FEATURE WALL

Rag Doll...

2006-09-12T13:05:00.000+09:00

We turned around and noticed that the door was open slightly and then realized that a thousand dollars worth of pedigree rag-doll cat had wandered out into the wilderness beyond the suburb of Timberlee in Upper-Hutt.

Torches, boots, jackets, a vaguely uncontrolled nauseous feeling, the hidden embarrassment of having to walk up and down a street in the middle of the night cooing and repeating the name “Gizmo” over and over again.

The sudden looming fear on seeing that an alley way backed into what could only be described as the New Zealand Bush, walking down the alleyway towards said bush and the relief of seeing two piercing blue eye’s reflecting the torchlight back at me.

Said pure-breed cat recognized me and promptly followed me home almost in the manner of a dog. Relief gave way to a long evening of ‘Yay we didn’t loose the expensive animals’ Euphoria, which resulted in people being un-fit to drive and a sleep on a couch covered in said pure-breed cats.

I’m back in Wellington and the site has a new banner accordingly, which has been a while in coming due to the current lack of a reliable network which, combined with an extreme dose of laziness has led to me not really updating this place for quite some time.

Now however, money is depleting, bank accounts set, boxes arrived, employment has been sought. Things are moving again. After two and a half weeks of, well, just being a rat bag really.

I turned 26.

Return to The Sleepy Isles

2006-08-20T12:57:00.000+09:00

I knew I had arrived back in New Zealand when, on asking for a pen at the customs desk to correct a minor mistake on my entrance card, it was thrown, gruffly, at me by the lady on the other side of the counter. After tersely scanning my passport into the system she then cordially threw my important I.D. document back at me with the same disregard.

The first thought that ran through my mind was ‘Fuck! I should draw my Katana and slit this insolent whore’s throat for this outrage!’ Then I regained my composure and realized that I was a reasonably well off world traveler and she was a sullen native girl with a nasty case of the oral herpes.

I am back in the land of the huge pink man again. The time since my last posting has been something of a blur. Whirlwind emotions ranging from the high of being in the front four rows of the Daft Punk gig, the lows of losing my wallet two thirds of the way through same gig, the arduous process of getting my money out of the bank without my normal I.D., getting the paperwork to replace my Alien card and saying goodbye to all my friends and Fumiko and the mid sections of 20 hours of international travel.

Alright, it’s not like I’m flying to the states, but I am sleeping three hours behind everything here. In fact I’m sleeping between 12 to 13 hours a night.

Suffice to say that right now everything is looking pretty surreal. The currency has changed here for one thing. Everyone is enormous and Mt. Wellington supermarket made me remember that in Japan people take pride in their appearance even if they’re popping out down to the store for a six of beer.

I’m trying to ween myself off the “in Japan” range of conversation topics, but it’s pretty hard when it’s been a rather dominating factor in your life for two years. Bear with me.

New Zealand, it’s very clean down here, but for now it all feels askew, dislocated, a-drift. I can already feel that it’s going to take a while to get my bearings back.

I’ll do up a new banner for the page this afternoon too.

Live from Summer Sonic 06

2006-08-13T12:10:00.000+09:00

Writing now at the free internet booth in the merch hall at summer sonic 06. Managed to work my way to front of the crowd yesterday for both DJ Shadow and was in the very ront for Massive Attack which was mind blowing. heading over now to check out Shonen Knife and the Cardigans, followed by the Deftones and then...

...Daft Punk

On the road again...

2006-07-31T17:28:00.000+09:00

Leaving the apartment yesterday my heart imploded as me and my supervisor pulled off slowly down the driveway. I had my 32 kg’s of baggage and a small army of extra things that are going to be left or passed on to other people. Many of my adult education class students showed up to see me off, including little Haruka. Seeing them all waving goodbye with my clean and empty apartment behind them, with Aine, my neighbor of two years up on her balcony and taking it all in I suddenly realized I would probably never ever be there again.

It hit home then, that this chapter of my life is drawing to a close, that the long protracted goodbyes of the past couple of weeks had been leading up to this moment, me departure from Kashima.

The feeling was very similar to when I left my apartment in Wellington over two years ago. The way as the motion of the vehicle starts, when the liquid in your inner ear picks up the change in momentum, it’s like a detonating switch that triggers this small implosion in side. Implosion is a good term for the feeling I believe.

I sat with Kazeyama, my supervisor, who I’ve only really gotten to know recently in relative silence for at least a good half hour as I collected my thoughts and let the experience sink in a bit. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, it was more a quiet respectful ‘I know you’re there, but that must have been a bit hard so have some quiet time to digest it’ silence. Once we got into Saga city we started to chat about things, the conversation picked up by my pointing out Saga University hospital where I had my wisdom teeth removed. We chatted about stuff and it was only when we arrived at the apartment I realized that I hadn’t said a word of English over the entire car ride. Guess you can teach an old dog new clichés.

I don’t think new clichés are possible are they?

ANYWAY…if you could imagine the following sentence in your best possible Keith ‘Oh my god I’m old and drunk’ Richards voice…

I am now, my dear, a man of fuckin’ leisure…

Now I’ve set up base camp in Yamato-Niiji, just a few minutes bike ride away from a mega-mall the size of downtown Kashima. Last night I went out, took in some local bands at a gig in the city, had dinner, did a bit of karaoke.

Today I woke up, rode to the mall, ate some food and then really just played games on Sarah’s ps2 and watched movies up until now. Everyone else is at work.

The Japanese term for being unemployed is “mushyoku”

Last night someone asked if I was a teacher and I quite cheerily informed them of my new status.

Let the holidays begin, discard the serious pants of work and don the antic-pants! Antic-pants I say! And be quick about it

A fixing...

2006-07-27T11:20:00.000+09:00

This morning I 'fixed' the hole in my wall.

I placed the missing piece of wallpaper over the hole.

I then thumb-tacked a 100 yen photo frame over the offending wall mark.

I retrieved my long absent T.V. and video set from Mr. Gatewood the second to aid in the 'not a shifty bastard who you should charge repairs to' look.

This is a female Kabuto Mushi, Kabuto Mushi being the Japanese beetles with the large array of spikey horns. We found her on her back, outside the apartment yesterday. She was unable to roll over onto her legs and was stuck in the hot sun. Picked her up, documented her, and then placed her into a damp tree hollow on a neighbours property. I didn't think it was possible for a hefty bug to look cute, but she managed it in the bottom close up with her big eyes and fuzzy antennae.

Just click play alright?

2006-07-22T17:35:00.000+09:00

It's all over...

2006-07-19T16:10:00.000+09:00

It’s all over.

I just finished my final class as a teacher in Japan. All that’s left now is the drinking and the speeches. I took a final look over the rows of kids and paused for a second to fix the image in my mind, although I’m sure its ingrained there, just with different faces. It’s a mixed bag of emotions, some sadness, some excitement, some sense of relief that the process I’ve been planning (badly) for over the past few weeks is finally beginning.

At a leaving party last week I got given this drawing by Haruka, who I’ve been teaching since she was about five at eikaiwa classes. She’s now Seven and is one of the newest 1st grade students at one of the Elementary schools I teach at.

I think she got the beard done quite well, although it also looks suspiciously like Ryan McArthur for some reason too.

I want to be a Whale Shark when I grow up

2006-07-14T10:17:00.000+09:00

Heisashiburi.

It has been sometime since the last entry in these journals of adventure.

The pace of events has picked up dramatically here of late. I have ventured far down into southern Kyushu in search of illusive mysteries, sand baths, shochu and giant sharks. I found them and was sated.

I compiled together a 25 minute long photo slideshow that was presented at the grand and luxurious leaving ceremony in the Capital city last weekend. It worked flawlessly, which is to say that opposed to last year’s slideshow failure it was flawless, flawless also in the technical facilities of the hotel. It seemed to be well received. When the final credit rolled up the screen I was inebriated, due to a tall English man constantly pouring me beer which in turn was well received, enough to allow a Mortal Kombat style ‘flawless victory’ chant to run through my head.

I was able to take part in the second annual Tafuse regatta. This involved purchasing a pirates costume of sorts, and inflatable raft, some beer, and paddling down the main river in Saga with an armada of assorted miscreants, much to the bewilderment, amusement or delight of some of the natives. I’ve never had so many spiders crawling on me as when we were swept into reeds time and time again by the current. The water pistol came in handy for dealing with the eight legged Klingons. Much pirate talk was used ruthlessly.

Drove through the misty hills of Saga that evening. The deep ravines and river beds spewing clouds of gas into the suspiciously empty looking countryside. I admit to specifically directing us towards the slightly longer route through the hills because I thought they would be suitably moody with the near full moon and current atmospheric conditions. Rewards followed with vast, ominous, visual backdrops that would make Holmes himself pull his cap down over his eyes, raise the collars on his jacket and take larger pulls on his tobacco.

Met a variety of Japanese people at another party on Karatsu beach. The swimming was naked. I was the only male. Phosphorescent plankton, mating on the high tide and by the light of the moon surrounded us, it was like swimming in a sea of neon green electric sparks.

Managed to get a base tan the next day on the same beach. Last weekend was so good in fact it’s kept me buoyant all the way through this final full working week of working weeks. I now sit here, with all but one final class to complete at this, the largest of my schools. Monday coming is a bank holiday, and the students finish on Thursday.

Many things have been organized. Items have been boxed, two years of bills and paperwork has been sorted. Air craft ticketing has been purchased, flight paths planned, dates confirmed, as have concert tickets and credit cards have been renewed and are being couriered across the oceans in case of emergency excess in baggage weight. In fourteen days I will no longer be a resident of Kashima. Incidentally, Google earth has recently added high resolution satellite photo’s of the city to its virtual globe service. I present to you a link to my house as viewed from space.Mine is the large rectangular apartment block with the single white car in the center of the frame. Zoom out and you can get an idea of the place that has been home for the past two years.

It’s been an emotional process, the endless saying goodbye’s and final classes are leaving me a bit drained. Of course, we are now entering into high summer as well, which compounds the sense of weariness. It’s topped thirty degrees before eight thirty a.m., which turns the morning bike ride to school into a struggle into the baking breeze of what seems to be the world’s largest, moistest, hair dryer. As was pointed out to me yesterday it’s a bad time to be leaving, to have so many things to organize and to do, so many people to see. Manners in interpersonal relationships have to be a bit stricter as fraying nerves can send tempers soaring at the drop of a hat. This is accomplished, inversely so, by drinking.

Finally, here is the footage I shot at Kagoshima aquarium recently, cut together, with the group of ‘special education’ adults who were trying to talk to me and Kamil in especially bad English (and completely ignored, I mean, you know? We were on holiday, we’re not English practice robots) edited out of the soundtrack. This clip is the prized center piece of my fish video collection.

I want to be a Whale Shark when I grow up.

A free afternoon and a scanner

2006-06-14T10:48:00.000+09:00

I had a free afternoon, my scanner and the Ichi-nensei New Horizon textbook. So I thought I'd indulge in some imature yet entertaining fun.

Ryutosen

2006-06-07T14:49:00.000+09:00

On the afternoon of the Monday Aine, Joe and I made use of Joe’s perambulatory motor vehicle and did go for a ride in the hills towards and into the Nagasaki Ken region. Once there we disembarked the vehicle and found our selves transported, as if by mechanical device and fossil fuels, to Ryutosen, a favorite swimming hole of all and one of my favorite places in Japan. For various reasons I was unable to partake of the swimming on this particular occasion. However, I did successfully endeavor in filling both of my memory cards with digital images of the events and surrounds. The best of these I shall present to you.

Now.

A sign post in English. Misspelled, but it was wearing a cute hat. That hat will stay there for eternity as people around here tend to leave things that aren’t their own alone.

An intrepid non antipodean descends the stairway down into the valley below.

The upper waterfall in all of its glory sits waiting for the hot and bothered passer-by to take advantage of its dark, cold pool of tenuous adventure. Apparently that pool underneath it is a worthy 23 meters deep, which if you think about it, is, in fact quite deep.

Although, I've always felt that it doesn't matter how deep water is, the fact remains that if it's over your head and you stop swimming you'll drown, so it doesn't matter if the water is 2.3 meters, 23 meters, or 2300 meters. Drowning is drowning and I've never had any sympathy for people who are afraid of deep water because they are behaving like irrational cowards.

And I mean, if you're a real spong you can drown in shallow water or even the bath tub. Babies can even drown in a bucket, but it's not they're fault they're stupid to the point of retardation, they are young after all. Anyway...

Again, the upper fall, bathed in the late evening setting sun.

Here we see a close up of the main waterfall, accompanied by a mysterious floating head to give a better idea of scale, dimension and some would say emotional depth. Or maybe I just couldn’t frame the shot right without avoiding it. It is this waterfall that Kiara jumped from the near top of when I visited on my first day in Saga. He did not drown because he was not a spong.

Here we find the lower pool, with rope swing, obviously enjoying the fact that it is an idyllic swimming hole at the start of summer. The rope swing is quite good. I recommend its thrills to everyone, young and old as being most efficacious in providing a nice jolt of adrenaline. Your granny will die happy. I mean isn’t that better than her sitting in some old folks home, eating bad food and smelling like nappies? Do you want her to live like that? Like a bird in a rusty cage? Or do you want to take granny to Japan and push her off a cliff into freezing cold water?

I can feel you might not be with me on this.

Here is a large boulder, into which someone has carved the Kanji for Ryutosen and then painted it with a very hardy paint. Please gaze upon its countenance and wonder…why?

As we depart, refreshed, bitten and happy, the sun sets behind the tree line, displaying them in the style of a silhouetted block against the clear sky beyond. Don’t you love trees? I know you love trees. You love trees more than your own family, you disrespectful heretic.

Now it is time for lunch. Please enjoy yours, whatever you’re eating, but beware. Gnomes lurk in Japan, gnomes that at this time of the year conspire to deliver the lurgy.

Mud, blood, sweat and beers

2006-05-29T08:51:00.000+09:00

Hello blog. Long time no see huh? It’s been pretty quiet around here aside from the occasional heavy metal concert, the odd swim and a party or two.

Yesterday a grand time was had by all who attended the annual Gatalympic events in Kashima. Everyone on the bloated ALT team performed to a remarkably high standard and a fine display of sportsmanship was displayed by all. I only had my short shorts to wear so the evening before I decorated my shiny white, yet well muscled, legs with all manner of black decorations and fighting Kanji, of course being ably assited by Fumiko in this aspect. The mud, thick and greasy as ever, clambered into every crevasse at the moment of impact into its mire some depths. Highlight of the day was helping pull Dabs up from the mud, only to pick her up and throw her back in once she was on dry land.

Five minutes later I was waist deep in mud, in a repeat of last years all out war, when I felt and odd sensation down around my ankles. Wearing my gloves this year, I reached down and pulled out a broken, twisted beer can. Damn.

Sweet, sweet irony ensued as only forty-eight hours after having Joe tell me about the amount of untreated waste water (not sewerage) that runs into the Ariake sea I got tagged up right mean by debris hidden a meter under the mud. Thus my day in the actual mud was cut quite short. Can’t help bad luck I suppose. Showered twice, went to the aid station, got sprayed with stuff. Still had a good day though, sitting around on the steps, drinking beer and catching up with people.

Koreans can cheer quite loudly as we found out. Watching our women folk compete in the ladies only mud wrestling tournament, we found ourselves seated next to about twenty Korean guys watching as well. So we, as somewhat relaxed foreigners as well, joined the cavalcade of chants and songs they displayed. In the center middle of a few thousand sedate Japanese families watching the mud Olympics, there was the smallest, loudest crowd of drunken Koreans, English, Kiwi’s, Australians, Americans and Canadians. It was like transplanting a little piece of a cup final into a chess crowd. Was seen to at the hospital later on in the day, thorough cleaning out of the leg with metal things and bits of swab, sticky skin patches and a three day course of pills. I just love dripping pus, so it’s working out fine. As another bonus, the biggest cuts run straight through some of the Kanji characters I had written on my leg for the day, the ones for 'fighting spirit'. looks cool.

Just before posting this I receieved a phone call. On a sadder note, I have just been informed that the section chief, Nakahasi, one of my uber-bosses at the board of education passed on yesterday morning. May he find rest, the wake is tomorrow evening.

Nagasaki

2006-05-09T16:08:00.000+09:00

Spiffing thanks.

Except for the weather on Saturday, this aspect of the city pouring a heavy windy storm on our first night. This led to a prolonged and entrenched dinner in a curry restaurant of such quality that it prompted me to gastronomic fits of high exuberance which in turn led to me nearly regurgitating from having eaten too much. Seriously, it was touch and go for about an hour afterwards.

During the day viewed some old churches, Nagasaki having its international city reputation to maintain, that while perhaps for the Japanese tourist who has never seen the inside of a real church before, might be somewhat amazing and yet for someone raised in the roman catholic tradition isn’t a patch on some of the examples that exist even in Wellington. However, the outside looks very nice.

It felt profoundly uncomfortable to be inside a consecrated building that was both church and tourist attraction. Now although I’ve taken plenty of Temple photos in Japan (and really who doesn’t?) , I’ve only taken pictures of the exterior’s and the surrounds of the structures, I’ve never taken a photo of what is actually inside the shrines themselves or any ceremony, save for the outdoor, public wedding procession in Tokyo, nor have I entered into the buildings themselves, as I have no real need to and don’t wish to intrude on the spiritual undertakings of those who do. So to be in a place of active worship that was at the same time a place of tourism was strange to the utmost. Didn’t stay inside for very long.

Up the road a bit among the tourist trap stalls is a shop that sells used U.S. anti-tank rocket launchers and F-16 series fighter pilot helmets for outrageous sums. And we found a life size Neko-Bus

Then we made our way through the pouring rain and ate a tasty lunch in Nagasaki’s outrageously overpriced China town restaurant district. Nice view of the harbor from out hotel room.

I didn’t know it was possible to spend six hours at an Aquarium that specifically caters to penguins, but in Japan it seems anything’s possible. You see, at the Nagasaki Penguin Aquarium,

which is mostly made up of rather large, well maintained penguin enclosures, if you are one of the first people to arrive in the morning, you get given a pass which allows you to walk into the largest enclosure later on in the day and hand feed the penguins. Which we did and I’ve never had penguins flock around my feet and hungrily snatch fish from me. I’ve had dolphins and catfish and stingrays and otters, but not penguins.

Also, this pass allows you to join a backstage tour of the aquarium an hour later. You get to see the food preparation areas, the penguins sleeping and breeding areas, the enormous water filtration systems and you walk across the grated walkways over this tank

and cause a minor feeding frenzy by giving them all some food. Add sea turtles, sharks, grouper, bat fish and anything else you see in the tank that I’ve hand fed.

Add some kayaking into the mix, some lunch, a couple of beers and then finally getting to stroke some penguins later on in the day and you leave, slightly bemused at three o’clock in the afternoon, six hours after arriving at nine with a finer knowledge of plankton rearing, penguin chick nursing and large scale water filtration systems than you had on first arriving. Photo’s for the trip are on the whole lacking, as I took mostly video this time out, which I will cut together with some suitable music later this afternoon.

Sunday afternoon we walked up into the massive graveyards that line the hills of Nagasaki.

and then followed Dragon dancers through the streets. I bought some new clothes on impulse and a new memory card for the camera. We ate dinner and wandered around the city, drinks in hand. Watched Bad Boys 2 entirely in Japanese as you don’t really need the script to surmise the plot.

The weather cleared and the next day the gondola to the Mt. Inasa observation post was taken.
The view spectacular, we rode down and made our way, collected our baggage and trained back home. Very nice small trip away.

The dark side triumphs

2006-04-28T14:21:00.000+09:00

I’ve always found that orchestral music played over a large loudspeaker system to be quite frankly far too authoritarian for my tastes. The way it has that hollow tin sound echoing just under the high ranges of the track and absolutely no low end just sucks the will to live, the heart of the music being torn out by thin copper wire, ceramic reverberation and instructions given out over the top in a rigid flat bored monotone.

Things have been progressing along at their own measured pace. The wheat is ripening, swallows are nesting and pastoral themes and analogies are boring me to death. Give me towers of glass and steel again I say! Although that’s only due to the fact I woke up at 4am this morning and everything seems to look quite grey now at ten to nine.

Biked out to the edge of the coastline last night with Fumiko. We drank and let off a bag of fireworks. A mortar fired off into the air, and then by the time it came back down again it was so quiet we heard where it landed on the road. Calm greasy sea water slowly laps against the concrete abutments that form the edge of this chunk of reclaimed land we’re sitting on. I make bird noises at sleeping birds on the Island, set of fireworks and pee off a four meter high concrete barrier into the gulf. Pondering on the potential ecological impact of my micturation, I arrive at the conclusion that it’s not like I do this kind of thing every day so the cumulative effects of the water, amino acids and glycosides I am depositing into this far from pristine fishing harbor will amount to little more than a piss in the ocean.

On another note, I recently wrote about the experiences I had in the unbelievably haunted 13a Adams Terrace flat and submitted it to B3ta.com’s question of the week “Messing with the dark side.” B3ta has a huge, world wide, reader base (it’s well into the tens if not hundreds of thousands) and they all vote for the stories they like. My response ranked into the ‘best of’ category, which means that it would have garnered quite some number of votes I believe. Here’s the link, it’s posted as being written by Feature Wall and it’s called ‘The dark side fucks with us.'

Also, as I stress at the start of the story, it is all true and did actually happen to me. Although maybe Goths don’t live there anymore, but still, taking a stab at Goths on b3ta is bound to draw votes, which is why it’s at the end.

---later on in the day---

Also of note, this afternoon I decided to do something about the lack of internet access at the larger school, where generally there is far less work to do because they fanny about a lot more. So I started to scope out if there was a free space on the nearest router. Found one! One of the head teachers noticed me and I asked for a cable. I was given one, but I had to strip the wires and attach the connecter heads myself. Which worked quite successfully and is the reason I am posting this now.

Small victories.

Boredom, Fan fic and game analysis, Oh my!

2006-04-12T11:01:00.000+09:00

A slow day on the newsroom floor. The on screen ticker of life scrolls slowly along, very little information of note to be passed through, except for the fact that everyone seems far to chipper considering the amount of booze I watched them drink last night. I realize that the entire point of my day is to leave here, swim this evening, and log onto BF2 to exact revenge on someone, for something. Not sure exactly what, but something.

So the other day, I was crouched down at the top of a hill overlooking a deep river. U.S. APC’s were rolling across the rocks and splashing their way towards out positions, while me and my valiant Chinese brothers watched on, quietly, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Le Quin came tumbling through the shrubs next to me, his hot sweaty hands pressed another volley of anti-tank rockets into my back, then he disappeared like the supply giving mystery enigma he always was. Somehow, like myself, Le would always survive the most intense firefights, while we watched out junior comrades melt like butter beneath the western imperialist hellfire, invading our lands, killing our brothers and sisters, until they came against my unit here in the Valley of the Dragon. They were so close now I could smell the diesel exhaust as they inexorably rolled their way up and out of the river, turrets moving left and right, scanning the area in a way I could sense was panicked. I could smell their fear, it was leaching out of their Yankee pores like so much mustard and beer.

Closer, closer now. They roll past us, hiding, squatting in the bushes, still, quiet, patient. The time has come now, as it has before and will again, the time to strike as the armored convoy presents us with its lightly armored rear, like a sweet university student at her first party. The time is now.

Slide the target reticule over the lumbering green giant. The rim of the scope turns red, as the men inside the vehicle begin to panic as they hear the warning sounds of their machine, indicating it is in mortal peril. My finger, seemingly in slow motion now, depresses the trigger. The missile sounds like a can of aerosol being blown out of a tight pipe, a hollow ‘whunk’ that an instant later is dissolved into a roar of steam as the rocket motor takes over, accelerating the missile along it trajectory, jerking me out of my slow motion revelry into the adrenaline pounding real time of combat, right into and through the rear left door panel of the APC. The fire begins, the screaming begins. The machine careers towards the river on the opposite side of the small island they have tried in vain to cross. The machine sits in waist deep water now, smoldering, smelling of burning oil, flesh and bone. The driver scrambles from the top, falls from the top into the water and wades back, bleeding from his ears, towards me. Behind him, the APC ignites into a column of fire and steel, spinning into the sky. He is blown forward, confused, disorientated. Now is my moment. I rush forward, un slinging my DAO-12 shotgun from my shoulder. It is over in a matter of seconds for him. Quick death, almost instant. In his shell shocked state he would have discerned little of my approach or of the shot that removed his head. Our job complete, we quickly retire back to the firebase to re supply.

