Liar

The celebrated Ryszard Kapuscinski and his lies.

Temporary respite

I will not be posting for a while. As many of the people who read this blog will know, my Grandma has just died and I`m not really feeling like writing anything at the moment.

A wonderfully orotund ramble through the Atlanta justice system by a former Oxford don...

A long time ago, in Houston, I had reason to discover US policemen`s anti-jaywalking zeal. This professor found himself deep in the mire:

"I had my box of peppermints confiscated, presumably on suspicion that they might be some dangerous narcotic" - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Prince of Asturias Professor at Tufts University.

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Cold Stone

Ice cream in Japan is good but the American "Cold Stone Creamery" store I found in Yokohama was a welcome new departure. They take whatever flavour of ice cream you want and put all the goodies you choose (slabs of chocolate, nuts, sauces etc.) into the ice cream on the "cold stone" right there in front of you. That means the goodies are not frozen and make a delicious contrast to the ice. Yummalicious.

Fierce beverages

Don't know why but this quiet little example of that well tried genre the official Japlish blooper tickled me. Next time I am rolling drunk entering the Yokohama underground system I will remember to leave my bottle of fierce sake at the door and put my Red Setter in a one foot cubed bag.

The heart of the cabbage

We now get most of our groceries from an organic delivery company called Radish Boya. The vegetables last better than the supermarket ones and it means we don't have to spend our time together as a family trudging around the shops. Anyway, one of A.'s things is to order the "seasonal vegetable box", which means they select seasonal stuff for us. Fresher and fewer airmiles, so better for the environment.

She was talking to her sister on the telephone the other day.

A.: "By the way. Do you have any good recipes for cabbage?"
Sister: "Ah, you must be using Radish Boya."
A.: "Seriously, we've had cabbages for the last four weeks. I don't know what to do with them. They are just piling up."

The next day, the new delivery came. We opened the vegetable box. There he was, big and proud. A. tried Bubble and Squeak that night. It hardly made a dent in our cabbage mountain. Cabbage surprise tonight, I expect.

The Google word processor

I am using Google's online word processor. It does everything a word processor should do but automatically stores all my documents online. It is a snap to back-up by saving onto my desktop (downloading from the web is a lot faster and simpler than uploading to it, in my experience). If I were a collaborative type of chap, the ability to share documents and the automatic saving of previous versions would be most useful. Google desktop is now working well, virtually creating a new architecture for using my computer. This is not an original observation but Google seems to be sneak-thiefing Microsoft's precious PC computer operating system dominance and squirreling away a new operating system online.

The Great War of Africa

Amazing how parochial I am. I did not really know anything about "Africa`s World War". More background.

For that matter, I don't know much about the continuing conflicts across that continent.

Are you sitting securely?

I was so stunned when I saw this London Transport poster that I spent several minutes searching on the internet to see if it was a spoof. No, apparently these posters went up around London ages ago. Surely it is against the rules for public bodies to issue improvements on "1984" book cover designs as part of their public information efforts.



Eight foot alien meets Big Brother.

Disney goes bananas

They are selling Disney packaged bananas at our local supermarket. Apples and oranges too. I suppose it is show business after all.

Talking of brands, Rover is alive and well and living as a bicycle in Japan. In keeping with the traditions of the marque, it is a rather boring one. The Chevrolet is much more sporty.

Maiko blog

A translation of a blog being maintained by maiko, trainee geisha.

So, I'm asking myself, are all these macho farmers around Hiratsuka really in the closet?

The evidence. Ahem.

How many racist voters are there still left in America?

If there aren't as many racists as people think, this Barack Obama chap is a very fresh and exciting Presidential candidate.

He seems to be off the narrow, self defeating script that centrist politicians have written for themselves. He is not just charismatic, he seems to have a sharp brain and integrity. When much of the rest of America and Britain, including all the main Democrat Presidential candidates, were moving towards war in Iraq in 2002, Obama made this observation:

...even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
More.

Does building a broad, non-partisan centrist bid for the US presidency have to just mean schmoozing Rupert Murdoch? Or can it mean doing something more exciting? This election in 2008 is very important and I would hate to see the Democrats getting carried away with some pet project, only to find America is not like what they want it to be, but, looking at Obama, I get a growing feeling that Hillary Clinton and Senator John Edwards, a Clintonesque politician and my previous favourite, are blasts from the past. Barack Obama has a couple of rather insignificant skeletons which he seems to be happy to take out of the closet and be honest about (experimenting with drugs and a small property deal with a shady developer).

America has a way of surprising the world, not only with its occasional stupidity and bigotry but also with extraordinary innovativeness, reinvention and audacity. If he does run for President, Barack will tell us something that I want to know about what America is.