Dave Brown

In which I am a bit of a cock

One of the nice things about riding a motorcycle is that you can, when traffic is stopped, fit your bike in between cars, and between cars and sidewalks when necessary.

But one of the downsides of that is when you get some cager who has no idea how big his car is, and where it is in relation to the road. They often end up far to one side or the other, and they get in your way.

This morning, there was one such person who was sitting way over to the right hand side of his lane, and I was venturing to pass him on the right, between him and the sidewalk. All of the rest of the cars were in the center of the lane, so it was smooth sailing, until I got to this one guy.

I figured I’d give him a bit of a startle, and maybe make him pay more attention to where he was in his lane, by bumping my mirror against his before maneouvering my bike around it. He was stopped and I was travelling very slowly, so it wasn’t like I was endangering anyone’s life by this—just making a bit of a point.

But his car’s mirror was set up better than my wildest dreams. Instead of just simply making annoying knocking noises to startle the driver, apparently the people who had made the car had anticipated this very circumstance. The mirror simply bent forward as I went past the car—and then when I’d passed, it snapped back with an incredibly-satisfying BBBBBBDDDDOINGNGNGNGNGGGGG noise.

I have no regrets about what I did. None whatsoever.

I feel this should be in comic format

Steve at his desk

I really like this photo:

I learned so many things from it. Using the Mac Pro in the foreground as a reference for scale, I learned that Steve had a custom 60" monitor made for his home office. I also learned that he was four meters tall.

Otaku moment

After listening to it for the first time after a long break, I can’t help noticing that Japanese anime voice actress Kikuko Inoue’s 1992 album “Tadaima” has an interesting characteristic: it is entirely free of English. There isn’t even any use of English loan words in it. It’s almost a linguistic exercise: is it possible to make an entire album of light pop songs that don’t make use of any English loan words whatsoever?

Well, she seemed to pull it off. Making the album not only fun to listen to for the music, but for the odd purity of the language she used.

So, I got home after work tonight...

Riding home, I was sort of dithering over whether to use the expressway under Yamate-Dori to get home. I noticed the pixelboard over the Tomigaya entrance saying 西池袋から渋滞 which means “Traffic jam from Nishi-Ikebukuro”. It also observed that the traffic jam was 1km long, which is pretty long, but nothing I couldn’t deal with. Just on a hunch, because I’m familiar with that stretch of road and how traffic jams build up on it, I decided that I’d not go onto the expressway there and that I’d keep going to the next entrance, to see what the conditions were like.

The next entrance, Nakano Chojabashi, had amended the congestion notice: 中野長者橋から渋滞５ｋｍ. Which meant that the traffic jam started right there and went on for 5km. Under it, there was another, much more ominous note: 自動二輪者死亡事故発生. Motorcycle fatality.

Not only did I not take the expressway home, but I was riding noticeably slower and more carefully on the way.

WTF du jour

I was first startled by someone riding their bicycle across Todabashi on the wrong side of the road, not generally-advisable at the best of times.

I did a double-take when I realized they were wearing a bikini. It’s kind of getting colder lately.

I did a triple-take when I realized that the rider was a middle-aged man.

A funny thing happened when I went out yesterday

I went out for dinner last night with a friend of mine, and that involved taking the train at about 5pm. My train is the Keihin-Tohoku line, and when I got to the station, I noticed that they’d rather ominously turned off the scheduled time for the next train on the pixelboards.

At first I figured there’d been an “accident” (i.e., someone jumping in front of a train), and those always take a long time to clean up. Then I noticed the announcements, and they were talking about an obstruction on the track.

As I stuck around, the reports became, as they tend to, progressively more detailed. At first, there was talk of the train hitting a bicycle on the track. I figured, oh, it’s some idiot who didn’t think that the flashing lights, bells, and barriers actually meant anything if he was on a bicycle.

Then it got weirder. It wasn’t a bicycle—it was several bicycles. The count kept going up, settling at 4 for a while. They were looking for a victim to see if anyone had been hurt or killed or anything. And they were looking for more bicycles. I vowed that I would be following up on this story in the morning.

So I just looked it up and discovered that what had actually happened was that someone had apparently gotten angry at people parking their bicycles outside the railway station, and had just started hurling them over the fence onto the tracks which were a few meters below. He managed to throw five bicycles over the fence before a train came along, smashing a couple of the bicycles, terrifying the train driver, and suddenly focusing JR’s attention directly upon him, at which he fled.

Well, this afternoon the police arrested a 50-year-old unemployed man. I expect he’ll be charged with destruction of property and made to buy his victims new bicycles.

The final end of the bodge

I’ve put quite a lot of effort into getting a satnav mounted onto my bike in the past, which was complicated by the fact that every piece of mounting equipment out there mounts onto the handlebars. Which, on my bike, are covered in plastic. What I eventually ended up doing was just slapping a bit of velcro on top of the headlight, and sticking the satnav to that.

The bike having recently been replaced with a newer one after some excitement a few months ago, I decided that if at all possible, I would try to find a non-bodge way of getting a satnav onto the bike. Preferably also no involving Velcro. So yesterday, I hopped onto #2 Industry Road, and went to a bike-goods store not too far away from me that happens to quite often have just the sort of thing I’m looking for when I go there.

I wasn’t disappointed this time either. I found one of these which is a bar bracket. It’s basically a little bit of handlebar that mounts in your mirror mounting, so that if your bike doesn’t make any handlebars available, you can make some extra for your purposes.

After puzzling out the dual-bolt arrangement for my mirrors (the top bolt, it turns out, holds the mirror on, while the bottom bolt holds the mirror assembly on), I got the thing in place, and it looks like this:

I also picked up an inexpensive generic mounting thing, because now that I have a bit of handlebar on my handlebars, inexpensive generic mounting things are actually available. It looks like this in place:

And with the satnav finally installed:

It finally doesn’t look like I’ve put a horrible hack into place. It almost looks as if it even belongs there.

This is relevant to this discussion. Pay attention.

Today I went to the Mister Donut near me—you know about Mister Donut, right? Well, there was an insane number of people there, and I couldn’t get in. Then I looked at the banner hanging from the ceiling. It had “half price” written on it. How stupid, I thought. Those fools.

You don’t go to Mister Donut because it’s half price! That’s crazy. It’s only like 63 yen per donut. Sixty-three yen. There were entire families here, I was thinking. Family of four, all going out for Mister Donut? Crazy.

“Alright, Daddy’s going to order a dozen crappy donuts.” I couldn’t even bear to watch it. Mister Donut should be a battleground. With a tense atmosphere where two guys at opposite tables can start a fight any time. The dog-eat-dog mentality, that’s what’s good about it. Women and children should piss off and stay home.

Anyway, I was about to start eating, and then the bastard at the cash register goes, “Old-fashioned, and a Pon de Ring.” Who in the world orders an old-fashioned and a Pon de Ring? I wanted to ask him, “Do you really want to eat both of those horrible donuts?” I wanted to sit him down for a good hour to figure out what on earth was going through his head.

Coming from a Mister Donut expert like myself, the latest trend is the “crunchy” donuts. That’s right, with the filling with rice crispie bits in the middle. That’s the proper way to eat at Mister Donut. Then it’s delicious—you can’t get better.

However, if you order that, then there’s a danger that you’ll be noticed especially by the employees the next time you come in. It’s a double-edged sword. I can’t recommend it to amateurs.

What this all really means, though, is that you should just stick with today’s special.

With apologies to 2ch.net oldbies.