Today the deal was on a company called EM International, which is about to announce a contract with JC Penney to produce furniture, or something. “It’s trading at $4.00 now. I won’t tell you it will go up to $10.00, but I can say that it will be trading at $6.25 within three or four months,” goes the guy. This is a deal to show me just what ACM can do for me and make me a loyal client.

A quick bit of Googling for EM International + JC Penney turns up this message board discussion in which two people report the very same EMIE/JC Penney story. Long story short, maybe I should have tried to keep the guy on the phone and get more info on the outfit to pass on to the authorities, rather than say “mm hmm, maybe not” and hang up on him.

Anyway, the most important thing to take away from all this is: Vast wealth! I gots me some of it, and they knows about it, yes they does.

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ’1′, ’2′ and ’3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ‘squeeze’, ‘guts’, ‘stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. . . .

Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals.

(Side note: This press release is really poorly written. Par for the course for language researchers, huh?)

It would be interesting to see similar research done on Japanese. What little I remember of the Heian-era stuff I studied back in the day was very different from what gets spoken in the streets of Tokyo today, although I suppose the numbers have remained relatively constant, and using the same kanji over all those centuries has given the vocabulary an anchor of sorts to keep it more static.

(Via the Tomedes Blog.)

JAPANESE MOTHER STRUGGLES TO HAVE DAUGHTER BACK

Mrs Michiko Deniz, a Japanese mother, struggled for days to get parental rights on her daughter from her Turkish partner in Turkey, but she has had to leave the country alone.

Mrs Deniz claims that Mr Deniz, who is still formally her husband, does not let her daughter, Kader, see her, and she has been seeking for help to take Kader to Japan with her. She has left the daughter behind for now, but she promises her daughter “to come and get her sooner or later”. Mrs Deniz is planning to try every legal ways including the European Court of Human Rights to have parental rights on Kader and take her to Japan.

A search for “Michiko Deniz” turns up numerous hits, but they all seem to be in Turkish so far.* This might be an interesting story to watch: if it gets picked up at all in Japan, expect to see any sympathetic coverage of Ms. Deniz get slammed as hypocritical in the light of foreign parents’ treatment when the tables are turned and the kid is with a Japanese parent. (See for instance this group and any number of stories like this one.) Do you suppose a trip home to Japan with mom would end with a happy return to dad’s house in Turkey soon afterward?

* EDIT: The second Google hit for her name is now this post. Fear the Google!

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.

(Time for the obligatory plug for Enchanté, my in-laws’ restaurant in Yotsuya San-chome. Lunch hours are smoke-free there as well.)

(Via Asiajin.)

There’s an interesting page that shows the subway networks of the world’s major cities, all at the same scale. These are the ones I’ve been on. Tokyo’s network is overwhelmingly packed with people and convenient, so it has a sprawling feel, but compare it to BART and you get a sense for just how spread out the Bay Area is, and the surprising compactness of Japan’s capital.

It’s got a dryer built in, which will be nice in the winter when we want that hot air blowing out into the apartment. It has a water heater, so we can do warm-water loads of whites (most Japanese homes only have a cold-water tap in the area where you install a washer, so having this onboard is good). It has a child lock function so we can keep inquisitive toddlers from crawling into the machine, like my brother no doubt would have tried as a youngster. It talks to us when we press the buttons, which is nice, because there sure are a lot of them. Good to have a sherpa here.
]]> http://www.durf.org/2007/09/15/getting-clean/feed/ 0 http://www.durf.org/2007/09/11/climbing-shasta/ http://www.durf.org/2007/09/11/climbing-shasta/#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:06:40 +0000 Durf http://www.durf.org/2007/09/11/climbing-shasta/ An interesting read: In 1878 a man climbed Mt. Shasta and stayed at the summit for nine days. An early experiment in high altitude acclimatization. (Of course there were Tibetans living at higher altitudes than that, no doubt, but you know.) B. A. Colonna of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey writes:

On the 24th of July we left Sisson’s Hotel to make the ascent. The day was a delightful one, and we were all in fine spirits. The outfit which I proposed taking up weighed 750 pounds, and had to be packed from the snow line to the summit on the backs of 20 stout Indians. Besides the packers there was the usual number of squaws, papooses, and lean dogs — the indispensable impedimenta of Indian braves. If there is anything outside of these household chattels that a brave in this neighborhood prides himself on it is his linen duster and jaunty straw hat. The former, to be stylish, must reach to within 6 inches of the ground, and for the latter a broad blue or red band is most desirable. Nearly every one in the party was mounted, and it was a somewhat noisy company, in which the voices of the braves and squaws were mingled with the crying of papooses and the barking of dogs, so that no one sound was clearly distinguishable. Our route was over a beautiful smooth mountain trail, which at first wound about in splendid forests of sugar pine. . . .

While up above the treeline, the researchers found some red snow, colored by abundant “microscopic fungi”; they of course tasted some of it—for science!—and learned that it “had decidedly a fruity taste; but none of us agreed as to what it was like. Sisson thought it resembled the flavor of ripe pears, while to me it was watermelon.”

You know, one of the first things I do when I find strangely colored snow is stick it in my mouth. Oh wait, that’s not me, that’s my 6-month-old daughter. (At least I’m assuming that’s what she’ll do when she sees snow for the first time.)

The trip ends with a glissade down a snowfield where Colonna barely escapes with his backside intact:

Looking back, I could follow with my eyes the tract I had made in the snow, and away up toward the place where I had started I saw my gunny sack. In the keen enjoyment of my ride I had not missed it, but a preliminary examination satisfied me that I had lost not only the gunny sack, but the seat of my trousers, and I congratulated myself in having escaped so easily.

I enjoy reading about snowy adventures while stuck in the muggy heat of Tokyo.

(Photo courtesy Deb and Dave on Flickr)

Now I’m doing a load of wash and waiting for the apartment to cool down a bit. This is a tough season since you never know when the heat will bring thunderheads from the mountains west of the city to fling water sideways at the apartment, so you can’t leave everything open and cool during the day when you’re gone. It all works out when Mom and the baby are home during the day, controlling the climate inside, but when they’re staying downtown with Grandma and you have to come home alone then the place to which you come home is DAAAMN hot. Seriously.

Time to hang up the laundry and hit the sack. I did the solid 12-hour day thing today, so tomorrow I have a bit more leeway to go in late and leave early for a beer-drinking session at Enchanté. Anyone out there feel like stopping by?

I’m on the other side of the International Date Line, so it’s already THE FUTURE!!! over here, but I thought this was cool just the same.

(Via the Freakonomics blog.)