayed, we missed our connecting flight to Nagoya by 10 or 15 minutes, and now we're stuck with a later flight. The staff were otherwise very accommodating and got everything taken care of for us. Originally, Rachel's company over here (ALTIA) was supposed to pick us up at Nagoya, but she got into contact with them and it's all been sorted out. Someone's going to get some overtime this week, and I wish it was me. It's 5:38 PM as I type this, which means that it's 1:38 AM in Seattle, which then means that since I've been awake since 2:30 or so... Yeah, 24-hour day. I've offset it with a few hours of sleep in the to-Japan flight, but I'm exhausted.

Kung-fu Panda is better than I thought it would be. It's a Jack Black vehicle, so there's a lot of Jack Black beating, something he excels at (see Tropic Thunder, for example – I don't think there's another actor who can replace him in that role, for what it calls for, and for that he's a little underrated). I liked that Po the Panda isn't a terribly good martial artist, but wins the final battle by mostly not fighting the bad guy directly – he has to play keep-away, which he turns out to be very good at. That, and the idea that the other anthro artists have very specific styles that are ineffective in the end – Po's style relies heavily on his bulky, durable physique rather than pure speed or strength, which throws everyone off. The animation is good and fluid.

Iron Man is still as cool as I remember it. The pounding music especially. And that scene where he slaps a dude into a second story wall? Priceless.

(8/22 Thur, 6 AM) And now I'm in the hotel in Nagoya. Happily, I didn't have to hork out the airplane food. After getting off the delayed flight, I discovered that they stamped my passport with a freakin' DEPARTURE stamp at Narita, which lead to a 10 minute delay at Customs. We ended up at the Kinyama Plaza Hotel at 9 PM last night, and fell into bed. Now that I've had time to look around the tiny business-style room...

The bathroom is the most striking – it's a self-contained tiny fiberglass room about two inches off the room floor (to make space for the floor drain?) with a high door jam. The sink faucet doubles as the bath/shower faucet (meaning that, if you try to wash your hands with hot water, you instead get OMG HOT! water), and the toilet is typically Japanese, with two separate flush amounts, heated seat, 'shower' and bidet. (The bath/shower is deep enough for me to sit, knees on chest, up to my chin in water, and the shower is detachable.)

The room has an AC the size of a card table in the ceiling – thankfully, as the temp is routinely 90 F around here during the summer – and a thermos of ice water. I've got pictures (fun fact: the gap in the toilet is just big enough to accidentally drop a hotel toothbrush down). The TV gets one free News channel and four pay-with-a-dispensed-card channels. There's a tiny fridge about the size of a computer monitor, and our beds each came with a yukata. As far as I can tell, there's no internet – we

Rachel received a phone as part of her job. The menus are less intuitive than you'd think, even in English.

(8/21 Thur 7:30 AM) We went out for breakfast at a Circle K 'Konbini' (shortened from 'convenience'). Japan takes its Convenience stores seriously, by the way: they sell video games and battery powered shavers, but most importantly, food. We got a small pile of onigiri (rice balls containing something like salmon or such, wrapped in nori, seaweed) and a couple of sandwiches; cucumber + ham + a little 'onion salad' = delicious. The onigiri were 105 yen a pop, the sandwiches were 250 yen, and Rachel's 500 ml of orange juice (paper container) came to 116 yen – breakfast cost us 1300 yen (plus more for the shaver). Not bad, I think that's about $12.

Japanese addresses are FUN. That Circle K is located at “Aichi Prefecture, Nagoya City, Central District, Masaki third-neighborhood, fifth, lot ten”.

We'll be taking a train to Hiroshima soon.

(8/21 Thur 10:40 AM) No, we'll be taking the damn subway to Nagoya first. Sigh. We left the hotel at 8:00 with a couple of other ALTs with ALTIA – one from D.C. and one from New Zealand – and made our way to the local station (Kinyama, I think). We got there at 9. What should have been a fairly easy trip was exasperated by a) heavy luggage b) rush hour subway traffic c) inexperience with the Japanese rail system and d) plain ol' miscommunication. I brought a full computer bag (old school type – you could carry around a thin client in it and have plenty of space) a full backpack (too full – wouldn't easily fit under any plane seat) and a large (<70>

Which leads to the subway traffic. Japan's subway rush hour is infamous, and I'm sure the locals have 20 different metaphors and similes for it. We actually lucked out in this respect, catching what seemed to be the tail end of it. I actually stepped on a guy's foot while trying to get my bags on board, and he was cool about it, seeing our predicament (three foreigners and ...me, all carrying bags). And eventually we found our way to the right station.

Well. It's not exactly a different station, as you can get to the Shinkansen platforms without leaving the station... but since there wasn't a map, and my companions were not terribly at ease asking for directions, I ended up asking. It's a different line, completely different – it's like getting off a plane and trying to board a boat (which you can actually do in the Nagoya airport). They all had tickets, but somehow the ALTIA people didn't know I was coming, and 14,010 yen later I was running with the rest of them to catch the train.

And the miscommunication... the guy was waiting for us at a clock in the station, in front of the Shinkansen ticket sales area, which we couldn't find. But I'm writing this on the train, so it worked out.

I bought some lunches (bento boxes) and apparently they're 1200 calories (depicted as 'kcal' – kilocalories – here) each. Sounds good. They're cheaper to buy in the station, on the platform actually, by a couple hundred yen.

(8/21 Thur 11:45 AM) Welp, just had lunch. The sauce was the sweet kind you put on pork, but they poured it on. And the best thing? These eki-ben ('station bento'), or this one at least, was actually _branded _ 'eki-ben'.

It's the little things that stick out in a foreign country (like, for example, what they call a 'quarter pounder with cheese'... I need to find out what that's called here, actually). The easiest example is probably the vending machines (jidou-hanbaiki – 'automated vending machines', however redundant that may seem), especially since they're so different. In the states, emphasis is placed more on the brand, Cokc or Pepsi or maybe bottled water, than the actual drinks themselves. In Japan, the sodas drink YOU... er, no (actually, there was a Pepsi truck version of Optimus Prime...). The style seems to be to let the drinks, or other dispensables (if you can name it, there's probably a vending machine for it somewhere), speak for themselves – if they major companies need ad space, they can get it elsewhere... and it will be at least a building tall and in neon.

