Category: general

It would seem that the “Japonisme” art trend influenced the creation of the monogram which now peppers the handbags carried by all Japanese women. From Asahi:

“It started with a question: Why do the Japanese like Louis Vuitton so much?” says exhibition curator Kaori Ikeda.

“Then, after learning that Japan’s kamon family crests had an influence on Monogram, I wanted to let people know about it, so they could be proud of Japanese culture,” she said.

[…]

“The research group believes that Monogram derives from a balanced, global integration of Japonisme, Art Nouveau and the Gothic style,” Ikeda said.

A unique and interesting history for what has to be the ugliest monogram pattern in the universe.

There’s been something of a controversy over Jason Whinghter, a Republican candidate for North Augusta City Councilman. From AikenOnline:

In the eyes of some Aiken County Republicans, the 27-year-old North Augusta City Council candidate may be a little too quick and keen.

They point to Mr. Whinghter’s deft footwork on the last filing day for the April 26 race, a day when eight-year incumbent Phil Mottel forgot to file his papers with the North Augusta Republican Party.

Instead of dialing up Mr. Mottel, a fellow Republican, with a reminder that Jan. 10 was the deadline, Mr. Whinghter stepped down as the city’s party chairman and declared his own candidacy.

With Mr. Mottel out of the picture, Mr. Whinghter is a prohibitive favorite to win one of the three at-large seats up for grabs in this bastion of Republican politics.

I don’t want to be here, and I’ve got to be here until around 2 (maybe 4) today. So you’ll excuse me for doing a little websurfing.

(Or maybe you won’t; I really don’t care.)

GlobeandMail.com: British plant missing 30 kilograms of plutonium (via Slashdot)

Well, that’s great news. However:

The amount of material listed as missing at the Sellafield plant in northwestern England was “within international standards of expected measurement accuracies for closing a nuclear material balance at the type of facility concerned,” the authority said.

“There is no evidence to suggest that any of the apparent losses reported were real losses of nuclear material,” the authority added.

When in doubt, apply statistics.

Guardian Unlimited Online: Second sight (Via Slashdot)

Slashdot was mostly interested in how Britain is ahead of Australia is ahead of the US in TV piracy, but there are other interesting points in this article.

TV moguls are not as worried about this sort of piracy as music and film companies because they have already been pre-paid by advertising and, if they want to stop it, all they need do is take a leaf out of Hollywood’s book and do simultaneous releasing, cutting the problem off at source.

The interesting thing is whether the likes of BitTorrent will fast-forward the forces making television a database rather than serial experience. Even the fixture of television – the news bulletins – could be replaced by, say, Google TV gathering TV news clips from around the world just as it does printed news today.

I like that notion of television as a database experience.

Snopes.com Urban Legends Reference Pages: Dry Cleaning

So yeah, Snopes has all kinds of interesting facts about the household dryer for us today.

In a standard (gas) dryer, a fan pulls fresh air into the dryer and sends it flowing over a gas burner. The burner heats the air, which is then channeled into a tumbling drum where the wet clothes are held. The heat, air flow, and tumbling motion all contribute to evaporating the moisture held in the fabrics, and that moisture is absorbed by the gas-warmed air. (Warm air is capable of holding more moisture than cold air.) The warm air – and the moisture it now holds – passes through a filter to trap lint and other particulate matter stirred up by its movement and is vented to the outside so that it can be replaced with new, less-moist air. This process repeats until enough moisture has been evaporated and carried away for the clothes to be considered sufficiently “dry.”

In the same vein as the title of my previous post, “Your jacket is now dry.”

(I think I’d better clean that lint filter…)

And finally…SUVs are dangerous! From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:

A man barely escaped serious injury Thursday after a lit cigarette he tried to toss out the window while driving across the Bay Bridge blew back in and ignited the vehicle, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The unidentified man was driving westbound at about 10:40 a.m. when he tossed the cigarette out the window of his Ford Expedition, said CHP Officer Shawn Chase.

Carried by the wind, the cigarette landed in his back seat and almost immediately burst into flames. The man quickly pulled to the side of the road, and leapt from the flame-filled SUV, which continued rolling into a guard rail, Chase said.

That’s what you get for driving a vehicle with flammable seats!

;P

He said the man will likely face a misdemeanor charge for littering.

“We see people throwing cigarettes out the window all the time but never a situation like this where it comes back in,” Chase said. “This guy was lucky.”

Um…how exactly was he lucky? His SUV has been incinerated, plus he’s going to be charged with littering…

Someone was wrong yesterday.

She doesn’t read my blog, but I’m not going to say who it was anyway. Just know that she is someone I interact with on a regular basis, and that her being wrong affected not only herself, but her colleagues and two other groups of people.

In trying to get to the root of the matter, I discovered her fault. But she had been hurt by what had happened, so hurt that she didn’t hear what I was saying. I only said it once. Then I backed off.

The whole thing has bothered me on and off ever since. I ended up eating some Chinese food Sean brought home after work (thanks, honey), and then taking a nap until around 9:30. At that point I got up and prepared all my stuff for today, and got online a little, then finally went back to bed. I woke up thinking about it this morning.