BF2 fan fiction, sunk to a new low there. Although it did manage to kill a few minutes of the morning until I got bored of it. That whole last bit really did happen the other day, Sarah was watching even. The team playing the U.S. side could not break out of their firebase for the entire game. They couldn’t co-ordinate their air support to remove us from the hill we were dug into, even though their commander was trying, and they never even capped a single flag. Kind of pathetic really, unfortunate for the commander, but sometimes you just can’t help it if your team is full of tools.

Tokyo 3

2006-04-03T15:46:00.000+09:00

This is one of the seminal pictures of the entire Tokyo mash up that ended with my arrival home yesterday evening. Fuji San dominating the highland areas on the out skirts of the Tokyo region on a perfectly clear spring morning and myself, gazing wistfully into the distance, pondering my overall importance in the scheme of things and finding it to be good.

Lets back up slightly though.

I was gazing down at Japan from on high. Stacked up all around us was other commercial air traffic. I’ve never been in an aircraft and had the sky around the plane so busy. There were many other jetliners around us, stacked up within the safety margins of the air corridors, above and below, to the left and the right. Have you ever been sitting on a bus, stuck in traffic, slightly bored, just waiting for the trip to be over and then seen somebody on a skateboard fly through the traffic and pedestrians having a great time and felt envious?

That’s what it feels like when you see two of these,

flying below your plane, sweeping in arcs through the clouds. Damn was I jealous, these two pilots were playing around as they traveled somewhere, crossing each others paths and generally messing about en-route. Lucky bastards in JSDF 15's. I Showed the Australian sitting next to me. Both of us well impressed. And hells no I did not take that photo, that’s an in house JSDF stock photo, just to give credit where credit is due.

I landed and maneuvered my way easily, successfully and with relative grace even, through the labyrinthine Tokyo rail and metro system. These maps controlled our movements over the course of our extended partying weekend and it’s relatively user friendly once you get into it. The red spot is the area I was headed.

And arrived here

The Sakura sat in Jimbỡchỡ and was stocked with a fresh supply of world traveling back packer types, all of whom were discovering the joys of Japanese pricing. The Sakura was however, reasonably cheap and well appointed for its style. I procured a top bunk, which was in retrospect a mistake, as there is nothing more difficult than maneuvering your way down a ladder with a bladder full and a hangover. The act needs to be performed with the appropriate balance and strength, most of which is lacking after imbibing copious quantities of various alcohol (except JD) the night before.

I sat in the café outside the hotel, sipping on a mango juice and awaiting the arrival of

TIM!

Who is a familiar face in particular from last years Thailand adventure series. Refreshed we adventured towards Akihabara, The centre of the world consumer electronics industry, to experience the best of contemporary geek culture. As always, Akihabara was draped in its glittering neon cloak and seemingly all male clientele. Our main goal, aside from finding beer and food, was to experience the latest in bizarre trends, the Maid Café. Maid Café’s are a new kind of eating establishment that has become popular recently, especially among the teaming male throngs, the Akibake, where you are served by attractive young ladies in costume play style maid, or nurse, or whatever, outfits, who call you master when they serve you and act very cute.

A man stops me on the street and trys to sell me a new internet service available for people living locally in the area which boasts a 100mb per second download rate. I am sold, unfortunately I live in Saga. He is our age and we strike up a conversation, he lived in London for a year and tells us the directions to a maid café. We struggle though seven floors of electrics, toys, costume stores (?), pharmacies, more toy stores, more electronics and eventually find the café at the top.

With a huge cue of men waiting in line to be seated. We see the cute girls, and figure our mission is partially complete, and trawl Tokyo for a few hours going from small bar to small bar in the Shinjuku area, taking it easy, except for a smashed glass of wine, saving ourselves for the next few days. We retire and spend the night filling our room full of noxious gasses. This pattern continues over the next few days of fine dining.

The next morning we walk up Yasukuni Dori to a large park which is displaying the number one reason for hangovers in Japan this week. Sakura!

It’s cherry blossom season. Thousands of people fill the park, spreading out tarpaulin and picnicking. Our wanderings take us back to the hotel, where we meet

KAMIL

We decide, by virtue of the wisdom handed down to us through the ages, to find lunch. Our man on the front desk recommends a restaurant where we can sample some local ‘weird’ cuisine. We jump into a taxi and totally fail to find it. What we do find is Tokyo Dome City.

We ate at, of all places, Denny’s, and went in search of deep and meaningful cultural experiences that will serve to give us insight into our developing lives…

I hadn’t been on any kind of rollercoaster in years. So after a beer I decide to get on this machine that pushes you to 130kph, outdoors, diving onto crowded four lane city streets and through the architecture of a major shopping mall. Dive bombing onto taxi’s and busses at 130kph, pulling three G’s while drunk. Tokyo man, Tokyo. The feeling of the first drop was unbelievable. I’d forgotten the force that you build up going that fast. Sudden acceleration slamming into the senses ripping your lips from your teeth, this one only had a lap bar, and thus felt much more precarious because of it. I ducked when we passed through the circle, as it was a tight, tight fit.

We also rode another machine that pushed its carriages forward and back, your feet suspended inches above the ground in higher and higher curves. Weightlessness achieved. Ate Mexican, drank pitchers of margarita with an old buddy of Kamil’s and retired semi-early (1 or 2 maybe). For the next day we had planned to visit,

Fujikyu Highlands is a large amusement park, located near the base of Mt. Fuji. Fuji san looms over all, a godlike, dominating peak, higher than Mt. Cook.

Did we meditate for hours on the merits and values of nationalism, explore the local towns and explore for ancient relics of ineffable value while meeting new and exciting people?

We went on more rides!

This thing spun you upside down and held you there, inverted and looking out over the plateau, arms held out and trusting totally in the restraints, in the power of modern engineering, to stop you impacting in a bloody heap 30 meters below you

This thing dropped you, and it was spectacular because we were facing the mountain when we fell. It simulates the process of jumping from a high place for those considering the option. The wait at the top is agonizing. Oh, it bounces too, you go up and down a few times.

We didn’t go on the wheel because, well, three guys in a rainbow wheel would be quite simply, well, gay. But I took a picture because it looked great against the blue sky.

This is not the best photo, but it was the best ride we went on. It’s pretty self explanatory, you get strapped in, it pushes you backwards and forwards and the wheel you are sitting on spins. But because of the spin it feels like you are always about to fly off the wheel into the sky, at each apex you get a moment of gut soaring zero G, often upside down facing Fuji San, before gravity kicks in and whips you down again, only to repeat the process over and over again. Much better for extreme changes in state than a roller coaster. We were also filmed riding this by a Nihon Terebi film crew, a famous comedian was filming a segment for his show, and we were looking right into the camera lens on each pass of the machine. It airs later this month and we will try to get a recording.

The cues for the large roller coasters were three hours long, so instead of spending all day lined up like lemmings; we went to the smaller rides with the smaller cues. We also went to a haunted hospital, but the cue was too long to waste the day in, and a haunted theatre, where you stood in a (too small) coffin and actors moved around screaming, spraying you with ‘blood’ and other such un-pleasantries.

Slept like a log, with a random 15 year old girl asleep on my shoulder, behind a Ganguro family on the bus back. Ganguro? Just google the term, this is a long post and I’ve gotta save space somehow.

Sayaka, a friend I made on my last trip to Tokyo, met up with us and used her influence to get us half priced entry to Club Air later on in the evening. This pleased us considerably. Lost in Translation blah blah blah, Lost In Translation blah blah. Yeah I’ve been there, it was like this…

I hadn’t been to a decent club in a long time, had a good catch up with Sayaka, whose jewelry designing is becoming more and more successful, she is now regularly traveling to Spain, Melbourne and L.A. next week, promoting her designs. H

Hurrah! Air is in a residential district and set quite some way back from the main streets, when you leave there exist large signs that say, in English, please be quiet, and the doormen also remind you as well. Also a good aspect, beer vending machines inside the club which allow the bar staff to concentrate on making drinks as opposed to pouring beers, keeps bar turnover high, expensive but high

The following morning, we checked out of Sakura and headed to Ueno in search of a capsule hotel in which to spend out last night. We booked into one, dropped the bags. Kamil embarked on a quest to buy an Ipod. Me and Tim journeyed across Tokyo after exploring the markets in Ueno, which didn’t remind me of Hong Kong because I haven’t been there, but Tim equated his feelings as such to me.

We fought our way up into Harajuku, where the last posting here was made from. Kamil, Ipod in tow, ventured out to join us. Harajuku was absolutely packed with people. We had to cue outside a convenience store to even get in and then the cue stretched out through the store. As the cue progressed you picked up your needs from the shelf as you passed. We of course, bought some Chu-Hi, as we all couldn’t face any more beer, and walked to Yoyogi park.

In Yoyogi park there was at the time, probably the biggest Hanami party taking place in Japan. Upwards of 20,000 people at least were spread out under the cherry blossom trees on a perfect spring afternoon. Diesel generators cranked out electricity for turntables, children played with rabbits and miniature dogs, all manner of sporting equipment was in use. The young of Tokyo, of all nationalities, met and merged in a party that covered an area nearly the size of the Wellington CBD. This picture doesn’t even begin to cover the scale of it…I just couldn’t get up high enough or had a wide enough lens to do it justice. Imagine this times ten.

Just before the seas rose, just before the pandemics and the wars, it seemed that we had reached the highpoint. The worlds political institutions in the hands of corrupt fools, determined to destroy it and seemingly far beyond our control for the time being, at that moment, in this great gathering at the top of world, there was nothing else to do about it for the day, but enjoy the party that was Tokyo.

And enjoy we did. Returned to capsule, spent some time relaxing in the bath house, washing the city dust away and sweating out some of the poisons in the sauna. Last year I was taken to Christon Café in Shibuya, I did a little bit of digging on the internet and found the address. We made a booking and later on in the day dined on fine cuisine and bottles of wine. The photo’s are blurry, but so are the memories. It’s emotive, or expressionist, or something.

Oh the ethical arguments that could spark from a discussion of the iconography used in this café, as Tim put it, it’s not the kind of thing you’d see in Ireland.

Club Yellow was next on the agenda, and my first night out in Ropongi, Tokyo’s infamous club district. Yellow was crowded and my impressions mostly range from spinning mirror balls and grinding house music to curling spiral staircases and ooking down on a 500 + person dance floor.

We went back to Ueno, by this time the sun was coming up, we ate in a ramen shop with no chairs, swaying over our meals while we stood at the counter.

Had another bath and crawled into my hole in the wall. It’s exactly like this, although I didn’t take the photo, the diagram is exactly what I spent the night in.

It was really rather hot inside the capsule, but its not too small of a space to sleep in. Just enough for one, but I did need another shower when we woke up, three hours later, to get out of Tokyo.

The rest of the last day was another blur of trains and subway, although this one blurred by a class 2b hangover, as this was the only night I didn’t drink a liter of water before bed, which mitigated the effects down to around the lowest categories of 3b or at the worst 3a. I got to ride a monorail. Kamil and myself arrived with significant time to spare, which we spent shopping in the large shopping centre attached to Haneda airport, which is the older international air terminal, as the city grew large enough to require two international airports on opposite sides of the city to deal with its air traffic demands. This is me, exhausted, standing in the middle of the mall.

Chicken wing facelock

2006-04-01T16:05:00.000+09:00

In a cafe in harajuku now, we're doing a bit of research for tonights activities.

Have done so much　in the past few days and don't really have the time or will to write properly as we just got asked to stop drinking in McDonalds, don't knock it, its CHEAP, and holidaying in Tokyo is a little like pissing money into a bottomless urinal.

When I said I was in a cafe in harajuku it might be best to clarify that I'm in my own private booth with a leather chair, a shiny pc, a PS2 hooked into a seperate tv and if i wanted to I could book a suite with a white leather couch and every gaming machine imaginable, stay the night and have a shower in the morning.

You know, I'd kind of like to say that we've experienced some deeper part of traditional Japanese culture in the period we've been here, but we haven't, we've been riding every roller coaster or amusement park ride we can get our hands on. This is mitigated by the fact that I live in the old country, so I've been encouraging indulgences that are the opposite. Like flying through and around a shopping mall at 130 kph on a rollercoaster at Tokyo Dome City, drinking at bars that are in famous movies that may or may not star Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansen and being filmed by Nipon TV at the theme park at the base of Mt. Fuji.

Pictures soon.

The sound of adventure

2006-03-28T23:05:00.000+09:00

The exchange rates were so in my favor I have now nearly achieved my savings goals for the past two years (nearly) of hard work (kind of) in Japan.

On Friday evening I had a very large Enkai. My memories end at the point where myself and one other, much older, male teacher were sitting in a snack bar, the mama san so drunk she was pouring us GLASSES of Jack Daniels. The next thing I know, I’m face down, fully dressed, at the wrong end of bed, its one o’clock in the afternoon and my walkman is still going. Thank you Creative audio industries.

I have been recovering since then. I will never drink JD again.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Tokyo, the city of eternal light and limitless possibilities, for five days of unleashed anarchy and site seeing with Tim and Kamil.

Can you smell my excitement?

Lazy Friday

2006-03-24T10:31:00.000+09:00

The machine now whirs happily into action every morning when it’s called upon, and the entire system is clean and new and complete. It’s really like having a brand new computer. Very nice to use and reasonably priced too.

At school today is the closing ceremony for the end of the year. At school today is not where I am. I have seen more than my share of ceremonies where children are spoken at and give pre-checked speeches back to those who were speaking. I can imagine the whole ceremony in detail as it is occurring now, in fact starting as I write these very words from the sun bathed comfort of my own couch. I have taken the last working day off. In fact, when I was looking for a supervisory teacher to tell this to this morning when I popped my head in at about eight twenty, I found that the person I was looking for had also taken today off.

The sun was bright yesterday morning as I arrived at work to watch the inter-school sports games that were running. I immediately saw two of my less sporting inclined students sitting under a tree and joined them. We agreed in unison that today was in fact, very boring, and set about learning about modern contemporary Jazz and Indie Rock, by listening to Adamu sensei’s walkman for an hour or so.

Soon everything at work will change. Looking forward to it in some ways, not looking forward to it in others. No mater the outcome, it is time to start slowly preparing for departure.

The exchange rates are in my favor today, so I might go to the bank and send some money home before they fly away again too.

Vernal Equinox Tuesday

2006-03-22T11:07:00.000+09:00

Fukuoka sat under heavy grey cloud, like a sprawling fat, neon frog in a muddy pond, as me and Fumiko disembarked from the carriage we had been sleeping in on the hour long trip from Kashima. Fumiko had been called in to cover a sick workmate, and I had arranged to have my computer repaired. My machine lumbered along at the end of my arm in its two brown boxes, packed tight inside between layers of thick Styrofoam and pink anti static bags, the kind that are unfortunately the same color as condoms.

It’s unusual for a public holiday to begin with such an early morning train ride, but then again everything has been feeling unusual of late. It’s currently party season, the end of the business year. Low workloads for teaching assistants and farewell enkai backed up in the appointment book, a time when one seriously needs to manage ones health to avoid falling under the weather. It is this that I have been trying to do like a dive bomber pilot desperately yanking on the control column, and after a weekend when I actually said to someone ‘as your attorney I advise that you immediately drive to my house, stopping to purchase a six of beer, a quart of Jack Daniels and two, two point five liter bottles of cola’ I am coming slowly out of the dive, on this, Vernal Equinox Tuesday. We are in spring. Fukuoka is wet, like a grumpy cat left out in the rain.

But at the moment, the downpour is holding back its extremities, obviously trying to save them up for the very moment that I decide to move a piece of expensive electronics. We march a block from the eki, it’s hustle, the push and shove of the crowded Japanese urban transport system, and disappear down a back alley behind a large, opulent hotel.

The interior of the computer store bespeaks the fact that the management are not just running a business, but are actually computer enthusiasts to an extent themselves. Instead of the mess, marketing and loose packaging that is associated with some computer departments in larger stores, the shop we enter is a calm sea of products behind clean glass cases, a well stocked technical desk and staff that know what they’re doing. The shop smells like new electronic components. It inspires confidence in the abilities it purports to convey.

By stroke of luck on this grey, dripping, vernal equinox of a Tuesday, the store has in stock one singular 80 gigabyte sized hard disk that will match my machine. This means that if the technical diagnostic I had presented them, ‘the hard drives well poked and needs replacing’, was correct then I could have my machine back this evening in full working order. I agree to let them service the entire computer and check all the other components, to ensure my diagnosis is correct, and they agree to re install my O.S. and give the machine a thorough clean.

MOS burger is a Japanese chain of burger restaurants. MOS stands for Mountain, Ocean, Sea. They have two types of restaurant, the first has red signage, the other has green. The difference is that green branded restaurants use organic vegetables and are a bit more expensive. It’s the kind of restaurant where you place your order from a menu at the counter, take your ticket number and wait at your table to be served. There’s no racks of stale burgers waiting to be unloaded onto which ever poor customer wants to play Russian roulette with a dose of E. Coli. It’s all cooked fresh. Brunch is a spicy cheese burger. Tasty.

I drop Fumiko off in the staff area of the mega mall she will stand in and sell Visa cards for the next six hours. I am now at my own disposal, with several hundred dollars, in a large Japanese metropolitan area. I of course, head straight for the robot store.

Seriously, the robot store. Five foot high nurse robots, with arms and hands straight from an 80’s sci-fi movie sit on glittering display. I play with the latest AIBO dog’s that connect to the web and can write their own blog using the pictures they take with their eyes. I talk in Japanese with a robot that’s only purporse is to talk with children, some bizarre kind of foster parent robot. It’s actually quite expressive and displays a range of emotions that are scarily subtle. I interact with a life size baby harp seal robot, designed for use in therapy with special needs children and the elderly. It is currently sucking on an oversize pacifier that is connected to a wall outlet. It’s how it recharges its batteries. It looks up at me, bats it big black, shiny, soulless eyes, wiggles its paws, its body and coos whenever I touch it. Maybe if you had limited cognitive abilities it would be a novel thing to interact with for hours on end. It is cute to say the least, which however, considering this is Japan, is like saying in New Zealand that a sheep has wool, or a movie has landscape shots.

In the next part of the shop, kids are gathered around miniature soccer arena. They are working through the playoffs of a robotic soccer tournament, which I watch for as long as it is possible to watch at an event where you don’t know the participants and want to see what’s going on. It’s interesting to see how the different teams have written different algorithms for their robots. One team writes programs that send the two robots around in concentric, complimentary circles, another writes ones that involve the machines moving the ball to the wall and using the wall as a guide to the goal. The ball is a large shiny flashing device, with a transponder that the robots are able to ‘see’. The youngest of the children participating is about seven or eight.

I walk up and continued on the way down to Canal City, a major retail complex that incorporates a multiplex cinema. The sky descends down another few hundred meters and it begins to lightly precipitate. Wandering through I uneventfully check out a pet shop. No sugar gliders today. I manage to find the cinema and after spending nearly an hour twatting about all over town, find the one film I wanted to watch starts in fifteen minutes. This is a good thing. I purchase a ticket and kill some time watching Charlize Theron lark about in skin tight lyrca and vinyl, dispatching enemies with some very flashy editing techniques and generally attempting to overthrow a corrupt regime. This is Aeon Flux and that’s all I’ll say for now.

I emerge from the cinema. It rains. I buy a small present for Fumiko. We have lunch. She loves the present. The computer store calls me, my computer is ready to be picked up. I take the subway across town again and receive my technically functioning machine from the store for the fairly reasonable price of 15,782 yen. I warily cross back to the central station, as in what seems to be a third wave of luck, the rain lets up for just long enough for me to cross the street and get back into shelter with my laptop in tow. I deposit it in a coin locker, secure the key deep inside the recesses of my backpack and browse through Yodobashi camera, looking at toys and games to kill the time. I sample the fair on offer from Microsoft by trying my hand at a game on their new 360 console. The game involves you controlling a character with a huge sword and equally huge mammaries from a third person point of view as she is pitted against whole armies, the size and detail of which is very, very impressive. The game play is frantic button pressing madness as you leap into massed formations of some kind of demon werewolf creature and the game has a good array of anime style combat special effects. You know the stuff, flashing white sword trails, lighting, glowing balls of energy, spinning dismembered corpses, bright lights and big bangs jazz. The game clocks up a superb body count and I quickly amass over 1000 kills in a one-on-many close quarter combat game. I’ve had my walkman on this whole time and have been too engrossed in the game to notice the five or six Japanese kids who have been standing behind me and watching as I dish out pixilated doom with the style and flair that only an experienced player of games can summon. I turn to leave, noticing I have to be across town again to meet Fumiko. They bow, I bow, hand out high fives and find my way out of the rabbit warren of techno-goodies.

Meet Fumiko, meet some of her friends and go to dinner at Zou, a huge restaurant of elaborate size. You sit, for the most part, in huge oversize fishing barges, large Asian style ones with elaborately sloped prows, maybe twenty five meters long and five across each, that are placed on top of a large, deep pool of live fish of all different varieties, swimming around in very clean, well filtered water. You can order from the menu, or, yes, you guessed it, you can pick up a rod and a net and try and catch your own supper, which is a little bit harder than you’d imagine, the pool is quite deep, you get no bait and the fish have more chance than you’d expect. Except for the crayfish, who are in large pens. Because of the range of wild life swimming around below you, it’s like eating at an aquarium. A man catches what looks like a small snapper. He nets it, takes it to a kitchen window overlooking the whole affair, hands it over, talks price and style, there is some loud song and dance which draws the attention of the entire establishment, and the fish is taken away to its inevitable doom. I took some video and will post it soon.

We can’t stay for long as we have to get a train back. We leave, eat again at MOS Burger, and find seats on a very crowded train taking people away from rainy vernal equinox Fukuoka. Arrive home. The computer, when taken out of its box, looks brand new. My assessment was correct, the hard drive was fragged, and all it’s other components have been tested and are in good working order. The machine the been totally cleaned and even smells new.

Hopefully when I turn it on and rebuild this afternoon, it will be just fine.

2006-03-16T15:26:00.000+09:00

If you were a kid and it was 1988, you were one of the blessed few who got to experience the true joy of what can only be described ‘a stroke of pure marketing genius’. Who thought it up?

‘Hey Chad, you’ve got a retarded name but I’ve got a good idea for a new line!’

‘What’s that Ron the unimaginably smart guy?’

‘Kids love Dinosaurs right Chad?’

‘Yeah Ron, kids love dinosaurs like my ex-wife loves the punitive alimony payments I am court ordered to pay her.’

‘And Chad, kids also love G.I. Joes right, you know, the whole action war fighting thing?’

‘Yeah Ron, hey I think I see where you’re headed, we make a range of G.I. Joes that are actually dinosaur soldiers, you know, the body of a human with the head of a dinosaur!’

‘Chad, You’re a retard, I’m taking your job, your home, your dog and your ex-wife. Why? Because last night I talked with the devil and he gave me this idea for a toy range that will give the under twelve’s wet dreams sooner than their biologically ready for.’

This was heroin for kiddies that they produced, a compulsively addictive range of perfect toys. In 1988-89 there seemed to be nothing more on the face of the earth that nine and ten year old boys wanted more than Dino Riders. Fuck the turtles, burn the Joes, these even shelved the Transformers for a while. Josh and me lived ate breathed and shat Dino Riders.

Now I was one of those dorky little kids that new his Jurassic from his Triassic and his Cretaceous. I had fact sheets, catalogue books, wall charts and I would’ve had tattoos of a Tyrannosaurus gutting the carcass of a triceratops on my skinny white chest, except for the fact I was mortified of needles and I was nine. While the other boys were playing bull rush on the fields I could often be found digging through the cat turds in the sand pit desperately trying to find a fossil, then I would get distracted and build a huge sand pile and make tunnels through it, only to find...more cat turds.

One day I was watching T.V. and an add came on. A huge logo blazed across the screen, I swear like message from on high:

‘Harness the power of Dinosaurs: DINO RIDERS!’

And behold, some blonde haired American children were playing with simply the coolest toys ever bought into creation in the late 80’s. Dinosaurs, controlled by humanoid (ish) characters, that were engaged in an epic battle for control of prehistoric earth after their spaceships had crash landed there. These weren’t just cheap lizard looking dinosaurs, oh no, these were scientifically accurate dinosaurs, modeled from fossil records. The boasted a degree of scientific accuracy that would encourage parents to purchase them on mass for their children as they could of course ‘play and learn’ about paleontology. This struck my young brain as being the kind of gifted inspiration that could only have passed down from some high peak of oriental wisdom to us in the west.