But back to the train. The Shinkansen, the famous 'bullet trains' (personified by the 300-line), are at least as expensive as a plane flight, but with the advantages and drawbacks of trains. If you want the scenic route, then by all means yes, the Shinkansen is for you. If you want to get there without stopping every 20 minutes, then maybe not. There's no real reason to buy lunch on board – they're more expensive than the eki-ben generally – but it's part of the experience. Taking it, you see very quickly and easily how Japanese towns are set up. They're cramped. The houses mostly don't have yards (which, on the flip side, means less need to mow the lawn) and the apartment buildings are built up, not out, to the point that the stairwells are often exposed and have the appearance of being 'attached' to the side of the building. Not sure if that's more or less reason to know your neighbors. Japan being famously earthquake prone, there are no hill-mounted townhouses like you'd find in Seattle or San Francisco (I think? never been there). And if there's no reason to build on a hill, there's no reason to raze the trees on it, so since 10:15 we've seen lots of trees – it looks, in places like I-5 before Bellingham. I need to get ready to leave.

(8/22 Fri 4:08 AM) Yay insomnia! No, I've actually adjusted pretty well to the new hours here, and I think it's because of that night shift I worked at QFC – biggest mistake of my life at the time, but hey, my body seems to have learned something from it. I'm sitting in the new apartment right now, and it's a weird feeling. It was 'unfurnished' when we got here (meaning that the only things it came with were the kitchen and bathroom sinks) but Rachel's work set up a gas stove (two flames and a fish-frying itty-bitty oven) and a fridge (comes up to my shoulder, wide as my shoulders). We have gas and electricity and water. The WiFi is currently being stolen from a neighbor who inexplicably left their connection unguarded and named a 12-digit set of numbers. They also gave us two light fixtures, which work out to being two really bright fluorescent rings and a tiny 'night lamp' in the middle.

The town itself is small and kinda in the sticks. Akitakata 'City' is about an hour's drive from the Hiroshima Shinkansen station, during which we passed many, many rice fields on plots about the size of an average house – planted in between houses, as a matter of fact. Land is apparently cheaper out here, and farming is more profitable than in the states thanks to price controls and Japan-produced quotas, so we saw some ridiculously large houses here and there. Like, not big by Japanese standards (and they were), but American mansion-sized. Not much of a yard, though, as always.

We are on the third story, and there's a fairly large balcony two rooms wide by a my shoulder and a half length long, with bars for clothes and futon drying. The complex was built a plot away from what we would think of as a drugstore, called 'Wants' – yes, really, in English and Japanese. They have a big lit-up sign that goes out after they close – a nice change from f-ing Best Buy, where I could almost read by their sign's light at night, back in the old apartment. The apartment has 3 12 ft. by 7 ft. (or so) rooms, a dining table sort of room (10 by 10?), a kitchen (with a freakishly low doorway – my head clears it by 2 inches), a bathroom (same sort of bath as the hotel, but with its own room separate from the toilet and sink), a toilet (no seat amenities but with the common feature of having a 'sink' at the top of the tank, so that the water comes out of a faucet before going into the tank proper through the drain – again, separate from any actual sink), three assorted closets, and a gas system that talks to us. If we want more hot water for the bath (this is Japan, where the bath is a sort of tiny god) we press a button on a panel in the wall, it talks to us about it, and presto, hot(ter) water. Overall, it's bigger than our last apartment, something of a shock to me seeing as how the rent is lower. The floors are linoleum in a wood-paneled scheme, and they don't creak. At all. Happily, the electrical outlets are polarized 2-prongs, with a few 3-prongs tossed in here and there (although, in this room, the one 3-prong is just high enough off the ground that, if I plug in my laptop adapter, it'll hang just above the floor), so the adapters Rachel brought fit (and laptop power adapters are built with variable Watts and Amps in mind). The room we're using to sleep in has a screen door and a typically Japanese-intelligent AC/heater, which is nice.

I think that'll do for now. I am actually tired, and I'll get some photos up soon. So yeah, we're here, we're safe. Also, one interesting feature about the roads out here is that there aren't many street lights – I look out into the dark, and all I can really see are house lights and some blinking red construction marker lights. It's different and a little creepy.

Upcoming posts: Ritualized Japanese speech, Shopping in Japan, Cars in Japan, little annoyances, culture shock, food, etc.

Last (full) day Stateside

Finished all the major packing. Room's still a mess, but the furniture is set up (I'm finally back at my desk). Can't put my DVD rack next to the TV, where it ought to be, and there's no space in my room for it.

Went to see "Tropic Thunder" with my brother - it was okay. Tom Cruise had me laughing out tears. Robert Downey Jr was great. But the sound was up too loud for me.

Bedtime now.

Moving complete...

Guh. The apartment is empty now. It's been home for 11 months - feels weird seeing it like that. My dad's friend came over, with his two kids - they live in France with their mother, but come over here sometimes. I can't relate to them, and it didn't help that Tiva came to the house (I can't afford storage, so everything is being 'stored' in my old room). "Hi, this is my fiance..." is generally not the best way to relate to teens, and they ended up talking more with my parents.

My room is full of boxes, but thanks to Tiva the bed is set up. If I hustle, I can have the room looking proper by tomorrow night. It's cooler here than the apartment. If it isn't already apparent, I'm exhausted. Going to bed soon.

Also, the Ford F150 Harley-Davidson Edition drives like a boat - except that boats generally turn better. It's high up enough that it's hard to gauge one's relative speed, and the shocks are overzealous - any more than a 20 minute ride makes me nauseous. It's black, inside and out, but this is countered with a decent AC, its only saving grace. The body was not made for rough work, the steering is too limber for something its size - sneeze, and you're looking at a rebuild. Basically a truck for people who don't like trucks - you could paint the body pink and re-release it as an unnecessarily girly "woman's truck". I like the Volvo wagon ('94 940, silver, fabric interior) better.

