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Back home
Made it in one piece! It’s another hot night in Tokyo, but I took my sweet time getting back to my apartment with all the windows closed (it might rain, you see) and no air conditioner running (that uses electricity that this country’s quake-addled nuke plants can’t provide, you see). I stopped by Sugitamaya, this Italian wine bar near my station, for a glass of red and a shot of delicious grappa and a plate of mozzarella and tomato and basil. A fine dinner if you ask me.
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?
Still playing
. . . around with the settings and look and feel of this place. It’s getting more and more like something that works, which means it might end up being the site’s top page sooner rather than later.
That’s later, though. Sooner, I am leaving the office and going home to have a beer.
Random Friday thoughts
Last night I was correcting papers on the train, looking forward to a late night of writing up homework comments to hand back to students in class this evening. After I got home I jumped in the shower (it was about 915 degrees and raining outside) where, in a spasm of reclaimed memory, I noted that it was summer vacation at the school and I didn’t have to hand back assignments until late August. Bam! Problem solved. I stepped out of the shower, put on clothes, and cracked a beer.
Sakura is sick now. She has something called herpangina, which means blistering inside her mouth and throat. Makes it painful to swallow, so she’s been very fussy during feedings. Megu took her to the hospital and get everything checked up, and we now have some medicine to give her. Should be all better within a week or so. Poor baby.
Speaking of baby (-ies), Adam has posted more photos of his. See them on his Flickr site. Unless he has them protected and visible only to family and registered friends or something, in which case enjoy the Flickr warning page.
I bought a black MacBook. Stuck 2GB of RAM in it and it works just fine. I got to do the Microsoft Office dance again, the one where I try to install Office 2004, which I bought as an upgrade, and it tells me I have to have an older version on the drive, so I have to track down the disk for Office 2001 or Office X or whatever, copy the Office folder from it to the drive, point 2004 to that copy, and then erase said copy. It’s all so inefficient. This machine has a camera on it; I should be able to show 2004 that yes, here’s my CD copy of your ancestor, now please allow me to view this .doc filled with client comments I will ignore! Seems like it should work.
I’m now translating an article on the scandal rocking Japan’s pension system, in which the Social Insurance Agency accidentally misplaced records for some obscenely high percentage of the population, rendering them incapable of receiving payments. I can’t say I’m too confident in my own chances at getting a piece of this pie, since by the time I’m old enough to claim some of the yen I’m paying into the system there will be 100 million people my age and several dozen workers trying frantically to prop the whole thing up. I don’t think Social Security will do me much good either—hey, the money to pay for Dubya’s Wild Middle Eastern Ride doesn’t grow on trees, you know—but I am doing an end run around that whole mess by not living or working in America and paying into that system. I’m way ahead of the game here.
All right, I lied. Actually I’m now editing the new issue of Japanese Book News for a very finicky client. “Please translate these reviews in a more formal register. This is too casual.” “But the new critic you people have writing them in Japanese is much more casual than the last guy; we’re being faithful to the source here.” “Well, we know that, but ignore his style and do that stiff, formal thing.” Thanks for sharing this fundamental bit of editorial direction at the end of the process, rather than before translation began.
More random things to type: I’m playing with WordPress and considering making it the default thingy for the whole bloggish shebang. It’s doing stupid things with dead links that I can’t seem to make go away, though; probably some permissions deal that the WP folks expect everyone just to know offhand. “Oh, when you install that plug-in of course you’re supposed to chmod everything to 666, except for file B, which is 755.” Pure gibberish! It’s arcane wizardry like this that drives people to use MySpace.
Last but not least, I added more shots to the set of photos from our honeymoon trip to Scandinavia, lo those many years ago. Nice place in October. Much cooler than Tokyo in July. Would my company let me telecommute from three months in the future and seven time zones away? I’ll ask the boss.
11 Top Underground Transit Systems in the World
In a list of the 11 Top Underground Transit Systems in the World, the Tokyo subway comes in fifth. I was surprised to see that it isn’t the most heavily used: this page says that 2.8 billion riders take the chikatetsu each year, compared with 3.2 billion in Moscow. (I imagine this isn’t so surprising since the JR and private surface lines handle so much of the daily traffic in this city. Moscow’s subways, by the way, are amazing; during the Cold War they were meant to double as nuclear attack shelters for the city’s population, and they are astoundingly deep as a result. I rode them in 1987 and remember being amazed by the escalators—easily the longest I have seen anywhere.)
One problem with the page linked above: two of the three photos for Tokyo show JR trains, not subways. There’s a shot of a Shinkansen rolling between Tokyo and Shinagawa and a shot of what looks like the Chuo Line, which I take every day.
(Via Kottke’s site.)
Building a better donut
Spotted in the International Herald Tribune: “Need your caffeine fix? Have a doughnut.” Sounds like pure genius to me.
Dr. Robert Bohannon may be your new best friend. Bohannon is the North Carolina molecular biologist who six years ago sat down before a glass of milk and a doughnut and had the audacity to think that there was something wrong with that picture. Why not add caffeine — to the doughnut?
A normal person would stop right there and call out for a latte. Someone who had been chewing coffee beans since he was 8 would call out for a kilogram of food-grade caffeine. With the help of a local baker, Bohannon set about attempting to create what he had already named: the Buzz Donut.
The early results were disappointing; “they tasted like aluminum cans,” he says. Grainy versions followed. As of this week, perfection has been achieved and a patent filed. Bohannon is now waiting for Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts — do trans fats somehow impair the ability to spell? — to call.
It’s a busy world we live in, and I’m all for time-saving efficiencies like this. Eat the donut as you dash to the station, and you get your morning jolt without worrying that the coffee is going to splash all over your coat and make you brown and stinky. Admittedly that’s a handy way to get a little more elbow room on a crowded train . . . Maybe lots of caffeinated crumbs stuck in your beard would help you cultivate that same air of STAY AWAY, though.
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