Dave Brown

Day O' Fail, kind of

I started out the day attempting to renew my visa, only to learn that there was a piece of paperwork that my place of work needed to fill out—which they hadn’t. They figured just the quick note saying “Dear Immigration, Dave still works for us, so please let him do so, love $ORKPLACE” would suffice. Immigration disagreed.

I’d taken the entire day off—the morning to take care of immigration paperwork and the afternoon to go to the dentist. I went to the dentist and got properly dented (that new tooth is quite nice, thanks).

Unfortunately my bike also got dented, but not nearly as badly as the car that ran into it did. I was pulling up to a red light at one of the crazier intersections in Tokyo and the car pulling up behind me didn’t see the light. BAM! I was knocked about a foot to the right.

The car’s driver was very nice about it, because he knew he was 100% in the wrong—the light was red, after all, and I was stopping, because that’s what you do at a red light. He was trying to beat it, which is precisely what you don’t do. He ended with the bumper of his car stove in quite impressively—and the only damage the bike suffered was a bent license plate and a couple of scuffs on the transmission case. Congratulations to Aprilia for making such a sturdy bike! I wasn’t even knocked off it by the impact.

We exchanged names, phone numbers and addresses, and he told me that if there was anything that needed fixing on it, to call him and he’d arrange for it to be paid for. Impressively enough, even though he hit me directly in front of a police box, no policemen seemed to notice.

It turns out that the bike is just fine, though—I didn’t even notice any difference in the way it drove at all. I’m quite impressed at the amount of damage to the car, though—I guess when they make cars with crumple zones, they take it seriously these days. Bike 1, car 0.

Lurching into the future

We determined that we needed to get a vacuum cleaner, so we went shopping for one the other day.

Did you know that vacuum cleaners have all of a sudden gotten really expensive? It used to be that you could get a really good vacuum cleaner for an ichiman or so (about a hundred dollars, for people in Foreign)—but the current crop of vacuum cleaners can be gotten for somewhere north of five hundred bucks. For that kind of price, I’d expect the thing to do its own damn vacuuming!

So we got a Roomba, which for the introductory model these days, costs somewhat less than ¥50,000—but which does, in fact, do its own damn vacuuming.

It’s really cute! It bumbles around just like a sort of drunken cat, in its efforts to cover the entire apartment. But it does have its downsides.

It really is happiest when you have a tidy apartment for it to run around in. That’s a bit of a problem for a geek like me, who has wires trailing around all over the place. It’s already proven its prowess at emulating a real human janitor, by tripping over the router’s power cable and disconnecting me from the Internet. It also tends to get tangled in the curtains—although to its credit, it seems to realize that this has happened, and backs away quite gracefully.

It’s surprisingly good at navigating its way around obstacles—for instance, it cheerfully clambered up onto the quite-thick living-room rug we have and did quite a thorough job of cleaning it, even though it has a coffee table and an end table on it.

A lovely benefit of having a vacuum cleaner that’s self-propelled and is only four inches high, though, is that it can cheerfully go under things. It did a great job of clearing out the dust from underneath the sofa and the TV stand, places which would generally go unvacuumed by normal people. And it’s still good fun to watch.

When we get sufficiently-organized, with any luck, I’ll be able to just hit “go!” on the thing in the morning and then head off to work, and come back to find a robot in some place for me to trip over—but a clean apartment. We determined that the price boost for getting a robot that could find its own charging stand was a bit high—and the price boost for getting a robot with scheduling was just plain excessive.

So far: two thumbs up!

Also, it’s fun when it gets stuck somewhere—it stops, beeps mournfully, and says, “I’m stuck! Please move me to somewhere else and press the CLEAN button again.”

As I was saying to my taxi driver tonight...

“Man, what a pain it is, this construction.”

Because backwards your sentences run, when a point there is you want in Japanese to make.

He seemed okay with the construction, because he earned an extra couple of hundred yen from me, just from time spent waiting for the construction worker to give the go-ahead.

On the Prime Minister's fashion sense

Yukio Hatoyama just can’t get a break. When people aren’t complaining about how he can’t get a simple military base moved from one location in Okinawa to another (and hey, good luck ordering the US military around while you’re at it), people find fault with every little thing he does.

Apparently this is a hideous shirt, and he deserves to resign over it. Or something. Or so says a fashion designer who talked to CNN.