Buh?

Hm. 7 months and 2 weeks since the last post. Just quit my newest job. Moving to Japan - Akitakata, Hiroshima. Playing more StarPirates than I probably ought to be. It's just my kinda game, actually - hourly bonuses, relatively slow 'n steady gameplay...

To my credit, I've been writing recently, or trying to. I've been getting these good ideas at work in the mornings, mostly plot and character bits that I jot down onto thirds of paper. Not many lines, since I seem to have worked with ...well, they're characters in their own right. (Also, H., if you're reading this, Daitrombe.net and mchan if you don't already know about it - check "downloads" for awesome.)

That was the only job I know of offhand where saying "the server's on fire" does not actually involve flame and smoke, but is far worse. I feel sorry for those poor bastards come Monday.

Too hot. Can't write. Feel Rorschach-like.

This morning's fireworks...

My theory on this morning's Space Needle fireworks show? Windows Vista. They had to resort to firing them off 'manually' - no, not a guy with a lighter running around arm outstretched. See, there's this computer, and it has these buttons, right? Three buttons. "Fire Fireworks", "Fire More Fireworks", and "Fire ALL DA Fireworks!". Just keep pressing them, and there's your show.


Resolutions? I want to _like_ writing. That's it. I'm going to keep the coke habit and the russian roulette though - those are just too fun. Oh, and the llama stays.

My Music

One thing I didn't want to do when I started this blog was insert my private life into it – this was supposed to be a semi-professional one.

Meh. Screw that.

So now I'm going to talk about music – what I like and suggest.

First, I like background music. BGMs. I also like Japanese hero-type songs, usually in the Sci-fi genre. This isn't to say that I don't like Western music at all, but it's close. I don't know how I got started in it, but I've always liked my genre. (A Japanese show will virtually always have enough music in it to put out a soundtrack – American ones don't, at least not at first. Example: the Power Rangers first season soundtrack is a joke, but one fans might buy for the nostalgia. The Zyuranger soundtrack is symphonic and runs the gamut from “heroic” to “tragic”. It could be run in a movie with little rescoring.)

So I finally got around to watching all three Megazone 23 OVAs. The music was pretty good for the first one, okay for the second, and not so much for the third. In particular, I like ROCK CAFE, which is the first thing you hear when you watch the first one – it's a natural “chase” theme – but not just because it's good. It has another context for me. See, Megazone 23 was also included in Super Robot Wars D for the GBA – and if you know anything about the SRW series, this a joke turned serious. But because the game focuses so much on dodging, the Garland is a surprisingly good unit – good dodge (it's not going to get hit on the ground, even before upgrading), cheap upgrades (it does good damage against anything with fully upgraded weapons, despite its SS size...), a cool pilot graphic (anime-hair dude on a bike, with a 'hisshou' bandanna...), and space for four upgrade parts (it's the smallest human-operated transforming mecha – where the HELL does it have space for four parts?!). But the best part is, the Megazone 23 unit theme is ROCK CAFE – or a GBA version of it – and this works out very well. There's a sort of desperation there that you can really only find in, say, “Gen ga Tobu” (the standard Ideon theme in the SRW series, Alpha 3 most recently).

And that's the sort of music I like – something you can battle to.

Ever see Gaoranger vs. Super Sentai? It's on YouTube, I think. You will not find a better explanation of the Sentai series anywhere else. It's basically a clip show in movie form – they got a couple of really good actors to do guest appearances, and a couple other actors as well, all in their original roles – but where the movie really shines is its hot-blooded approach to showing off 25 years of Sentai. They chose their clips well, but the accompanying music draws from previous shows are chosen carefully, to great effect. Thus, you have “Ore no Heart wa Yume-jikake” (“My Heart is a Dream-work” – 'work' here being like from 'clock-work', so “My Heart Runs on Dreams” might be better) playing over the 'power/strength fighters sequence', where it works to great effect. Red Falcon (from Liveman) gets the 'violins and brass duel theme' for his teaching duel, and Banba Soukichi (coolest character in Sentai history by the estimation of most fans, being played by the great Miyauchi Hiroshi) gets “Spade Ace, the Young Lion” (not written for his character, but suiting him VERY well) – that he also gets to throw off a disguise and beat down two commander-class enemies, WITHOUT transforming, is a plus. But as a mecha fan, the best moment comes when, after the enemy boss grows to giant size, he defeats the Gaoranger robo. Oh noes that can't be good. But wait... what's that on the horizon. It appears to be – yes, yes it is. A mecha from every prior Sentai show (with a little intro from Miyauchi's two other roles in the series – it's a younger version of him flying one of the planes), to the music-only version of “Itsutsu no Kokoro de Fiverobo” (“Five Hearts in Fiverobo”, with 'de' here giving a 'to make' implication). It's a bunch of strung-together clips, but it works – makes one wonder how good a Super Sentai Robot Wars game would be, in fact. (My favorite one, here, is the Denzi Tiger's 'really big missiles' – the boss turns to his right, and there's a giant tank sitting there. It aims and fires two huge herkin' missiles at him. They go boom, in a way CGs can't replace or replicate.) But yeah, that's it. I also like to imagine what if other Sentai characters came back for the movie – like, one of the women. Momoranger would have some bombs ready (“Are you ready? Here I go!” *boom* *BOOM* - most understated phrase ever), the Ohranger and Changeman ladies would bring artillery (or not bother with small potatoes, and just bring in their mechas), Ninja White would throw some shurikens and transform into a paper crane (while making Naruto characters look like pansies – yes, ALL of them), Houou-ranger would simply blow up a couple of ki-whirlwinds, etc. And Heart Queen? Remember Magneto, from Marvel Comics? Like him, but a cyborg with a cool phrase. Also, all the Sentai ladies get to show their stuff to two songs: “Hanasaku Goggle Pink” (a slower song, with hanasaku here meaning “flowering”) or “Sexual Lady” (from Bioman – a faster, dynamic song) – fun stuff.

