Japanblog 2004 March-June

2004 June 30 Wednesday.
Got a kind e-mail advising me of the existence of OpenOffice for Linux

2004 June 29 Tuesday.
Yesterday, in the course of my busy day, I chanced by a place offering haircuts in ten minutes for a thousand yen

2004 June 28 Monday.
My BAMBOO HORSES project has been stalled, dead in the water, for weeks now. My life has been dominated, rather, by the new baby, by a big curriculum development project that I've been doing for the company I work for, and, generally, by that demanding mess known as "life."

2004 June 27 Sunday.
I was riding in a train with some other teachers a couple of weeks back and one of them looked at my battered computer, greasy with stains and spills, the screen unwiped for weeks

2004 June 19 Saturday.
At two months of age, baby Cornucopia seems to sometimes be saying her first proper word

2004 June 12 Saturday.
I got a real lesson in Japanese demographics today when I was sent out into the streets of our part of the city of Yokohama to price nappies (diapers) and baby milk (cans of)

2004 June 12 Saturday.
Words of wisdom received by e-mail today

2004 June 11 Friday.
My baby daughter Cornucopia, less than two months of age, has definitely invented mobility. Her means of locomotion is not described in any of the textbooks

2004 June 06 Sunday.
Today's culturally interesting experience is eating small dead dried flying fish

2004 June 05 Saturday.
Monday, I finally found time to cut my toenails

2004 May 29 Saturday.
Apparently while I was at work yesterday my baby daughter Cornucopia had a slightly disturbing encounter with an anomalous object entirely new to her. The anomalous object

2004 May 26 Wednesday.
At roughly five weeks of age, my baby daughter has developed at least one clear communicative strategy and, what's more, is showing a definite anticipation of future events

2004 May 24 Monday.
At a little over one month of age, my daughter has devised a method to communicate

2004 May 18 Tuesday.
A couple of strange things happened, odd incidents of the kind that can nourish fiction.

2004 May 14 Friday.
Not yet quite mid-May, but already the Tokyo-Yokohama area is starting to get uncomfortably hot. Under gray skies, misty gray smog. The heat, the smog and the end-of-week fatigue

2004 May 13 Thursday.
My big excitement today was that I found time to get out the shears and cut the grass on our pocket-handkerchief lawn, something I haven't done for about eighteen months. Normal everyday life: cutting the grass, putting on my necktie, heading off to work, opening the daily newspaper on the train, and - hey, what's this? - a beheading.

2004 May 10 Monday.
A few days ago I wrote about mystical text strings, incantatory creations of cabbalistic arcana discovered hidden inside vulgar HTML spam messages

2004 May 08 Saturday.
Given that I've been watching Japanese TV coverage of Iraq on NHK and American TV coverage on CNN and seeing stuff on the Internet and reading the International Herald Tribune on a daily basis, I thought I was pretty much up to speed with the growing scandal of the behavior of Anglo-American occupation forces in Iraq, but it seems I'm not. It's not just a matter of humiliating people: it's a matter of killing people.

2004 May 08 Saturday.
Today I solved (I think) one small mystery which has been puzzling me for months now, and got a sudden insight into a previously unsuspected world of semantic creativity, a product of the Age of the Internet.

2004 May 07 Friday.
Switched on the TV this morning and was surprised to see George W. Bush apologizing. Two things surprised me about the apology. The first was that he made it at all. The second was that the George W. Bush apology

2004 May 06 Thursday.
A working day. The early afternoon found me sitting in a cream-gray room with a view of a gray stretch of harbor water calm beneath a gray sky. The view beyond the water: gray Tokyo office blocks and construction cranes

2004 May 06 Thursday.
Bush didn't apologize? Apparently not.

2004 May 05 Wednesday.
A few days ago I saw a hard-headed newspaper opinion piece which explained, at least to my satisfaction, exactly what America should do about Iraq. The Iraq exit strategy

2004 May 05 Wednesday.
One set of inputs my baby most emphatically does not get is those from the TV, which is in another room altogether, and which has recently been showing, at intermittent intervals, the most disconcerting images

2004 May 05 Wednesday.
My daughter, less than three weeks old, is my youngest English student, and already she is beginning to learn the nuances of communication, if not of speech.

2004 April 29 Thursday.
And of course other things have been happening besides the birth of my daughter. For example, in an undisclosed location in a remote area of Japan, I was able to take a genuine UFO photo.

