One thing that I wanted to see in Tokyo: weather. (You know, like we don't get in LA ( Read more... )

If I had known that they didn't mind my connecting at internet cafes with my own laptop, I would have updated here a long time ago. It's only been a week since I landed in Tokyo, but it seems like forever. I'm still not able to actually speak Japanese, but I get a little farther each day before I throw up my hands and request that they switch to ( Read more... )

Going to Tokyo Monday, will return after New Year's. No particular plans.

Doomed. Totally doomed.

Bought a turkey for Thanksgiving, which I suppose means I'm obligated to cook the damned thing. No goose this year -- I liked it last year, and I think it went well, and for exactly that reason I doubt I'll ever do it again. To indulge in a bit of Shirley Jackson pastiche:
I might have thought differently about it if it had gone badly the first ( Read more... )

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition:
The Rickson's is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion ( Read more... )

Raining again today. I walked to the 7-11 and bought an ice cream bar, then ate it standing outside. I can do these things now. I'm an adult ( Read more... )

Occurred to me today that, as we've been defining the sides in the U.S. lately, the military ought to be among the farthest-left institutions in the country. Consider:

• Affiliated with a strong central government
• Provides comprehensive, single-payer health care (with emphasis on preventative treatment, no less)
• Favors centralized planning and ( Read more... )

The local transit service runs some trivia questions on their in-bus displays. (I know, it's like all the most annoying parts of the future are coming true.) Thing is, the trivia questions are impossibly difficult. At least I think so, and I think that I've got a pretty good fund of trivial information ( Read more... )

Spent the last three weeks growing a beard. It wasn't all I did, but it might as well have been -- turns out that, at least for me, the sensation of having a beard is incredibly distracting. Couldn't concentrate on much of anything. Plus, my mom commented that I looked like Castro, so I shaved it off ( Read more... )

I find myself wanting a second-person plural quite a bit of the time. Usually in constructions like, "Could y'all send me a DTD for the dms on-the-wire format?" (The Wikipedia helpfully points out that I could also say "youse", "use", "yinz" or "ye". Helpful, that ( Read more... )