But really, I like the older ones. Clarification: I like brassy or orchestral pieces. If they have an appropriate singer (Kushida Akira, Mizuki Ichiro, Kageyama Hironobu...), even better, but an instrumental works just fine. The best characters don't need lyrics to introduce them, and this applies in all cases. Superman (probably the best example - “dun daDAA”), Batman (the opening for The Animated Series doesn't just set up the show, it introduces the whole mythology!), Rocky (Gonna Fly Now and Eye of the Tiger are quintessential training montage themes now, even without the lyrics), Robocop (no other refrain better introduces a reborn cyborg), Captain Jack (the American version of Banba Soukichi), The Doctor (if everything has gone to hell and you hear the theme, you start looking for a Police Box...), the Powerpuff Girls (Dun dun dadada daa dun...), John Shaft (Theme from Shaft is great background music for everything. EVERYTHING!), and so on. If a ship can be a character, then the Star Trek theme/refrain counts. But yeah. Spider-man, oddly, doesn't have a memorable theme – several SONGS, yes, but not really a theme. The movie had an excellent soundtrack, but could you really put it on the radio and get a bunch of correct guesses about it? (Robocop – Rock Shop, specifically – is old enough to have died out as a leitmotif, but memorable enough to remember as a theme in general. Your crap has hit the fan, and then – Rock Shop – you hear footsteps. Heavy footsteps. You recall killing a cop way back when. Oh crap he's back from the dead. You are thrown through a window as he reads you your rights. ...Were there that many rights? You want your lawy- ow. This is tortu- ow. No, no it isn't... ow ow ow. Okay, you did it. ...Help?)

But a song is nice, too. It's hard to listen to Stan Bush's “The Touch” without imagining a certain Matrix of Leadership, and this is what a Opening Theme is supposed to do – the length not totally mattering. “Seinfeld” opened with a scat-like theme a few degrees above a cold open, and it worked better than the “Friends” theme in some respects – hard to duplicate, easy to identify, original even 15 years after the fact, and much more unlikely to annoy. A well-written original theme, of course, is meaningless if it is too much like everything else at the time – it should be ahead of its time and durable. Example: The Transformers theme, which was such that there were some 3 variations of it during its original run (not exactly par for the course at the time, and something quite a few long-running anime shows do nowadays), but beyond that is short and to the point. You know the show will involve robots and transforming (and likely Frank “voice o' God in the '80s” Welker *cough *).

But a show where an incidental piece works better than an OP Theme? How about... Big O. As a show, it looks like Batman with Giant Robots, with the sort of overarching mysteries that have only been emulated by the first few seasons of X-Files and Life over here. There actually were two OPs, one for each season. The first famously sounds like Queen's “Flash” (“He'll save every one of us!”), and the second was edited over in favor of the first when the show came over here (it was originally a homage to the theme from Gerry Anderson' UFO...). But it isn't a terribly heroic theme, and doesn't work too well as a battle theme – doesn't work at all, in fact, and they wisely never used it – but like the Transformers theme, introduces a Giant Robot and calls it good. In this respect, it works. After listening to it, no one will walk away thinking they heard the theme song to a cutesy girl's anime (to which something like . Instead, they came up with a track called “Sure Promise” that rounds the bases – perfect for a sudden heroic entrance (Big O is delivered to the scene through an underground/subway system, and crashes up from the ground upon arrival) of epic proportions with nigh-indestructible armor, while also pulling a second duty as the “final attack” theme in the last episode (“Final Stage” - as appropriate an ultimate attack to Big O as the Goldion Hammer was to GaoGaiGar). When it plays, you know Roger's gonna win.

As for overall memorable music, GaoGaiGar takes the cake among mecha fans. A number of the pieces were full-orchestra sorts – or rather, there are some pieces of music that only sound right when played by a small group, say a quartet, and the exact opposite is true with certain GaoGaiGar BGMs. Namely, there are some pieces of music in GGG that wouldn't sound right until a sports arena's worth of musicians played them in unison – scale is another thing, then. An epic movie score, in the space of a half-hour show, makes all kinds of difference. Anything else for GGG's final attacks – well, example: GaoGaiGar makes an appearance in SRW Alpha 2 and 3. He has a final attack called “Goldion Hammer”, and the unfortunate problem is, the accompanying theme had to be rewritten for the game, so it pretty much sounded like a MIDI. While it was a good enough BGM to work without the scale, not having it made a difference, robs it of some of its effect. It renders the attack not sounding like something that, unchecked, could easily destroy a planet, and more like a handy attack to use on boss units.

So what was I talking about in the beginning? Oh. Music. Um... The Megazone 23 soundtrack is good. There.

I wonder if it's possible to cancel a holiday?

No, seriously. I know I'm not the first person to think this about X'mas, but to me it seems to bring out the worst in everyone - more so than any other holiday.

I live in Seattle, right? Fairly tech-y city with a port, not that this means much. I live a stone's throw from a mall, also – apparently not that far from the Penny Arcade office, either, if their posts are true – and consequently I get to hear sirens practically every day. (This is not so bothering – I came from a smaller town, but I lived in the U-District for a couple of years – and they are almost always fire trucks or ambulances.)

But I also work in the mall (or 'worked', depending on how things turn out). Working in retail is always fun the three or four days before X'mas, but my place of employment attracted a higher breed than, say, Nordstrom or JC Penny – usually. I went back for a pay stub yesterday, and the first thing I see is an irate customer telling first the Head Cashier, then the Manager, that he wants his money back – the shoe apparently not fitting. (I obviously walked in on the tail end of a conversation, and it wouldn't surprise me if the HC exasperated the situation somewhat – it nearly happened before.) So, they can't refund his money – something that can only be done with credit purchases – and would he like a gift card or store credit in its place? But no. This guy insists on getting his money back. “You have my card number in your computer! Look it up!” “What am I supposed to do with a credit! He's already gone back to college!” (by this point, I'm guessing why 'he' left so soon after X'mas – wish we could send 'him' the video, it'd get a few laughs in a frat) He'd gotten so worked up, that as he leaves and passes me, he spits out that I shouldn't buy anything from them (I get a discount, as long as I work there...) and that he'll never shop there again.