Had Josh seen this? Did he have one already? Was I already in an arms race that would leave the cold war for dead in its wake of dismembered, smoking dinosaur corpses and partially digested action figures? Parents had to be cajoled into providing funding immediately! Like a veritable President I stood before the congress of my two parents and begged for the funding necessary to assemble my army of perfectly detailed dinosaurs. Dinosaurs...

THAT SHOT LASER BEAMS

Hells yes was I ever persuasive. Now of all the myriad range of dinosaurs that were available in the first series release there was one, one huge, brilliant, gargantuan item that no true collector, no true aesthete of Dino Riders would or could ever do without.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex. Seeing the box on display in the toy store was a feeling akin to what I’m sure it would feel like to look on the face of God for the first time. The art work on these boxes was amazingly detailed. It had a rich palette that evoked perfectly the dark and sinister primeval world that the warring Rulon and Valorian factions had crash-landed on.

Somebody had taken the largest flesh eating creature ever to walk the earth, the biggest, coolest thing that had ever existed, bar none, and they had built a laser cannon battle station on its back, which was Christmas, Easter, your birthday and the last day of school all rolled up into one cluster fuck of endorphin producing, eye ball popping, expensive beyond the realm of pocket money Lost Arc-of-the-fucking-Covenant.

My battle of one-upmanship with Josh continued, progressively over the year our armies leapfrogged one over the other in progressive escalation in accordance with birthdays and Christmases. He got the Deinonychus, I got the Styracosaurus, he got the Pteranodon, I got the Quetzalcoatlus. One day I was mortified, shocked beyond belief when he pulled out the Triceratops! The Triceratops! It was only one of the three battery powered dinosaurs that walked on its own. He could put it in a direction and it could attack autonomously,just by running over my armies while I was forced to attack and defend against Josh himself. It was a large scale force multiplier. It had a moveable radar dish! All was lost.

My parents went to London on a holiday business junket. I sacrificed playmobil and star wars characters on an arcane altar to the heathen god’s of the Rulon’s, for there was only one thing that would truly be able to sucker punch Josh’s Triceratopian reinforced army of doom.

When the now beloved congressional panel of Dino Rider war funding parents produced the physically overwhelming box that held within it’s confines the solution to my long and weary campaign of attrition I thanked them profusely, then took with my own two hands one of the greatest toys of the 80’s into my possession. It gleamed, it glimmered, it’s mouth opened and it roared when it walked, and most of all, all it bits and pieces were surprisingly really well designed, sturdy and stayed on the dinosaur when it moved. Hopefully, somewhere high above in the attics of my family, my T-Rex still remains.

Josh got one at the same time. Somehow to this day I think there was a meeting of congressional funding panels that orchestrated this. This effectively ended the Dino Riders arms race, and they did look cool when they ran into each other. You see, the T-Rex had the power to destroy anything on the battlefield. Josh Eventually got the Torosaurus and I got the Diplodocus, so between us we had the entire first series release in what at the time was mint condition.

Dino Riders were one of the coolest things ever about being young. So damn cool. I want my T-Rex.

Now.

addendum: The images I pinched for this piece I got from TheToyArchive.com at
http://www.toyarchive.com/DinoRiders/DinoRidersToys.html

They pinched the logo for their banner, but the two photo’s of the box and the armored T-Rex are personal photo’s someone has donated to the site. Didn’t think they’d mind me using them as long as I didn’t claim they were main. Got to the Toy Archive now and browse through all those old toy’s you had. The entire post is in aid of today’s Japanese phrase…natsukashi. Essentially referring to sentimentality, especially regarding ones childhood.

The Unthinkable

2006-03-13T09:02:00.000+09:00

It happened so quickly. The program I was running locked up and then within a few short seconds, the screen switched to a bright, blank blue color. I began to feel the blood drain from my face.

A reboot confirmed my fears. I was facing a full hard disk drive failure. Stomachs clenched, pupils dilated and my first thoughts ran along lines of ‘where are my backup files’ and ‘how much will this cost me’ at the same time I was inserting the XP boot disk.

Booted up into the recovery mode from the installer disk. Ran XP in safe mode. Managed to make it into safe mode once, but the program became unstable within a few minutes, rebooted, which now takes five to seven minutes. Ran some diagnostics in a DOS shell. Yes, my hard drive has died.

‘This disk has one or more unrecoverable errors’

The digital man, his entire working life existing mostly within the mechanical confines of an 80 gigabyte internal hard drive suddenly found himself adrift on the open ocean of life as he watched his steadfast stead take on water and list beneath the waves. It feels like a pet cat or dog has gone missing or is very sick. It’s kind of like an empty yawning sensation that nags in the pit of the guts, like a worm twisting on a hook of frustration.

Fortunately, I have a life raft. The hours ticked by until a neighbor arrived home and I was able to use her machine to check on the state of the food supplies in my life raft, the quality and extent of the files I had backed up.

Aside from the physical inconvenience of now being marooned without any working computer of my own, I have sustained only minimal data loss as a result of the hard drive failure. What I have lost is annoying, recent photo’s, my downloads file of the past year and a half, my full email records, internet favorites and contact list, and all the original work on chickens Vs tanks. I have also lost anything and everything to do with gaming, although these are only games and really not very important. In a sense this is disheartening, but it’s not so bad if I look at what I have still got and the fact that the majority of what I have lost is easily, if not time consuming and annoyingly, replaceable.

I still have nearly all of the photo’s of the past year and a half, and of those photo’s I have lost, I posted the best of them on the web, so I will be able to recover some part of them at least, including chickens vs. tanks, which is on hold to say the very least until I am back up and running, which will take at least a week. I still have nearly two years worth of lesson planning material. I still have the full copy of everything I have written in Japan, more or less. I still have all my music, movies and pre Japan downloads. I will still have an old email contact list. I hope I still have the draft of the bay, although I do hope a certain someone still has the copy I sent to her locked away in an email somewhere. If that certain someone reads could she please let me know?

I was lent the use of Aine’s laptop, the one which recently also succumbed to full hard drive failure, giving me the diagnostic experience to arrive at the conclusions I have regarding my machine. I immediately went to the video store and rented ‘The Big Lebowski’. Reverted into the modus operandi of ‘The Dude’ in order to see myself through the data crisis. Made a white Russian and went to bed.

Now I wait for 10am, when the companies help line opens in Tokyo to schedule a pick up and deliver repair job. Unfortunately, my warranty expired quite some time ago, so this will cost me a few maan to bring my machine back up online, however, when it does arrive back, I will be able to start again with a fresh clean system and will ustilise even more intensive backup methods than ever before. In the mean time, if you need to get hold of me urgently, please use my lycos email address, which is my full name, with no spaces, full stops or underscores @lycos.com. Or there's the good old fashioned telephone of course.

What the hell am I going to do this evening?

Racism part 2

2006-03-09T11:01:00.000+09:00

Recently over on Saga Blog,

http://sagaalt.blogspot.com/2006/03/is-japan-racist.html

my buddy Jayne described an encounter she had with the Nagasaki police over a parking ticket and why she felt discriminated against due to the fact that she's a foreigner. You have to go and read this brief post which references BBC articles about Japanese attitudes towards foreigners in Japan that were carried out by the U.N. recently. Jayne invited people to comment on her posting and I began to. However, at present word count, my reply is over 1000 words long and is a bit too long to put in the comments section, so I’ve posted it here, in case anyone wants to continue the discussion here on my site, or the SagaJET forums. To the people that normally just read the Feature Wall, click that link to put the diatribe below in context for yourselves.

Yes, I have witnessed recently a pretty bad example of indirect discrimination in Japan. It was bad enough to the extent that I was personally offended by it. While on holiday in Sapporo we went into a late night onsen. In the changing rooms was a sign informing patrons to ‘secure their valuables’ as ‘thieves were around’.

On the poster, in between the text at the top and the bottom of the layout was an image of said thief. Yes folks, you guessed it by now, a Caucasian male, with a beard, like mine but blonde, dressed in a black cliché burglar’s outfit, all in slinky black, with a black woolen cap. He had a black mag-light and a black loot bag. In fact, he looked a bit like James Hetfield.

To the owners of that onsen:

FUCK

YOU

BUDDIES

Never the less at the time I was drunk, and it was late at night so a vociferous protest from me would not have accomplished much as you can bet the top management wouldn’t be around at this time of night, and chiefly would have reinforced the stereotypes that some people like to build around us here. So I let it slide. I bent like the proverbial reed in the wind. However, if anyone who was on that trip kept any of the fliers they were handing out on the street that led us there, I’d appreciate their address so I can send them a U.N. style “We’re very angry with you and this is the letter to tell you so” letter. What’s wrong with having a figure, male or female, dressed in all black clothing wearing a balaclava that covers their face for goodness sake?

Then there was the time I was standing in line behind a middle-aged woman at a convenience store. Quite neutral, zoned out, just waiting in line. I was well outside of the limits of her personal space, especially as I use my own, western limits of personal space, which are somewhat greater than Japanese limits. She turned, saw me and jumped, really, she *jumped* another half meter away with a look of abject terror on her face. I thought to myself,

“What a fucking retard”

And didn’t do anything, again, not wanting to actually provide her with a legitimate reason for her stupid, inbred, banal reaction. Not actual discrimination per se, but certainly an example of the sometimes rampant xenophobia that lurks in Japan’s soft underbelly. But i really wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her screaming "What did you think I was going to do to you?"

Of course to balance it all out, for every stupid person or thing you run into here, you run into someone who is totally the opposite, here's Joes comments on the website for the reason why the bad ones tend to stand out...

"Most Japanese however, are not racist. The problem is that the 20% or so who are happen to be yelling the loudest. Plus, they have government support, which really isn't a surprise since the LDP founders were mostly right wing war criminals..."

and on a seperate note

"The saddest part is that this attitude will only make Japan weaker in the years to come,"

Joe's probably got a good point with the idea that xenophobia / racism could make Japan weaker in the years to come. With Japan's birthrate in decline, if the current trend continues there will only be 27 Japanese left in Japan by the year 3000. Well, that’s the fancy statistic they've put out anyway.

So Japan actually needs more foreigners to come and live here to keep their labor pools and employment markets at a sufficient level as time goes on.

However, we can but hope that the current generation of students who we have all been educating over the past x many years of the JET program will eventually be able to move things in the opposite direction, as they have been exposed from an early age to foreigners and foreign culture, and thus perhaps be slightly less xenophobic (unless you terrorize your students for fun).

The majority of students who have passed through the education system while the JET program has been in place will still not be as fully integrated into the broader political franchise, in terms of actually holding political power, for some time yet due to their relatively young age.

Maybe over time our students, with their less polarised views of gaijin, will be the ones who will begin to remove some of the more significant legal barriers that can face foreigners in Japan. Hopefully the kids will be alright, and I honestly think they will be.

But we have to deal with the here and now. Did anyone read Seb’s article earlier in the year on the forums?

http://www.sagajet.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1177

The article concerns proposed plans in the name of ‘anti-terror’ legislation that involve placing small computer chips into all Gaijin cards that contain all information about the owner and may even have their fingerprints encoded into it. Biometric data tracking. Welcome to the police state. Sorry to sound like Alex Jones, however, the more I’ve been reading over the years, the more that things are actually starting to resemble what Jones and other people like him have been warning about is a wake up call and it’s time to take this whole thing seriously. Really, biometric data tracking is just stupid and invasive. I am not a violent criminal. Never mind the blatant glaring omission that the only major terror attack in recent Japanese history was carried out by JAPANESE PEOPLE.

Its bad enough I have to carry an internal passport, it’s bad enough that the government brutally enforces what kind of material I can and cannot put into my own fucking body (Japan’s draconian drug laws), but to enforce computer controlled collection of biometric data based on a persons nationality, or legal status as a ‘foreigner’ is outright blatant racism.

Yes, the U.S. does now collect data on all foreigners that visit the country now and of course, that’s not acceptable either. In fact U.S. tourist numbers have dropped dramatically recently by up to 30%.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/23/wus23.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/23/ixworld.html

So it’s obvious that many people around the world will simply not put up with the bullshit that modern governments are trying to foist on people in the name of anti-terror legislation. Giving up your rights in a time of crisis is the worst possible action for any civil society and is one of the first steps on the ‘granny takes tumble down the stairs’ fall into authoritarian government.

Fight the power!

End of the business year

2006-03-07T09:24:00.000+09:00

A weekend in which one undertook a variety of activities including the imbibing of fermented alcoholic beverages, procurement of a variety of new filmic forms of entertainment and even traveled at great length and expense to view in detail at large on the very big screen, a new moving motion picture.

Friday did end with a whimper when I skulked lately out of the office after finishing the publication of the latest edition in my epically unfolding web cartoon series. I did retreat back to my quarters and didst replenish my spirit with beer, before advancing with my good lady friend and Mr. Joe Tris of Chicago towards a local eatery where we dined on the flesh of porcine beasts flayed over a thick cabbage and pickled ginger yest batter, fried and covered with cheese, the mayonnaise and sauce.

From this point we made further travel by way of the train across the sprawling morass of fields and houses to Kubota. On arrival at the house belonging to ms. Poonam, we were somewhat early in our arrival and passed the time where for the rest of the evening we engaged in digital sport, vying to outscore one another in bouts of guitar karaoke, vocal karaoke and the partaking of alcohol.

We awoke with a start the next morning, still sitting in front of the gaming machines, coated in beer.

Was then distracted from writing in style for about thirty minutes and now cannot bring myself back into the headspace.

Yes, also saw the Narnia film. Tilda Swinton was good, the CG looked top notch, the battle sequences were fairly violent affairs too. A well polished piece of commercial fantasy cinema. Leave your disbelief at the door and buzz out for two and a half hours. which is all you can ask of a fantasy film for it to rate as "workable and successful" so yeah, it was okay. Wouldn't want to see it again and again, but I’d consider paying to see the next installment. One nice touch is that its release date in Japan seems to have been delayed to sync with the start of spring, as this is one of the key themes of the movie, the seasonal shift from winter into spring. So you watch a film where an entire region thaws out and then when you leave the cinema it’s happening in reality all around you. Yes, it is warming up over here.

My favorite trick at the moment is still to walk up to people in the staff room first thing in the morning, point to them with both fingers game show style and say “Oklahoma” to which they invariably reply “Ohayo”. This terrible joke provides me with a much needed kick in the mornings.

This week is graduation time again. I am in favor of a ‘two plan’ style of graduation, once when you finish your final year secondary school (not if you leave before hand) and once again if you finish a tertiary qualification.

In Japan however, compulsory schooling ends at the termination of Junior high school and thus is the justification for another long winded ceremony involving speeches from every Tom, Dick and Daisuke. Solemn, robotic sounding pronunciations and idealistic promises from graduating students, a song or three, and people getting far, far to emotional over the whole thing. This happens whenever a child graduates at all levels of schooling. Tim even had to attend a kindergarten graduation one year. KINDERGARTEN! These children have no comprehension of what is even happening to them!

Graduation season actually provokes a marketing drive in the video camera sales department, so parents can cry like little babies while watching their wee precious ball of resource consummation waddle across the stage, and then replay the whole nauseating event over and over again to bore people to tears for generations to come.

Another event that we have coming up is the end of the Japanese business year. The new business year starts on April 1^st. In most Japanese companies, especially the civil service, people are transferred around from department for department, with blocks tenure being allocated in one yearly allotments. You may have been working in the board of education for four or five years and then told that you will be transferring to the board of civil engineering. April 1^st is the official date of this transfer and it can bring some pretty big changes. Last year my desk moved across the room unexpectedly and this year I am expecting essentially the same to happen. I may have all new people to work with; I may get a new supervisor or nothing may happen at all.

Thighs that sing in the night

2006-02-27T14:11:00.000+09:00

I nearly blew up the speakers in Jesus bar on Friday night doing an off rendition of an AC/DC song. Wasn’t properly warmed up and the vocals were well off. Just volume…too much volume. I fell asleep over a hamburger steak and chips a little while later and woke up in a diminished state on Kamil’s floor the next afternoon.

Instead of sitting in my house and making chickens 6 (which let me assure you is well planned out) I jumped on a bus, was provided with beer and sake and driven through the night and woke up in Hiroshima-Ken where I spent all day snowboarding. Random. Very random.

Jayne was along on the trip with me, Kamil and Sarah. She put me and Sarah through our paces in basic snowboarding, which was very useful. I managed to learn how to connect turns from my heel edge onto my toe edge and was comfortable putting a bit of speed down, with moderate control by the end of the day. Still beginning stages to say the least, but I advanced over my performance last time.

Living on a bus for twenty four hours in close quarters was a, um, bonding experience. Especially after a days sweating it out in spring snow season. Oh the fabulous odors we produced.

My legs are singing songs of delight after their all day workout and I have some spectacular colorations on my knees from learning how to connect turns onto my toe edge

Castles...I want one.

2006-02-22T17:46:00.000+09:00

So, this is a dead porcupine fish I found washed up on the beach at Karatsu last weekend. It roughly describes how I felt the morning after Yoshi’s farewell party, as he is departing for China. I haven’t really known Yoshi for all that long, but he seemed to be a very worthwhile person to get to know in the short time I’ve known him. I told him as much too. It was one of those parties at a restaurant where the action spills out onto the pavement, as does the pre digested food and booze of a few different people, the police are called but then bugger off as the owner of the place knows them and explains what is going on. This has been the major event of the past week, except for when one of the senior students at school got so stressed out over exams she flipped and ran away, which caused general excitement around school for about fifteen minutes before she was located. Excitement stemming from the high rate of suicide in Japan perhaps? Maybe that’s just me trying to dramatize things. Again. Dramatize isn’t a real word or term is it? If it is it is a silly term and I should think up something new to describe taking things one morbid step too far.

In all honesty I have very little recollection of this photo being taken at all and was rather pleasantly surprised when I checked my photo’s the next day. Yoshi is the man on the far left being fed and the man next to him let me ride his mountain bike for nearly a year before requesting it back due to his being harassed by the police for being a foreigner. Well, to put that in perspective he was a foreigner driving without a valid Japanese license. But they stopped him because he was foreign.

This is the almighty Karatsu pine forest that wraps around half the bay, is infested by crows, snakes, enormous spiders and on the whole is taken straight from a Dr. Suess storybook with its bizarre twisting pine trees that loop and distort themselves seemingly on purpose. Needless to say I love the place.

When I first learned I was coming to Saga, one of the first images I found on the web was of Karatsu Castle and I hadn’t actually managed to get there until last weekend. Here it sits above the city (think there’s an ordinance that forbids buildings to be built higher than the castle, I agree with this measure) with its Aeria of Eagles. This is cool because of three reasons. Firstly I just learned the correct term to describe a group of Eagles, Aeria, secondly, you just did as well, third and most importantly this castle has huge screaming Eagles flying around it. I’m sorry, it’s very hard to get more impressive than that.

This is a more imposing shot looking upwards from the lower battlement staircase. Again, may I point out that bird is in fact an Eagle of some description, and they fly down quite low sometimes and scream. They are not kept, in any sense, on purpose. There are no cages, just the protected forest areas where they live. They choose to live around the Castle. They use the updrafts it generates to rise up higher and higher and then fly out over the bay to catch fish. It’s a pattern, you can see two or three of them always circling slowly up or down over the castle. They never seem to flap their wings. Just sitting, motionless in the air currents.

This photo is taken from the beach on the other side of the castle. It took ten minutes of waiting for an Eagle to be in just the right place.

Please be enamored of an image of me, bathed in white light, viewing the bay from the top level of the castle. I am busy surveying the realm in front of me, with a serious face, musing on heraldry and pondering the fate of my hordes of surfs who are working in the fields behind me as did the Lords of old from this very spot.

This is a panoramic image of what I was looking at. Its seven individual shots stitched together into one. You can get the basic idea, but if you want to see a larger one in more detail, let me know by email or by commenting and I’ll send you a larger version. Not for the bandwidth impaired.

However, the Castle itself is mostly rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in the 1960’s, so the inside is a museum containing many relics hundreds of years old. These two blades pictured above are the real deal. These are three hundred year old Katana. They have small nicks in them from being used in war. Placed into a river, they will split a leaf if it passes over them as it runs downstream. A sheet of rice paper dropped on top of them will be sliced in two. They are still sharp. People’s lives have been ended on their edges. If you carry this blade and perchance meet God, God will be cut, and he will cry the red tears. You should be listening to the Kill Bill soundtrack while you view these. This is the kind of relic level weapon that never leaves Japan anymore. Look on them and tremble. I was and that is why there is a slight blur. No flash possible as it would bounce back off the glass of the display case. Apologies.

On a slightly lighter note, here is a photo of me and a monkey. An old man was walking his pet monkey through the train station and it scampered over to me and Fumiko and said hello for a while. Although I have seen lots of monkeys in Zoo’s, nothing compares to the fun of playing with a monkey. They have little tiny hands! Not paws, not fins, not claws or wings but hands. Of course I knew this before, but the full reality of the concept hadn’t dawned on me until this guy was playing with the zips on my jacket with his fingers, that looked just like mine. He belonged to an old man, who looked like he had the time and money to look after a monkey properly because they need lots of attention and care otherwise they aren’t as sociable and healthy as this one was. Pete put it best when he said there is nothing like a mint condition monkey.

That was the weekend. New chickens out soon I hope.

Todays misty temple shots bought to you by...

2006-02-15T13:55:00.000+09:00

This morning was significantly foggy and seeing as I have no classes at all today due to the students sitting exams again, I took my camera out first thing before it lifted and snapped this eye candy up at the shrine, which looked suitably mystical and reasonably Asian shrouded in the early morning fog with the sunrise trying to burn through. Enjoy.

The path through the fields I take to school every morning, about 8:10 today.

Tree by temple grounds.

Part of the series of gates leading up to the Inari Shrine.

Secondary Shrine building.

In all it’s glory.

Tori! Evryone’s favorite ubiquitous image of Japan, seen here with added misty spookiness.

Tori EXTREME!

Monday ape

2006-02-13T09:04:00.000+09:00

Monday morning. A frost melts in the sun, which now is rising earlier and earlier each day. A weekend spent partying leads to a Monday morning persona resembling a snail with an anorexic sense of happy.

I dreamed of Damacy last night. I keep on wanting to touch small objects around the office and pick them up.

The small glowing embers behind my eyes indicate that this could in fact be the start of a detox week.

I watched a short comedy sketch this morning that was based around the premise of a new exercise system. The new exercise system entailed a medium sized, violently aggressive, half man half ape creature which attacked you as soon as you let it out of its box. The ensuing fight provides you with a full body workout ‘the natural way'.

I hate half man half ape creatures. They are probably one of the only things I find irrationally terrifying, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that they are not (in all likelihood) real. There is still a part of me that was terrified through every part of Harry and the Henderson’s (and not just by the script) and is still convinced that the next time I wander into a forest death awaits me with a swaying man like gait and short nasty, pointy teeth.

Did you know that recently a government sponsored team has begun to try and find evidence of the existence of a these creatures on Islands in Indonesia? It’s news worthy because it is the first time any public body has ever conducted serious, funded research into whether or not a missing link type creature exists. I will never ever again go into any forest without being armed if they find some and prove the existence of half men / ape creatures. They could be anywhere.

Watching me.

Sapporo

2006-02-07T16:06:00.000+09:00

Sapporo Sapporo Sapporo. Many activities were packed into three and a half days of rampant holiday fun. Chief highlights included:

Teaching myself to snowboard.
Three meters of snow in the streets and the temperature never going above zero.
The snow sculptures at the world famous snow festival.
Drinking at the Sapporo beer factory.
Snow fights.
Throwing small squealing girls into snow drifts.
Cheap karaoke.
Elaborate Onsen
Having a bath outside in -3 degree temperature.

I have never seen snow like that before. Just piles and piles of snow everywhere. Half a meter of ice covering the roads. Once some more photo’s come through I will do a picture post with stories as well.

Of note would be the fact I spent some time teaching myself how to snowboard. Fell down a few hundred times but kept on getting back up. To begin with had a couple of spectacular wipe outs and then figured out what it felt like just before I was going to fall over, then learned how to go down a bit safer. Incidentally this was how I learnt to control my speed and direction, by leaning back into falls, until eventually I was leaning back and balanced, then falls were only precipitated by me becoming distracted by the amazing mountain scenery. There’s just so much to write about I think I will in fact wait for some photo’s to come through (lots of people took many good photos) and when they do I’ll use them as talking points.

One more sleep to go...

2006-02-02T10:34:00.000+09:00

A day where timetable changes and exams have depleted me of any meaningful work whatsoever, I’m sitting in this hot house of a staff room again actually looking forward to getting out this afternoon to the elementary schools to

Do some work and
Not have to sit in a room with two blazing kerosene heaters.

