狂った!

I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much fresh fruit in Tokyo, and what there is is fairly expensive. Good juice as well is hard to come by.

I guess good juice is hard to find in San Francisco as well, but I made a staple of Tropicana Pure Premium, and had no trouble getting good apple juice when I got bored of that. I’m having a hard time finding a replacement for these. The 100% juice Tropicana orange juice tastes like Tang, and that’s the best I’ve found so far (though I haven’t visited any high-end or specialty stores yet). Even though I’m not that picky about the type of juice I drink—I’d be pretty happy making a staple of mango juice or guava juice, or something along those lines—I do tend to be picky about the quality of the juice. Juice from concentrate appeals much less, and I despise those juicemakers that use white grape, apple, or peach juice with mango pulp and call it mango juice. That practice seems to be as common in Tokyo as in SF.

We’ll have to see how the fruit is more towards summer. Right now, the apples don’t look good, the oranges are kind of dry (and bitter!), and the strawberries seem oddly artificial. I’ll have to play around more with the possibilities.

*****

Tokyo transit is a bit of a nightmare. It’s incredibly efficient and timely, but it’s also hard to make sense of and very expensive. It’s interesting in that it’s on the one hand a perfect model of the efficiency espoused by those who feel that such efficiency can only be accomplished by private enterprise and on the other hand a perfect example of the unfortunate side effects of having an essential public service run by a handful of competing corporations. The rail system is run by several companies: JR (the largest passenger railway company in the world, according to the wikipedia), Tokyo Metro (the network of Tokyo Metro’s lines is referred to as the Tokyo subway, although I haven’t really been able to see the difference between the subway and non-subway rail lines), Keihin, Keio, Odakyu, Keisei, and probably a half-dozen others. This is particularly obnoxious since, while as a whole, this network of companies provides a fairly comprehensive transportation system, each provides very little information about the others’ services (e.g., you don’t see many maps with more than one rail system depicted on it), each requires buying a separate ticket (which makes transferring between companies pretty expensive), and each comes with its own multi-trip system, with a few companies providing inter-company multi-trip systems (though I’m not sure if any of them are all-inclusive).

The bus system is essentially the same, but it’s made much worse by the fact that, while you can easily find a guide to the rail system in any guidebook, bookstore atlas or roadmap, or helpful Website, it’s much, much harder to find useful information on the bus lines of more than one company at a time. Particularly odd to me is that my atlas of Tokyo has all of the bus stops marked, but none of the bus lines or routes depicted or listed anywhere. The best solution for finding my bus routes so far is note all the bus stops within walking distance, and look through the bus companies’ Websites in order of preference to see which buses service those stops and where they go.

I do of course recognize that being a newcomer (both to Japan and to Tokyo specifically) and being someone that speaks little Japanese are both significant aggravating factors here, but I can’t help but thing that these matters aside, the Tokyo transportation network provides some challenges that would be eliminated by a single public service or by a better-regulated network with an eye towards inter-operability. The negative consequences of these moves are of course entirely debatable, though I’d be a fool to think there aren’t any.

I have arrived safe and sound in Tokyo. I’m staying in Setagaya, and working out of Shibuya. This is going to be very interesting. When I collect my wits, I’ll start carrying my camera and uploading pictures.

I haven’t posted in a while. Partly because I’ve been so busy, partly because I was waiting to move this blog to one running on Mephisto (as well as setting up a new blog for the robot6 crowd to post their technical advice and anecdotes), and partly because… I’m lazy.

I have no idea what my life will be like in two months. It’s a bit of a frightening concept, even if I have confidence that I will land on my feet and gain a lot of experience in the process (and hopefully fluency in Japanese). I have never had so little an idea of what’s coming ahead. Even when I went to college, I had some loose ideas about what it would be like (half of which were wrong), and I had visited the campus and some of its students and teachers some three months prior to moving in.

Since I last posted that I had seen White Chicks, Lucía and I went to New York for 8 days and 10 nights to visit my relatives and friends, and we purchased our tickets to Narita. We’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine (cute, but they killed my favorite character halfway into the film) and Absence of Malice on DVD with my brother, Blood Work on television, and Letters from Iwo Jima and Children of Men in the theater. Also, I finally saw It’s a Wonderful Life (on DVD with Lucía), and we’ve seen The Yes Men (which was the most disappointing thing I’ve seen in a very long time—a fascinating subject that was turned into the most tedious vanity piece imaginable).

Of these, only Letters from Iwo Jima stood out in any way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another film quite like it. It had its fair share of clichés, and took a few easy punches at Japanese nationalists, but it managed to do a remarkable job of depicting doomed soldiers torn between a lack of desire to kill other people and the desire to make their short lives meaningful by taking out as many of the enemy as possible as they go down.

