Archives for October, 2006

Now reading . . .

Recently finished:

The Telling by Ursula K. LeGuin. Great stuff, as is just about everything she writes . . . There’s an artistic concept called 間 (ma, or “empty space”) that’s used in many Japanese art forms–the blank space around the ink in a picture, the quiet moment in a Miyazaki movie when you see just some water flowing in a creek or a cloud in the sky. LeGuin makes excellent use of this in her books, which are quiet and punctuated with action at the perfect times.

Now working on:

Blood Money by T. Christian Miller. Depressing and important. I lived with T for five years during our college days and it’s great to see him writing things like this. I wish everyone would read it before the next election.

Up next:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Love everything this guy’s ever done. I think he’s the number-one American writer alive today. This book is a postapocalyptic tale of a father and son traveling through a nuclear-ravaged America. I don’t know anything more than that and I am keeping myself from reading a thing about it until I get through the book myself.

The Box by Marc Levinson. I saw this one reviewed together with Brian J. Cudahy’s Box Boats; if I find it fascinating enough I will go ahead and read that book too. All about standardized shipping containers and the ways they ended the traditional livelihood of longshoremen and made the economy much more efficient. A present from Adam and Sue!

The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy. Robert Parker is one of the most poewrful men in cultural consumption today; when he says he likes a wine it can change the fortunes of the entire grape-producing region where it came from. There’s an excellent look at him online here. He’s responsible for the 100-point wine scoring system, so thank or blame him for that. Another present from Adam and Sue!

10/17/2006 | life | Comments Off

A successful update

Now running this thing on Movable Type 3.33. This makes this blog (and the other one I run off of this same installation) officially 0.13 better than it was just this afternoon! I’m sure you can see the quality shining through your monitor.

And with that, I’m going home. Enough FTP madness for one day.

10/06/2006 | web | Comments Off

Word watch

This Japan.internet.com piece uses a couple words I hadn’t seen before today, although I understood them right away from context. The title: ネトゲのプレイコストはオフゲより格安？

“Net [online] games” and “offline games” in easily digested katakana. And “play cost” for good measure. The folks at the National Institute for Japanese Language would go into conniptions looking at this.

ネトゲ gets more than 4 million hits, compared to 50,000 or so for オフゲ. And ATOK knew the former off the bat, while I had to fiddle around with the IME to get the second typed. It may be a new creation to differentiate what used to be just about the only kind of computer games (ゲ? no, probably not) from their hot new online counterparts.

10/06/2006 | work | Comments Off

Rescued post 2006/10/6

Taken from another blog I’m shutting down, and stuck in here for posterity, or something.

Yeah baby. Drinking beer and making interesting combinations of leftovers right now. In some farming areas (including my sort of out-of-the-way part of Tokyo) people stick their crops in plastic bags, nail up a can, and post a sign telling to you stick a couple hundred yen in there if you take some of the harvest home with you. Last week we grabbed about a kilo of chestnuts for 200 yen—a bargain if there ever was one, since that’s like a sixth of the price in grocery stores.

Then we spent about two hours getting the damn shells off of the things. Calculating by hourly wage I suppose we came out behind on this deal, but meh, whaddyagonnado. It was an experience. I can now talk with authority about the pain of getting chestnut shards driven under my fingernails. Which, as George W. Bush will tell you, is something that America needs to be able to do to its enemies if we are to be kept safe from them.

Anyway. We shelled the things and cooked up a pot of rice with them in it. Right now I’m polishing off the last of that, drinking a beer or six, and tossing Mr. McQueen’s finest into the DVD video picture machine. San Fran in ‘68 was basically awesome. That’s what I’m taking away from this film right now.

The wife is doing battle with her wisdom teeth these days, and is drugged out and crashed at her parents’ place in Yotsuya for the night. So I have the apartment all to myself. Yes! So far I’ve celebrated by getting a blog set up on the in-laws’ restaurant site. Once it goes live I will link it here so all of you can behold the posts (in Japanese) about the new menu updates at Enchante.

I need to sign off; Lieutenant Bullitt just woke up with a wicked hangover and has to go to work.

10/06/2006 | Japan, life | Comments Off

Sorry Adam!

I was betraying my brother’s employer and having a look at these Google Gadgets For Your Webpage. This one looked fun; here’s an attempt to embed the thing in this page.

I downloaded this game to play on the new iPod the other day. Not bad, although sometimes I tap the scroll wheel a bit too hard and end up fast-forwarding through a song I’m listening to instead of just shifting a jewel over.

10/05/2006 | web | Comments Off