My favorite part of the CNN story is how Kyung Lah, the reporter who fashion designer Don Konishi talked to, blandly reports:

On the day Konishi spoke with CNN, he wore white-rimmed glasses, silver shoes and a small brimmed hat.

Yes, I did giggle at that. It’s a shame nobody else noticed that subtle Look Of Disapproval on the part of CNN. The Diplomat in their story went a step further though: they linked to the designer’s web page wherein he wears the same horrendous orange shirt on four different occasions. Talk about your motes and beams.

Casual racism or laziness? Or just excessive pedantry?

Cory Doctorow has a new novel out! It’s called For The Win, and as is his usual wont, he’s put it up on his web page for people to download at will. Which is, of course, exactly what I did.

And then I was almost immediately ejected from the book, through the petard of carefully establishing that a bunch of characters are speaking Mandarin to one another, and then having one of them say, “Oh, here comes the gweilo.”

Two things wrong with that spring immediately to mind. The first thing wrong with it is that it’s apparently a spelling that’s been through at least one iteration of someone who doesn’t know Chinese looking up “a Chinese derogatory term for a foreigner”, and pronouncing the resulting “gwailo” through their monolingual English filter. Hence ending up as “gweilo”, which if this were a linguistics paper, would have an asterisk after it to indicate its non-word-ness. That’s just not the pronunciation of the word. Just ask someone from Hong Kong.

The other thing is that, even if that’s what he came up with, it’s a Cantonese word. That would be like asserting that gringo is a word that the French use to talk about foreigners. Cantonese is a different language from Mandarin, with its own grammar, vocabulary and all that stuff.

As a bonus, he went on to carefully explain that the word meant “foreign devil”, which is nonsense. It actually means “foreign ghost”, and refers to the pale ghost-like skin that Europeans tend to sport. It ain’t a polite term, but its literal meaning is considerably less diabolical than people think it is.

This leads me to wonder: is this just a case of being lazy (asking some guy what a derogatory Chinese term for foreigner is and accepting the first answer that comes by) or casual racism (assuming that all of those yellow people speak the same lingo, and hey, Chinese is Chinese)? If the former, I would certainly expect better from someone so proud of being a member of The Internet. If the latter—I am very disappoint. I would expect better from a Torontonian.

Loud pipes do not save lives

Tonight on the way home, I found myself behind a guy on a big scooter. He had, er…enhanced his exhaust system. Instead of making polite little quiet scooter noises, he had set it up to make earth-shattering explosion noises. I swear, his exhaust had been set up to make whatever poor bastard who was stuck behind him stone deaf.

As a direct result of the sonic assault, I drove much too fast and much too aggressively, just so that I could get ahead of him—and get way ahead of him. I didn’t want to hear that horrible noise any more.

Which just goes to show, loud pipes not only don’t save lives, but they’re actually dangerous. For the love of God, please keep your motorcycle quiet. For my sake.

If only I'd thought to take a picture

Chie’s out tonight Drinking With Her Co-Workers And Boss, a curious ritual that Japanese people take part in in order to foster a closer working relationship amongst the workers (also, when Japanese people get drunk, they can say what they want, and anything embarassing they say can be laughed off as “Oh, they were just drunk, disregard”). Which leaves me at home alone, allowing me to indulge in something that I’m quite fond of, which because of her distaste for it, I don’t get to have very often.

Namely, tofu.

I totally stole the idea from Torisumi, but then again it’s simple enough. Take a block of tofu, slice it up, arrange it on a plate, splash a bit of sesame oil and light soy sauce over it, sprinkle some katsuo flakes over it (vegetarian alternative: substitute thinly-sliced nori for a different, but equally-delicious effect), and serve.

Easiest dish ever, but oh so good. Preparation time: less than a minute. Best results with slightly harder tofu, but Torisumi does it well enough with soft, light tofu.

Slightly mistaken identity

I just helped a bunch of people identify the face on the US $1 bill. The Federal Reserve helpfully wrote George Washington's name under his portrait.

Bonus points to whoever that rapper was for helping me to remember which bill has Benjamin Franklin's mug on it.

The pathetic thing is that I couldn't possibly name who's on the Japanese bills. It's that guy with the hair, the lady who wrote one book and then died, and uh...the guy who founded Tokyo University, or something.

