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About meArchives for August, 2005
For Boyd.
Boyd writes:
Durf,
You need to spice up your blog.
I read it every other day.
Maybe you can mention me in it sometime?
sb#21
You got it, baby! “Steve Boyd.” The following post is a reprint of something from this old page, and it’s all for you.
OKUTAMA FESTIVAL!
In summers past the Bochi crowd would take weekends off, fleeing western Tokyo for evern more western parts of Tokyo. Okutama! We would head up the hill to the six-lane and hit that rental shop for tents and camping mats. It was too warm to need many sleeping bags, but we took some along all the same because of the rocks. The damn rocks.
We would head up on the train–Tama Bochi Mae to Musashi Sakai to Tachikawa to Ome to Okutama. End of the line, near the tallest peak in Tokyo Prefecture, Kumotoriyama. It’s a pleasant place to spend time, and many people do just that, and by the time we got there all the good camping spots were generally taken, and we would head closer to the river bank, with the big rocks. The ones that went right under our tents.
The river runs cold and clear there, except when heavy rains hit the area, sweeping mud and silt off the hills and into the river. You see the results in the pictures. One result you don’t see is the river rising, affecting–who else?–the idiots camped on the banks. Every time we headed up there a typhoon would hit, and up would come the river level. The loudspeakers would broadcast their message of doom: “Get off of the river bank now!” (Scary sidenote: a few years ago some people didn’t, and when the dam gates were opened the water rushed down and washed most of them away.)
Four fine fotos above. (1) The crew in a lull in the rain. Me, Misa, Duke, Boyd, Beach, Sherry, Glas, and Jen. Beach is no longer with us. Jen should not have been with us at that point (but Glas insisted). And Boyd should not have been in that hat. (2) Cooling our heels, part one. Crap, now I’m in the hat. Glaser could lift a smaller one. Boyd is wondering what to do with his noodles. (3) Boyd figures out what to do with the yakisoba. Beach is less than thrilled, but the other three of us are! (4) We took a walk up the road and found a karaoke club. A fat man grilled meat on the barbecue on the balcony overlooking a branch of the river. We talked with him and his friends, drinking beer they offered us, and when we realized Boyd was gone we looked for him and found him in the bar–singing his little heart out. “New York, New York.” His desire to entertain never dried up, and it has earned him an Emmy, by the way . . .
Not that Boyd is a Bochi. He never spent his night on Perv Mountain. But since I am a good guy I include him on this page anyway.
Saturday Night Live
The good: Just got back from a walk around the neighborhood. There was a festival going on up near our station, so Megumi and I walked up to the soccer field, where they had a bunch of people playing drums and dancing and stalls set up to sell beer and fried noodles and such. Summer festivals are the best part about summer in Japan. (The summer weather is the worst.) We drank beer and awamori (Okinawan booze) and ate noodles and boiled soybeans and listened to the music. Fireworks for the finale´. Great stuff.
The bad: The weather, and the work I have to do this weekend. Must wrap up another 10-15 pages of this article on Chinese and Japanese views of history, and how they lead to trouble. I might have to give up and close the windows and fire up the air conditioner. We’re an eco-friendly house usually but this is getting ridiculous.
The good: On the way back from the festival we found a restaurant we hadn’t seen before. Italian joint. Great selection of wines, wonderful snack-style food (we had the mozzarella/tomato salad and the prosciutto with fresh figs), and very affordable prices . . . Plus the guy who runs the place says he stays open until two most nights. So we’ll be heading there again.
The bad: Got home and looked at email, and there was a note from a woman who’s scheduled to teach a class this summer at the language school whose translation program I coordinate. Sudden crisis in her life. She might not be able to hold herself together for the class. So I might have to take on an extra six classes later this month. Not to complain about an extra 180,000 yen coming in, but that’s a lot of evenings I don’t know if my schedule can take at this point . . . I’ll probably suck it up and take care of it just the same. (When there are three classes a week you can’t assign much in the way of homework, which means there isn’t as much to deal with outside of classroom hours; that’s one nice thing about this item.)
The good: Got a package from my brother and his wife. New sticks of RAM for the computer. I have the home machine up to 2GB, which will definitely tide me over until there’s a sweet new Intel-based Mac on the market for me in a couple of years. Memory is good.
So hot . . . Time to get some sleep.
Whoops!
Crap. I think I just erased a real human being’s comment instead of approving it. There was a new batch of about 30 spam posts and I zapped them all at once, but as the server was working on it I noticed that one comment was titled “Sorry for spamming” . . . That sounds a bit too honest to be from an actual spammer.
If that was you, I apologize and I promise to approve it right away if you’d be kind enough to post again.
EDIT: Never mind. I got another copy of the same post . . . and it actually was an honest spammer. Whodathunkit.
Work weirdness
So there I am, sitting in the office, translating something about this year’s crop of literary award winners. Someone comes over with a phone message for me: “Call this cellphone now.” I do, and it’s a National Diet member. I’ve written some speeches for him in the past (he speaks good English and gives talks overseas from time to time).
Today he wants something different. “There’s this song,” he says, “that I’m trying to understand. Help me out.” And I fire up the browser and get the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” up on my screen. We go through it, word by word, line by line, talking about the “poor boy whose story’s seldom told” and wondering whether he’s the same person as the boxer in the last verse, or whether that fighter is a symbol of enduring the hardships life throws at us.
After we get it all straightened out to his satisfaction, he thanks me, tells me mata yoroshiku, and hangs up. Now I’m back to the literature stuff. Very odd.
I do have that song stuck in my head now . . . it’s a nice one to have there.
Currently mousing mightily
So I took a walk and headed over to Ginza on my lunch break. Hit the Apple Store there and bought myself a Mighty Mouse. Some quick thoughts on this thing:
- It’s not a bad mouse. The right- and left-clicking work fine, although I prefer the Logitech mouse I use at home, with its separate buttons. This whole “one button with sensors to figure out where you’re clicking on the mouse surface” approach means that when you want to left-click, you can pretty much have your fingers all over the place, but when it’s time to right-click, you need to lift up everything that isn’t on the right side of the clicking surface.
- The scroll ball is pretty sweet. I loaded up some big photos in a small window and zipped up and down, back and forth. You can’t really go 360 degrees with this thing; like the Ars Technica review notes, it’s more of a “moving in squares” sort of motion. Or Tron light cycles, or something.
- It’s way too freaking hot to be taking lunchtime walks in Tokyo, Japan. Seriously.
- The Mighty Mouse, like Tokyo, is a hot item today . . . There was a pretty long line in the Apple Store, and probably four in every five people in it had one of those little black boxes.
- I need to get this damn PowerBook fixed already . . . It won’t read the CD that came with the mouse, so I can’t get the side-squeeze action going yet. Argh.
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