This week has mostly followed a pattern of getting up and counting down the days until I go on holiday. This time tomorrow I should be boarding my flight to Sapporo for a few days of r and r after 5 months of relatively normal work and that whole ‘get really sick and have a shitty winter vacation’ thing. I’ll order my copy of Homeworld 2 tonight as well, so that it’s ready and waiting for me when I get back.

Things are going okay. Fumiko is apparently moving to Melbourne now instead of the U.S., a good choice in my opinion. I’m running into the good old ‘tired of this position’ grumbles that I get and know how to manage from time to time. On the one hand they take some a little effort to put aside and do the job properly, which happens and on the other hand they are justifying the decision I made last year not to re-contract for a third year here.

Decided I will look up the man who directed all the miniature photography on lord of the rings. Show him the decent work I think I’m doing with the visual look of Chickens and say that if he has any good development positions open I can fly my self there in an instant when my contract expires here. On a similar note, Chickens 4 went live yesterday. This is the final scene setting part of the storyline and finished at the very moment…well, if you want to know just click the link at the top of the page. Anyway, when I return I’ll have to spend some more time developing special effects techniques because Chickens 5 will be the first action set piece.

How to fry a chicken without depleting the ranks of your cast and not angering your girlfriend who has expressly forbidden you to even singe one hair on any chicken, because they are ‘cute’? I may have to buy a bag of fuzzy cotton dots and burn / melt them somehow? Eventually I’ll have to do the tanks as well.

Another point of note is the focal distance of the macro on my camera isn’t quite enough to get a good crisp shot of a whole tank because they are too small to come into a crisp normal focus, yet too large for the macro to get the whole machine in clear detail. There are I believe two solutions for this at present, well three really.

Sacrifice visual detail. Not really an option.
Buy a new camera and some new lenses. Expensive, could buy bigger models for less.
take shots of the same set up at different focal lengths and composite them together.

Out of all the options three actually seems to be the most cost (if not time) effective. I’ve done some test panels and they look okay. That’s me out. See you after the snowboarding.

Choppy Waters and Snowboarding

2006-01-27T12:05:00.000+09:00

Another week has washed over us here with a brief but relatively uneventful conference which was made more interesting because of the fact me and a few other people skipped off in the early afternoon to do some shopping across town and mingled back in with the general population during the break between sessions in the afternoon.

Of further note was my attendance at the ‘Things you need to arrange for leaving Japan’ a list of which is just as extensive as the things I needed to do to come here. It’s all rather boring, involves nominating tax representatives so lets leave it at that.

Episode 3 of Chickens is complete and up on the site. Had lots of fun making all the forest backgrounds by layering trees at different scales over each other to give some notion of distance perspective.

This time next week I will be on a plane somewhere over central Japan going on a nicely expensive snowboarding weekend in Hokkaido…After five months of solid saga it’s beginning to wear again, have to motivate myself to be as happy and positive as I need to be to get the job done properly here. Time for a break. Holidays are good. Speaking of holidays, some people take them a bit more seriously then needed.

Middle aged people who go on cruise liners can suck. No really, you guys can suck ass. I can say quite happily that its mostly middle aged people who pay for holidays on these floating pleasure barges, these mobile Hilton hotels, because anyone my age just doesn’t have the money, and even if they did, would do something far more exciting than being chauffeured around exotic islands in a floating shop front of western civilization, looking at quaint locals and being sold things by people desperate to make enough cash to survive. I’ve had this opinion of cruise liners for quite some time and working in a waterfront bar only reinforced this position. However, the latest pack of whining, fat pampered morons who are throwing their toys around onboard the QM2 are enough to make me want to start up an enterprise in Somalia that focuses solely on firing RPG’s at cruise liners. Just read this article on the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4645316.stm

‘Anxiety and depression’ after twelve days at sea? Good God look at how far we have fallen in the west over the past 100 years! Long gone are the days when young men and women would pack themselves onto a boat and sail for THREE MONTHS to the other side of the world for a chance at a better life. Braving storms and ice in rickety wooden death traps where permanent sea sickness could be a way off life if you couldn’t adjust. Now we have a few rich people, probably a minority of the total on-board population who complain about their encroaching psychological problems when, due to an accident with the ships propulsion systems, they are forced to spend twelve days floating at sea onboard a stabilized, air conditioned, pleasure ship replete with casino’s, a full theatre, movie screens, swimming pools, gyms, saunas, karaoke bars and all the gourmet food their heaving bloated fat bellies can eat.

In the real world, sometimes things go wrong. You have to accept this. Nothing is perfect, and hey guys it’s a horrible cliché but lets face it, worse things have happened at sea. Sure, some people have missed stops, some people have missed a hotel booking and there has certainly been some inconvenience to those on board and the company is offering compensation, which may, or may not be adequate. I don’t know, I don’t have any figures to base an analysis on. However, I totally lost patience with this storm in a teacup when I read about middle aged peoples psychological problems at sea on holiday in the worlds largest, most luxurious cruise ship. Filing a class action suit may even be justifiable depending on the financial loss incurred by the holiday makers and considering the miss-representation that they claim Cunard guilty off. Not being in full possession of all the facts it’s hard to judge.

However, once I hear people crying about how they are depressed, anxious and stressed inside their ocean pleasure dome it just reeks of opportunists trying to take advantage of a situation. Come on you pampered toy dogs, just relax and have sauna, then go to the bar and have a drink before your enormous gourmet dinner, try making the most of the situation you’re faced with. Your cries for help fall on quite deaf ears back in the real world. You booked a cruise on a ship and you’re sick of seeing the sea? What the hell were you thinking might happen if something goes wrong? More money than brains obviously.

Nearly time for lunch! Woo!

Chickens and Pooh

2006-01-21T20:29:00.000+09:00

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on the Chickens launch…much appreciated. Episode 3 was shot this afternoon and episode 4 will probably be the ten panel first showdown between the chickens and the tanks as they meet.

Moving into multiple composite shots as the script demands more varied locations but it’s progressing quicker now as most of the styling elements have been decided on. Its those ones that really take the longest because you have to um and ah a lot and take decisions that are going to effect how the rest of the work blends into one whole piece. Being able to do rough edits with the workstation next to the blue screen set is useful too.

Last night we were shopping for a new nabe, literally ‘pot’ in English and Fumiko spied a lost little pooh bear toy sitting in a puddle in a huge parking lot. Looking as forlorn and sad as he did, the toy was subsequently picked up, squeezed out, put into a plastic bag, taken home, washed, dried and will be moving into his new home at Fumiko’s in a few days. He looks much happier now.

It's working

2006-01-17T15:32:00.000+09:00

The first episode of Chickens Vs Tanks has been completed and is now uploaded into its own new photobucket account…What are you waiting for? Click below and go to read the newest, sweariest cartoon featuring the largest all star cast of chickens and miniature tanks ever! Rated LSC for lots of swearing chickens.

http://chickens-vs-tanks.blogspot.com/

Chickens Vs Tanks: The chronicles of the days when God lost interest, took a major leap forward over the weekend with the design, purchase and construction of my first blue screen set and tripod. Because of the scale of the miniatures I am working with it’s 1.5 meter square floor and 1 meter high main walls are large enough for me to build entire villages and cities in and turns my two foot high tripod into a 150m crane. Which is nice. It also turns the two new 30 watt UV lights above the set into a full lighting grid.

Mostly I was very excited about the fact the blue screen actually works and works well. Once I upload the stills into the editor I can remove all the blue with a click of the button and have a clean fresh image for compositing in a fraction of the time it would take if I was shooting against some kind of background. Also deciding to shoot the entire production on blue screen eliminated all concerns about weather conditions (chickens blow over with the slightest gust of wind) lighting elements and doing photo shoots on the weekends as its always dark by the time I get around to it these days. Most importantly I finally managed to get some shots of the tanks done and they look stunning once they’re processed

All in all it’s kind of strange to watch a cheap throw away idea lodge in my head somehow and take on a life of its own, with its look getting progressively more and more refined. Time to crank the local PR machine a bit.

Stardust Capsule returns to earth. Zombie researchers sounding red alert.

2006-01-16T10:18:00.000+09:00

Zombie researchers, a field of professionals whose opinions often differ wildly to the point of violence, today united in expressing their outrage and horror at the return to earth of NASA’s stardust capsule.

“This return to earth of the Stardust Capsule represents the most significant threat of a space based zombie pathogen breaking out in the wider human population that we’ve seen since the discovery channel used a robot crawler to open the mysterious inner chamber of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.”

Jesus God No! Don't do it man!

This statement by Dr. Gag Zeltwurst was part of a press release put out just hours ago by the American chapter of Zombie Watch International, the group who also recently made headlines by stating that the recent outbreaks and spread of bird flu was merely a government cover up story to mask a horrific series of local level zombie outbreaks that started after French tourists defiled the temples at Angkor Wat and in other locations in east asia. The statement read out by Dr. Zeltwurst spelled out the danger in the clearest possible terms.

“For the good of human civilization, we desperately urge the scientists of NASA not to open the Stardust Capsule at any cost and for it to be buried in a sanctified led pressure chamber at sea over the Mariana’s trench.”

NASA scientists committing the unthinkable

The group fears that exposure to the elements of deep space could have allowed the aerogel sample package to pick up the dreaded ‘great space zombie pathogen’ or GSZP, a variant of the zombie virus so horribly communicative that even “the particulate remains of the recently cremated would begin to reanimate and become mobile, moving across the land like a dust storm, infecting all who inhale even the tiniest amount of the virus laden particulate matter”.

History would prove their jubilation misplaced

Further more, the group’s statement offers an even more dire prediction than a possible outbreak of GSZP. The statement reads thus, “If NASA scientists must open the sample return capsule then it is crucial to the survival of all life on earth that they are at least 47 miles away from any locations such as church buildings, synagogues, mosques, any place where significant numbers of dead are interred in any way or any other spiritual nexus point.”

Apparently according to Zombie Watch International research, an outbreak of GSZP near a so called ‘spiritual nexus point’ may concentrate so much evil in one spot that it could possibly open the long foretold of ‘gateway to hell’, a scenario whereby the unholy legions of the dammed are able to pass over into our world to inflict their deepest torments on the flesh of living man himself.

File photo of Demonic Invader

“The consequent demon invasion would threaten not just the United States, or the broader world economy, it would potentially be the end of human civilization.” When asked what preparations they were taking in the light of these potentially world shaking events, Dr. Zeltwurst commented that the group was “amassing arms, ammunition, body armor, heavy trucks, church equipment, priests, imams, monks, fuel, fresh water and canned food supplies. We are also beginning to train an elite, multi faith Paladin Warrior Combat Squad in the event of any demonic invasion that may occur if a GSZP outbreak occurs to close to a spiritual nexus point.”

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts, And I looked and behold: a pale horse. And his name, that sat on him, was Death. And Hell followed with him

Chickens Vs. Tanks progress report

2006-01-11T10:32:00.000+09:00

Work on chickens vs tanks is proceeding as well as can be expected for a creative endeavor that was dreamed up on the first day of work after a long period of time sitting around with nothing much to do. Arse-biscuits. However, the first three episodes have been scripted and the over arching storyline is well planned out at this stage. Currently looking at potential locations for various major set pieces. Last night nearly completed the first frame, but awaiting an opportunity to get a photo of a tank into the editing suite to do a frame featuring the other main characters before I can make any decisions on final color grading, overlays etc...

The website on the other hand has been formatted appropriately and now even has a web banner instead of a blogspot title as I spent most of yesterday twatting around with the HTML code in the editing window. The banner itself is quite impressive and even surprised me with how well it turned out. In fact it upped the production value levels for the entire concept. Once I have the look down and the introductory episode completed I’ll post a link up here to what promises to be the most violent, degrading and sweariest web cartoon series featuring chickens and miniature tanks EVER.

I can smell your excitement from here

Tiny little chickens...millions of them...

2006-01-10T11:31:00.000+09:00

Um, whats going on here then?

Not much at the moment really. Fumiko has populated my apartment with every single little wire chicken she could buy from the 100 yen store. I think I will make a web cartoon with them, because, as I found out after she arranged them all over my house, she intends to leave them here.

Going a bit stir crazy around Kashima and have recently taken to traveling to other cities for the purpose of taking very expensive baths.

http://www.taupohotsprings.com/page.php?PK_PAGE_ID=113

Today is the first day back at school and there are of course tests. Fumiko has populated my apartment with tiny wire frame yellow chicklets and I’m thinking of spending my evening writing a new comic featuring them in an epic battle against their nemesis…the miniature tank army…watch out for the new upcoming feature…exotic locations..epic battles…daring courage and bravery. In a chickeny way.

Clancy the rancid Camel

2006-01-05T13:51:00.000+09:00

I was taken very ill over the whole new years period and have spent the past few days at home recovering and learning how to eat again. The whole process involved plastic containers, regurgitation, sage like elderly medical practitioners, needles, bags of saline liquid, powders, pills and watching all three parts of the Lord of the Rings back to back.

I honestly haven’t been that sick in years.

Planning a foray school wards tomorrow, if only for something to do with myself. I ate some Mexican rice and potato croquets last night and spent the next four hours burping like Jabba the Hutt.

New Years

2006-01-01T00:09:00.000+09:00

Its New Years!

Whoopee fuckin do. Why am i writing now? Tell you tomorrow.

The Battle of Yuletide Gulch

2005-12-27T11:44:00.000+09:00

And lo, there was a cold front, yet like those from the ancient times of Kraan, that swept up all in its blinding white path. It did run itself in majestic waves, like a furious otter of Nordic cold, over the seas and oceans and spent its wrath like a sailor in a foreign port on mighty Kyushu, slumbering in her bed of frozen soils and solid puddles of wet. Yea verily did the white powder come down upon them all in great abundance, covering ice encrusted drive way, school and graveyard alike in the frozen water that falls from the sky like the ashes of angles as they are burned by the devils that, naught being in the sight of Adam, defeated them.

Our hero, slumped in his throne, resting before the end of year excess period, was called on once more to don his battle coat of fur lined wonder and set forth once more into the barren wilderness to hunt down and slay the mighty Squiggoth beasts that are called forth from their tumescent slumber by the wake of the powdery signal. Yet did the heat of their footfalls melt the snow around them.

A Squiggoth, yesterday.

Our hero called forth his mighty powers, yet again they were delivered unto him in spurious abundance.

Powers! And well chuffed he was when they were unto him delivered!

And with all his might and power did in fact smite the Squiggoth in all their hideous glory. See! Look how they burn in agony with the power of the blows of out Hero!

Squiggoth burn in the angry glare of the base elder gods. Yesterday.

And there was much rejoicing on the night of our Hero’s triumphant victory over the snow storm from the brutal plains of Leng and its Squiggoth hordes.

Yahoo and hooray for the prowess of the Hero and his magnificant manner!

Yea verily was there drinking of Meade and the wearing of silly hats and masks by all.

And yet the next day was also set aside for a sumptuous commemorative feast. The table was laid with all the trappings and gilding of import and joy. Our Hero sat and feasted with his comrades, assured they would all pass into the halls of the warriors after his epic defeat of the hordes. Thus was liquid imbibed and solids consumed.

Yea, where they all eventually rendered incapable of doing anything save the worshipping of their tiny fish gods.

Thus was it at an end, our Hero sat back on his throne and his eyes rested upon his domain, once more at peace. The villagers relaxed, asured in the knowledge the benevolent gaze of their Hero and protector would forever more ensure the safety of them and their progeny.

ROLF HARRIS

2005-12-19T20:02:00.000+09:00

Rolf Harris has managed to paint a portrait of the Queen that looks entirely like Rolf Harris...

This is divine comedy...click now!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4541388.stm

HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA........

oohhh...shit.

Overt Political Content - consider this warning

2005-12-14T16:19:00.000+09:00

The other day while finishing my latest post I clicked on one of the links that flash up as being 'recently updated' from the blogger update page. I surfed on over to read the well penned yet somewhat bizzare musings of the gentleman who writes under the name of X-Marine. Heres the page
http://xmarine.blogspot.com

You can view the full chain of discussion here if you really want to
http://xmarine.blogspot.com/2005/12/murtha-effect.html

I engaged with him and another person in the comments section of one of his postings and it evolved into a small debate among a few concerned individuals. This posting is a repost of my latest additions to the argument chain by way of just being neighbourly and in the spirit of discussion and debate, the reasons behind this are contained in the post itself.

This is a discussion of overtly political nature

As this page is more of a personal diary and a solution to obnoxious group emailings while I am away overseas and rarely gets into political writing I thought a warning might be required to let the regular readers who have no interest in the subject matter avoid this post altogether and move down to check out the latest photos. It begins thus:

Yes, rightly so, cheers XMarine for sponsoring this discussion. I only realized when I posted my last comments that you have moderation turned on, so you have to read them all and it’s good to see you’re open to debate even if the religious zeal you put into your writing freaks me right out. Instead of promising to keep it quick I will post this reply in full on my blog as well, which you can post the link to instead of the full text if you don’t have the time to continue moderating the discussion. We can pick things up in the comments section on my page if anyone else is willing. Here is the link,
http://feature-wall.blogspot.com/

XMarine

Fair enough if you think that a particular kind of university education has infused my or others mind with anti-American sentiment under the guise of “open-mindedness”. I have just as much a view point that your military indoctrination during your period of armed service has artificially emboldened you with a gung-ho nationalistic pride that allows you to deny basic human rights abuses and a foreign policy doctrine that encourages an endless war on terror.

Why not embrace America over Iraq on this issue? I’ll take it you mean agreeing with America’s decision to invade Iraq.

1. If the United States government possessed any true care and fore-thought for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people, as is implied in their statements of wishing to bring freedom and democracy into the country, then surely they would have allowed for the easing of post Gulf War 1 sanctions to allow medical aid into Iraq for those that desperately needed it at the time.

2. It has been proven time and again that the political administration in the U.S. did manipulate pre-war information to exaggerate the threat posed by the Iraqi regime to justify going to war. In reference to your recent posting, I don’t feel deceived because I never believed what they were saying in the first place. See point five.

3. The aims of the American Political administration have always been suspect and range from shoring up the declining dollar as we’ve already discussed to furthering American geo-political dominance in the post-cold war era and ensuring the massive U.S. military industrial complex, and all their rich buddies who run it, have a reason to continue to churn out expensive weapons.

4. Because the use of nuclear industry byproducts as armaments is just so plain wrong. It was wrong the first time around, it was wrong in the Balkans and its wrong now.

5. I’ll let the cat out of the bag now by saying I don’t fully believe the official explanation behind the September 11 attacks. I realize that by saying this I am probably opening myself up to a whole new line of argument from you. I’m sure you have your thoughts on the subject and I’m sure they’re valid, but I dare say I have a radically different viewpoint on those events than you. However they underpin most of my position regarding what we’re talking about and it’s important that you see where I’m coming from. Yes I consider that there is significant evidence that throws into reasonable doubt the official explanation of the attacks on 9/11 and suggests some pretty sinister motives employed by those behind them. No I don’t believe in holographic planes or under-wing missile pods. This is a whole topic in itself, which is why I am more than willing to discuss it under a post my page, which is mostly personal and non-political, hence the link.

Which side of history do I stand on? The right side or the wrong side? I feel it’s a bit more complicated than a right side and a wrong side. Star Wars has a right side and a wrong side, it was also penned by a stoner film student who turned it into a great business model, got other people to direct his next two star wars films while he in turn focused on the franchising and marketing departments and earned some nice cash while millions wallowed in new age Californian religious beliefs wrapped up in a 70’s design fiesta.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love star wars, but the way you merge it with international relations, historical content and Christianity at the same time just bamboozles me. I’m not so sure a fusion of literary and historical lines of argument is the best way to push forward in these already confused times.

I'm kidding, I dont take your Jedi rant that seriously, however I can but hope my gentle prod will push you to new heights of republican confusion and inanity as evidenced by your recent jovial writings about Christian Jedi Knights. I’ll comment about that on the other page though…

Hello Eric,
Nice gauntlet,

Just looking to put a name to the comment, simply to establish if the person is serious enough about their intentions to take some accountability and possibly respond instead of disappearing into the world wide web, is hardly tyrannical labeling. You’ve taken the time to join up even, instead of posting a follow up with a name, which is cool. The reason I had a go was my work has a board online because we are spread out over a wide geographic area and sometimes we get people jumping on (or we did until we fixed it, we’re new at this), saying things anonymously and then just disappearing again. I suppose it kind of spills over from that. Anyway T.C., it’s good to see you care.

If on the other hand you still want to view it as left wing tyranny, (which historically occurs as does right wing tyranny), by joining and becoming one of the ‘named’ category as opposed to the ‘anonymous’ category I would like to thank you for conforming to my labeling system without too much fuss, your co-operation with the powers that be is appreciated, here’s your barcode tattoo, grey overalls shaved head and welcome my son, welcome to the machine etc etc etc…

On with the show,

I tried to make a case that all American Christians were members of the KKK? Woah there! Let me clear this up a bit. I pointed out that saying all American Christians were members of the KKK was as ridiculous as saying all Muslims were extreme fundamentalists. Of course it is ridiculous, pure folly if you’d like, to suggest all American Christians are members of the KKK. As ridiculous as saying all members of Islam are fundamentalists, which I inferred from your statement thus:

No, the current enemy is Islam in case you haven't been paying attention.

By Islam I understood you to mean all people of Islamic faith as being included along with Islamic doctrines, moderate or fundamentalist. So please rest assured Eric, I do not believe all American Christians are members of the KKK. Let’s break it down for further clarity

Now you want to simply lump them all into one homogenous group?

Meaning that I thought you were suggesting all Islamic people followed the more extreme fundamentalist doctrine.

That’s like saying all Christians in America are members of the Ku Klux Klan

An example I came up with to provide an image of another group with religious underpinnings that takes its beliefs to an extreme level. This extreme level would of course not be practiced by other American Christians, just as fundamentalist Islam is not practiced by all Muslims. I hope that clears things up for you.

The extremists control the religion and dictate its actions? Hardly, a group of extremists take on board a religious based war against the injustices they see being perpetrated on their own people by western superpowers, they then employ many of the tactics taught to them by said western superpowers during the cold war to turn around and give what they see as being justified payback against the double standards practiced by western governments in their dealings with the middle east.

True, their numbers are growing rapidly now, although this could be argued as being more as a result of American foreign policy post 9/11, you know, that whole “invading Iraq and killing lots of people” business.

Islam is not completely silent. Muslim organizations readily condemn terrorist attacks and preach a pacifist or neutral stance. Yes, there are radical clerics who preach the virtues of Jihad, but there are those who also condemn it.

Yes in the past Islamic religion has been matched alongside an aggressive political force set to invade and take over other territories. To balance it out however, there have been just as many counter invasions of the Middle East launched from Europe over the course of the past few thousand years. The crossroads we stand at now is whether or not we continue to blindly follow down the same path, a path that has far more serious consequences considering the weapons with which modern battles are fought, or whether we are able to open up dialogues and courses of action which can diffuse this constant ebb and flow of hostility between the east and the west.

White mounds

2005-12-13T08:57:00.000+09:00

We got more snow this morning. The hills are dusted white and an icy northern wind is rattling the doors in the corridors. Slate grey and light violet clouds have covered everything. I was pummeled by gusts of icy slush on the way to school. Novelty ensues and I become joyous with leaping cold.

Other things, children, leapt all over me last Thursday and left me with a marvelous cold that saw me on the couch all weekend watching movies in a subdued, rather sick, manner. Still not the greatest now.

It’s now time for this years bitch about kerosene heaters. Why do they have to be on the whole time? I am now convinced that the Japanese are actually reptiles incapable of regulating their own internal temperature. Land of extremes.

Recently I asked Hiroshi why, when leaving the staff room, he walks out and around in an arc towards the staircase, while I walk in a straight line. I knew it was because he was moving around to the right hand side to go up, and to avoid people coming down, but the way he automatically did it without thinking, even when there was only the two of us present on the stairwell, seemed worthwhile to bring to his attention. We spent the next ten minutes discussing with the class issues regarding cultural staircase practice. As someone has recently pointed out here, teaching English is sometimes not the primary reason for my employment here.

Internationalization.

Snow

2005-12-05T10:08:00.000+09:00

We got our first snow this morning.

The hills are dusted white and an icy northern wind is rattling the doors in the corridors. Slate grey and light violet clouds have covered everything. I was pummeled by gusts of icy slush on the way to school. Novelty ensues and I become joyous with leaping cold.

Look at that Zippy!

2005-12-04T16:55:00.000+09:00

Oh my friends and family, vidi this lovely rainbow...

