Along my jogging route

We`ve just moved into Tokyo. The entire length of my new jogging route along the river Kanda has suddenly come out in a blaze of white:




This is the season of "hanami" (flower viewing) , when everybody goes out and has picnics under the cherry trees and many get unreasonably drunk on sake. Some parks have even gone alcohol free to try to protect the flowers from stumbling fellows. Not our nearest park though. Plenty of stumbling:



And a long line at the toilets, especially (for once) the men's one:

A seriously good movie musical?

Don't like horror and don't like musicals, but I want to see Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd.

The Hollywood musical done right.

New Hampshire recount

I think there is a danger of conspiracy theory here but that election process is SERIOUSLY flawed.

Bush`s favourite picture

And an explanation here.

Music

Rap superstar 50 Cent and Jimmy Shand mashed up by someone cheeky.

An old documentary on spin

Click on the video and you can make it a bigger image in Youtube.

The Northern Rock problem

It seems there is a bit of a problem with Northern Rock, the bank that sponsors that other great and discredited north eastern institution Newcastle United. The solution is so blindingly obvious that it amazes me that no one has thought of it before me: put Kevin Keegan in charge.



While they are at it they might put the whole of the UK mortgage sector in the hands of the Messiah.

Techno Victoriana

The Japanese are in on this steampunk thing. Keep up!

The steampunk raptop
The steampunk desktop

Funny. Some of the delight in mechanical detail reminds me of a book I read about the Mavo artists in early 20th Century Tokyo. They often used mechanical environments and aggressive abstract shapes suggestive of riveted steel. But they were very different, the exact opposite in fact: they were all about the future - ripping apart the past and present to smash themselves into futurist reality in which man and mechanism could be reconciled.

Now, it seems, those unsettling industrial and mechanical objects and environments have become reassuring. Steampunk has its roots in long established tendencies in science fiction, comics and anime films but I think the mechanisms it fetishises definitely have a partly nostalgic appeal. This attraction seems oddly connected with neo-Arts and Crafts yearnings like this. Strange really: the mechanisation and industrialism that worried the Arts and Crafters has become part of the same sort of alienated yearning for something solid and meaningful in the past. As Arts and Crafts showed, nostalgia like this can be very fertile soil for creativity. As fertile as futurism?



Okada Tatsuo in the "Gate and Moving Ticket-Selling Machine", 1925
from "Mavo" by Gennifer Weisenfeld

Queen Elizabeth

Ah, the Royal Yacht Britannia may have reached the end of her sailing days and the QE2 be nearing her dotage, but another legendary royal ship still sails! The "Queen Elizabeth", a Japanese love hotel, rises majestically beside the motorway leading from the Shonan coast to Yokohama. It made me swell with patriotic pride just to see her. Must go there one day for a monarchical bonk.

A scary thought ... for me anyway

Democrat party candidate - Ron Paul on an independent ticket = President Neo Con

Union leakage

Earlier this week a Labour MP called for the Union flag to be redesigned to include the Welsh. Well, the Japanese internet chatroom 2Channel (a phenomenon in itself) has come to the aid of the cause. The music adds to it.

The Real News Network

The Real News Network is an interesting project to create an international English-language television network which is funded by its viewers, instead of by advertising. I should add, from a British perspective, that it obviously also not licence fee funded.

I think this is important because it allows a much more sharp edged and analytical coverage of world news. I think we need more than the bland consensual broadcast news of the type that comes, in different ways, with advertising and the licence fee. The problems electorates are confronting will not be addressed by uncritical understandings of the world.

I think projects like this are likely to proliferate as the internet and TV merge. Of course, I will disagree with many of the services that will spring up and there is a risk of Balkanisation. But, anyway, it is nice that one of the first in this line is so gloriously radical and right up my street.

The trailer:



The reports:









Although, I have to say, on that last one, that the tenor of the report shares the same inability to interact in a respectful way with Muslim countries that seems to bedevil us. The assumption seems to be that we must make countries "secular" or face disaster. I think, by trying to make countries "secular", we are inviting disaster.

Scalded lawn

Mum and Dad didn't often ask me to do the lawn. Perhaps it was the terrible scalded bald patches my mower runs left all over their lush grass.

Anyway, I invested in some hair clippers this weekend. Due to retreating Barnet issues, I decided recently to revert to a more buzz cut look. I was quite pleased with what the barber produced but it occurred to me that there was no point in paying a pro to buzz cut when I could buzz away with my own set of cheap clippers.

Yesterday, I got buzzing. Can't say there are no scalded patches at all. The bit where I forgot to put the length cover on the razor and just buzzed straight into one of my more follicle free regions was particularly unfortunate. However, from some angles in some lights, you could hardly tell the difference!

No illustrations.