Sigh. I can't quite put into words just how far 'gone' this guy went; I'm just not that good a writer, and my memory is foggy besides. But in retrospect, there are a few things seriously wrong with his reasoning. First, if we can look up his card number so easily, what's to keep us from committing massive credit fraud? Second, gift cards (ours, at least) work online – and we have many things amusing things online that, for space reasons, we can't put up in the store. (Not to mention that, in a smaller college town, it's often easier to buy online – and if he went as far away as to make gift sending difficult, say Pullman, it's preferable.) Finally, the guy was trying to return a pair of 'shoes' that were more expensive than a pair of surprisingly comfortable slippers we sell – no trade, no store credit, not a whole lot of thought for the recipient, just 'gimme gimme gimme'.

Is this typical? I don't act like this – if I can only find one thing in a store, I don't bother – and it confuses me why someone would. So now I wonder if the dude was a Christian – and if so, to what extent. Agnostic? Bible in the house? Bible in the bedstand? Church, per wedding/funeral? Per 'every now and then'? Per month? Per week? Per X'mas? Or not at all?

Yeah, I know I have no readers, so I'm just asking the empty air. Or God, or Jesus (“What Would Jesus Blog” – heh). Cyberspace Jesus, fresh from being Sweet Zombie Jesus or Robot Jesus – no, I'm not trying to mock the dude, and I think he might chuckle besides. (I keep wondering if this is the difference between Christianity and Islam – Jesus can be treated quite a bit more lightly than The Prophet...) But I digress.

This all reminds me of that old argument: “Guns don't kill people, bullets/people kill people.” Wonderful. This would crack Spock up – have we seen a Spock “LOL” meme yet? – with its bizarre logic. So a dude with a bullet doesn't need a gun? Great! Let's take away the guns, save some metal for more meaningful projects, and see what happens. (Knives – the use of which leave far more identifiable traits and material at a crime scene – might take over in violent crime, or blunt trauma. The medical fees might go up or down...) Same thing with X'mas, I think. It's so much an excuse to spend and show that it ought to be separated from the celebration of the birth of Christ. No, correction: NEEDS to be. Call it X'mas (or maybe just 'Love Day').

...Now that I think about it, given that so much emphasis is placed on the DEATH of Christ (specifically, how he died), why isn't it just represented as t'mas, or T'mas? There are enough crucifixes brandished about anyway – why not? I also have an idea for a story: The Three Wise men are actually aliens from other planets, and couldn't make it in time for the original birth – they arrive NOW (cue Bill Murray's “Only a Carpathian...” lines) and are greatly mystified/annoyed by the modern world's take on a single birth.

But yeah, back to my original point. We should ban Christmas, as it is commonly understood, from being a public holiday. I hold enough respect for Christianity to say this, as much as some Christians will hold for my opposing viewpoint (when they find out), and banish me to their private (ie: subjective – where do the masochists go?) hells.

...Wow. I was sipping English Breakfast tea near the beginning, and I was on message. By now, I've moved onto Slim-Fast (not a meal replacement, but as healthy as anything else I eat nowadays), and you can tell. Maybe I do have ADD...

What the cat does...

So, I live with a cat now (moved in late September). And one of the things she's started doing is using the bath as a source of water – we run it a little so she can see it moving, since cats like drinking from moving water. This means that I sometimes have to pick her up and out when I need to crap, and she waits just outside the door while I finish my business. As I open the door, I am greeted with a “what the f**k do you do in there that takes so long, human?” look.

Ah, the pitfalls of living with a woman, and her cat named Princess.

What? _TWO_ posts in a month??? un-HEARd of!!

Welp, I'm bored. So I think I'll just write about The It Crowd, a full year and then some after the premiere of the first series. But I won't even talk about the first series. Go find it for yourself – it's good, and very available on the major torrenting circuit.

First, my favorite episode of the first series has always been “Yesterday's Jam” - the second episode. It had a sense of complete, utter surrealism about it the other five in the season couldn't match. So I'm very happy to see that the second series is an extension of that, not allowing such petty things as Continuity and Good Sense to get in the way.

I've never seen so many sacred cows trotted out, and then ritualistically slaughtered in a way that would never pass on American TV – not even on the new cable drama, “American Abattoirs”. The three are brought out to a musical, simply titled “Gay: The Musical”, and things go downhill from there, taking Disabilities along for the ride.

Then the boss dies, the son (resembling, to my eyes, the Fifth Doctor in outfit) takes over, and the concept of a “pimped out” cell phone powerful enough to give a man an orgasm is, for the first time I am aware of, introduced to the viewing audience.

The third episode opens with the best anti-piracy ad yet made by man (only God could do one better, against geneticists), involves a surprisingly polite German cannibal with a cello, and a bootleg Korean DVD – one of which leads to a mobilization of the police.

And the most recent episode, which I have just finished watching, is a dinner party with the people from work. And it just takes off from there. I felt a sense of shark-jumping right around the time the woman Richmond gets paired with makes her first appearance.

So far, the theme of this series appears to be, “The (blank) From Hell” - “Work Outing”, “Boss(es)”, “Cooking Class/Police Priorities”, and “Dinner Party/Name”. The IT office has been revamped (likely a result of Jen's addition to the TEAM!!!!) and there is a feeling that more screen time has been given to the main characters than before – it's probably about the same, but their presence in the stories feels more concrete. Feels like Moss and Roy are actively (that is, accidentally in-story) causing the events to come about and suffering the not-always-obvious consequences, rather than get swept along by them as they would do in the first series, and as Jen seems to do this year.