Back of the apartment at noon today during a spell in the rain. Only there for four minutes or so. Opportunity knocks, get the camera.

Photos from a city

2005-12-04T15:53:00.000+09:00

Recently I have spent much more time in Fukuoka City than I did last year, so I thought it might be a good idea to take the camera in one day and see what presented itself. Yesterday was spent looking in shops at all manner of items and having lunch in exotic places, in the cold.

Possibly the only good shot of the day I missed was annoyingly my own fault for being to slow with the camera. We were crossing the road when the air above us started to split open. Fukuoka Airport is in an urban area to the left of the central city and the incoming flight path for landing aircraft runs right over Tenjin. I should have been quicker when I heard the noise, but when I turned a JAL Boeing 747-400 appeared from behind a building and lumbered its way over us at a low level landing approach altitude. Very impressive.

I remember when I used to have hardly any photos at all. Now I have simply gigs of images sitting here. I have 4.35 gigabytes of still images. Its double that if you take the backups on the secondary hard drive into account. It was good to read that Maxell will soon be releasing holographic storage media. A few more years at this rate and I’ll require it.

Yes it’s me. That’s what I look like now, or rather looked like yesterday, but there’s not much difference between the moment of then when I was trying not to make a silly face in front of the camera, the moment of now when I’m writing this and eating anin tofu, and I dare say that in the moment of later on, when you read this, I will still bear a remarkable similarity to the image above. This next image is of a tree that stands in a park, near the hotel I stay at. Its surrounded by buildings on all sides which provides shelter from the wind, which explains why it maintains its golden foliage. It looked rather nice with the morning light behind it shining through, and it came out well in the photo. One was pleased with the result when it came up on the monitor back home

This is the only dog that wanted to play with Fumiko all day. I leant down and said “Hey doggy” and he looked right into the camera. Perfect.

This is the Acros Building. It is part city hall and part function centre. Personally I think that the mix of natural components into architectural urban design is rather good and should be undertaken far more often. The headline photo is of course taken from the observatory at the top of the structure. Just for the sake of reference, it’s because we sat at the top for a while that I know about the flight paths for aircraft into the airport.

The walk up to the top through the gardens seems quiet and removed from the rest of the city. There were very few people there. Waterfalls and ponds dot the pathways and now in early winter some of the trees have stunning colors. Used the color selection feature again in this composition to bring out and highlight the vivid red of the foliage. The full color shot looks good also, but between the two this is the better.

Again, I was playing with color selection. I zoomed in and sampled Fumi’s skin tone and then zoomed out to take the shot. The camera also found the same tones in the fur around her jacket and in some of the leaves behind her. Combine that with the sudden beam of light that shot out from behind a cloud and you have one of the best shots of the day.

This is a Christmas tree, maybe eight to ten meters high silhouetted alongside some of the architecture in the Canal City shopping complex behind the Hyatt Hotel. Very large well maintained shopping centre, thronging with people and tasty food. I am afraid to bring my mother to places like this as she would probably feel the need to set up camp somewhere along the river like a mobile infantry shopping battalion until every bargain was exposed, or until she ran out of financial ammunition.

This is the gigantic Mitsukoshi department store in evening twilight. I like this one because the light is timed just right. You can still make out the shape of the exterior of the building and get the details of its construction, yet the interior lights are bright enough to give an idea of the internal layout, especially the ten floors worth of escalators. This building is linked via underground shopping arcades to perhaps four or five other department stores and shopping complexes of equal or greater size. Again, afraid to ever bring my mother here for fear of losing her, or at least having to come back the next day and collect her exhausted frame from the floor of yet another clothes store that designs for middle aged ladies who dress impeccably, appreciate fur and are the same physical size, or lack thereof, that she maintains.

I spent a good deal of time checking out camera equipment as I want to buy either a decent digital SLR still camera, or a good video camera before I leave Japan. This was the most exorbitant accessory that we were presented with during the day. Cannon’s enormous EOS Digital EF600mm Telephoto lens. It was very impressive. On special at only 1,100,000 yen, or around 12 thousand NZD. Included is Fumikos hand to give an idea of scale.

Also had a look at the brand new Cannon XLH HDV camera that has been released. You could happily shoot an amazing looking feature film with it. The leap in picture quality over the old XL1 and 2 DV cameras is jaw dropping. They had an XL1 linked up to one monitor and a new XLH on another. Wow. A scoop at a mere 946,000 yen. I may be shopping at the end of a price range slightly out of alignment with my own yearly earnings at this stage.

We did find one bargain during the day. In Yodobashi Camera a salesman sat on top of a ladder in the middle of the mp3 player showroom floor. He was yelling into a megaphone and trying to sell a bunch of Creative Zen 5gb mp3 players, the newer baby brother to my 20gb player. Only the orange color on offer and he had a stack of maybe 7 or 8 units on special, reduced from 25,000 yen to15,000 yen. Major saving. Fumiko had decided earlier on in the day she wanted to buy one, she liked orange so she pounced over and bought one, at the same time as an Australian lady also picked one up. We went upstairs and sat in massage chairs for maybe twenty five minutes and when we came back down the rest of the stock had been sold. Just as well Fumiko didn’t wait to think it over.

This week

2005-12-02T14:51:00.000+09:00

This week has been shrouded in a pleasant all pervading gloom of constant moody clouds and rain showers. It’s getting colder and my black jacket has awoken from summer hibernation and now encases me with its wide array of interesting smell and textures.

This week’s creative writing capitol has been expended mostly on the discussion on global politics I have been maintaining with Josh and MC Masterchef over on the SagaJet forums. It’s good to practice to have open discussion about a topic; it puts your own beliefs and ideas about a subject to the test, exposes you to the viewpoints that you have not considered, hones your argumentative tactics, keeps ones writing up to scratch and is a good way to get to know about other people and their opinions. It’s kind of like playtime at school but for big kids. And I get paid to sit their and write about it. Yeah!

I try to refrain from mentioning political stuff here, as the purpose of this page was always to document my adventures in foreign lands, however, as we go into the transition period of next year it will not only record that and beyond, but serve as a potential example of writing ability for any jobs I will apply for. I also intend to send the full manuscript (which I have) to publishing houses, just to see what happens.

Aside from that, most of this week has been taken up by the elementary school classes which have replaced my regular junior high schedule due to exams taking place this week. I have taken over full lesson planning for two out of three schools and have recently acquired resources that make communication with the Japanese teachers much easier and thus my job much less frustrating.

Tonight I will travel to the city again to see my rather nice Fumiko and have dinner. Now, I sit, behind my desk, waiting for the clock to hit 4:05 and them I am out of here. I will disappear faster than the popes fart this afternoon. I’ve just had enough of work for one week. I resorted to stealing kids pencil cases in class this afternoon to alleviate the amazing boredom that can result from your job being to teach the most basic aspects of a language that you’ve spoken your whole life.

Borderlines....stupid borderlines

2005-11-28T12:23:00.000+09:00

I lost my thanksgiving virginity on Saturday night at Jayne’s house. Ate mashed potatoes and a variety of other foods, except turkey because you have to mail order that stuff here. Maybe about fifteen people showed up for a pot luck dinner. Aine and myself pooled resources and made an enormous fruit platter, which went down well after the pumpkin pie and chocolate slice.

This weekend’s crazy stand out event was the extreme weather on Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Purple grey clouds had been rolling in all afternoon. As we were leaving Kashima for Shiota they were swirling about real low, threatening a rain which held itself off quite nicely. I returned from Shiota by bicycle at around half past ten in the evening. The space between the two cities is farmland. Vast broad sweeping fields, flat for kilometers around, except for the odd tree covered hill in the middle. The main road runs to the side of all this farmland. I don’t take the main road though, as it’s crowded with traffic and pachinko parlors. I take the road that runs through the middle of the fields. It’s a good twenty minutes of riding from the edge of Kashima to the edge of Shiota. As the sun went down, the temperature dropped, we ate and drank and a heavy mist crept up over the plains between the two towns.

I wrapped myself up in layers of thermals set my headphones and slowly arced my way out towards the fields. The mist had matured into a full fog. I put some new batteries in my bike light the other day. It barley pierced the fog, like a thin silver guide rope as I turned the final corner, headed away from the city and out onto the plains. A car crept past me slowly, it lights confined into pools by the miasma surrounding us. Way ahead in the distance, the lone traffic lights at the intersection cycled slowly. The only beacon in the vast black, murky landscape, for there was no moon. Just stars, yet the fog eventually obscured most of them too. I pressed along, noticing now strange intermittent flashes of light behind the hills on the far horizon. Biking slowly to avoid puddles of freezing cold water I weaved my way towards the intersection. The fog cycled red to green to amber. As if I was trapped as the sole survivor of last dance party on the edge of the river Styx. I pushed off from under the light into the wall of glowing greenish black murk in front of me, thick enough to obscure the lights from Kashima beyond. It really was the kind of weather that you could let your imagination run away with.

I pulled over halfway down this one long stretch of road. I looked back, the traffic light now a faint pulse in the far distance. The kind of light you would run towards if being chased in a nightmare, but would never ever reach. I looked around. Nothing but swirling mist and the edges of the road on one side and the dirt of the field set two feet down on the other. A small pool of light reflected around me from the light of my bike. I had nothing except the traffic light to get my bearings from and was beginning to feel pleasantly disorientated. The light trapped me in a box of impenetrable fog a meter wide by a meter and half high. On one wall a faint light changed color. The need for a sword of some description was felt most keenly. I cranked up the music and set off, slowly following the road and avoiding shiny black puddles, waiting for the creatures to lunge out the dark and rend my limbs asunder.

This of course did not happen, but when one has spent a portion of ones leisure time playing computer games or reading fantasy novels, one finds oneself isolated in a far flung corner of the world, enshrouded in fog, one has had a few beers, glasses of red wine and Kahlua, the tendency is to push the fantasy as far as it will go.

Sadly, although I wanted it to be a small village where I could buy potions, armor and new magic spells, Kashima did come into view through the mist, I did return home safely, with no gold, magic armor or major experience bonuses. I went to bed, slightly miffed that, once again, the borderlines between our world and the world of darkness had failed to slip and unleash a horde of wild demons to plague the land. Stupid well defined solid borderlines.

I swear I will never find a good career opening.

It was 5 am. There was a bright white light in my room. The apartment was shaking. There was loud noise all around. Was this finally the moment at which I would be abducted by aliens? Had they at last sensed my willing eagerness for interplanetary contact to subdue the burning fear that mankind is alone and helpless in an infinitely large empty galaxy like a solitary, drooling child throwing a ball into a black room whilst slowly filling it’s undergarments with excrement all the while oblivious of its own stench?

WAS THIS THE MOMENT OF SWEET DISCLOSURE AND REVELATION? WAS I ABOUT TO BECOME IMBUED WITH THE MYSTIC POWERS I SO DESPERATLEY CRAVE YET WANT TO EXPEND AS LITTLE ENERGY AS POSSIBLE TO GAIN?

This was not what I thought as I opened my eyes, although perhaps it should have been. Rather mundanely as the thunder woke me up I pondered,

Gosh, what an odd time of the year for a thunderstorm.

It was right overhead and had crept in sneakily just behind the fog, but fortunately for those of us who had been biking across wide flat open spaces on aluminum bicycles, it had held off its arrival until we were safely grounded. I opened the curtains and watched the lightning crash down, immediately following waves of dense heavy cracking thunder shook the apartment walls. A massive rain burst opened up, only increasing the amount of static electricity in the air, precipitating more thunderous bursts of white light above my apartment. Perhaps this disturbance would bring down those sneaky netherworld barriers? I would be better off starting here with my air rifle and black practice katana than out on my bike with only two beers in my backpack. Infinitely higher chance of surviving demon hordes. Eventually the storm died down and the sun came up. My head was pounding from watching the strobes of the sky show, but it was worth it.

Other people thought differently. My colleague, Hiroshi told me this morning at work he woke up and thought North Korea was attacking Kyushu. I asked him why he thought North Korea would attack the Fujitsu-Keisei area when there is nothing here but rice fields, schools and Sake distilleries. He replied saying maybe they had missed their targets in Fukuoka. I teased him some more.

Now it is lunch time. There are no demons, but there is a foul smell.

It’s lunch.

Poos and wees.

Take the children away now

2005-11-25T09:52:00.000+09:00

My classes have all cancelled this morning and if it wasn’t for the DVD cooking in my drive at the moment I would begin to contemplate how long I could get away with playing games at the office. The answer to this, of course, would be as long as I bloody well pleased, but oh how they would talk about me when I leave.

Leaving Japan is going to be just as big a step as coming here in the first place. Already the past 18 months of financial security are beginning to drift away slowly as long term planning mode (career angst) is kicking in and forcing me to do something creative and interesting with my life. At this stage I don’t even know where in the world I want to live. New Zealand will be an option only if I can find the kind of job I am looking for. Either writing, photography or film work will be necessary to keep me in the country, if I get one of these kinds of positions then I will contemplate using my savings to knock of a significant chunk off my student loan. If not I will use them to catapult myself overseas to…not sure yet, but it will probably involve one of the very large cities where many of my friends have taken up residence in the past few years. More on this topic later.

Sometimes I grow weary of maintaining the ‘nice friendly teacher’ appearance. I love to revel in many irresponsible activities and if anyone in any position of authority here knew the full extent of my activities prior to Japan they would question their decision to place me as a role model for young people in their schools. For example yesterday I was tasked with conducting elementary classes. You have to be in the right frame of mind to deal with 25-45 screaming children. It is very rare for me to ever be in this frame of mind and I have to blatantly feed of the positive energy generated by the classes themselves to bring myself up to their level. This in turn means that I start all of my classes in very grumpy clown mode and eventually warm up to being nice. Sometimes. I will never ever take any job that deals with young children again, especially those who do not speak the same language as me. My patience for exploratory hands, screaming, jumping, flying bodies, dirt, scabs, measles scars and food stained clothing has worn out entirely.

A lot less work

2005-11-22T11:53:00.000+09:00

The period of intense business passed over us here on Thursday afternoon when I said the word ‘adjourned’ and ended the successful, hour and a half long seminar presentation myself and my co-worker had been holding for about 70 people in the Renaissance Hotel in Saga city. It was with a deep sigh of relief I settled back into my couch on the Thursday to ruminate on the end of 10 hour days at school, coaching preparing and teaching, and realized that I still had one more day of conference to go.

Overall the conference seemed slightly worse than last years event, but a full post mortem was performed by myself and Aine yesterday, so really, I can’t be bothered thinking about it anymore.

I visited Cybac for the first time on Friday evening. Cybac is a large entertainment centre. It has multiple floors which house everything from private rooms for you to play video games and sleep to pool tables, table tennis, karaoke, bars, and whatever else the modern Japanese person likes to do with their free time. You sign up and acquire a membership card and you are given an access badge. You are charged by the hour for the time you spend in their, but everything except the food and alcohol is free. You can walk up to your favorite video game machine, grab both player weapons and blast away for as long as you like. We played rounds of pool and table tennis, sang and then after that you will have to ask other people what became of the evenings events as I don’t remember.

Saturday morning I came to at Ollie’s, minus my last asthma remaining medication and with a keen urge to eat some food.

Last night I was walking to meet Fumiko at the train station. I was wearing my grey hooded sweatshirt and it was cold so I had my hood on my head. I was walking up behind three senior high school girls, my pace overtaking them as they were walking slowly, when one of them turned, saw me and they all fled to the train station. I continued walking to the train station and had to wait on one side of the gate until Fumiko arrived, with them poking their heads around the corner, watching me. I told someone at school about it this morning just to be on the safe side in case they decided I was following them to perform untoward acts.

I would call them stupid girls, but they were actually being quite smart about their interpretation of the situation. Oh well.

Autumn. Nice

2005-11-16T11:24:00.000+09:00

The sun creaks slowly into view these mornings and it arrives later and later each day. Every morning my house is progressively one shade darker on waking than it was the day before. Kashima’s streets are littered once more with the detritus of its tree’s. The sun seems to wield one tenth of the power it possessed a few short months ago. The other day while sipping plume wine in a park in Fukuoka a small bat flew down from the trees and flew in circles in front of me for a few minutes.

It’s the time of the year when I am asked on a daily basis if I am cold. Maybe I’ve mentioned this here before, but it’s such a regular occurrence when you don’t begin to wear sweaters and long sleeve shirts at the same time as everyone else. I just don’t feel the cold as much as the average Japanese person does, so I am still comfortable during the day wearing a t-shirt. This is out of line with the Japanese tradition of changing ones entire daily wardrobe into winter attire as the seasons change.

Lantern festivals at shrines. Thousands of intricately carved bamboo shafts with small tea light candles placed in the bottom are arrayed in huge designs. Personally I found them to be evoking of circular cityscapes. Walking into the hills in the dark and finding a line of lanterns on each side of the ground leading up into the dark of the hill side. Lights a thousand small creeping glow worms march upwards into the night.

Autumn.

Nice.

General Update

2005-11-09T12:50:00.000+09:00

This update is designed to generally inform public opinion as to the reasons pertaining to the lack of recent publication occurring at this website:

The Feature Wall

Suffice to say that work has become disproportionately busy for a number of different reasons and this has caused some distraction from the task of actually recording events, as events have been at such a pace as to prohibit their subsequent recording.

This is somewhat vexing.

Will the members of the general public please be assured that of this moment everything, if somewhat busy, is in effect fine and normal publications on this site will hopefully recommence sometime around the Friday to Monday mark, failing that, then the following Friday dependant upon seminar preparation timetable.

We thank you for your continued patronage and encourage you to visit back regularly and even to comment on the material you discover herein for your enjoyment of perusal. Thank you very much for your time and a pleasant good day to you all.

Yours with affection.

The Proprietor

Medical Check

2005-11-01T09:48:00.000+09:00

recently had my once a year medical check for my medical insurance. They insisted I take it because of the ammount of money they spent on having my teeth removed last year. I think they were waiting for me to say "oh thankyou very much for all that money" but the insurance is a stated clause in my contract so they can stick their feet in the snow for any continuing apology or thanks four months down the track.

Anyway......it was moderatley dehumanising queing up in line to be weighed and measured and have blood taken and pee in a cup. They wanted me to do something that involved my poo and a stick but i flat out refused. What makes it annoying is that the medical people get excited and giggle because they are dealing with a foreigner, which makes you feel even more like cattle. So after the electro cardiogram, the vision test, the hearing test, the consultation with a doctor they put me, somewhat annoyed, into this eye testing machine. I was told to watch the red light, which I did. Then they went and got my supervisor to translate that I should look at the red light, which I was doing anyway. Here's me thinking that they were going to scan some kind of light across my eye. Wrong. The fuckers took a photo of the back of my eyeball. Ouch. its like basically opening your eye right in front of a camera flash bulb as it goes off. I jerked my head back wearing and cursing, ready to punch anyone. Certainly a useful medical check to have done, but I was angry no-one had given me any kind of explanation about what was going to happen, otherwise I would have refused to have it done.

That man of great emotion

2005-10-24T15:52:00.000+09:00

Friday night I indulged in one of my favorite pastimes….playing BF2 online. Again. However, there was a difference.

Normally I play on Asian servers to get better connections speeds. This is especially true in Japan, but on the whole the games voice over IP system is very rarely used on these servers. Or if it ever is, it’s only being used by guys sitting next to each other in an internet café, and they are speaking in a foreign language.

On Friday I played on an Australian server where exactly the opposite was true. I joined up to a squad in game and was immediately welcomed by the other squad members….so I ran and got my mic (which I bought especially for this game), plugged it in and spent the next five hours drinking beers, chatting, and causing havoc with a group of aussie guys, and one kiwi, who were all drinking late into the night as well. In fact the guy in New Zealand mentioned that the sun was coming up as he was going to bed. The game runs so much more efficiently when you are just able to press a button and tell someone what is going on rather than having to type something out.

We indulged regularly in the time honored tradition of base raping. Base raping involves sneaking across the other side of the map, camping (or waiting) for your opponents to spawn (re enter the game after having been killed previously, or starting another life) and then killing them as soon as they do. Base raping is very fun. As long as its not happening to you. However, the map we were playing on (Wake Island 2007 for those in the know) presents the unique challenge of this enemy base being located on an aircraft carrier.

I often found myself flying through clouds of missiles in a big helicopter and landing in the sea docking bay underneath the carrier, to the screams and howls of laughter coming from my team mates as it was obvious the enemy side was getting more and more frustrated. Good night in.

Saturday was a nocturnal journey into Fukuoka. Karaoke was sung, clubs were visited, money was spent and fun was had. Yesterday I journeyed around the city during the day. Found a very large shrine in the middle of the city. Surrounded on all sides by trees, this long sprawling shrines boasted flocks of exceedingly tame pigeons. Bought a bag of pigeon food and tipped some out onto my hand. No sooner had I done this than two big pigeons flew onto my hand and fought, the winner remained on my hand while it ate all the seed. I stood in the sun and fed pigeons on my hand while musing about viral genetic recombination and how awfully glad I was that Japan (apparently, they might keep things hush hush and they would be really good at it too perhaps) has had no outbreak of bird flu. Lying in the sun I watch as a brand new Mercedes saloon, shiny from the showroom floor, is driven up to the foot of the main building. The owners exit and a priest comes over and opens the bonnet, the doors and the trunk and gives the new car a blessing for good luck. He moves to every opening, in his hand he holds a two foot long pole covered with maybe a thousand long strips of paper attached to the end. He shakes the stick two or three times over the engine, in each door and then the boot. He closes each surface as he goes about and waves the stick slowly back and forth. The car blessed for luck and safety on the roads, the couple drive off, glimmering, into the setting sun.

A father plays with his young child. He drops seed in a big circle around his two year old son. The boy is immediately encircled by hungry pigeons. The child is confused, the father roars with laughter.

The previous night at a hamburger restaurant, maybe at three in the morning, we all noticed a man sitting alone in the corner who we thought at the time was having an animated conversation with somebody else via a hands free mobile extension. On my return to the restaurant the next day, he is still there, having obviously been home as his clothes have changed. He sits in the same spot as before, smoking cigarettes, and is still having the conversation. It is obvious however that he is talking to no one.

His face is intense, one moment he looks as though he is keenly interested in what he is hearing from the other person in this imaginary conversation, a second later his expression will change to one of extreme worry or care, sometimes displaying anger. Other times he will have a look of profound happiness and pride, as if viewing his child’s accomplishment. He pays no attention to anyone else in the restaurant, however, this morning I am seated directly in his field of view. I wouldn’t say I am sitting where he can see me, for his eyes, when they happen to move towards my direction, look straight through me, focused on whatever ethereal subject his conversation revolves around. The man himself is in his forties. He is well dressed, clean shaven and for all other externalities in a manner of good appearance, which makes his behavior all the more intriguing, for if he had the look of an outpatient or a recluse then his behavior, if not somehow sad would seem more readily explainable. I don’t want to say that I saw a man whose sense of mental attachment to social norms is detached due to a debilitating mental condition, for perhaps he is a master theatre practitioner, learning his lines, or perhaps doing a character study. Maybe he sits and acts out scenes, watching the reactions of other patrons to his abnormal behavior. Maybe I myself, not wanting to ever arrive at the state where I am talking to myself in an obvious way in public and thus not wishing the fate on someone else, am merely projecting some kind of alternate reality on him. Maybe he is just crazy. Maybe he does just go home and get changed, supported by rich relatives, into smart clothes everyday, and sits contently in a burger restaurant chatting contentedly to no one at all. He certainly causes no harm or distractions to others. Whatever the reality of the situation it is fascinating to watch the evidently epic drama that is unfolding on some plain of the imagination in this man of great emotion.

Why can't dutch people sing the blues?

2005-10-20T08:58:00.000+09:00

So most of this weeks writing efforts have been going into the draft of a story I dreamed up the other night. You know when you have a really vivid dream and wake up and write it all down on paper in the middle of the night? It involves absolutely none of the following:
Monsters
Spaceships
Foreign Planets or
Armies
In that respect it is entirely different to last nights dream, also very vivid, however this dream involved one of the four riders of the apocalypse running me over with his horse, a horse and rider so vividly real I could smell the shit on the shoe of the horse as it stood on my face.

So yes, I woke up early again this morning to.

It’s in an infant stage right now, but the idea keeps working around in my mind and I’m able to do a little bit more work on it each day. Currently working on setting speech patterns that communicate personality aspects of the different characters.

Once again I received faxes full of useless lesson plans from the local elementary schools. One school wants me to play paper, scissors, rock for a full 45 minutes.
Fuck off, what a waste of time.