I don’t know, what do you do when someone you care about is wrong? How do you fix the situation without betraying them? Do you just take their side and not worry about fixing it?

And on a completely different note…what do you do when you come to the point in a debate where you realize the other person isn’t going to see things your way, and you aren’t going to see things their way? How do you end the debate without making the other person’s opinion seem trivial? I’ve tried saying “It’s time to agree to disagree,” but that doesn’t seem to work.

Emily Mann blogged today about other people’s expectations, and how they affected her outlook on life.

Her post prompted the following comment from me:

I have felt the same way–that everyone expected great things from me, and that nothing I accomplished mattered because it wasn’t the Big Thing.

This unfortunately has caused me to hit several stumbling blocks. I basically have felt many times that I can’t get anywhere near meeting people’s expectations, so I’ve given up. This happened when I went for my mechanical engineering degree (I dropped out after one year), and it happened in many classes in which I should have made As. It hasn’t really happened at work–typically I exceed expectations there–but I feel too “big” for the job I have now, like I’m overqualified for the work I do and that I’m not getting the responsibilities that would help me grow. But I’m having trouble pursuing something different; only recently was I really able to try and sell myself to a prospective employer. In that case, I’d found a challenge that I was desperate to work to meet.

People still expect great things of me, whenever I meet them. I don’t know why. It makes me scared, like I’m going to let them all down. I feel like I haven’t done much with my life, and that right now I’m spinning my wheels. I don’t feel like I know how to achieve what everyone assumes I will achieve.

The fact that you were able to ride people’s expectations into true greatness is something to be applauded. It’s not easy to be a lawyer. I imagine I would have dropped out of pre-law.

Kind of depressing. But I really feel like I have never learned how to try.

When I was little, Mom used to take us to the Living Arts and Science Center in Lexington, Kentucky. One time, we were supposed to make an octopus. I chose to draw Olive Oyl (from Popeye) instead, because I didn’t feel like counting all the way to eight. Another time, when I was older, everyone was making paper airplanes. Instead of trying the new things we were learning about aerodynamics, I just made the same airplane I’d learned how to make years before. Could those have been caused by a subconscious fear of failure…or am I just inherently lazy?

I suppose it’s a good sign that I’m working to correct these flaws. But thinking about all the things I want to accomplish just makes me tired. I’ve been so tired lately.

It would be so easy to just give up.

From today:

See, Dr. Murphy is British. I don’t know why, but whenever I’m around a Brit, I feel like I’m around some sort of parental figure. And in a sense, I guess they are our parents. So when I fall asleep in the guy’s class, I feel like even more of an ass than when I fall asleep in my other classes.

I can hear him thinking, “Tsk, tsk. What sort of lads have we spawned here? No attentiveness nor common courtesy. Pish posh! I say Belvedere, we should ask for our colonies back.”

Ahahaha! :D

Asahi is reporting that the National Museum of Art in Osaka has new digs. Sounds like a neat place.

Thanks to its new venue, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, is now as much of a work of art as the Japanese and foreign contemporary masterpieces it houses.

[…]

Visitors enter the museum through a huge, sculpturelike entrance of steel and glass. Although the rest of the museum is located underground, a glass ceiling and open space that let in abundant natural light give the exhibition halls a warm and airy feel.

I haven’t been to Osaka yet, but this is just more impetus to go.

Like Timbits, but with half the calories.

Here’s a blog about people going into retirement with no savings, and what they are trying to do about it. (Via BoingBoing)

Yahoo News – Oddly Enough: Amazon blames muggles for Harry Potter mixup

“We assure you that howlers have been sent to the muggles responsible for this action and we are investigating the possibility that You-Know-Who may have been involved,” the company said in a subsequent apology email to customers on Thursday.

You’ve gotta watch out for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Fortunately, the Ministry of Magic at least will acknowledge the existence of…Thingy…now.

;>

Japan Today: Rules revised to let foreign students teach languages in Japan

I hate Japan Today’s flash ads.

Japan Today: Resident certificates to be issued via convenience stores

No, I really hate them.

The new service will become possible if convenience stores adopt measures to protect personal information and connect their copiers with certificate issuing machines at government offices via the Internet.

Do you think the U.S. would ever put that much faith in convenience stores? (You never know; Costco sells coffins, after all.)

Japan Today: Court accepts priest’s touching of girl’s breasts as ‘religious activity’

Yes, I’m sure it was a very religious experience. (This reminds me of what happened to one of the characters in the novel Christy by Catherine Marshall. I always loved that book, but I always wondered exactly how Christy figured out what was happening to that character…did she have experience? ;P)

And finally, Mainichi’s WaiWai: Close-minded tourists slam Japan!

Common complaints about Japan’s most repulsive tourist lurks were that they attracted huge crowds, involved enormous expense and never lived up to expectations. Nowhere was this better exemplified than Kyoto, the most plugged place in a country where crass and class are pronounced the same and a city that proves such annunciation an actuality.

Uh…yeah.