Children of Men felt very familiar. It had a style borrowed from a number of video games I’ve played (Half-Life 2, FEAR), as well as a number of classic films (Blade Runner, Escape from New York, Brazil), all of which is probably somewhat unavoidable given the subject matter. The story structure was very familiar as well: a disillusioned man has an incredible responsibility thrust on him by someone who knew him way back when; he is framed as a criminal in the media, making his return to normal life impossible; he finds he is surrounded by traitors and must escape and do the mission (almost) alone; he goes to a safehouse unknown to the outside world; it becomes unsafe; he places his trust in a man on the ‘other side’ (Sid); he goes into the most dangerous possible place so that he can get to the safest possible place; he reaches the safest possible place after being nearly killed or his mission lost several times. In more than a few ways, it was almost the same story as The Da Vinci Code and probably countless other films around the same idea of the disillusioned man saving humanity (though in the case of both of those films, the salvation of mankind comes in the form of a woman).

How would the world react if North Korea performed a successful test of a nuclear weapon? How should the world react?

If you lived in San Francisco or New York and you fell asleep and woke up 20 years later, only a day older than when you went to sleep, which do you think would be a more difficult adjustment to the changes in the world around you?

a) fell asleep in 1928

b) fell asleep in 1960

c) fell asleep in 1986

I’ve been trying to play with as many new rails apps as I can, to get a better sense of what other people are doing with the technologies. Among other things, I’ve created an account at 37Signal’s Backpack to list all the books and movies I need to see and read or think about seeing and reading: http://jundai.backpackit.com/pub/637518. Feel free to send me recommendations.

Samedietc wanted me to come up with a list of ten things that are important to me that start with the letter b. Personally, I think it’s important to do elementary-school exercises every so often, but normally I keep the results to myself. But because he asked…

1. Benjamin Blattberg - Ben, my hero, you make this too easy for me. Though I shan’t use any more names in the list, since it would be too easy to fill the list with them (starting with my parents).
2. buttocks! - After all, where would I be if I didn’t have their cushiony softness to support me? Though I shan’t use any more body parts in the list, since it would be too easy to fill the list with them (starting with my belly and ending with my brain).
3. Bread - Rice is a bit more important to me than bread, but I think bread is probably the most important food item that starts with b.
4. Bad - As a moral and aesthetic relativist, I haven’t really believed in “bad” or “good” behavior or art in a long time, but it’s certainly something I think about and argue about a lot. Most of my life, however, I pretend as though a “bad” and “good” really do exist, even though I know them to be internally constructed notions and responses.
5. Beef - is a close second. I eat more pork than beef, but when it comes to the flavor of the meat itself, there’s none that I prefer more than beef (not even lamb). Beef jerky is my favorite snack food.
6. Beinn Bhreagh
7. Baroque music - Nowhere were the basic basic ideas of Western music theory so considerately and methodically experimented with and expanded than in baroque music. The tremendous constraints that the composer imposed upon their works allowed them to produce some of the most sublime and intricate music (and set the stage for everything that was to come later).
8. The Badlands - In the few times I’ve driven (or been driven) across most of the United States, the badlands were the most memorable part of the trip. More than the Sierra Nevada or our canyons, the badlands for me epitomize the natural beauty of this vast country.
9. Broadband - Probably a terrible thing to put into the list, but fast Internet is a large part of my life—work, play, communication, and learning are for me all very things I rely on the Internet for. I need to get out more.
10. Bed - There’re not many things in my life that are more important. I’m headed there now.

I thought about putting Bartleby the Scrivener on there, but it’s really not that important to me in the scheme of things, and I couldn’t let the valuable slot go to waste. Sorry Ben, sorry Ryan (sorry humanity).

Hmm. Boats should probably be in there somewhere. Ah well, it’s too late—I don’t know what I would drop to squeeze it in.

Also, I have an unrelated question. Which of the following would make for the best band name, and what would each band sound like or look like?

• Ben and the Blattbergs
• Summer and the Unsinns
• Ryan and the Wheelers
• Dave and the Warths
• Amy and the Mulzers
• Chris and the Van Dykes
• Ethan and the Bremners
• Jeff and the Bards
• Karen and the Lampreys
• Melissa and the Tremblays
• Kyle and the Ganns
• John and the Coynes
• Josh and the Hall-Bachners

I left out a couple that really didn’t sound good to me, but feel free to include them: Lucía and the Wongs, Andrew and the Acerbos (Acerbi?), Jun-Dai and the Bates-Kobashigawas—

Marc Laumonier, whose excellent hospitality I leaned on for a week in Aix-en-Provence, has a blog. My French is limited and dying, so unfortunately it is mostly unreadable to me, but I like to look at the pictures and names and try to imagine I understand what he’s talking about.

I so enjoyed my time with Marc et sa famille that it has caused me to reconsider my assumption that I would always need to live in an urban environment. Being in the countryside with good company, numerous pets, and a large collection of books and board games feels like a life I would have little trouble adjusting to.