Also have to start planning out my presentation for the mid year seminar. Not in the right frame of mind at the moment to design a seminar with the theme of effective team teaching while I am putting my head around a new story and the various different Ideas I have about what I want to do next year when my contract expires. What I really need is a good night out in Fukuoka.

Then the glory of the weekend will fade again into the gloom of Monday morning working in an environment where most of the kids can’t even bring themselves to say ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ in English.

Long term job morale not high this morning.

Hara

2005-10-17T14:07:00.000+09:00

Arrived at school this afternoon to the news that Hara sensei’s young daughter died yesterday. The school is pretty quiet today. It just doesn’t seem fair when you hear about that kind of thing. I’ve been told it was sudden, however he organized six months of leave recently, to the extent that a replacement teacher was bought in to cover his classes, so I expect it was not as suddenly as I was led to believe. It’s a shame, he had photo’s of her all over his desk. She was a very sweet girl.

In other news, it was cold this morning when I got out of bed. Blissfully cold. The mercury is right back up around where it normally is today, but the nights are cold again well and truly now. Summer is finished, autumn has finally begun in full swing.

I was in class today, revising new vocab with the students. There was a gap of silence while myself and the teacher discussed Meg Ryan. Meg is a character in the text books the students use and her name was included in the vocab list. This gave rise to the subject of Meg Ryan, and approval or disapproval of her ability as an actress. In this moment of perfect silence, a student at the front of the class piped up with,

“Mr Adam, do you eat Meg Ryan?”

Myself and the other teacher collapsed laughing, as did the student, who I believe was kind of relieved his off color English joke had worked.

I declined to answer.

Re-fueller

2005-10-15T16:11:00.000+09:00

At drinks last night I met Lisa's boyfriend. He is Japanese and is in the Japanese self defense forces air wing.

He refuells f-15e and f-18 jet fighters.

Cool.

Sweet Doom

2005-10-13T08:51:00.000+09:00

I read the news too much some mornings. However, all current unfolding events taken into consideration my position is looking rather well placed for my age at this current juncture point in world history.

On one hand I am about as far away from the beginnings of world war three that are condensing in the Persian Gulf as you’d want to be. While Iraq spins towards civil war (a situation I predicted, like many other people, about six months before they began the greatest strategic disaster in United States history….so called that one, stick with the kid baby, Mentoc: Mind Taker!) and the U.S. looks to apparently expand its operations into Iran and Syria I sit out here on the edge of Japan in one of the last places trouble would come calling. Even if North Korea got antsy and started some trouble, I live in Kashima. Ha! There’s nothing here. Sweet.

Bird flu. Japan is probably the best part of Asia to be living in if / when a wee outbreak occurs. The organizational structure of Japan is such that in the event of a serious outbreak all sections of society would probably carry out whatever means are necessary to stem the consequences and carry them out dutifully and conscientiously. I don’t live in a densely populated polluted city. True it is a rural area, but poultry farms where I am are non-existent. Its all rice and potatoes and tea out here. Sweet. I know that’s a bit optimistic but lets not get all down on the situation.

Coming U.S. financial crash. I’m going to sure up some of my paper money by converting it into gold stock. Sweet.

I am very fit and healthy. Sweet.

I have a steady paying job with benefits and health plans. Sweet.

If things get really hairy I have that most valuable of travel documents (as sought after by bastard mossad agents) the New Zealand passport. This allows me entry into one of the more isolated countries in the south seas that should, hopefully, in the event of total global break down, seal itself off and become completely self sufficient. Sweet.

The majority of things considered…..Sweet.

Good to live in interesting times though. Sweet sweet doom mongering

Tum te tum...saga is slow

2005-10-11T10:10:00.000+09:00

Weather drags on at a still ungodly hot level during the day, but has relented during the evening allowing some sleep without the aid of an air-conditioner. Sleep however was troubled. That feeling of waking every hour or so and then drifting back to sleep, only to wake again in another hour. I had problems sleeping this time last year too.

The weekend involved the watching of several movies, some occasional food and the odd round of BF2. BF2 1.3 patch has been released which is nice because now I am able to gain points for eliminating enemy strategic objectives.

Looking at the option of doing some investment in futures trading with the gold market being incredibly bullish at the moment.

My hair is getting longer.

I was presented with a bag of shackled ring puzzles this morning and immediately managed to partially solve the first one by removing the steel ring from two conjoined horseshoe shaped loops.

Putting it back on required a lot more time and effort though.

What am I supposed to do with my adult class this evening? Maybe some film watching. A few rounds of guess what happens next maybe?

This will be interesting as the film they will be watching is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Still nothing exciting

2005-10-06T08:49:00.000+09:00

Thursday. A string orchestra builds up into a crescendo. A spotlight in the corner of my apartment slowly illuminates the ghost of Marvin Gaye, dressed in a blue ball gown and carrying a martini glass. The afterlife is apparently full of sick surprises for all. Marvin Gaye steps up to the microphone. He croons through the first verse and then reaches the height of the piece. The main lines of “Whats going on?” are just about to pass over his ethereal lips when he realizes, that, in this apartment, there is distinctly nothing what so ever going on at all. It is 6:46 am; a sleepy man has bashed the alarm clock into quiet meek subservience yet again. The freckled, nicely shaped arm flops onto the ground. Marvin Gaye checks his PDA, notices he has made a small mistake in his scheduled round of appearances and promptly disappears, leaving the room completely unchanged in any way shape of form.

A seriously non-eventful morning routine takes place in the proceeding hour and a half. It involves a staggered entrance to a bathroom, made after the ritual of turning the pc on has taken place. Some granola is placed in a bowl. An expensive, yet very efficient, new can opener whisks the top off a giant can of mandarins. The mandarins are arranged on top of the granola. Yogurt is poured, music is selected, news is read, email is checked and food is eaten. Washing and grooming occurs immediately after and following ten minutes of wandering around an apartment in circles gathering items that may or may not be useful during the day, a foreign man of average height and build walks out of his apartment and boards his bike, with an air of clockwork precision at around 8:04 am.

Routine. Repetition. The bywords of the average working week. This in particular is a very routine and repetitive working week. The classes are regular, the instructions for the elementary school lessons are back to the normal piss poor standard that 2 out of 3 schools continue to maintain. It has involved, this week, so much Swiss motion as to make the time literally fly. It is Thursday, yet is severely reminiscent of a Tuesday. Maybe something exciting will happen this weekend.

A very unexciting post

2005-10-03T15:01:00.000+09:00

This is not a very exciting post and readers should be forewarned of its nearly pointless contents. It's not deisgned to enthrall with tales of Asian wonder or supernatural awe, nor is it supposed to be poignant and provoking of the thoughts in our little heady-weadies. It is merely a post to maintain habit and regularity and as such is short and provides very glib details of a mundane yet relaxing weekend's activities.

You have been warned

This weekend was of a remarkable contrast to those previous.

Saturday I cleaned, I cleaned like a man possessed by a cleaning devil of ancient days. I scrubbed and polished and cleaned and tidied and vacuumed and I did it from about 8am until 4 in the afternoon.

Sunday I relaxed in my nice clean house and won my first couple of games in BF2 acting as commander. Hooray for double points.

I also observed and handled an Ipod nano at the electronics store and yes they are very stupidly small. If they were waterproof I would get one to swim with.

Now it is so hot and humid I want to go and lie down for a sleep.

Which is what I believe I shall do now.

Ghosts

2005-09-30T22:30:00.000+09:00

Rense.com (see the link on the right) is running a halloween competition calling for true ghost stories. So I wrote about what happened in Adams Terrace and then had to slash it down brutally to 1000 or so words. Here it is in it's un-edited form, because I wrote it today and want to get some more milage for the effort.

Reflections that concern various incidents pertaining to my current belief in supernatural phenomena.

Dear reader,

Let me humbly set forth before you a brief record of the true events that transpired during my years as a Student at Victoria University which led me to question, nay change, my beliefs in matters paranormal.

It started with the house.

I had to live in this house. I was recently unencumbered of a young lass I had been living with. In a very short space of time I had to acquire new lodgings for my self and my personal affects. My friend of old times, Leif, fortunately had room in his house.

The house.

The dwelling in particular was numbered as 13a on Adams terrace and was situated in Aro Valley. The valley itself was the first placed where European settlers built significant homes some 140 odd years before. All of it’s houses are aged, some decrepit, some protected. Many are dear reader, I can assure you, haunted.

Adams terrace rose up from the street into the steep gully separating two small hills. It was bordered by ridgelines topped with ominous pine trees and was the abode of many a film student such as I myself was. Backyards were scrub and thick, knee high under bush leading into forest.

13a was set into the left hand side of the gully, set deep back away from the road by a good twenty five to thirty meters of stairs. Our house, as it was when I moved in, never saw the light of the sun. It was eternally in shadow throughout the year. To say it was damp would be approximate to saying that there is a little bit of rice in Japan. 13a was a house damp to the point of decay. Myself and my housemates would, on a regular basis, find exceedingly large, dead spiders scattered around the house. Spiders would crawl inside our cold abode to end their days, it was their graveyard.

As the days progressed after my arrival I became aware of a background sense of uneasiness within myself. I labeled the feeling as a symptom of my recently terminated relationship, yet when I was outside of the house I felt in no way perturbed by the same vague and somewhat unpleasant feelings I had while in the house. I did however notice the same behaviors in my housemates. The mood was often hushed inside. People were quiet, withdrawn, on edge. Then I started noticing the regular and constant footfall noises coming from below our house, as if walking up stairs, for the house was split into two levels.

Winter set in. It grew bitterly cold in our mildew pit within the pine trees. One spot in the hallway was abnormally cold to say the least. One day, being on edge while sitting in the lounge I once again heard the heavy footsteps of our neighbor below, tramping up and down on his stairway.

“Why does he have to be so loud when he’s walking up and down those stairs?” I commented aloud, greatly vexed by the number of times he felt inclined to walk up them of a day, like some insane bee plagued with a wasting mental deficiency. My friend looked at me from across the sitting room,

“There are no stairs down there my dear fellow. They were demolished years ago when the house was split in two.”

“Good gracious man, what do you mean?”

“I mean no one knows who is walking up and down those stairs that don’t exist anymore.”

A chill came over me as the tale of a previous house mate who had been more than a little too interested in study of the occult was related. While too long to relate here in this brief passage it led to his eventual mental breakdown and subsequent departure from the flat, leaving behind him only a mutilated copy of the King James Bible.

Time wore on and I grew accustomed to the noises from the stairwell that didn’t exist, though it brings chills to remember the noise now. Winter descended like a hellish roller coaster into what can only be described as uberwinter.

I was seated on my own in the lounge, not one of my housemates was at home of the evening. I was reading a book. The footsteps in the hall started again, they walked up, down, then up again. A small knock at the door disturbed me. I glanced out towards the smoke glass doorway through the hall. No one was illuminated in the porch light. I rested myself back against the wall, noticing the sudden plume of steam from my breath. Then down one end of the hallway, near the door

BANG!

A huge sound, as if a fist was being slammed into the wall. Every hair on my body stood on end!

BANG! BANG BANG!

Coming down the hallway to me faster and faster. I sat paralyzed with a horrible crawling fear! What was happening?

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Behind my very head I could feel the impacts on the wall. The paralysis snapped as I fled in terror though the hallway, daring not look, into my bedroom, slammed the door and played music at an extremely loud volume. The noises stopped or were drowned out by the music.

Sometime later my friend returned home and found me in my chambers still in a perturbed state. He took one look in my eyes, leant back on the doorframe, and, raising his head slightly from where he had rested it on his chest asked me quite plainly,

“Banging on the walls?”

I nodded furiously in ascension, relieved he had obviously experienced the same. I felt myself clawing my way back to sanity as he related the story of his experience, similar to mine. It did not end there however. This spirit was not adverse to manifesting in front of groups of people.

Dear reader, and I ask this question with all sincerity,

Have you ever heard the sound of phantom breathing?

After a night of playing records in our lounge I was in the process of retiring to my quarters of an evening. I had performed my regular evening ablutions and was walking down the cold, dark hallway when I heard my friend call my harshly name from under his breath, almost like a whisper he said

“Adam! Get in here now!”

I joined him and his lady companion who were sitting on the couch. They both looked pale and shaken.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Quiet, listen!”

Then I heard it.

That awful, yet amazing sound that shredded what was left of my remaining skepticism concerning paranormal activity forever.

From directly in front of our faces, not from the ceiling, not from the floorboards and certainly not from any outside source, came the sound of heavy, distinct, dreadfully cold, breathing. It sounded like how the breeze blowing out from a jarred mortuary door might. It was sound a person might make as they breathed their last. It was an eerie, disjointed sound, un-natural and uniquely disturbing, near impossible to describe to those who have not heard the same. We gazed at each other in pure disbelief, a look that mingled both terror and sheer amazement at what was manifesting before our very eyes and ears. Whatever it was, it was definitely intended for us to hear it. We could feel the tangible presence of something inhabiting the space just in front of our faces.

Something, that was…..

……looking back at us.

It continued manifesting for maybe a minute, then faded away. We all retired back to our rooms immediately, leaving all the lights on, not trusting our senses in the dark and jumping at the shadows in the corners of the room lest they hold some spiritual vision of unchained malice. For this was the feeling that all these events held, malice. We were unwanted, extremely unwanted.

The months progressed and during the daytimess and in the bar’s of the city we would make light of our haunted house. Then the moments would return in the late evenings. When you were afraid to glance in the mirror for fear of glancing something over your shoulder. When you were surprised by a cat moving through the house. When you heard those echoing footsteps in the hallway again.

Other events happened that were not experienced by me. A friend sleeping in our lounge overnight told us how he felt a presence move through the room, disturbing glasses and cups on the coffee table, walk up to him and tug on the bone pendant hung around his neck. He refused to stay with us in 13a ever again following that incident.

We eventually moved out from 13a in the early spring, we were all of us desperately ill with complaints relating to the overwhelming dampness of the house. One night we returned, Leif and myself, to clean the empty house for the new tenants before their arrival. The house stood empty and dead, in a way I’m sure it was happy to be. We entered the dark structure and turned on all the lights. Without our familiar furniture and belongings around, the menace of the house increased one hundred fold. Five minutes cleaning separate rooms was enough to convince both of us that we should stick together. We felt continually watched by the presence we knew existed in the empty rooms of the spider’s death chamber. Eyes watched us from behind the walls, regarding us with an intent that was palpably hostile. We finished our cleaning, moved backwards through the shell, turning off lights one by one, until only the porch light remained. We turned it off, locked the door and moved with haste down to the road below. Forever sealing off the chamber from all but our memories. We never ever have returned to 13a Adams terrace.

That is the end of the stories I have to tell of 13a Adams terrace. Maybe others have more, maybe they don’t, but the details as I have related them to you, reader, did occur. For the more skeptical I would like to impress upon you the point that when these events happened to me I was of a mindset similar to yours when I experienced these phenomena. I am today, asking only for an open mind and a willingness to if not accept, then at least not to dismiss what I have set down here as whimsy or fanciful tall tales.

These events did happen. One day they might happen to you too.

new benchmark again

2005-09-30T22:27:00.000+09:00

by decree, all future blog postings concerning swimming will be in large green type. Because I liked the way it looked last time.

Today - 2k - 36 minutes.

Electronic Performing Sports Aid

2005-09-28T14:12:00.000+09:00

Last night I decided to push myself a little at the swimming pool. The 17 minute one kilometer swim has now been surpassed as a benchmark of fitness.

I have now entered the dawning era of trying to break the 37 minute two kilometer swim.

When I got to my final 100 meters, just after touching at 900 I decided that instead of sprinting I would just try and see how long I could keep going. I hit 1100 and 1200 okay. It was about this time that the song ‘Electronic Performers’ by Air came into my head, as its rhythm and pace were similar to that I was keeping in the pool.

So I kept on going.

Out to 1450 and 1500.

By the time I had reached 1700 meters there was no way I was stopping until I hit 2k. I still had some lungs left for a small sprint at the end. Did another 150 meters to warm down and got out, having completed my longest and farthest period of continuous swimming ever. 37 minutes, all tumble turns, no breaks. Excellent. A few people commented on the “goodo swimmingu” when I finally stopped.

When I got out I felt fine, not even thirsty like I normally do, or even nauseous how sometimes I am after extreme swims. Liking the long distance at the moment, so I will probably keep trying to push the distances further and the times lower. I don’t even really feel I get into any decent rhythm until I hit the 550 to 600 meter mark.

Aside from that the first full length working week of the year rolls on. We have hit the Wednesday afternoon mid point now, and the rest is downhill from here. Tonight I have devoted to the pursuit of total sloth, seeing as over the weekend I plan to clean my house, squirrel some cash away and not go anywhere in particular.

Except the swimming pool.

Hoops

2005-09-27T10:01:00.000+09:00

Thinking about education is weird. I have been trying to design a listening activity for students who have only just started learning English and I just can’t focus on it right now. One of those moments where you sit there, examining the syllabus, that concrete wall, trying to craft together a concept that will highlight the main point of the lesson, yet give you some room to teach something a bit more original or interesting. I just keep wandering off topic this morning having read too much news when I arrived at work this morning.

Bits of the weekend keep on slipping into my mind, images and sounds. A teacher comes over to me and jokes about using my mouth as the pencil-sharpening machine. I tell him I’m not hungry right now. Try to concentrate on the lesson plan again and within a few minutes find myself wondering if my sub average game on the BF2 servers last night will radically effect my slowly increasing score per minute statistic of 1.12.

Focus back on the lesson and start laying down ideas, find myself wandering all over the book, looking at various bits of Japanese and realizing I know a little bit more than I did a few weeks ago. Some of the Kanji even look familiar. I’m trying to express a sentiment concerning the dotting of an I and the crossing of a t, yet I can’t for the life of me remember how to turn of auto-correct on a Japanese language machine to express a simple lower case I, the machine capitalizes them.

Sometimes it’s still strange when after years of jumping through hoops in the tiny wide broad small world of educational institutions, someone turns around and lets you hold the hoop for a while. It’s the ring master who I’m concerned about however.

Shelve lesson planning for this afternoon. Eat a mandarin.

In a word, Hiroshima

2005-09-26T16:48:00.000+09:00

As predicted I traveled to Hiroshima and had a very active weekend in the city.

I finally saw the gap between Kyushu and Honshu. I am fairly sure that the path is an underwater tunnel if traveling by Shinkansen, as by Bus you traverse the channel via a suspension bridge of prodigious size.

Hiroshima sprawls around the base of several hills that break up the overall layout of the city. It has a nicely functional and easy to use tram system that also has the benefit of being relatively cheap.

Many of the same comparisons that I drew when describing my trip to Nagasaki are sufficient to describe Hiroshima. The same serenity exists, backlit by the appalling reality of what took place there.

Friday afternoon was the time of our arrival. We found our hotel, a small, cleanish place just next to the peace park. The owner had a tank with a small turtle and crab combo, another with a fish, and another with a very large beetle. We slept two or three to a room, depending on who needed somewhere to sleep.

Friday afternoon and the early evening were taken up by the obvious tours of the nuclear sites and museums. Hiroshima Peace Park seems to be twice the size of the Nagasaki peace park due to the geographic layout of the city and as it also incorporates the cities museum on the subject. The Peace Park itself takes up the majority of the delta island in the centre of the city. The large bridge intersection at the top of the island being the bombardiers target. The resulting devastation sweeping a large area of this delta clean, and the river banks providing natural borderlines for the park.

Grim reminders preserved in the museum. The original orders and process of the U.S. military’s decision to subject Hiroshima to atomic bombing enlarged, the relevant passage highlighted in blood red. Keloid scars preserved in acrylic resin. Enlarged photo’s of children disfigured with burns that would prove fatal within a day. Japanese paintings in the classical style depicting the suffering of the day. A toddlers tricycle, hideously melted and deformed, bears testament to the damage inflicted on its riders young body. A litany of horrors in hall after hall.

Emergence from the museum into evening sunlight feels like a slice of Eden compared to the cocoon of remembered hell incorporated into the carapace of the museum. I film some young buskers sitting under one of the main bridges, using its architecture as an amplifier. People exchange cameras and snap photos. I ring the peace bell.

The Atomic Bomb dome, forever preserved and reinforced to allow it to look exactly as it has done since the day the light of a thousand suns exploded into existence 600 metres above and just slightly to the left of it, broods behind its fences. A sarcophagus, trapped within its bars and presenting incontrovertible evidence for all to see.

We stay out that evening until about 4:30 in the morning, exploring Hiroshima’s nightlife and running into Dave Ashby of all people.

Electronic dartboards are fun.

We travel as a group out to Miyajima Island, of the coast of the mainland and accessible via a ten minute ferry ride. Miyajima is an idyllic coastal island. It really is every bit as nice as this photo makes out

Tame deer roam over the streets of the Island. You have to be careful if you have paper packages as they go for paper and t-shirts, but it’s very nice as you get to play with bambi.

High mountains run over its back and its mainland facing coast is home to a very large and rather famous series of temples. The temples are themselves built on piers that just out over the beach. Puffer fish swoop around under the floorboards, providing game for the Herons. An infinitely old pagoda looms over the surrounds.

Miyajima Island is home to this exceptionally famous piece of Japanese scenery.

The famous floating Tori of Miyajima Island was built around 600 A.D. and is one of the top three most photographed landmarks in all of Japan. If you queue up for a little while, you can even get your picture taken like this.

That is probably one of my most classic, “I’ve been there photo’s”, so I hope you appreciated the chance to gaze in awe and wonder upon my remarkable visage once again. I’ll give you a few minutes to regain your composure after being subjected to my fabulous appearance.

The morning, and yes, it was the morning for despite staying out until 4:30 am we had left the hotel again by 9:30, wore on and we decided to enhance our understanding of Miyajima by taking one of the famous climbing tracks up into the hills. Not one of us fully understood the scale of this Endeavour as we set out on our trek with four hours sleep, having breakfasted on McDonalds, little or no water and our food supplies consisting of four Oreo cookies and one third of a bag of honey covered nuts for five people. Connor was wearing Jeans. Jon, Jayne and Sarah were all in sand shoes. We went up into the hills and the pace was really nice and easy going. Enormous spider webs littered the path, providing amateur entomologists with plenty of eye candy. Very nice.

We had been moving upwards steadily for around half to three quarters of an hour when we arrived at a steep incline, steps carved into the rock in places. We ran into someone and inquired how far to the top, thinking it maybe only a few more minutes.

“Oh it’s at least another hour”

Straight up. Remember those sheer Asian style mountains I described this time last week? Impossibly steep looking? Yeah. To put it in context for those in the know, this was like scaling up into the Rimutaka ranges from sea level, yet only covering a distance of two kilometers total.

We push onwards and upwards, climbing higher and higher above Hiroshima as the afternoon wears on. We pass wild deer grazing on the mountainside, me and Connor both think we catch glimpses of monkeys back in the undergrowth fleeing from our path. Mt. Misen, as it turns out we were scaling, has a final height of around 520 metres above sea level.

Eventually we break out of the forest onto the mountains ridge line. The view of the islands is worth every step. We make our way out onto the edge and are able to catch a full view of Hiroshima below us. This spot is a sub-summit of the mountain range. Just slightly to the left and out of frame is the summit of the mountain, another 100 metres down into a ravine and then another 130 metres up again.

We keep on going, determined to get to the summit. Scenic temples dot the landscape. Eventually we reach the summit observation platform. It gets cold at this point, the wind picks up. We catch the ropeway car down an improbably steep incline, dine in Miyajima and head back to the hotel, sleep and then venture out into the nightlife of Hiroshima again. A more risqué area tonight, finding clubs through the forests of hostess bars. Girls in dresses hand out flyers as Yakuza pimps with earpieces and microphones find prospective clients and direct their girls. The next day we make a journey to the mall and eventually make it back to little old Kashima by about 7ish. Great weekend and to cap it off for now here’s a photo taken from the summit of Mt. Misen looking down at one of the small towns near Hiroshima.

2005-09-22T12:45:00.000+09:00

According to some sources I have been kidnapped by the U.S. Secret Service

http://sagaalt.blogspot.com/2005/09/another-typical-day-in-japan-my.html

Deep in an underground bunker beneath Tara-Cho

Mr.T, Phd: Fool! Whatcho tryna do to Bush?

Me: I just wanted him to autograph my jar of magic pickles! It could be the most useful and effective thing he has ever done in his tenure as President!

Mr.T, Phd: Fool! Don’t give me no sassafras! You gonna fry now once secret service Jesus is through with you.

Me: Who the fuck is….

-= CLAP OF THUNDER=-

SSJ: I AM SECRET SERVICE JESUS!