Canada's bills have Wilfred Laurier, the Queen and er...well, I remember the Newfie Firing Squad on the old fifty well enough.

Didn't Yugoslavia have Nikola Tesla on their bills when they were enjoying skyrocketing hyperinflation?

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Zoom!

Chie told me that she wanted to spend the remainder of Golden Week (from here on) with her family rather than with me. To accomplish that, she told me she would be going to Sendai this evening.

I said, “Hey, well, if you’re going to do that, why don’t we make a bit of an adventure out of it anyway, and go up to Utsunomiya on my bike where you can catch the train from there to Sendai?”

She said, “That sounds like a fun little adventure,” so that’s what we did. I enlisted to come with, because Chie was a little concerned about me roaring about the countryside on my own (even though I do so quite often). Also, he tends to drive a little less, uh, exuberantly than I do, so having someone around to temper my driving style was a good thing as far as she was concerned. Chie tends to get anxious when I skip past a line of stopped cars to get to the front of the queue at a red light. If she saw how I dealt with traffic jams, she’d probably have a heart attack.

It was an awesome fun adventure. First of all, my navi routed us through a ridiculously-scenic part of Saitama—we all had trouble believing we were still in Saitama City, because we were going through these beautiful little areas with flower gardens, little family rice fields, gorgeous houses, wonderful things. I didn’t even want to go fast, because there was so much to look at—I was happy enouh just regarding my surroundings.

Then we finally hit the open road and went roaring along at a decent clip. There were interesting people on the road too—-for instance, there were four people on bikes that seemed to be color coded, as if they were a superhero team. called them that, but it was a fitting description: one was obviously Spider-Man, another was obviously a member of the Green Lantern Corps, and the other two simply had color codings that we didn’t know about yet.

Another character we spotted on the way up to Utsunomiya was The Ultimate Squid: an 18-year-old (or so) kid, riding a ridiculously overpowered motorcycle, wearing (I swear I am not making this up) shorts, a T-shirt, flip-flops, and of course, no helmet at all. When he caught me glaring at him, he gave me an aggrieved “What the hell is wrong with how I’m driving?!” look. I imagine he gave that look to quite a lot of people who were forced to share the road with him.

But then a bunch of kids decided to outdo The Ultimate Squid: I saw a teenager on a 125cc scooter, no helmet, with two passengers, also not wearing helmets, roaring around Utsunomiya. Apparently the police also have the day off today. Well, some of them.

After dropping Chie off at Utsunomiya Station to let her make her way to Sendai, we took the Tohoku expressway home. It was full of traffic jams. The first one was particularly amusing: it was caused by rubberneckers, gazing at the spectacle on the road going the other way. What had happened was that someone’s Harly had broken down (because that’s what Harleys do), and they had had to summon a truck to tow it home. But they’d also had to call an ambulance to take the victim of the Harley’s breakdown to a nearby hospital. Ironically that caused a great big traffic jam to happen in the opposite lane—everyone wanted to slow down to get a good look at the motorcycle accident.

There was another traffic jam on the road home, but it was a curious rolling traffic jam: traffic was moving quite fast, but everyone was really close to everyone else, which made the whole thing quite uncomfortable. Fortunately it dispersed quite far north of Tokyo, which meant that the ride home was pretty quick and comfortable.

Score one for mamacharis!

Chie got herself a nice new bicycle recently, although it has somewhat, uh…old-fashioned styling. It’s something that, say, Sheldon Brown would probably laugh like a drain at, but who cares? It’s got two wheels, three gears (and a planetary hub gear shifter, which means you can shift gears from a standstill), and a basket on the front. It’s a little-old-lady bicycle.

So today, it was a nice day and a holiday, so we took our bikes out for a bit of a spin. After going around the local park (which is surprisingly-enormous) for a bit, we went out onto the city streets for a bit—and encountered a brand new home center that’d just opened today. Chie said “Let’s go in!” and we ended up about ¥10,000 poorer as a result. Which left us with an interesting problem: how do you get a closet organizer, a little set of shelves that slides in between the fridge and the wall, teapot, a wok, and a sock drawer that fits inside your regular drawer (to say nothing of a handbag), home when all you have is a couple of bicycles?

You do this:

My bicycle is the one right behind hers: note the abject lack of luggage-holding capability on it. Note that there is lots of room to put nearly everything on hers. My bike ended up with just a shopping bag hanging from the handlebars.