Will and I were discussing blog frontpages yesterday. He was saying he was thinking of changing one of his blogs to a one post-a-day, one post on the front page format. That way there would be no “context” that might detract from whatever post was made on that day.

I, on the other hand, am worried about posts that were made a day or two ago that I still consider interesting, and that I was hoping people would comment on. I post so much that my stuff keeps getting bumped off the main page, and casual readers, who might not visit frequently or subscribe to the RSS feed/email, might not see everything. I think I have changed my mind about using a clip blog, simply because I want to treat all of my posts equally on the site.

Today I thought of a solution that would be great, if I could get it to work in WordPress.

Many blogs have a “recent entries” section in their sidebar–it’s built into Blogger’s templates now. I never had a use for such a thing, but I’ve been thinking that something similar might be effective. Basically, what I would like to do is have all of today’s posts show on the front page, either the full post or an excerpt, plus the number of comments. (Ideally it would show when the latest comment was posted, and by whom, but I haven’t seen anyone doing that so I don’t know if it’s possible.) After the posts of the day, there would then be the titles of yesterday’s posts (and maybe the day before yesterday’s? the whole week’s?), along with the comment information I just mentioned.

This would let people know if they’d missed posts, plus inform people of any commenting activity, plus not take up too awful much room on the page.

(“Too awful much”…I love that!)

So, that’s my idea. If I can make it work, I think it would be a good choice for my site. Any suggestions would be appreciated, of course.

I’m not normally a huge fan of the “rants” of webcomic authors. The two main exceptions are Penny Arcade, whose rants I devour, and PvP, which occasionally has something that strikes me as brilliant. Otherwise, I’ll only read the rant if it’s right below the comic and I’m bored, or if I’m trying to figure out why in hell the comic hasn’t updated yet ;>

But as I read Chris Baldwin’s reasons for not updating Bruno today, I was touched.

Good lord, i am not batting a thousand lately.

Short story, I got the flu, started on Saturday, and it’s kept up. I’ve missed the last two days of work, lying about in a general usueless state. Somehow I managed to keep Bruno up since then, but not today. Instead, enjoy a picture of a bus.

And dream of travels, to places that remind you of spring, of love, of desire, of happiness. And you may also dream that you dont have to take the bus to get there.

It’s rough, and unrevised, and there are typos. But somehow…it’s beautiful. That last paragraph, that blessing, it’s just poetic. And the added jibe about buses at the end is comforting in its simple mirth.

It made me realize that we don’t bless each other enough.

So to all of you, I’d like to extend Chris’ blessing, and one of my own: May you find comfort, and family, and home, in unexpected and delightful places.

Yesterday I didn’t want to come to work. I’d felt that way since the previous night. Stayed up too late, in fact; I probably subconsciously was hoping I’d be too tired to make it in. But I had to be here, because Robert’s in Boston for the rest of the week, and no one else is available this early in the morning. So…I rode my bike.

Biking gave me the energy to stay at work and even to be cheerful.

This morning, while my feeling of not wanting to come to work wasn’t as great, I still would rather have stayed in bed. When I started to ride, it was cold, and the wind seemed to cut right through my jacket. I wondered if I should turn around, take my bike back upstairs, change, and just drive.

But I didn’t.

I rode, and as I rode my body warmed itself. I had the bike in 2nd and 3rd gear for most of the ride…which means my legs are getting stronger. I felt comfortable, and I was never really winded, and the cool morning air sharpened my senses. Right now my earlobes are so stiff it feels like I’m wearing heavy earrings ;>

But I feel good. I’m glad I biked, yesterday and today. I hope the weather permits me to do so tomorrow, too…and next week, and the week after that….

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop (the manga’s been licensed for awhile now).

No more free episodes for me…;_; I hope they hurry up and come out with DVDs.

See ShoPro Entertainment’s Press page for more info.

(Blogger Sucks Note: I originally wrote this yesterday, at 6:15 pm. Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t get it to publish until now. :P)

McDonald’s is having a nationwide free sampling event of their Chicken Selects. I wonder if either of the McDonald’s restaurants within five minutes of my apartment (;P) are participating?

I hate that I lose posts, can’t even start writing posts, can’t edit posts, can’t get to the comments, etc. because their servers are so busy. I mean, it’s great that they’re popular and all, but I like to blog, and I like to blog frequently, and these server issues just don’t do it for me.

I was unable to make the two previous posts when I wanted to. The first one kept timing out over and over. When I finally got it to go through just a few minutes ago, I discovered that it had posted six times, so I had to go back and delete the duplicates. The second post I didn’t even bother trying…I just emailed it and the first one to myself in a file called bloggersucks.txt.

:>

(As What’s-Her-Face might say.)

From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:

Carol Birmingham almost had a heart attack when she realized her Mac Attack had cost $8,700.

The 62-year-old British tourist didn’t notice until Sunday morning that she had left her cash-stuffed purse on a McDonald’s counter when she bought lunch the previous day.

Here’s the best part of the story:

Ilona Barattin, 23, said she found cash, mostly hundred-dollar bills, but no ID. On returning the cash, she said: “It was the right thing to do.”

You see, people don’t have to suck. So stop sucking, people! :)