Me: Christ!

SSJ: EXACTLY!

Me: Where did you come from?

SSJ: YOUR CULTURES COLLECTIVE SUB-CONSCIOUS FEAR OF DEATH! I AM ITS CURRENT MANIFESTATION! WHERE ELSE DO DEITIES COME FROM?

Me: Do you always shout?

SSJ: OF COURSE I ALWAYS BLOODY SHOUT! I ‘M BLOODY SECRET SERVICE JESUS AREN’T I?!

Mr.T, Phd: D’you want some toast Jesus?

SSJ: YES! HEAVENLY TOAST WITH SHRIMP BITS PLEASE!

Me: Why you working for the man secret service Jesus? I thought you were supposed to be all, you know, for the poor and downtrodden? You know? I thought you were a bit more liberal?

Secret Service Samuel L. Jackson: Motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker!

SSJ: JOHN KERRY AND HILLARY CLINTON PUT ME OFF THE WHOLE THING! 2005 YEARS OF HARD WORK SHOT TO HELL! I’LL ASK THE QUESTIONS HERE MATEY POTATEY! NOW, WHO PUT YOU UP TO THIS STUNT?

Me: The Volcano God, Kahl-Zamesh….WHOSE PRESENCE I SUMMON NOW TO AID ME IN MY TIME OF SHOUTY PERIL!

-=Explosion of fire and brimstone with sulphur reek=-

Kahl-Zamesh: ROOOOOOAAAARR! WHAT PERILS DO YOU FACE WORTHY ACOLITE?

Me: Kahl-Zamesh! Worthy Volcano God and protector of all things red! Jesus has turned to the dark side! He is working for the man, every night and day! I am bound here and face torture and imminent death!

Kahl-Zamesh: RRRROOOOOAAAARRRRR! DAMN THE MAN! THEY SHALL FEEL MY WRATH! SHELTER IN THE PROTECTIVE MANNER OF MONG WORTHY ACOLITE!

Adam Shelters in the protective manner of mong by putting one hand over his nose and the other between his legs as prescribed in the unholy books of the Volcano God.

Me: You get ‘em Volcano God!

Kahl-Zamesh lunges towards secret service Jesus

Kahl-Zamesh: ROOOOOOAAAAARRR!

Mr.T, Phd: I say old bean, you look rather like the Balrog from Lord of The Rings don’t you Mr. Volcano God sir?

Kahl-Zamesh: ROOOOOOOAAAARRRR! I WILL SEND MY DISCIPLE TO DEAL WITH YOU WORTHLESS PEON!

Kahl-Zamesh coughs up none other than

Disciple Terry Gilliam: You fuck-sock! Die secret service scum!

Gilliam stabs Mr.T Phd with his painfully over budget film, inflicting 3000 points of damage. Mr.T, Phd dies, painfully

Mr.T, Phd: Urgh……

SSJ: I’M OUTIES MOTHERFUCKERS!

Secret service Jesus flees into the underground chambers buried deep beneath Tara Cho. Gilliam, Kahl-Zamesh and Adam pursue.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion….

Ralph

2005-09-21T14:53:00.000+09:00

One of my students has learned the phrase “Shut up you” and regaled me with his skill this morning. I placed him in a decent headlock.

My much anticipated lunch out yesterday afternoon bought the ill wind of dodgy curry my way. I turned green in the late afternoon and spent most of the evening recuperating after a fairly vigorous post school stomach evacuation.

Rats.

Today is well sticky hot. The kids are dead in the water. Its like trying to mold honey into shape getting any response out of them. Busy morning though with back to backs all the way through to lunch, then some planning for tomorrow. Tempted to slipp away and have a kip in the tatami room for a while.
I’ve been dead on my feet the past couple of days. One more day of work and then I leave for Hiroshima on Friday morning. Expect many grand photos.

Kumamoto - Oita rally

2005-09-20T09:39:00.000+09:00

I covered a large amount of southern Japan over the long weekend with my French Canadian friend.

Riding shotgun in the red biscuit, Carol, the weekend path led from Saga through Fukuoka and into Kumamoto, up to Mt. Aso via an hour long traffic jam, then overland across the island to Beppu in Oita Ken on the eastern coast. Highlights included;

Visiting the Mt. Aso volcanic Plateau, the largest active volcanic caldera in the world at something like 140 odd kilometers wide. The plateau levels off about 1000 meters above sea level and as a major bonus it is blessedly cool, especially after the sweaty hell of the traffic jam earlier. It’s like being instantly transported to the English moors described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of The Baskervilles. Mist and cloud cling to the bleak, scrubby hills. Black rocks jut up from the ground at jaunty angles. The sun is reduced to a small speck behind the columns of steam and sulphur spewed from the active volcano’s. Large swathes of land are laid bare, swamped by fields of volcanic ash. Bright blue sulphur lakes hiss as wind runs over them, fanning plumes of gas up towards the blue vault of sky. The area is well developed, like most of Japan. Serious amounts of seismic instruments litter the landscape. The museum on the northern edge of the Plateau looks more like a re-enforced war fighting base rather than a geological museum. It gives more than a subtle hint to the degree of activity that the buildings planners foresaw the museum surviving through. Helicopters rattle overhead. Red warning lights flash over multi language signs warning people with asthma to avoid going to the crater due to the amount of gas in the air. Damn the man. Catch the ropeway gondola up to the crater rim. A two kilometer or so wide crater with a large lake at the bottom. The strata of the bare rock of the crater walls exposed, ripped apart and blown upwards during the craters creation. Apt evidence to the power of the forces maintained below our feet. Rugged looking men sell yellow sulphur cake blocks. Drunk businessmen play silly buggers on the craters lip. Took a very long walk out to the edges of the crater area and was rewarded with a stunning view down into the valley below. Spent so long exploring that the ropeway is shut down for the evening. Walk back down through the rock and the scrub along the edge of the road. It begins to get darker, mist starts to descend from the hills. It’s all very Led Zepplin. You can almost imagine a group of skinny English men, high on drugs, wandering about the place posing on rocks, singing about time and indulging in five minute long drum solo’s.

Pull over by a large crater lake. Long overgrown with grass, a herd of horses makes their home in this landscape straight from a Roger Dean painting. We walk down into the field and play with the horses, who stand, munching on grass and letting themselves be patted. Large docile, gentle animals. The light fails totally. The horses move off across the lakeshore into a mist advancing out at the same speed as their withdrawal. The cold mist clings to the ground as we drive off the edge of the plateau. Driving through thick clouds for a few minutes as we drop altitude. Holding breath that we don’t run out of fuel at this comparatively remote part of Japan we emerge down into Aso town and break for dinner.

Decide to drive to Beppu, a resort town on the eastern coast. Fill up on gas, crank the music and follow the road into the night. A huge full moon rises. The Aso plain is flat for a while, then a massive black hill ridge appears, silhouetted in the gloom by the moonlight. We make our way up, and up and up into the mountain ranges of central Kyushu.

This is true Revenge of Shinobi country.

We drive into clouds. It is remote. Sheer, tree lined mountains stretch up into the clouds. Round, curving improbably surreal looking Asian mountains. They are drenched in a light that is close to day. It gets really remote. We think we live along way away from civilization in Saga, but that’s just peanuts compared to this. Plumes of steam from hydrothermal vents creep up into the sky. The mountains keep on rising up higher and higher. This is all still national park. Isolated Spa towns nestle in valleys. A mechanical breakdown out here would be, to say the least, a major buzzkill. Army vehicles roll dangerously close to us as they drive past on the narrow mountain roads. They are towing 105mm howitzer cannons. Out of nowhere a town emerges with a large amusement park. The park and its lights fit in and kind of amplify the natural beauty of the surrounds. Hours later we emerge into Beppu, the town where I got remarkably drunk last year. Beppu is in full swing on a Sunday night as Monday is a national holiday. It takes us an hour to find a hotel room. We crash, exhausted from a full day on the road and volcanic exploration.

Spent a very nice morning at Beppu’s Umitamago aquarium. Went to pieces over sea otters, who are one of the most endearing animals ever created. Stroke stingrays, pick up sharks, get erked by crowds of swarming Japanese old ladies and children. Visit the monkey sanctuary, but most of the monkey’s are up in the hills. A few are wandering around. When they get into a fight one flees, screaming straight for Jayne’s legs and dodges around them at the last minute. Monkeys are cool.

Browse though some shops in the afternoon, grab some lunch and then hit the express ways back to Saga.

When I get home a receive a phone call from Tim in Dublin.

Here is a photo that expresses how good the weekend was. I was at the time imploring the Volcano God, Kahl-Zamesh, atop the ceremonial sacrificial drinking and chess playing rock, for assistance in vanquishing the armies of man. I was screaming at him to release his unearthly army to my control so that I could spread a wave of darkness across the globe in glory of his name.

Received no response, gave up evil sorcerer ambitions.

For now.

Previous weeks writing

2005-09-20T09:36:00.000+09:00

This is all the previous weeks writings from Sagablog which I wanted to archive here just for recording purposes. Clink the link in the last post to see the writings on sagablog, properly formated with pictures etc...

Friday, September 16, 2005

Satan Babies
AN IMPORTANT NOTICEIf you wish to give birth to the Son of Satan on the 6\6\6 next year this weekend is your last chance to concieve.
*hums the theme to The Omen and drinks another beer
posted by Adam at 10:35 PM 1 comments

Rag Doll
From wikipedia
In computer game engines, ragdoll physics are a replacement for traditional static death animations. Early computer games, going as far back as computer graphics themselves, used hand-created death sequences for characters. This had the advantage of low CPU usage as all a dying character had to do was choose from a pre-set finite number of animations.
As computers increased in power, it became possible to do limited real-time physical simulations. A ragdoll is therefore a collection of multiple rigid bodies (each of which is ordinarily tied to a bone in the graphics engine's skeletal animation system) tied together by a system of constraints that restrict how the bones may move relative to each other.
The term ragdoll comes from the fact that the articulated systems, due to the limits of the solvers used, tend to have little or zero joint/skeletal muscle stiffness, leading to a character collapsing much like a paper ragdoll.
See a basic demonstration of ragdolling here. Hours of fun. Especially if you’re drunk. Grab the model mid flight and you can make him dance too.
http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm
posted by Adam at 4:36 PM 0 comments

'Nuva day 'nuva dollar
Yesterday was hard work returning to my apartment to find it littered with puppy raising objects yet to have no puppy to utilize them.
Today has been the first time I have ever had a senior student at a junior high break into tears during a warm up game. I was playing the criss cross game, again (chiefly because I don’t need to explain it anymore). It was one of those retardedly shy quiet girls who, through no fault of my own as I hadn’t been manipulating the game, was left as the last one standing. Now what I believe made her cry was the fact that the class was laughing at the last few people standing, regardless of who they were. I served her up an easy “Do you like Ice Cream?” question and she burst into tears and sat down.
Now initially I felt bad about this, as most people would, but as the class progressed I realized it had very little to do with me, or the game, which has worked hundreds of times before without producing this result. It was the classmates laughing at her and her own, totally intractable shyness that produced her outburst. She had picked up to her normal, quiet, eyes down and hide from the foreigner at all costs, mannerisms.
Sometimes I get tired of trying to coax the tinniest amount of English language out of the most introverted of Japanese teenagers. I discussed the matter with my Irish colleague on return to my desk and she expressed the following opinions which seem to be true and made me feel better also.
All she had to do was blurt out three, not four, not five, god forbid six or seven, but three, very basic, words of a language she had been studying for 3 years. You can’t constantly keep these kids wrapped up in the little ball of protective cotton wool that allows them to maintain a totally introverted set of behaviors. Eventually, you have to take some kind of stand and find your own voice. You have to be presented with the opportunities at some stage and take a swing otherwise some of these kids will spend their whole lives as quiet, mouse like, recluses.
It’s not like I was asking for an opinion on analyzing whether or not consideration has been provided to each party in a dispute over an issue of contract law, I just asked her if she liked ice cream. I wasn’t asking her to strip in front of the class was I?
It reminded me of an incident last year when I encountered a whole class room of fifteen year olds who were still so depressed and upset by one of their class mates moving to a different school the week before you’d have thought he’d died rather than moved house. I spent a whole period giving every once of goodness I possessed and got no response, at all, ever. So as we are leaving my team teacher explained to me about the student having left and its resulting class room apathy. The halls resounded with my cry of
‘THAT’S ABSOLUTLEY PATHETIC!” as by this stage I was quite frustrated. The teacher was shocked.
“Why do you say that?” she implored. I explained to her my opinion that these were fifteen year olds. They weren’t young kids anymore. I told her that at this stage they should be given a boot up the arse to get them moving again. They need to start to grow up now. Your friend moved away, boo hoo, life’s not fair have a cry when it happens then get the fuck over it. These kids were about to burst into tears a week later. It was ridiculous. Stop molly coddling them and present them with a few facts about the world outside school without covering it in cartoon animals and pastel backgrounds. The JTE of course did not disagree with me or offer much in the way of a counter opinion.
I also had a unique teaching experience yesterday when I went to my elementary school classes. I had a classroom of 20 or so 7 to 8 year olds in front of me. The class was one of those blessed events where the homeroom teacher blatantly refuses to help in any way, shape, or form in the running of the class. He marked some papers at the back of the classroom. He cleaned the fish tank. He left the room on occasions to go and do something else. This made it mostly impossible for me to explain any activity at all.
These days when I find myself in a situation where a classroom of children is getting rapidly out on control I just take the ‘fuck it’ approach and let the kids do what they want. It’s a lot less stressful than trying to take control of the situation and convince kids to do a game that you can’t fully explain in their own language. I mean, English in this class went out the window completely. Not just learning it, but exposing the kids to English in general as I had to pull all my Japanese out the bag just to get by. We played the punch Adam in the nuts game, the hide in the closet game, the jump on the foreigner game and the dangle children by their legs out the window game. I’m not kidding, one kid ass jabbed me hard so I whipped him up off his feet and dangled him head first out the window. He loved it.
Tomorrow there will be a general election in New Zealand. The race is looking tight. The main centre right wing party in New Zealand, National, has over the past few years cannibalized the smaller, even more right wing parties that used to support it, absorbing their popular support and rallying behind a new, stronger, more confident leadership. Don Brash, the man at the helm who is running for the title of Prime Minister, is an ex central banker with an eye for Yankees. His is strongly in favor of ditching New Zealand’s long held and nationally defining stance against nuclear powered vessels and nuclear weapons in general. A National led coalition government will possibly try and drop New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance in favor of strengthened defensive ties and trading privileges with the United States. In short he may sell our nation out to the Neo-Conservative imperialist war machine quicker than a fox fucks a rabbit if he commands a majority coalition in Parliament.
It is direction time again in Aotearoa. Personally I don’t want my country to throw the towel in and start taking advice from a foreign administration ostensibly headed by the chimp that let 3000 of his own citizens get murdered on his watch, played the guitar while thousands more drowned and is unable to string a coherent sentence together to save his life.
If you are a New Zealand citizen and you haven’t voted yet you have until 4pm Japan time tomorrow to fax your vote in.
It’s important. People in some parts of the world, are prepared to die, have died and are dying to try and obtain the right to vote in a free and fair election. So many of those who are in possession of the ability to vote choose to ignore and neglect that most basic of civil duties that allows you for the briefest of times to make stand and clearly state which direction you think your own country should head in. New Zealand has a voting population of less than four million people; in a demographic of that size the only vote wasted is that which isn’t cast.
Fingers crossed for tomorrow.
posted by Adam at 3:51 PM 0 comments
Thursday, September 15, 2005

Puppies are very nice indeed
I decided that feeding HomeStarRunner would require some utensils. The family mart was bereft of baby supplies. I was considering purchasing a small genki drink, ripping the top of a rubber glove and fashioning a bottle from the two when I glanced over the toy section. Thank you Sanrio Corporation. A Hello Kitty nurse play set, with an eyedropper and a squeeze bottle. Was there ever a more Japanese puppy?
HomeStarRunner settled down after being fed again at about 10:30. She then slept all the way through until about 3 am, when it was time for some more food, then again at 5, and then again at 6. The 6am feeding required another bath. The bath this time was great. She calmed down and relaxed as I placed her into the water. She stretched her legs out, had a big yawn and was asleep soundly again before I had finished toweling her down. Which is a delicate task when you’re dealing with a small puppy.
This morning I had to employ my old jellybean jar to transport her to school. I cut a hole in the top for some airflow, put her little blue blanket in the jar and dropped her in the top. She curled up into her blanket and snoozed during the bike ride to school, which was painstakingly slow. Picture a gaijin, with huge white knees poking out of his shorts, wearing aviator glasses, sporting horrible sunburn and clutching a plastic jar with a small snoring puppy biking through the rice fields of Saga.
Our story ended happily just a few minutes ago. My Kyoto Sensei has just taken all 6, now rather frisky, puppies out to his friend in Takeo, who is a dog breeder and definitely will have the experience and facilities to give these pups a better start in life than just being discarded on a rubbish heap.
Puppies rule.
I miss HomeStarRunner
posted by Adam at 9:18 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Puppies love listening to Isan
The person from Takeo was unable to make a pick up tonight, so I decided to play the puppies cute card to their own benefit and take them into the staff room. Kyoto sensei has agreed to take them to Takeo tomorrow, requiring them to be looked after for one night.
The other teachers fawned all over them and they were split up into groups and taken home to be cared for overnight by various teachers. I have one with me now. I will call her HomeStarRunner and she is now resting nicely after having her first bath. She did not enjoy her first bath and protested mightily, however, she is much cleaner now. I did find her in a garbage pit after all. She has been fed three times this evening and when she makes a noise now I just stroke her back and she quiets down as she doesn’t appear interested in any more milk for now. I feed her by dipping my finger in milk. Then for her part she tries to inhale my finger. Then she burps a bit and goes back to sleep. I expect I will spend a good portion of this evening comforting a scared puppy who misses her littermates and cries a lot.
That’s okay though, she had a pretty rough start.
posted by Adam at 8:14 PM 0 comments

I FOUND PUPPIES!
I decided to bike out around the coast and get some photos this afternoon for something to do instead of just sitting here doing nothing. I biked out and took some nice photo’s.
As I was heading back to school I was pushing my bike up a steep river embankment. Now all around here there are farms, and the farmers have piles of rubbish they collect as they go about their days in the fields. Every so often they burn these piles of rubbish. As I head over the edge I see one of these big piles of crap.
There is a tiny little squeak coming out of the pile. I park up and head over. Looking into the pile of old Styrofoam containers, empty sake bottles and half eaten lunches I find six, new born, abandoned puppies. They’re so young they still have umbilical cords and their eyes haven’t opened. A couple weren’t moving and I didn’t know how long they had been there.
I raced back to school and grabbed some plastic bags, raced back to the pit and pulled them out of the garbage one by one. I had to wade in through spiders and bush to get the last little one that was making the noise that led me to his brothers and sisters. Three male, three female. They cried in my backpack all the way back to school.
They are now sitting in the office, where, apparently, someone from an animal shelter in Takeo will come to get them. I am sticking around until I find out for sure they are safe.
I SAVED PUPPIES!
posted by Adam at 4:03 PM 1 comments

The Doldrums
Ancient mariners spoke of cursed regions of the seas. These were places where no winds blew. Where heat rose from the very ocean and where ships could drift for months at a time, the crew slowly dying of thirst and starvation while their ship drifted aimlessly like graduate student searching for research funding.
The doldrums are an equatorial belt of calms, slightly north of the equator. At this point on the earths surface large amounts of solar radiation cause the land and ocean ro become intensely hot. This heating results in the rising of warm, moist air; low air pressure; cloudiness; high humidity; light, variable winds; and various forms of severe weather, such as thunderstorms and squalls. Hurricanes originate in this region.
The doldrums are also noted for calms, periods when the winds disappear, trapping sailing vessels for days or weeks. Time would slip past slowly, like a mildly disabled bear that has just raided a large supply of rum.
The doldrums, oh my friends and relations, is where you find me this morning. My arms are sticking to my desk as I try to type. I am watching the clock tick by. Teachers are moving out to supervise yet another round of tests. I am sitting at my station, sweltering in the heat. It won’t be long now until we move into the cooler part of autumn. Soon it will begin to be cooler in the evenings, then by the time the balloon festival rolls around a jacket will be a compulsory piece of evening attire.
My cell phone just received an email.
This provoked a wave of laughter around the staff room. What the fuck is so amusing about my phone in particular? This room is permeated every day with about 50 different annoying, cute ring tones. We get everything from obscure Japanese opera to Numa Numa. What is so absofuckingloutely incredible about my phone receiving an email?!
Jesus wept! Look at that foreigner! He must be able to work a piece of Japanese technology! I thought they just used hollow drums made of sticks, feces smearing and smoke signals to communicate in New Zealand! Do Maori people live with everyone else in New Zealand? Do you have schools and bridges too? How strange that a stylized cartoon bee is a symbol of New Zealand!
This coming from the people who live in the land where the cartoon animal is the king of advertising.
Sometimes, when it’s hot and I have no real work to do all day, I get so fed up of being constantly novel out here in the inaka. You’d think after a year it would wear off wouldn’t you? It’s the days like this where people become amazed at the fact I eat a small salad for lunch everyday that get to me a little bit and provoke outbursts like the one above. Sometimes the comparative anonymity that living in a large Japanese city would provide sounds nice.
Oh well, it's part of the job isn't it? Deep breath and focus on something else.
You don't think our paychecks are just merely remuneration for the services we provide in our working hours do you? Whats your thoughts on the matter? Where does your professional employment end in this country and your personal life begin in terms of the dictates it places on your everyday behaviours?
Personally, I consider that there is a certain percentage of my wage that is devoted to compensating for the kind of frustration that can build up when you live in a society as traditional, for lack of a better word, as society in Saga can be. There certainly is a gap between pay thresh hold and actual job responsibility that I fear will vastly skew my perception of any employment contracts I glance over in the future. Imagine glancing over a contract and looking at a large list of position responsibilities and saying something like,
What do you mean I won't have days where I am paid to sit around and read about UFO's on the internet all day?
crazy world huh? I suppose that in a society where teachers occupy a certain social status its to be expected that you have to alter you lifestyle to match in with what is viewed as being socially normal behavior for a teacher to exhibit.
Thats not to say you have to meet those expectations.
And that is where the fun lies.
I have been pretending to be busy experimenting with DVD backup software this morning. Moving my region 4 DVD of The Wall by Pink Floyd over onto a new region free DVD using the software I posted a link to on sagaJET the other week. It’s really working well. It has taken a couple of hours to analyze the DVD and encode it again, but I have it on the highest quality settings and it hasn’t been sucking down too many system resources, so my laptop has been running along nicely while it’s been working in the background.
Yes, maybe after lunch something interesting will happen, but for now, the bat has descended and test time inactivity has commenced. Yesterday was really busy, and I felt I had a good productive day, I was useful and won a few minor victories. I need to hang on to that today, as this posting fits exactly into the description emblazoned at the top of the website like a stamp of confirmation that some aspects of this system of employment we are involved in need a bit of change. Time to motivate and make some English posters or an English board or something to do with English.
Oh, that software works well, just put my new DVD in the drive and it runs perfectly. The world is mine.....
posted by Adam at 11:15 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Pointless Celebrity
I've just been reading on Xinhua that apparently Victoria and David Beckham have been voted the U.K.'s first and second most pointless celebrities respectivley. But can anyone inform me who Jordan and Abi Titmuss are?http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/13/content_3482366.htmTitmuss.......I just want to giggle like a school girl. This article begs a personal response, so allow me to present my own personal list of top ten pointless celebrities.1. Princess Diana...........shes dead.2. Kelly Osborne............her father should have bitten her head off and raised the bat as his own. Then she would be dead.3. Ice Cube.....................worst screen acting ever in XXX 2. Gangsta is dead.4. Paul W. Anderson......for killing many promising movie franchises dead.5. Paris Hilton............. ..If she was dead, would her personality suffer?6. John Paul II...............dead popes society.7. Pat Tillman............. ..Suckered in by media machine and dead in Iraq. Stupid Jock.8. Starscream..................Killed dead by Galvatron.9. XZhibit......................He will be dead and can't spell his own name.10. Courneay Love.............Dead soon. Don't worry. Gave Gen-X their Nancy.
posted by Adam at 12:10 PM 0 comments

