Lotusblog

There were two big earthquakes here tonight . The first, around 19:00 stopped trains and scared a lot of people. Apparently it caused some injuries in Kyoto. I was waiting for a friend at Big Man near Hankyu Umeda station whilst talking to a different friend on the phone. The phone-friend panicked and hung up (she was on the fifth floor of a building in Osaka) and while I could feel the floor moving (the sensation is sort of like standing on a large boat that is rocking ever so slightly) I wasn’t sure how big it was. The second happened about 5 hours later at midnight, the train I was riding at the time suddenly slowed down to a crawl, while the train conductor explained there had been an earthquake.

The second was actually the larger of the two (I think it was 7.3 on the Richter scale) and by this time I was a little concerned as to what state my apartment would be in. Everything was OK- a few things had shifted slightly, but that was all.
I am glad I wasn’t home: earthquakes make me pretty nervous and I think I probably would have started freaking out. It’s times like this I am glad I live in a new reinforced concrete building.

I am interested to know what happened (if anything) to Kansai Airport- being stuck in the middle of Osaka Bay not far from the epicentre can’t have been pleasant. Tsunami of up to one metre were also caused by the ‘quakes- and again, I am not sure where they struck and if any damage was caused. September has been pretty exciting so far, what with the huge Typhoon Number 16 passing through last week, and now this.
Typhoon Number 18 is also rapidly approaching.

Batten down the hatches.

Asahi Shinbum’s Vox Populi, Vox Dei column is seldom overtly political, but even thorny political subjects are tackled with its usual aplomb and grace. This is one of the very few newspaper commentaries I actually look forward to reading. Even more remarkable is the fact that it is originally written in the vernacular and then translated into English featuring the following day in the English Language Asahi Shinbum (in Japan it’s included with the International Herald Tribune).

You can see the original Japanese version of the above column here .

So the Russians, after being warned by a demoralised, exhausted and pretty pissed off group of Chechen Freedom Fighters (sorry, I won’t be referring to them as terrorists on this page) that military action would be highly inadvisable, still, quite inexplicably, stormed the school. Said freedom fighters are getting pretty skilled now- they are starting to get an idea for how far they can push the Russians, and thanks to their previous defeats (such as the Moscow theatre siege) they are also getting more skilled and ambitious.
I have only read the BBC website’s news coverage of this story; I haven’t seen any TV footage or read about it in any other sources, so I am now going to refrain from making any snap judgments about this.
It is interesting however, to read the snap judgments of others. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions (after all, conclusion jumping is hardly my job and something at which I seldom excel) but I did notice that people who posted from countries of The Coalition of the Willing ™ were quick to post rather hackneyed and predictable “opinions”.

Interesting, I thought to myself. It’s just such a pity and so sad that in a couple of months it’ll all happen again.

Louis and Oscar have finished, now Barry White’s Love’s Theme has started playing. I had forgotten how musically perfect this is. Guitars. Strings. Trumpets. Funky basslines. What more could you want in a four minute package?

With Typhoon Number 16 here at the moment, it has understandably been pretty windy. Funny thing was, today was another scorcher, so walking around Umeda was like walking around a sauna containing a high-powered fan. Quite a strange experience.

I am at home now, listening to Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson and pretending to do work. Problem is I keep having to get up to look outside to see if anything has happened- the wind is now absolutely incredible. I don’t recall it ever being this windy before- maybe it’s because I live by the sea. I just hope it has all gone by tomorrow and cycling days are here again.

Many thanks to Mike who posted this scary picture of me at the end of our recent video chat.

Oh dear.

You just wait ’til you’re on video.

***

Anyway, it’s Friday night again. It seems like every night is Friday night. Actually, every night is Friday night. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.
Yesterday I met Momus. He was wandering around our gallery and interviewed me for his audioblog, and also posted a rather scary picture of me on his site which you can find here . It’s interesting to read his thoughts as he travels around what has become my home.
And if you want to know why I am wearing bunny ears… well you’ll just have to listen to the recording.

A bunny boy at gm

… the newest member of the family.

Mongoose Fairlane

Woah.

The decade of the nineteen-eighties was responsible for so much of what is good in the world, but similarly, for so much of what is bad. Maybe in twenty years’ time we’ll say that about this decade, too.

But it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Max Headroom, one of the most profound, dark and disturbing TV series ever made was running back-to-back with Webster, Family Ties and The Greatest American Hero. In fact, 20 years on, it’s amazing to see just how much of an influence Max Headroom has had not only on entertainment, but also network broadcasting. Maybe it didn’t actually influence TV network broadcasting in a direct way, but it certainly made predictions and hinted at a future that actually has very much come true. “Embedded journalism”, such as the type we saw throughout Gulf War 2.0, is probably the best example, but as you watch the series, time and time again you see in the fantastic-20-minutes-in-the-future-world things that don’t seem quite so amazing now that we deal with them every day.
In entertainment, you realise the huge debts that SF movies such as the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report owe to our favourite eighties show.

Now that twenty years or so has passed, maybe we are due for a revival. If the movie companies are happy to spend tens of millions making movie versions of TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels, then surely they could do us all a favour and make a Max Headroom movie. The only thorny bit of this plan, is that we all know how much the movie would suck.

To celebrate my acquisition of a Mongoose Fairlane , I decided to head down to my local First Kitchen and try their “The Hamburger”. It was big. Impressive, and another salvo in the current Japanese burger wars. After the beef scares of the last couple of years, all of the major burger chains now offer a huge, luxurious, beefy burger.

But I wasn’t convinced. I don’t think I will be heading down there to try it again. It just lacked something. The beef wasn’t beefy enough, either. It had all the right ingredients, the proportions were great and the presentation was fantastic; sadly, they just couldn’t pull it off.

As my bed time is fast approaching this will be a quick post, but I was pleased to read that Nicholson Baker has released a new book. You can read an interview with him here , and you’ll see that this time he has written something quite different from any of his previous works.
Maybe.

Anyway, I am eager to read it. Once again I have a feeling that Amazon (yes, yes, the book merchant) will soon be making another sale. I just wish they had the Naqoyqatsi DVD in stock too.