Dave Brown

!

Even raising the top speed of the little bike by a modest 15% or so cut about ten minutes off my ride to work. I am impressed.

At home with Chie

A few days ago, I spent over seven hundred yen at 7-11, which was cause for them letting me draw a ticket from a bucket in case I won something.

I was lucky, and did! A can of Sapporo Mugi and Hop. Which is a bit of a booby prize for beer drinkers—it’s happoshu, which is a beer-like drink that you can get in Japan which cleverly skirts rules about what officially constitutes “beer”.

Well, I finally had a good reason to crack the can today—it was LUDICROUSLY hot, and I needed something that was (a) cold and (b) not actually necessarily good. The free happoshu fit the bill perfectly!

I let Chie have a taste, although she didn’t really see any reason to. But you never know, it might actually turn out to be good (there’s a novelty happoshu from Osaka, for instance, called “Hemp High”, a stoner brew that uses hemp in place of malt, and is actually very drinkable).

It wasn’t very good though. The odds were against it right from the get-go. She said, “Yup! That’s definitely happoshu. It’s actually kind of a nostalgic flavour.”

I said, “A reminder of the days when you had no money?”

She said, “That’s about the shape of it, yup.”

“Your university days?”

“Half a year ago, more like.”

Well…I guess she’s doing well for herself, at any rate.

Speed demon!

Since I decided to keep the little toy scooter (well, it’s fun to ride, for one thing) instead of giving it away or selling it, I’ve decided that I might also use it to learn a thing or two about doing Manly Work With My Hands—in other words, I would do my own maintenance on it.

To that end, I decided that, as the first bit of maintenance I would do by my own self, I would replace its drive belt. It has a CVT transmission which connects the engine to the wheels by means of a V-shaped belt and a pulley with springs connected to these little metal saucers to vary how fast the engine drives the wheels. It’s quite ingenious really. But one of the bits that wears out is the belt itself.

So I popped round to my local motorcycle bits store and picked up a new belt. I could have gotten an official Suzuki belt, but I chose to get a Daytona-brand Reinforced Drive Belt™ from the “tuning” bit of the store, just to see what (if any) impact a performance drive belt would have.

Well, I managed to get the transmission open, after quite a lot of fiddling. Lacking an impact wrench to dismantle the gear assembly, I had to sort of wrestle the belt off, and then wrestle the new one on (which was actually much harder than taking the old one off).

Somewhere along the line, I managed to make the bike so the starter motor can’t turn over any more. Whoops. I think I did something wrong with the starter widget thing so that it doesn’t fit in properly any more, or turn around, or something. At some point I’m going to have to fix that, I suppose.

I put the bike back together, which went a lot smoother than taking it apart because there weren’t so many confusing puzzles to figure out along the way, and then kicked it to life to take it for a test drive.

When I first got the bike, it had a top speed on flat ground of about 52km/h (by its own speedometer). By the time I changed the belt, it could just barely manage 50km/h. With the new belt, on the other hand, the new top speed on flat ground is about 63km/h; and going downhill, it can get up to nearly 70km/h!

Stay tuned (heh!) for my next exciting installment, where I get it up to 80km/h, whilst at the same time (because I’m a genius) disabling the turn signals.

Obligatory omiyage

Of course, being back in Japan, I am pretty well obliged to bring the people in the office something by way of omiyage—something small and edible and somehow representative of where I’d gone to.

Since I’d gone to Canada, the obvious candidate is maple cookies. However, cookies in Canada aren’t packaged quite like cookies in Japan are—instead of having each cookie individually wrapped in its own sterile wrapper, it was just a bunch of cookies in a tray in a box.

So when I gave the packages of cookies to the admin assistants, this happened:

The admin assistant made tiny little boxes, one for each cookie, for everyone in the entire department.

It was annoying me, and it can annoy you too

Richard Goyce in the recent TV adaptation of Going Postal sounds exactly like David Essex as the artillery man in Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War of the Worlds.

I'm in Canada!

Maybe something weird has happened to me while I was in Japan, but man, the food here is all HUGE. I wanted a little bite to eat and got an oatmeal square from Starbucks—but there was some trick of perspective caused by how everything is scaled up by about 1.5x from what I’m used to, and I swear, the thing felt like it weighed about a kilogram.

Anyway, I’m in Vancouver right now, having cleared immigration and customs and picked up my checked-in bag and then re-checked it for the rest of the journey, in approximately, I’m not kidding here, five minutes. I was astounded—it’s never been that fast for me before. There just happened to be no lineups anywhere, and the whole rigamarole with showing my passport and handing over the customs declaration card was handled deftly by a robot. It was awesome.

Also recommended: Air Canada’s multicolored light show from the ceiling lights on their new 777s.

Phew

My drive home tonight felt like some sort of traffic safety exam.

The drive was full of lots of lovely cars swerving and changing lanes at the last moment with no notice, people on bicycles only rarely looking where they were going, and people with only a vague at best concept of such things as “traffic lights” and “lanes”. At one point, a little kid actually ran out into the road directly in front of me! Also, the ride was oddly-populated by old guys driving big bikes—I noticed a Harley Sportster 1200 and a BMW R1200 especially—really really fast. That was a bit disconcerting, yes.

Fortunately I apparently passed—nobody was hurt, nobody got driven into, and nobody got knocked off their bikes. And here I am, home.

Couple of inches to fill

At least 28 people died and at least 44 were injured when a bus plunged off a highway and into a ravine in Bolivia Sunday, state media said.

Preliminary police reports indicate that brake problems on the bus, which was carrying 70 passengers, may have caused the accident, state-run Radio Patria Nueva reported.

I love a nice shiny doomity-doom scenario

This scientist thinks that humans are doomed to extinction.

Hey, 95-year-old former scientists are very rarely wrong.

How I spent today

It was a nice day, and the next few days are all forecast to be rain, and Chie was feeling more like curling up in front of the TV doing nothing than going out and doing stuff, so (with her blessing) I took my bike out into the countryside for a bit.

Instead of what I normally do when I do things like that, which is to see how many prefectures I can manage to encounter in a single ride (I consider such rides successful if I hit four of ’em, counting Tokyo as a prefecture), I decided to explore some of the more hilly country-ish bits of Saitama.

Final tally: 220km (plus epsilon for me to get to the gas station—ten or so, I believe). And some lovely photographs. You might think my camera exaggerates the greens, but it doesn’t. They’re actually slightly more vivid in person than the camera can record without making them look plasticky and artificial. (Maybe they’ll look better if someone makes hexachrome sensors and displays—possibly for the benefit of mantis shrimp.)