Wandering tribes of puppy eating bats
Tuesday morning has no animal associated with it at all. It is simply Tuesday morning, reliable, regular and calm. There is no post weekend euphoria that is slowly worn away in a school were kids are disciplined for sometimes what I consider to be the most retarded and unnecessary misdemeanors. It’s just a Tuesday.I thought last weeks typhoon was distinctly disappointing. Although majestically slow, Nabi just failed to impress me as much as Songda did last year. True, Songda did rip a tree behind my apartment in half and this year that tree is, well, just not there to be ripped in half again, but Nabi just seemed to be a bit of a let down. I was looking forward to a good storm. I like storms. They’re dramatic. Like me, I’m often dramatic. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’ve always been. It can be particularly hard to switch off at times. It’s what makes me a decent (and decently impoverished at times) actor.So far I’ve worked my way through a large pile of marking today. Oh the sense of raw and unexaggerated accomplishment that flowed through my veins as I placed the last cross on the stack of worksheets in front of me. It was tantamount to the feeling I’m sure Moses may have had if he did indeed part the red sea. Except with less fish and Hebrew pilgrims.I left my Hebrew pilgrims at home this morning. What do you do with your lost tribes when you’re at school?I still don’t consider myself to be a teacher in the fullest sense of the word. I have no formal training to teach young people, I can’t read or write the majority of the language so working can often be slightly limited because of this. However, I think more points should be awarded in grading to students who display more creative and interesting answers. I think it highlights that not only do they grasp the concepts they are practicing; they are comfortable to manipulate them in more abstract terms than the exercise allows for. Today for example I was marking a worksheet. On the worksheet are two cartoon pictures of a city. One is fifty years in the past and the other is in the present. Using the patterns of there is and there was, along with the associated correct grammar and syntax, the students have to create 10 statements about the town, such asThere was a school in this town fifty years ago.One girl in particular drew little brackets linking two of her statements together. In the first statement she observed that,There were some trees in this town fifty years ago.With the second cartoon displaying a distinct lack of trees in the city, instead focusing more on convenience stores and tall buildings she then observed that,There aren’t any rainbows in this town now.I wanted to give her more than two marks for these sentences. It was just a good observation and comment not only on the worksheet, the grim realities of the distinct lack of rainbows in the day’s English routine, but also on encroaching urbanization and the degradation of the environment.I have stood accused in the past of being able to read too much into things.The rest of the day after this will be taken up with back to back classes until the late afternoon. I prefer to be busy during the school day if at all possible. Tomorrow there are tests running all day, no classes, nothing to do. The day looms over the horizon like a fat bloated bat, gorged on the flesh of dead puppies. Or any other kind of creature that, if feasted upon, by a horrible bat, would provide you, dear reader, with an appropriately visceral response to the description of my anticipation of approaching uselessness.Also trying to publish this post from a Japanese computer is hard as all the buttons are in fucking heathen squiggle language.
posted by Adam at 10:21 AM 3 comments
Monday, September 12, 2005

Rhinocerotidae execting child and not feeling chuffed about it either
Good morning my fellow lackeys of his Imperial Majesty. Being this is the Monday of the 12th of September 2005 I suppose I am now in control of the literary direction of this page for the next week.
Monday sneakily crept into my consciousness this morning, heavy, hot and grey. Like an angry pregnant Rhinoceros. The Rhino battered gently on the wall of my house, as gently as any expectant Rhino is able to accomplish, which is to say, not really very gently at all, especially as this Rhino tends to sound like all of my wonderful neighbors starting their cars and departing for work on the gravel outside the window behind which I rest my often weary head. I have considered moving my sleeping attire away from the window, however, a part of me suspects my neighbors will only just start their engines at a greater volume and drive away more aggressively.
However, this morning I was able to ward off this vicious, obscene denizen of the working week by setting off my flare of self righteousness. You see, yesterday, I attended the traditional outdoor enforcement of rigorous and painful group orientated activities that comprise the layout of a Sports Day Festival, or Undokai, at one of my Junior High Schools. This gave unto me a coveted day off this morning and that rarest and sweetest of gifts, the self righteous Monday morning sleep in. I set off the flare, placed my Qantas airways blindfold over my eyes and listened to the sound of the Rhinoceros bellowing angrily as she scampered away over the plains to give birth to her cumbersome workload upon some other poor teacher like a heaving mess of warm red meat. I drifted off to sleep, content. Did the Rhinoceros visit you this morning? It was my fault. I am not sorry.
This sleep in lasted only until about 9:30 when I peered out from behind my blindfold, surveyed my apartment and decided that the heaving garbage bags, the quite tastefully flung clothes, compact disks and the odd collection of dishes were distorting the perfect balance of my slumber like little demons that lurk on the edge of consciousness, poking at you with offensively dirty little forks. I arose, triumphant and manly, veritably shining with vigor, like a beam of hope for the nations, from my three extra hours of sleeping to be reminded of one very obvious physical reality.
Yesterday I fell into the trap of ‘It’s overcast so I don’t need to put any sunscreen on’. This was distinctly unwise and resulted in the band of nearly purple skin that runs around my neck like the kind of markings Amazonian poison frogs have to warn other animals of their toxin. I feel secure in the fact that if I choose to bask on some rock or leaf during the course of the day, the only creatures that will bother me will want to carefully rub their arrows over my skin to collect venom to kill monkeys with. Monkeys are today’s evil creature, so I am happy to oblige if anyone needs any neurotoxin. You will have to come to me though, because, horrible monkeys aside, it only took three minutes outdoors in the early morning heat, moving my heaving garbage bags and their dubiously potent contents, to convince myself and my newly acquired tropical markings that today will be spent exclusively in doors sheltering from the vengeful wrath of the sun god.
Sports festivals. Jesus God almighty and his magical pixies I wish they would think up some other chant of encouragement rather than just “Ganbarre!” repeated over and over again to the point at which it losses all relativity and meaning. One of the highlights of the day was Aine Flynn’s example of the total failure of the Japanese national to grasp the concept of sarcasm. Aine arrives, dressed completely in Blue, to support the blue team.
Non-descript Japanese Teacher Slave Drone: What team are you supporting today Aine?
Aine: Red.
Three hours pass like frozen treacle through an eye dropper
A: Ganbarre blue! Ganbarre blue!
N-dJTSD: Aine! Why are you cheering for blue?
Sports festivals. At least the majority of the kids have a good time, which is the main thing. Sometimes I wonder though, is it actually possible for anyone to enjoy traditional Japanese marching? I was told at one sports festival it was very important not to make the students smile during the formal marching as it was not allowed.
One aspect of Saga I often find cloying are the vast amounts of rules and customs that must be adhered to. I suppose its part of the continuing process of cultural adjustment that you experience when you move from one culture that is predominantly focused on individuality, like the kind I lived in previously in Wellington, to one where the concept of the group is more primary to the social fabric that you find yourself tangled in. I have been trying to incorporate the ideals of Japanese society into my own life a bit more, but this often meets with limited success. Why I like living in Japan is that it removes me from my own societal rules or customs, and places me in a society where to a certain extent I am always viewed as an outsider, and not really expected or sometimes even not allowed to take part in cultural practices to the same level as most members of the society. This is extremely liberating. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s a pain in the arse.
Sports festivals. There are lots of things I enjoy about Japan. Soccer games, beer vending machines, the acceptance of geek lifestyle, okonomiyaki. Many many things there are that I enjoy about Japan. It just so happens that my first posting to this page is the day after one of the things I am really not so much a fan of.
Sports Festivals. May is a good time to have them. I had one in May. It’s not 30 degrees in the shade in May. It was fun. I spent most of the day either playing soccer with my students and their younger siblings or narrating the races over the P.A. system in an Australian horse racing commentary voice. I was also given one of the school cameras and charged with taking photographs, some of which were actually used in official school publications. I was expected to eat lunch with the staff and was told of the enkai two weeks in advance. I had jobs to do and felt like a useful member of staff. Yesterday I had all the responsibility of, to pinch a phrase from Tim Cooke, ‘A dyslexic kitten’.
This stems from the vast differences I encounter between the two Junior High schools I work at. At the smaller high school I have a lot more responsibility and a lot more interaction with the students. The other teachers all talk to me. I am at this school three and a half days a week, so this makes sense. The other school I am at for only a day and a half, and because the majority of public holidays fall on Mondays and Fridays, along with any other interruptions that piss around with the all important schedule, I am much less of a regular face there. Sometimes I even have to press teachers to get them to teach with me. I often feel, well, weird, at the larger school and have never really settled in at all. I can’t even use the bathroom at the large school. There are no western style commodes. I have a nice torso, but my legs are shot. Not flexible at all. Japanese style bathroom facilities are all but useless to me. Bathrooms aside, there is just something about the larger school that often doesn’t sit right with me. This is doubtless a combination of actual influence from the school and also my own personality. Maybe it will get better this year.
The point is that my working week starts with Monday morning’s at the larger, not so cool, school. I am now 25, and I still have to get up on Monday morning and go to school, and we’ll talk about institutionalization later on in the week maybe, but not only is it school, it is also work. We all have work and school, together, on a Monday morning. Piss biscuits.
Which is why I was so happy to get rid of that Rhino this morning. Stupid animal. It’s lunch time now. Hotdogs and Beer!
posted by Adam at 12:00 PM 0 comments

Hey You!

2005-09-12T12:08:00.000+09:00

Click on this link here

http://sagaalt.blogspot.com/

All the goodness you have come to expect will be posted here for the next week as I am the guest writer for Saga blog this week.

I M weasel

2005-09-07T23:47:00.000+09:00

Telling off kids for plucking eyebrows is the same kind of bad decision that could be made if your house was being approached by a pack of marauding weasels.

If you let the weasels pass through on their way, provided you hid your chickens, then everything would be okay. If however you decided to catch and shave all of the weasels it would take up too much time, be detrimental to the weasels, who are only being weasels and doing what weasels rightly do and in fact could be the most non-productive way of dealing with the weasel situation in general.

Sometimes, some teachers just need to hide their chickens and stand back.

I browse

2005-09-07T22:30:00.000+09:00

Today was very busy, which was nice. Full day of classes and lesson planning that gave me exactly ten minutes to break and eat one meal during an 8 hour day. Then I did the bike swim thing and came in at a low 17 minutes again. After that I ate a chicken dinner and was then called away to teach an adult class I had forgotten about completely. I just finished doing my washing now.

At my school the biggest discipline scandal of the moment is a group of senior girls who, and get ready because this is a bad one….

THEY PLUCKED THEIR EYEBROWS.

For fucks sake.

I mean really, come one, disciplining 15 year old girls for trimming their eyebrows? How are these young people ever supposed to mature if they are cajoled and browbeaten (HA!) over the tiniest thing? I actually took a step back from the conversation I was involved in when I found this out.

A few hours later while talking to one of the male teachers I work with I found out he

a.) thinks it unnecessary to discipline them over it and

b.) couldn’t give two shits if the girls plucked their eyebrows out.

Between the two of us we believe that it is only being raised as an issue because all the female teachers weren’t allowed to pluck their eyebrows when they were in school. Or no one told them that you could actually do it anyway. The reasoning behind it?

“If the girls spend time at home plucking their eyebrows they will not be spending time studying.”

Come on Japan, give it a rest. The amount of usable study time they spent disciplining these kids is the more than they amount of time lost if they had plucked their eyebrows. You know why this country has a high suicide rate? Rampant unnecessary indoctrination type practices in the schooling system for one thing, a system where if you are even the tinniest bit different from everybody else it can be picked on. So if you really don’t feel like you fit in you have one big problem.

Another main event of the day was the revelation that after spending a year and a half dodging any kind of broader official duty, the Saga Prefecture Board of Education has decreed that I and Hiroshi Nakata must present a seminar on team teaching at the mid year conference / excuse for a drink with the lads. I then spent a few minutes reassuring Hiroshi, who is already nervous about it. If I had to help present a seminar and speak only in Japanese I would be too, however, little or no Japanese will be required of me. I will be doing the lion’s share of the presenting though, and this is fine with Hiroshi.

Update no. 6

2005-09-06T22:12:00.000+09:00

At about 4pm the front wall of the storm passed over us. Everything went still as the walls of purple grey cloud swirled around.

I made some hotdogs for dinner.

Then about an hour and a half ago the wind picked up again. The eye of the storm took over four hours to pass over.

Its back to howling winds now and the house is shaking a lot more. It sounds like there’s animals outside who want to get it in.

Cool.

I expect it will be like this for the next few hours and then it will be back to business as usual. School included. I’m going to hit bed early tonight, after brining the bike indoors for the second night running. If anything dramatic happens during the night I will post, but I doubt it.

Update no. 5

2005-09-06T12:17:00.000+09:00

Well, it’s overhead right now. It’s a powerful storm no doubt, but so far nothing as remarkable as the news media here have been making out. However, this is only a LOCAL observation. It could be much worse over on the east coast. It could get worse here too.

Just checked, they advised 70,000 people to evacuate over on the south coast areas, with 800mm of rain and one poor soul drowned.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4215098.stm

It’s been building steadily for about 4 hours now and outside is looking a bit battered around. Must be gusting to around 80-90 kph at times I reckon, maybe 30 kph average. Its making that jet engine sound regularly, sometimes I hear the roof creak and groan. The roof groans, not me. I’m having a ball.

I spent a good three hours solid playing BF2 this morning and did nothing else all last night. Got a new promotion and unlocked my first alternate kit. Cool.

http://www.eagames.com/official/battlefield/battlefield2/us/home.jsp

Shit, a really big gust just did shake the whole house. Time to dip into the supplies of pickles again I think.

I’d try and post some pictures, but it’s really hard to convey heavy rain in a photo as rain doesn’t tend to show up easily on camera.

More as events progress

Update no. 4

2005-09-06T08:26:00.000+09:00

It started to get a lot more violent at around 6am this morning.

We now have heavy rain and strong constant winds with large gusts that are moving the house a little bit. None that feel like an earthquake just yet, but this is a slow storm.

Trees outside have dropped all their fruit and there’s peoples rubbish skittering around outside. Its pretty average so far compared to Songda last year, which split a tree outside here in two.

That’s not to say I would want to bike to school in it though.

Update no. 3

2005-09-06T02:18:00.000+09:00

I am now in possession of slightly less vodka, cranberry, pickles and custard pudding.

The rain has started to pick up a bit now, the wind settled to a steady strong breeze.

The gusts, when they come, are getting stronger now, and louder. They build up more of a bass roar before they hit.

A quick check of the weather maps shows that the heavy rain has been shed so far along the eastern part of Kyushu. After all the usual warnings it feels rather anti-climactic at the moment, however, tomorrow may prove me wrong.

If the weather alters drastically enough to wake me up I will post.

Update no. 2

2005-09-05T23:18:00.000+09:00

Welcome to Typhoon Nabi Watch.

With school cancelled tomorrow I have little else to do except stay up late and ride out this storm, which is heading straight for Kashima.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4215098.stm

If you click on the link about rain to the right of the page you’ll be taken to the JMA rainfall data for Northern Kyushu, so even if I loose power and can’t post you can still see the state of things here. JMA is amazingly accurate and there’s a lot of other useful info about this storm. Check out the satellite updates here;

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/gms/index.html?area=0&element=0

Let the animation load and watch it spin.

We’ve had those massive clouds twisting over the city all day now, and at about 12 it started to rain. Nothing too extreme. But oddly enough timed to the exact second I walked outside. Bastard.

I put aside 12 liters of fresh water in the fridge, some new batteries for the flashlight and I have some candles too just in case it gets hairy later on tonight. I filled my outside rubbish bins with ballast water to stop them blowing away and bundled up the empty kerosene bottle between them. If they move, then we’re really in trouble. I tied down the clothes bar outside my house that I hang washing on.

It’s now just after 11pm Japan time, the crickets are still chirping, and we’ve just had the first few gusts of the wind which has been steadily building over the past 11 or so hours. The gusts start with a deeper rumble and at this stage they aren’t shaking the walls yet. I bought my mountain bike inside instead of locking it to something. I don’t want it to get damaged if other stuff starts moving around out there.

That’s it then, locked down and battened shut like oh so many sailing clichés. Sensible precautions I believe. Time to party.

Additional supplies include 23 cans of Dads brand root beer, 5 liters of Cranberry juice, one bottle of Banford Station wine, one bottle of Sake, one nearly full bottle of Absolut Vodka, one massive jar of baby dill pickles, a custard pudding, some pineapple, 2 pounds of honey roasted cashews, a whole shit load of granola, some rice, and a ready made salad.

Update no. 1

2005-09-05T10:35:00.000+09:00

Its official, school is now cancelled tommorow, Nabi is heading straight for us. The slow, churning storm has winds that can reach up to 148 kph.

Battening down the hatches this evening.

Huge grey clouds are looming over the southern hills, much like those depicted hovering over the Fields of the Pelenor in The Return of The King.

They are twisting.

We cannot hold them,

They are comming

Superfluous Levels of Indulgence

2005-09-05T10:28:00.000+09:00

I am now officially 25 years old.

A weekend of near superfluous indulgence took place. Bar the brief accident last night it was a very enjoyable birthday weekend.

Friday dawned, as it often does on Friday’s. This particular Friday being no exception, even though it was the momentous 25^th anniversary of the day of my birth. I arose, ate a sufficient breakfast of pineapple, yoghurt and muesli, then cleaned myself and reported in to school.

School on a Friday is as we have established, Seibu. Seibu is now organizing for their sports day this weekend. Groan. It’s too damn hot to have to spend all day on Sunday outdoors in the baking sun. Speaking of which, I might go and put my face in to watch the lads practice their stance training. Make it look like I care or something, be a teacher bit, you know?

So, Friday droned on as the sports day, Then in the afternoon I attended the official ceremony to receive my permission to teach for the next year at the Board of Education. Following the brief ceremony my supervisor gave me the afternoon off. Beer was duly drunk and then Jayne came and collected me.

Afterwards we made our way through to Ureshino. There we joined Kamil, Aine, Yuko, Yoko, and some other guests for my birthday dinner at the Okinawan Izakaya. Okinawan food is pretty greasy. The master gave Kamil a new keep bottle of shochu free of charge to celebrate my birthday, which we drank.

Karaoke at Jesus was next, followed by more extended drinking at Chi Ro Ri, where I was compelled into drinking a birthday shot of spirituous, the poisonous Polish Liquor that they import into Japan that is 96% alcohol. I imbibed my cleaning fluid without too many negative side effects, bar a very red face and a confused look. I am a bit blurry about conversational details for the rest of the evening, however, The next day I was reminded that the topics I was discussing had been covered the previous evening at least two times already. We purchased the services of a Daiko (think that’s the word) company to end the night off. They are the Japanese version of Dial a Driver.

Crashed as soon as my head hit the mattress, which I dragged into the lounge as it was closer to the air conditioning. There was corn.

Saturday was spent fucking around.

In the evening I went out to Takeo to participate in Chris Gibson’s birthday celebrations, which involved, funnily enough, Karaoke. Had my first turn in a batting cage as well. For 200 yen you get twenty pitches. You put on a helmet, pick up the baseball bat and stand in front of a large series of video screens which display life size clips of famous Japanese baseball pitchers. The video is perfectly in sink with the pitching machine, the ball exit is mapped to the video and the ball leaves exactly where the pitchers hand would be. So you really can work out your timing nicely by watching the video pitcher. It took me twenty shots to even work the timing out. The next twenty were a bit better, and by my last twenty I had some kind of a rhythm down and made a good few connections. Baseball, tricky.

Karaoke was fun, I’ve written about so much karaoke it makes me feel queasy to contemplate writing about any more. You know what happens.

Alarms,

Sunday,

Driving,

Costco…..mmmmm…Costco. Rumi led me and Jayne in one car and a group of six hit the Costco wholesale barn in Fukuoka after driving via Karatsu. Saw some amazingly beautiful parts of Saga to the North. Really nice rolling valleys filled with lush rice fields. Very very green and also exceptionally clean and tidy compared with southern Saga. Picked up Tan, a new guy from L.A. and got given a tour of a really nice new Japanese house. Drove through the main metro area of Fukuoka for the first time. The Fukuoka dome looking ominously like the images of the New Orleans superdome. Just an update, Super Typhoon Nabi is drawing closer to Kashima as we speak. We are expecting to have all public offices closed tomorrow. No School! Yay!

After Costco we moved to Tosu for a soccer game, Sagan Tosu versus Fukuoka. Tosu Stadium is a mid sized stadium, but is very new and also has lots of places you can buy beer. We found some seat right behind the home team’s goal box. Maybe 20 metres away from the box itself. Front row. Nice.

You’d think.

Me and Angus were talking about how you would have to keep your eye on the game to avoid getting hit in the head by any stray goal shots. While we were doing this the Sagan strikers were warming up, by taking goal shots. Rumi and her sister were down the very front, dribbling over Japanese soccer players and taking photo’s.

I saw the whole thing almost in slow motion. A striker took a practice goal shot. The ball arced out and just missed the top of the goal post. It curved around, I said something eloquent like,

“Bugger here it comes”.

At this moment Rumi decided to look down at the screen of her camera. The ball connected with her camera and face at full speed. As hard and fast as a professional soccer player can kick a ball. The poor girl. The awful smashing and crunching sound was pretty brutal. She spun around and the look on her face…..the look on her face as she fell down.

I jumped down to where she fell, there was blood pooling all over the ground already and running down her arms. Tan asked if she was okay,

Me, again, very eloquent,

“Nah she’s fucked aye. Give us a hand.”

The ball connected mostly with the camera, the camera connected with her lips, smashing them into her teeth, and her nose, possibly breaking it. The rest of the ball hit her left eye, which immediately swelled up all red. Medical staff were called and we all hovered around while they assessed her, calmed her down and got her ready to move. I snatched the blood stained camera up off the floor before it got even more trampled. The lens had been knocked ajar and wouldn’t slide back in. Angus wrapped it in a shirt for later. Eventually they moved Rumi into a medical room to treat her properly. Her sister went along and we four sat, kind of shell shocked, and watched the first twenty minutes of the game, now kind of impossible to get into for me. We were contacted and we went to meet Rumi, who was being taken to her car, where team management were going to drive her to Saga Idai, the hospital I lived in a few months ago. She apologized for what had happened in a style uniquely Japanese. We limped home coming up with ideas to do something nice for her as her birthday is this weekend.

September babies, we’re great.

So yeah, Rumi will be okay I hope. I expect they will have kept her in hospital over night for observation, in case she develops concussion, not necessarily from the ball, but she also fell down pretty hard. I can’t remember if her head hit the ground or not.

One wonders if nets should be employed at the stadium and how often things like this happen.

Will post with details of her condition when I find them out today.

Aside from that freak accident the weekend was lovely.

Birthday Haul:

New Red Tie

Carnegie book

Two wooden, black foam padded practice Katana

A New Pillow

A free dinner and drinking evening

100 dollars worth of luxury groceries.

Some really great photo’s

Lots of kisses*

*The term ‘kisses’ may or may not included activities not deemed suitable or appropriate for full public disclosure at this or any later date.

Pictures that are moving

2005-09-01T15:14:00.000+09:00

I spent this afternoon editing together some clips from Sydney and then mixing in some audio over the top. Its Wildlife Analysis by Boards of Canada acompanying the Lion Fish, Sharks, Rays and other creatures of Sydney Aquarium.

And then I finally put some LOTR backing music to the Thailand Elephant ride.

They might be for the patient or bandwidth worthy, but check them out and let me know how they run for you, I can always recompress them smaller. Let them load. They need time. I only put them up as a spur of the moment thought and if I get some comments I will re author them for the web properly

The day has past now and I am back in the working mode. Last night I did in fact kill my first cockroach with the gun and I'm sure he was happy for his swift release from this mortal coil as opposed to a long death by poison.

Somebody is in trouble behind me. I can hear the kind of yelling that makes you feel funny when it's directed at you. Tomorrow I turn 25, a quarter century of survival. I will go and collect my official teaching permission for the next year from the Kyoku Enkai and then dinner is in Urehsino at an Okinawan style Izakaya.

Question time with Pat

2005-09-01T11:59:00.000+09:00

Head to this link and you to can ask Pat Robertson a personal question.

http://cbn.com/700club/features/BringItOn/askpat.asp

Here’s what I just sent in for him to read by the firelight,

I just want to know what your plans will be if the Venezuelan Government formally requests your extradition to Venezuela to answer questions resulting from your comment in which you called for U.S. Covert Ops to assassinate the elected head of a foreign nation? Jiminy Pat, I sure hope your buddy buddy with the big J.C. on this one! What will I do without your stirring example of Christian living in my life when you’re in Venezuela? Let me know! I'm Lost!

Go on, go have a go, I’m sure they haven’t got enough baiting yet, I mean it was only Something Awful that linked to their site. The only trick is limiting what you want to say and narrowing it down to twelve lines of text. They can’t be complicated questions obviously.