So do I like it? Yes. It's the geekiest comedy ever made. There's going to be an American version of it, but I can think of a couple of good prior examples for it working out or not: The Office and Red Dwarf. You may recall that they passed and failed on how well the localization process went – this kills the best-known joke of Yesterday's Jam (the new number for Triple-9). I am optimistic, as the writers of IT Crowd are clearly aware of the international nature of the show, and even the surrealism of the Triple-9 joke works out without an understanding of the events that lead into it (there actually was a number change, but more along the lines of the addition of a 411 line).

Find this show online or from a local video shop, and watch it. If you haven't downloaded it already – aaah! FBI dude with a silenced pistol! *spills jam on keyboard*

Hey, I'm still alive.

RFID implants linked to animal tumors

This amuses me, of course, and I penned a little reply... but I couldn't get the comment thingy to work properly - had to turn off Page Style to get the text box at the bottom to even show up. Plus, hey, might as well post sometime, right?

"Huh. An implanted RFID might just be the next Myspace, then - one you wear and walk about with. Want to avoid the irritating need to introduce yourself to someone? Get an RFID, allow them to scan you (you know how dogs sniff other dogs? kinda like that) and boom - you've saved yourself a couple of years of fascinating conversation.

Imagine, once ten thousand people call you a friend, you can have your very own tumor, and people who pester you to be their friend in public (remember that recent Candorville?) will die off all the quicker.

And remember, as with smoking, drinking, and various other things that are fairly hazardous to your health, there are only two things that matter with the latest craze: approval (or lack of disapproval) from a government agency that ought to be watching it, and influential people who swear by it."

UW is no longer in my Top 8

...but I think MySpace is a joke anyway, so that's a moot point. And now for my annoyed rant:

What the hell!?

This could easily be an opportunity for another school (I think Wisconsin was the first? Could be wrong) to tell the RIAA to "[four letter word or any other favored explicative] off" and go start picking on people who actually profit from such alleged theft. But no, what does the UW and its overpaid administration do? (WARNING: INVOCATION OF GODWIN'S LAW AHEAD... sorta)

Yeah, full cooperation. Appeasement and FULL COOPERATION. Vichy France, meet your 21st-century equivalent.

This is ridiculous, and I, a lowly "blogger" with a T20 getting ready to suffer from Sudden T20 Death Syndrome, should not be the only one saying so. But what really pisses me off is that the article is in _THE NEWS TRIBUNE_. Not MyUW, The Seattle Times, or any other easily-accessible news source. The F'ing News Tribune.

Of course, I'm also annoyed by the high-minded assholes (who aren't getting served or sued, of course) that seem to believe that the RIAA is justified in this - "You broke the law, and now you're just paying for it, so stop yer whining" - without noting that a) the fees ($3K ~ $5K settlements) are ludicrously overpriced given that the songs aren't (and can't be) identified in any realistic way (the fees don't go to the actual singers and writers, who, in theory, are the ones most hurt by illegal downloading as it, in theory, leads to lower album sales and royalties) and b) the methods used by the RIAA to sniff out evildoers are pathetic, enough so that the government probably wouldn't use them as evidence in terrorist trials for fear of the case being thrown out over it.

Luckily for anyone who has the sense to not download and yet still got prosecuted for it, someone had the guts and balls to go after them. "...negligent and illegal investigation and prosecution" doesn't cover it all - there ought to be a "malicious" or two tossed in there as well. I'm not sure how the laws are different in Washington, but given that they're invoking the RICO Act (federal law) I don't see why it can't be done here. I'm also surprised it isn't class-action, either, as I can recall a few other cases along these lines.

Yes, there is illegal file-sharing on the UW campus - no doubt about that. If any UW students are reading this, I suggest that you stop and browse Amazon.com more, or rent movies - for free! - from Odegaard. And yes, the UW would be aiding the illegals (I'm going to start using this word to apply to any lawbreaker in the US, as it seems strange to simply use it in reference to illegal immigrants) but we're not talking about a political or national security issue here - this is simply an industry trying to make a few extra bucks off of people who are culturally not likely to be able to afford it. Of course, if the targeted students/staff happen to be the most well-off on campus... the UW would ignore it, the news media would ignore it, and it might come up in a footnote to the above suit or a leaked memo from the RIAA main office.

So in summary: I'm very disappointed in you, UW. Very disappointed. And you still haven't sent me my diploma!

Favorite Mac Hall strip

Here it is. Now that it's back up again, I popped by to see if I could find it. And there it was.

...It's even funnier if you can imagine X-Men II's Wolverine saying that as he jumps down from a balcony onto some soldiers.

CLASS: "Final Essay" - The Remixing of Language

Here's my final paper for ENGL 349-A. Came out about as well as I expected.

The Remixing of Language

Language is an important part of human culture – this line has greeted many a reader to a high-school-level exam essay – but the fact is, culture cannot survive without a language of some sort, and in this way it might be simplest to say that language is culture, making for disappointing moments when a popular work of science fiction does not remember and exploit this to its fullest. It goes without saying, then, that language is an especially important thing to have in mind when discussing or writing an Afrofuturism sort of text, and that, in theory, everything should follow from it. To use Kodwo Eshun's words, cut for space:

“Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a

century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing

tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken.” (Eshun 301)

Of course, “tools” here can only be quickly explained as “things by which to manipulate ideas and their distribution” – with “manipulate” being in the very literal sense and encompassing both the complimentary and pejorative usages, and “ideas” being just about anything that can arguably fall under the phrase “intellectual property”. In short, the “tools” he refers to can be just about anything that can be said, sung, written, composed, copied/appropriated, and in certain cases thought, among other things – Eshun's “tools” are a means by which communication of ideas with a constructive purpose¹ can occur. Language obviously falls under these categories, but as my convoluted way of coming to this point has hopefully made clear, to simply ask how language works inside of Afrofuturism on its own would be (somewhat) selfishly limited in scope, as the movement, or “program” as he refers to it, may be thought of as² essentially being an Afrocentric offshoot of futurism, itself an offshoot of Science Fiction – in the sense that futurism tends to work best in the realm of Sci-fi and the possible. Thus, it is better to ask questions of Afrofuturism (a topic-system relatively small in scale) as it relates to language (a mind-bogglingly vast topic for a non-linguist), rather than the other way around. Switching gears slightly, the most important question one can ask with all this in mind, of course, is a reply to Audre Lorde's comment, that massa's tools will never dismantle massa's house (Hopkinson 7).