2004 April 29 Thursday.
Japan is still, in very many ways, a nation of ceremony, and so the birth of a baby is (naturally) accompanied by a certain amount of ceremony. Seven days after my daughter was born

2004 April 28 Wednesday.
Got an e-mail from G. saying his son is nine months old and he's still "insanely busy," and I can definitely relate to that. My new universe runs non-stop. Yesterday's really packed schedule, for example

2004 April 23 Friday.
The first time I knew I was ready for fatherhood was in the delivery suite

2004 April 19 Monday.
Still rushed off my feet but had time to check a few favorite Internet sites, and so discovered that

2004 April 13 Tuesday.
I got an e-mail suggesting I might like to think about blogging about the Japanese hostage situation

2004 March 29 Monday.
Tonight's TV news showed scenes of counter-terrorism training in the Tokyo Dome, including

2004 March 28 Sunday.
One of my recent culinary adventures in Japan was going to a tenpura restaurant in Minowa, which is in Tokyo, and eating sperm. The sperm in question was in the form of shirako, which in English translates into

2004 March 28 Sunday.
Yesterday, when I took the Tōbu Line from Asakusa station in Tokyo to Ōta station in Gunma Prefecture, I noticed that the trash cans all along the route have been sealed so nobody can put bombs in them - counter-terrorism precautions

2004 March 24 Wednesday.
Yesterday, on the Yurakuchō line, a subway line which runs through the heart of Tokyo, an announcement came over the intercom (in Japanese, of course) warning us (I think) to be on the alert for terrorist threats. The announcement definitely made specific reference to the recent bombings in Madrid, Spain. Later, at Ikebukuro station, I saw

2004 March 21 Sunday.
Busy. Today I uploaded the text of a novel, which is

2004 March 18 Thursday.
My mother, who is currently visiting China, is exploring the wonderful world of oriental cuisine. Earlier I got an e-mail saying that she had tried (and had enjoyed) eating ducks' tongues. Today's e-mail message says, in part

2004 March 14 Sunday.
Right now, the the website associated with the British newspaper The Guardian has an article about how people are being treated at Guantanamo Bay. The article reveals the existence of "a secret super-maximum security facility" called Camp Echo

2004 March 14 Sunday.
Safety versus civil liberties - this is the debate which is starting to intensify after the recent terrorbomb attacks in Spain, and I think it's a false dichotomy.

2004 March 13 Saturday.
Hillary Clinton for vice president?

2004 March 11 Thursday.
On the TV news on NHK 1 here in Japan, not one word this morning about Martha Stewart

2004 March 08 Monday.
Bill Clinton for vice president! This (theoretical) possibility surfaced (briefly) on CNN this morning. Apparently it's constitutionally possible

2004 March 07 Sunday.
I found a startling quote from the Age of the Ayatollahs

2004 March 05 Friday.
It's 22:36 Japan time and I don't know when I'm going to be able to upload this, because I can't access the zenvirus.com website at all. In frustration, I started clicking round other blogs, and clicked through to the website of the Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, who blogged all through the recent war in Iraq.

2004 March 05 Friday.
This morning I woke up at 0400, rather earlier than usual. Is there news on NHK at 0400? I didn't know. So I switched on TV and got the answer: there wasn't. Instead, there was (today) a program about animals in the wilderness in Argentina. I went into the kitchen and there I found, on the sinkbench, a light blue plastic carton with three mushrooms inside and a dark blue ceramic bowl containing five strawberries.

2004 March 04 Thursday.
Today, when I woke up, it was really cold, so when I slid back the metal shutters (a standard feature of the architecture of modern Japanese houses) I was really expecting the snow that we had been promised by the weather forecast. But there was no snow. Instead, gray skies, a narrow strip of dry grass (my "lawn") and the world of concrete. And from that occurrence, plus a key word on the news, I got a story idea.

2004 March 03 Wednesday.
So how does one write an original story? I've decided to construct a guide to this, and the first tip is to watch what happens in your own life, and try to figure out the fictional possibilities of any unique little incidents that happen, particularly those which can be viewed from two different perspectives. For example, let's look at an incident from my own life which happened yesterday.

2004 March 02 Tuesday.
In the writing world, theft is the sincerest form of flattery. However, I'm annoyed every time I have to deal with another case of word-for-word plagiarism