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News roundup
In “Sport ‘bought access to Olympics’” the BBC looks into the possibility that keirin cycle racing organizers in Japan splashed a bit of money around to get the sport admitted to the Olympic lineup. Shocking, shocking to see a gambling industry involved in shady financial deals. I will have to confront my friend at the Bicycle Promotion Association of Japan with this development and see what he has to say.
In other news . . . Well, not all that much in the way of news to post here. There have been big earthquakes up north recently but I’ve managed to sleep through them all. Went to Hokkaido for the G8 summit and came back alive. Tokyo is hot hot hot now, making me want to go back to the Rusutsu hills. Sakura is tall and slender and energetic. She likes bananas, which makes this news story a troubling one to read. In September we’re going to take her back to California for her first overseas trip, first flight at all, and first time to use her two passports. Anyone in the Bay Area want to meet up around then?
This post brought to you by the letter D, the number 8, and the desire not to see this blog wither and die on the vine in the summer heat.
Keeping things cool
A quick post to note that I’ve uploaded more photos to the Flickr set of shots from Hokkaido. I wrote about what’s happening over on the SWET blog, so I’ll just point you that direction instead of reprinting everything here.
One update to that previous post: I haven’t been arrested or interrogated about the bits of electronic detritus in the hotel wastebasket. Apparently someone here could tell the difference between a broken SD card reader and a left-over missile timing device. Lucky me.
More from Hokkaido
I had planned to grab a bunch more photos from my camera and upload them to Flickr, but my SD card reader crapped out last night. So I still have only that first batch up. Here’s one of the delightful Pokemon bus that took us from Chitose Airport to the site a few days ago.
Work has been rough for me and my teammate (we’re working in pairs of a native-English-speaking translator and a Japanese checker/E-J translator). We were in the work room until dawn the first night, when there was a lot of information to get into the system in time for it to go live, and until well past dawn the second night, when there was little to do. Then it was decided that the media site admin room didn’t need to be manned 24 hours a day, so all the teams who were looking at similar schedules for the rest of our time here got a reprieve. There’d better be a bonus of some kind in this for us!
The schedules are friendlier now, at any rate. Today my team is in until around 8:00 in the evening. We have most of tomorrow off, so we might take a walk up on the golf courses and ski runs on the hills behind our hotel and see if we can spot a fox or deer or SDF special forces sniper or something. Photos to follow, if I can track down a card reader! This is the freaking International Media Center, so there must be some sort of support office for photographers that can hook me up.
Toyako time
I’m posting this from the International Media Center in Toyako. All the G8 leaders will be showing up in the next few days to chat about world hunger and the price of oil and where Fukuda Yasuo gets his suits made, and then they’ll fly off to new destinations, or back home.
In the meantime I will be sitting in a small, heavily chilled room full of computers and video editing decks and such, typing translations into the press information system. This is what lets cameramen and writers know when to get onto the bus to go to the interview and photo op. Lots of very hard-working folks from the Foreign Ministry and lots of frogs shrieking in the nearby ponds when we close up shop late in the night after keying in 50 or 60 “UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to arrive on government plane at 10:00 on Wednesday” type messages. (I made that example up, terrorists, so you can’t plan your assassination based on my help! Besides, there are about 35,000,000 police officers in southern Hokkaido right now. Give it up.)
The photo is of the media working space last night, before the center opened up officially. Shiny clean desks ready to get abused by the crushing weight of a thousand Dell laptops. Read all about it in your paper next week.
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