Who I am

G. has this book called "You Choose". It's fun. It has lots of pictures
of food and people and cars and stuff and you get to choose what you like,
what you don't like, etc. etc. You can build little stories around it.

Anyway, there is one page full of pictures of people. There lots of
them: kings and queens, knights, rock stars, pirates, artists ... cavemen...



So guess which one I am.

I've checked this with him on three or four occasions now and he is
quite definite:

The vegetable orchestra

It does what it says on the radish:

Night of Fire

If only they would let the Japanese compete in the Eurovision song contest. This is a sure fire winner:

Give me another life

I like to think that I am just behind the curve on techie, internet like things but I realised just how behind the curve when I chanced upon this video of a Second Life designer making a virtual guitar of Suzanne Vega's performance in the Second Life virtual world. She became the first major recording artist to perform live in Second Life in avatar form. The video is quite beautiful really:



For those of you who are dummies like me, Second Life is a virtual world. There are nearly 7 million people there. There are other virtual worlds like Entropia (they have just signed a massive deal in China). These are not really games - there are no points or targets - just spaces to live. People can make things in there, like this guitar. People can make money there.

Problem is I don't have enough time to live this life let alone a second one, so I think I'll pass for now, nosily gazing at this other world over the fence.

Achtung Shweinehund

Great little insight into the childhoods of my generation of British boys on the back of the TLS. I was a great reader of Commando. In fact, I am a little ashamed to admit that the last copy I bought was about 3 years ago when I saw it in a newsagent. Read it cover to cover.

It is striking how little modern violence there is in children's toys in Japan. I suppose it is predictable, given their recent experience of war, but boyhood aggression is almost all channeled into either samurai stuff or science fiction fighting heroes like Ultraman.



I think more recent generations have less of a taboo about modern war. There are now a few manga and films about WWII. But the only things I have found for making a war mongering nut out of my son are the odd packet of little plastic ninja and samurai figures and a very basic polystyrene British Spitfire. Perhaps I should add a subscription to Commando to my TLS. It is now going for £1.20 a copy. Jeekers! Could nearly have bought a model of the Enola Gay Superfortress for that back in the old days.

Funny little game

Cat with bow golf

Loose socks

Loose socks are a thing among Japanese school girls. This Wikipedia article explains them well. The idea is that you wear very long, very loose socks with your shortened school skirt. They have been around for ages but I hadn`t realised just how long they could be.

The picture above is of loose socks being sold in a mall near here. The longest ones there are 150 cm long! That is taller than a lot of the girls themselves. Either they are catering to a niche market of gargantuan Japanese schoolgirls (scary) or there are a lot of folds in them there loose socks.

The company-less office!

At last, I have found a office-like space where I can work outside my home as a freelancer, allowing me to have a social life, to network, to enjoy some separation between home and work etc. etc. without having to tie myself to some corporate behemoth.

I have been thinking for ages that in an internet connected world the identification of all office spaces with particular businesses was a bit old hat. Also, because it entails long commutes to a central location rather than a walk round the corner to the nearest co-working community, it is quite bad for the environment and stressful for the workers. Now people are loosening the connection. Only problem: my nearest coworking spaces seem to be a few thousand miles away.

The photo is of this co-working space in San Francisco.

Fast

If only I could write my stuff this fast:



Doing a lot of "silly" tagged posts at the moment. Sorry. Distracted. Or maybe that's better.

Quick save Fred!

Its was all your fault in the first place, so the least you could do is try to do something to help him!

Do you take that man`s brother to be your lawfully...

This is one of those foreigners do funny things stories but, apart from wondering about what it must be like to go to your brother`s wedding and end up in the bridal bed, I liked the irony of the final words of the article:

"[The groom] has been crying that word will spread and he will never get a bride again."

Well, you could say that word has spread... unimaginably.

Earthquake!

Very odd reading this from where I am sitting. Like the world had been turned on its head. I was trying to work out if I knew anybody who might have been effected.

High School holds its first integrated prom...

... in 2007!