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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 129 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 November 22 Monday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) An empty schedule this Monday morning, so a good chance to plan my lessons, catch up on paperwork and clean up my room. Had a bad moment when I thought I'd lost all the notes I made yesterday for the Christmas story I'm writing, a heartwarming piece called SANTA CLAUS, SEX CRIMINAL. However, the notes turned up okay, and, all going well, I'll be able to post the story online in the next couple of weeks or so. In time for Christmas, anyway. In the process of cleaning up my room I come across all kinds of notes on all kinds of bits and pieces of paper. A note on the price of kerosene locally this year. Right now, locally, it costs 1,100 yen to get a refill of your standard 18-liter plastic kerosene storage tank. (Coincidentally, as I input this, I hear the music of the kerosene truck coming around the neighborhood.) That 1,100 yen is way up from last year, when the price was seven hundred and something. An old note going back to the early days of the Niigata earthquake, saying that NHK is showing special weather forecasts for selected locations in Niigata. A fragmentary scrap on Japanese saying "aru toki mo aru." It means, I think, "not always" or "sometimes." Must upgrade my Japanese skills. When I have time. But when will that be? Some of the notes are on things which once seemed important but no longer do. For example, an undated note which says "Almost got killed by a cyclist scudding along in the silence of the night, riding on the sidewalk, displaying no lights. Well, so what? The "almost getting killed" business happens with uncomfortable regularity. And not just on silent nights, either. Also on wet nights noisy with passing traffic, the cyclist coming from behind, zap!, or shooting through an intersection against the lights. If this blog suddenly ceases, suspect a cyclist! Section 129 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 November 23 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) And it's finished. And it's posted online. A story in the spirit of Christmas, 2004. SANTA CLAUS, SEX CRIMINAL. He was a sex criminal. Once. But that was then. This is now. These days, he's doing penance. He's Doing the Right Thing. This sweet, heartwarming story is - Okay, okay ... truth in advertising. SANTA CLAUS, SEX CRIMINAL is actually a sick horror story, the degenerate product of a twisted mind. Part of it I made up and part of it I saw on TV, here in Japan. Just as well I don't have much time to watch TV these days, otherwise there'd be no hope for me. Section 129 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 November 24 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) A public holiday yesterday, so we all three of us went to the zoo, me and my wife and the baby. The zoo we went to was Nogeyama Zoo, in Yokohama, about ten minutes on foot from Hinodechou station on the Keikyuu Line. It was a good day - well, a half day. We started early and went home at lunch time. We had neglected to bring any of the basic survival gear that the entrepid explorer should take along as a matter of course - we had no food, no water, no firearms and no means of making fire - and we suffered for it. Because there's nowhere at the zoo to buy food, unless you count small and rather highly-priced ice creams available from one of the vending machines. However, a good day, and baby Cornucopia enjoyed it. She enjoyed the lesser pandas, which are small and very active animals. The empty elephant enclosure failed to impress her (the last elephant died off some time ago) and, when we got to the giraffe enclosure, Cornucopia was more interested in the green railing round the enclosure than in the giraffes. I got one story idea while at the zoo. The zoo features a place called the "Nakayoshi Hiroba," which the zoo's English-language pamphlet (available free at the entry gate) translates as a "Meeting Place With Small Animals." This is a petting zoo within the main zoo, a petting zoo where small and highly excited small children get to groom and carry around extremely small animals - animals which are much, much smaller than the children themselves. The animals I was able to identify (with children greatly outnumbering animals it was difficult to get a good view) included a number of baby chicks and what seemed to be a guinea pig. I will refrain from speculating about the life expectancy of the small animals. Anyway, the story idea, which I probably won't have time to exploit (and, besides, maybe it's been done before), would be to write a story called "Petting Zoo," in which people with no other options earn a buck by allowing themselves to be petted by aliens in the alien-meets-human equivalent of a petting zoo. The particularly good news about the trip into the big wide world was that Cornucopia consented to travel in my baby carrying pack without a fuss, and behaved well when she encountered the noisy world of trains and cars and milling small children. The Nogeyama Zoo apparently has an URL which I haven't had a chance to check out. According to the English-language pamphlet (which apparently is a bit old - the pamphlet still thinks the zoo possesses an elephan) the URL is: http://www.city.yokohama.jp/me/green/noge/index.html [Later: checked the URL. Works, but it's in Japanese.] Anyway, as mentioned above, I probably won't write the "petting zoo" story. I can remember at least one SF story in which humans become the playthings of the children of a bunch of aliens. So maybe the idea is a bit too obvious. The next story I want to post online (soon, I hope) is HOT CARDBOARD, a story which touches on a subject curiously neglected by English literature, the subject being the sex life of cardboard boxes. The protagonist of the story is, of course, a cardboard box.
Section 129 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 November 26 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Feedback on the petroleum jelly entry and on the snot-sucking machine. One the petroleum jelly from a flesh-and-blood human being who asked me if I really put petroleum jelly up my nose, and, if so, how much? Yes, really, and just enough to moisten it. If you stuff your nostrils with the jelly and end up snotting out great chunks of it, you're overdoing it. And I put it up my OWN nose, not other people's noses. I would never (NEVER!) put anything into or up my baby daughter's nose. Which brings us to the snot-sucking machine. Got an e-mail about a guy in Thailand, a teenager with a fighting cock, whmo apparently got avian flu and died after sucking mucus from the cock's throat during a cock fight. Yes, if your sport is encouraging chickens to kill each other, maybe you need a snot-sucking device. But I somehow don't think the "made for humans" version would suit a fighting cock. I don't think fighting cocks have anything that we could reasonably recognize as a nose. Closing note on the petroleum jelly: lips, too. And heels, sometimes. My hells tend to crack in winter. Section 129 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 November 27 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) So baby Cornucopia got taken by her mother to a special lecture on baby food which was for babies aged seven and eight months and their mothers. And every single baby who attended the lecture was quiet, and sat neatly on mother's lap, and listened attentively. Every baby but one. One of the babies was not quiet at all. One of the babies wriggled and squiggled and did its best to displace itself in all directions. Right through the lecture. But I'm not going to say which baby it was. This stuff gets archived forever, right? Anyway, at the lecture, a very important point was made: at this stage (seven or eight months) Baby should be getting used to all kinds of new foods. And (MOST IMPORTANTLY!!) Baby's plain rice should not be mixed with anything else. When Baby eats plain rice it should be served to Baby straight. Why? Because if Baby always expects rice to be mixed with something else, Baby might be reluctant to eat just plain old rice, and that would be something of a disaster, wouldn't it now? Personally, I wasn't fed rice as a baby, but I can eat plain rice straight, and was doing so the other day when someone asked me if I put salt or pepper on it. "Salt or pepper?" I said, shocked at the very thought. "No! This is plain rice!" "And what does it taste like?" "It tastes disgusting. This is the worst rice ever." And it was, too. It was the rice from our time-expired earthquake rations. Having bought new earthquake rations, we went and cooked the time-expired stuff. Which tasted like cardboard. Really. Essence of cardboard. Later, my wife asked me how much of the rice I had eaten before throwing the rest away. I could have lied (because I had taken the rice to work rather than eating it at home). But, given the nature of the rice, a lie would not have been believable. So I told the truth. Half. (And that was hard going.) |
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