Before going any further, the idea of a “hybrid language” must be either struck down or further explained. Under one way of thinking, “hybrid language” is obviously a good way to describe a language that has evolved from the contact between, let's say, two “parent” languages – and under another way, it is an oxymoron. The idea basically is, to have a hybrid of something, the original parents must be clearly defined, and while this works on paper for a number of things that can be clearly defined, it does not work as cleanly for something as nebulous as a language. To keep things more or less simple, English will be the example³ here, and the thought experiment here will be research-paper simple – that is, very simple in scope, to the point that we will ignore the effects of race for the time being. Let us say that, Parents (A) and (B) both speak a particular dialect⁴ and that their Child (ab) grows up learning to speak a hybrid of that language. Given the way the public school system works in America, (ab) will probably be taught in American English – but will hear around her whatever regional dialect/accent is prevalent in the area. As she grows up, she will, unless she takes specific steps to speak otherwise, speak and write in a “peculiar” way – let us say that she uses her verbs in a particular way that would, to some outsiders, seem a bit odd – but will otherwise stay within the certain boundaries of American English. Assuming that she has the good sense not to go into linguistics in college, she goes about her life not really noticing the difference, and then has two children with a guy named (cd). These children cannot possibly both be (abcd), for two reasons. First, they would have to grow up in the exact same environments, under the exact same conditions, and come out to be exactly the same as far as their minds are concerned – anyone with more than one child knows that this, for all intents and purposes, simply never happens, although if it did it would make gift-giving much easier. Second – and this comes from the first – they would both have to speak the exact same language, the exact same dialect and accent of American English. This would require not only the exact same life experiences – friends, preferences in TV, music, lifestyles, literature, games, courseload when it becomes relevant, and so on, but mostly the sorts of things that both the child and the parents do not have complete control over under reasonable circumstances – but the same awareness of their language and how they use it. As the first is impossible, the second is as well – there will always be a minute difference somewhere in their lives, and so there will always be some minute difference somewhere in their language. Now take the second half of this situation, multiply it by the current number of families in America alone, keeping in mind the restrictions of a “local language”, and suddenly the word “hybrid” does not quite account for the fact that there are many hybrids coming out from all walks of life. Now toss the concept of race back into the experiment like a pin-less grenade – we didn't consider it, remember? – and attempt to come to the conclusion that a cacophony can be tuned. Finally, and for more entertainment, apply it to all English-speaking families on Earth, or write a book about it that confuses Samuel Delany. As this simplified and possibly flawed thought experiment should show – considering that English isn't even the most widely-spoken language, for example – everyone has a different set of Eshun's “tools” that are only similar in broad terms, that they are all “tools”.

But back to the “real” topic: Audre Lorde, who once stated that “massa's tools will never dismantle massa's house” (Hopkinson 7). There are a few ways to answer it, and for the most part, Nalo Hopkinson sums up the question by noting two answers: the tools themselves are in the public domain and now anyone with the skill can build a house, or they have been re-appropriated for other uses and so the size and style of the houses that pop up in the neighborhood no longer matters (Hopkinson 8). They are not mutual exclusive overall, but there is a small error here: note that neither actually solves the main problem of a house that, in the opinion of some, needs dismantling. This is actually a very silly question to ask at all – if “massa's tools” happen to be the best for the job, or are considered to be the best for the job, from a house-dismantling perspective this question wouldn't come up in the first place. But it has. This means that “massa's tools” cannot be the best for the job of taking the house and reducing it to not-house status – if it isn't “true”, it has to be “false” and not “maybe”, the latter of which isn't an option in a True-or-False question. As anything that can make can also be used to unmake – a hammer can drive in a nail, or break apart the two-by-four around it with some work – the question is really more of how one might go about it. In terms of construction, time and effort is spent to make something well, but most demolition jobs do not even reuse the same tools and are more likely to involve large tractor-driven hunks of metal with pistons or some explosive materials designed to very efficiently break things apart⁵, more so than the hammer. However – and the two answers Hopkinson gives are only possible with an awareness of this – there is little point in tearing something apart if it still has productive use, and as unpleasant as the phrasing of the metaphor is, “massa's house” and “massa's tools” are not without use. If the house is read to be the body of work produced by the language of the “massa”, then there is no problem at all with reusing the house in some way, as the “tools” here cannot be discussed in any fashion without an understanding of them – the problem lies in the understanding. While a description along the lines of “hammer goes whack” would be the simple, quick-and-dirty understanding of how the one particular tool is to be used, in the wrong context it might invite accusations of insensitivity – but it is an accurate foundation on which to build an understanding of how it can be used, and how other tools can work in conjunction with it. Gradually creating from scratch an understanding of how everything in the toolbox works and interacts with the building materials – which would be along the lines of experiences, dialogue, and other things the reader actually sees on a book page – the newly-minted builder finds that he or she is inside the house, figuring out how it all comes together. From there, it is a simple action of dropping “massa's tools”, running to the empty lot next door where the new builder's “tools” are, and building a new house – maybe not getting it right the first time, but eventually.

