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Section 68 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 September 12 Friday.
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At the risk of incinerating myself, I'm attempting to advance human knowledge by running some thermal damage prevention experiments. My motivation for doing this is that I don't want to show up at the place where I'm going looking as if I've spent the night sleeping on the beach.
It's really hot here in Japan, and, as I'm sitting here in the train, running my experiment, I'm wondering if I'm going to be burnt to death. The reason that I'm in danger of being incinerated is that my laptop computer is sitting on a newspaper, and I have the uneasy suspicion that my laptop might (just possibly) be hot enough to set the newspaper alight.
The reason why the laptop computer is sitting on the newspaper is to prevent the laptop's heat from ironing the crease out of my trousers. Today I'm dressed very formally, salaryman-style, in a suit with a nice sharp crease. And, in my experience, nothing removes the crease from a pair of pants faster than a hot laptop computer.
If you're ironing something, and you want to remove an existing crease, the fastest way to do this is to dampen the offending area. And the laptop, by causing sweat to come bubbling out of the user's legs, automatically dampens the user's trousers.
By putting a newspaper between the laptop and my trousers, I'm trying to insulate the trousers from the heat, and so nullify the laptop's crease-destroying tendency. However, how successful this method is going to be I'm not really sure yet.
All going well, the hot days of summer will soon be at an end here in Japan. If so, it may be that I won't gain enough experience with this method to produce a conclusive answer (good or bad) before the end of the season. Of course, if I catch fire and burn to death, this line of experimentation will, obviously, have been a move in the wrong direction.
Section 68 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 September 13 Saturday.
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Yesterday morning, as I stood on the station platform waiting for the train, it was so hot that I could feel sweat beading on my back. There were little droplets of sweat crawling in my underwear. And then, to top it off, the most disgusting sensation of all: a drop of sweat dripping somewhere in my ear.
Maybe I just haven't been sufficiently observant, but I don't remember ever sweating inside my ears before.
Section 68 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 September 14 Sunday.
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Yesterday, we went to the Shin Kokuritsu Gekijō (the New National Theatre, at Hatsudai, which is one stop from Shinjuku) to see a performance piece by a Japanese drama group called Ishinha. This performance piece, called "Nocturne," was billed as a play, and consisted of chanting, music and dance-like rhythmic movement sequences.
Quite frankly, I didn't understand any of this, but the whole thing was so visually stunning that I just just sat back and enjoyed the spectacle.
At one stage there was a looting sequence involving people criss-crossing the stage carrying things such as a clock, a net on a stick and a large blue vase. The large blue vase seemed to me to be a visual reminder of the looting in Baghdad, but then shortly thereafter we were in a railway station (I think) listening to a voiceover announcement in what seemed to be one of the Chinese dialects, and a little later in the piece some of the actual on-stage dialog was in Chinese.
Throughout the piece, there was very little dialog, and I didn't understand much of what there was. At one stage, there was a chant which sounded to me like "Kyū, kyū, kyū, kyū, kyū," which I interpeted (rightly or wrongly) as meaning "Urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent."
At another point, my own name was being chanted on stage:-
"Hugh, Hugh, Hugh, Hugh, Hugh."
That part I understood because I know that, in Japanese, "hyū" is a piece of onomatopoeia designed to imitate the sound of the wind. However, while I understood this, I couldn't make sense of it.
Despite not understanding anything that happened, I most thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.
In the complex which houses the Shin Kokuritsu Gekijō there are a bunch of eateries, including a branch of a chain called The English Pub. This outfit has a number of branches in Tokyo. The result is a reasonably convincing facsimile of the real thing, only cleaner than the real thing, and the patrons in the real thing aren't usually eating pub food with chopsticks.
The English Pub served up fish and chips for five hundred yen - not a large serving of chips, and not a large serving of fish either, but, even so, I found the portion adequate.
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