Aside from the poor-but-accurate choice of metaphor, there is something else wrong with the metaphor of dismantling a house with tools, or rather, it implies something that is more disturbing than the idea of “massa's house” by itself. The exact wording of the first answer Hopkinson gave⁶ was:

“He looked over at me and said (I'm paraphrasing), “We've been taught all out lives how superior European

literature is. In our schools, it's what we're instructed to read, to analyze, to understand, how we're taught to

think. They gave us those tools. I think that now, they're our tools, too.” (Hopkinson 8)

This ought to bring many things to mind, anywhere from the idea of forcing one culture to assimilate by disallowing education in the native or local language – basically, the not-the-colonizers' language – to a conservative school board with an irritatingly low budget for new books and no tolerance for controversial ones. In any case, it hints at censorship. Censorship in itself is not always a bad thing, in the same way that a five-year-old should probably not have access to an actual hammer and breakable things. But after it has been allowed to creep up past a certain point, it becomes a problem, and intellectuals everywhere bear arms of ink. There is a moment in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond The Stars” where Comdr. Benjamin Sisko faces it – for most of the episode, he finds himself as a black writer, ending with his story of a Black spaceship captain rejected even after changes – and refuses to give up his idea nonetheless. But a better, perhaps even frightening example would be the “authenticity rules” in Evie Shockley's “Separation Anxiety”, which are exactly as they sound – rules designed to keep protagonist [P]eaches' preferred form of art, dance, “authentic” and “black”. In her words: “all these authenticity rules! gotta have eighty percent historical content in each program. can't change not a step in performing some nineteenth or twentieth century dance. it's like we're fossils, walking around.” (Shockley 60) Specifically, if dance – a somewhat minor “tool” in the toolbox, all things considered – can only be performed in a specific way, what's to say that other, more widely used “tools”, are not under similar controls? Nothing – it isn't confirmed or denied, and the only hint of this possibility is in her pluralization of “authenticity rules”, which could quite easily be referring to something else. There is some irony here, in that they have absolutely nothing to do with “massa's house” and “massa's tools” in the “ghetto” and are using their own “tools” – but aren't allowed to change the “house” too much, or else something happens. That [P]eaches is the only one to really complain about it is also bothering, but there is only so much that can be read into.

If censorship is one way to keep certain “tools” from ever getting anything new done, what would be another way? Assuming the materials and the tools cannot be destroyed or intercepted⁷, the only other option would be to remove the builder – and that is where Derrick Bell's “The Space Traders” comes in. Since simply publicly killing all users of a particular “tool” would usually be fairly illegal under most America laws, the solution would be to accept a trade for them all, from aliens who speak in the “familiar comforting tones of former President Reagan” (Bell 327) – for some reason, this never sets off alarm bells in anyone. (Why Reagan? The simplest answer, from a writer's perspective, is that he was the most recent President at the time of writing.) It should have been cause of great worry from the American perspective in the story, as it would mean that the Space Traders knew a great deal about them without explaining why - “sinister” is not strong enough a word – and, in a more ironic sense, likely have better-established “tools”. Regardless, in the end – and despite all sorts of effort to prevent it – virtually all Black citizens of America are forced to leave with the Space Traders. Various “tools” are employed, but the right ones evidentially were not – Golightly, the current President's “unofficial black cabinet member” (Bell 330) attempts to suggest that they all pull a “trickster” on the rest of the population, but it does not go through the wall of prideful integrity at the “Anti-Trade Coalition” (Bell 342). There is no conformation that careful and judicious use of language would have turned the tide, but Golightly gets the last laugh, sort of:

“ “I wonder,” he murmured, half to himself, half to his wife, as they rode in a luxury limousine sent, in some

irony, by the Secretary of the Interior to convey them to the nearest roundup point, “how my high-minded

brothers at the conference feel now about their decision to fail with integrity rather than stoop to the bit of

trickery that might have saved them.” ” (Bell 354)⁸

If there is something to be learned from this, it is that it is probably better to carefully compare “houses” before committing to one – pay less attention to the craftsmanship and builder than the location and safety of it.

As mentioned before, “hybrid” is not the best word to use when referring to languages, and a “tools and houses” metaphor for expression in one is not foolproof – most of the preceding two paragraphs is an excellent example of this. Despite its simplicity, it actually is a difficult question to answer, as it is possible to both agree and disagree with it depending on what context it is placed in. The best to answer it, as hopefully shown, is to not assume that the answers are limited to a simple yes or no, but to remember that there are two components to it: the end and the means, the actual expression and the roads that actually lead to it. There are really three answers, in this case, wherein one or the other is more important, or they are both of equal importance. In other words, “massa's house” (the body of literature) can be kept while the “tools” are destroyed and a new “house” is built across the street, or “massa's tools” (the methods which can be used to create it) can be kept and used to dismantle the “house” while another is built across the street, or both can be kept while another “house” is built across the street. It almost does not matter, as another house is eventually going to get built anyway – the only difference is whether there will even be a neighbor, an annoyed neighbor, or a neighbor who comes by twice a week to the new house to study and criticize it for years until it is accepted.

At any rate, “hybrid” is not the proper word to attach to “tools”, but in keeping with Eshun's attention to the sonic medium, perhaps “remixed” might make more sense when the “tools” are language. It certainly seems to fit within the boundaries of Afrofuturism.

Works Cited:

Bell, Derrick. “The Space Traders.” Dark Matter. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. Aspect, 2001. 326-355.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.2

2003. 287-302. University of Washington, Seattle, WA. 27 Mar. 2007

<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v003/3.2eshun.html>

“Far Beyond The Stars.” Writ. Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler. Perf. Avery Brooks. Star Trek: Deep Space

Nine. 2 Feb. 1998

Hopkinson, Nalo. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson,

Uppinder Mehan. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004. 7-9.

Shockley, Evie. “Separation Anxiety.” Dark Matter. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. Aspect, 2001. 51-68.

1A debatable way of putting it: simply imagining a world in which everyone is Black will not do it along

2This is a highly limited reading, of course, but to keep a longish paper under control, it will do.

3English, lacking a governing body as a language, is notoriously unreliable in cases.

4Dialect refers to a particular syntax and vocab, often with its own accent (pronunciations) in practice.

5Related and fun, but ultimately pointless, example: in the original Transformers, the six “Constructicons” are each good at a particular construction job and transform from/into a related heavy vehicle – they build things. They can also combine into Devastator , who does exactly what his name implies, not uncommonly to things recently built by the Constructicons. It's like this, in a way.

6This person is described as a friend of Zainab Amadahy, and a recent recipient of a PhD. (Hopkinson 7).

7I'm sure they could, and that perfectly good books and movies have been written about forced memory loss...

8There is no question mark or tone – he likely expected it.