flemmings | Entries tagged with rl

The first time I saw the terracotta warriors, in mid-December, the exhibit was full of school groups, teens and preteens in long trailing lines and clumped yattering knots. Negotiable enough for someone who regularly passed through Shinjuku Station in the morning rush, so I saw the exhibit at my leisure. The second time, after Christmas, the whole museum was packed with families pushing small children in the miniature tanks that (cough) a certain breed of parent thinks de rigueur for their darling. Seeing anything-- moving anywhere- was something of a challenge, so it was lucky I knew exactly what I wanted to see and snaked my way through the obstacle course to see it.

I can't say why I then remember the terracotta warriors as a jewel moment of happiness, but I do, especially on this snow-flurrying day so much like that first day. The dark, the spotlights, the silent figures raised above the eddying human flotsam at their feet: yes, blast it, it *was* impressive. The background exhibit on pre- and post- FirstEmp was extensive and informative and very satisfying for my purposes. Which still shouldn't account for the bodiless quiet happiness I associate with it. Maybe it's just the reappearance of the museum itself in my life, like an old friend from high school (note that my high school days were happier than many people's: so many friends, so many sympathetic minds and genuinely nice people)-- altered by the intervening decades and with a truly unfortunate taste in makeup or partners nowadays, but someone I loved long ago and retain affection for still.

(Which said, dear god the Lee-Chin Crystal's entrance hall really is a downer.)

( Cut for appropriate verse )

2010 was not a good year. Nothing terribly wrong, nothing at all right until the fall, and then I think I went a bit hysteric with relief. Am glad it's over, whatever, even if Eeyore here doesn't expect 2011 to be any better.

However I did do stuff this year that I've never done before, like attend a Buddhist ceremony and see Osgoode Hall on the inside and go to Peterborough (I know very little of my home province) and see the terra cotta warriors, which at least puts me one up on 2009 where I did none of those things. Nor did I realize what terra cotta means until I saw the mandatory French signage at the ROM saying 'cooked earth.'
( Cut for stats )

( Tis the season to be cranky )

I detest the song Walking in a Winter Wonderland. Also Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, and OMG most definitely Santa Baby, and I hear them everywhere. But let's not talk of unpleasantnesses. The reality of a winter wonderland is yappari not bad at all.

If it were merely an overcast Toronto day with greige sky and grey streets today would be dispiriting indeed (aka why I could never live in Vancouver.) But a light snow is falling, not enough to impede locomotion, just enough to make a nice contrast to the greige and grey. Takes me back all the way to high school, the greyer city Toronto was then, and how much better the solid Presbyterian buildings looked in snow flurries. Takes me back too to the rare Tokyo snowfall, which believe you me impeded locomotion, as well as the Yamanote line and anyone mad enough to go out in a car. "I'm cancelling your class," my boss told me one Saturday after a two inch/ 5 cm dusting. "The mothers won't let their children out in such dangerous conditions." What madness is this, I wondered; and then on the way to the station observed what happens when non-snow tires meet two inches of slushy snow. Feared for my own life once or twice, there being no sidewalks in that end of Nerima.
( Read more... )

Visited the house of a young friend. Young friend is hooked on phonics and has made a holiday sign, posted on the kitchen wall, that says 'Mere Christmas.' I concur with the overt portion of the sentiment.
( The perpetual snow saga )

Went to the terra cotta warriors exhibit Tuesday, on a cold blowy day of light snow. The museum's rotunda is still open, but now it's around a corner (or rather, what looks like a slanted section of grey plasterboard wall) and the two galleries opening off it are First Nations and Canadiana, and in consequence it's almost entirely devoid of people. This is sad. Even sadder is the realization that the low dark empty entrance hall *is* the entrance hall, with the only natural light coming from one angled pane of the Excrescence's glass between two of the Excrescence's angled girders, looking north out to the wall of condos on Bloor St. The museum has no architectural focus any more. The Crystal itself takes you nowhere. Oh, there's a narrow angling vertiginous stairway for those without arthritic knees and vertigo, reminiscent of something seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but to get up or down otherwise you must use elevators. In its intermediate stage mid-80s, which I wasn't crazy about but dommage, the ROM had escalators but they took those out.
( More ROM maunderings )

Jo Walton has a lovely explanation of why time goes elastic in Patrick O'Brian. For the uninitiated, there's not enough Napoleonic War for all the Aubrey action, so that several voyages of many months if not years all happen between 1813 and 1815. Her reasoning-- Stephen's almost mute assistant Padeen, who can speak well enough if it's Gaelic and who does canonically manage well with children and animals, is fae, and time works differently where he is. Does not explain why Jack's family back in England doesn't grow older, though.

Otherwise a grey rainy December Sunday, and I reading a translation of Soseki's short pieces, which has put me in a nostalgic mood. Rainy grey is what it did a lot of the first December in Tokyo, and Soseki was the first novelist I read in my intensive Japan period, back in the fall and winter of 1985. That doubtless explains why I always think of Meiji as cold and grey and invigorating; it's amazing how much the weather of Toronto influences my notions of an era.

The translation as ever is one of those 'but *I* could do better than that' ones, even if I couldn't. Still I see no reason to translate the word for the small drum that accompanies Noh performances as 'tambourine' even if that's what it looks like. Especially not when the player first has to tighten the cords on it. (I'm assuming the Japanese is shime-daiko; a shoulder drum would surely be called a drum?)

paleaswater often says the US, or rather New York City, and frequently New Jersey as well, is turning into a third world country-- this usually in response to some delay or breakdown in transit. By which definition Ontario is third world too, if my adventures with Greyhound yesterday are anything to judge by. But then there's K-chan's stories of having to instruct a Greyhound driver how to get to Kitchener while they were in the process of /going/ to Kitchener, and doing it with a migraine as well. My driver didn't lose us in the middle of the countryside like hers, but our bus did fail to restart after a mandated *stop* in the middle of the countryside; which stop is a whole 'nother story I won't bore you with. Oh, and then my left eye decided to take umbrage at the presence of a cat and dried to Gobi-like levels and my lens crawled off so persistently I had to take it out, so getting home was an interesting experience as well. (Took out, had no place to put it because lens case had peroxide solution, not saline, so held it in my mouth, if you want to know, for upwards of two hours. Moral is 1) never travel without glasses and 2) never travel without saline.)

So today I woke late and Did All The Things. ( Including... )

Oh such sadness. The lovely little 15" monitor I got second hand from my SIL took me back seven years to the lovely 15" monitor I wrote my best stuff on. Square, you know? Fonts to the edge of the screen and quite happy with 800x600; none of the pale pixillated crap the 17-inchers pull, flat-screen or not. I was chugging away at the current story in a haze of nostalgic creativity and hurray go me.

But it has a quirk. The first three times I tried to use it it wouldn't quite turn on. The on-off button on the front blinked and heat lightning flashed on the side, but no picture. My brother looked at it sternly and it then behaved beautifully.

The secret seems to be not to turn it off. Leave that little button alone and all is well. Alas, last night I turned it off. This morning is heat lightning and no picture. So am back on the trojanned computer's 17" flat screen that wants to be 1440x900 and sulks at 800x600 and pixillates everything to death.

What I don't get is that even the geeks who produce this stuff are getting older. Why are screen resolutions getting higher and higher? Does everyone really hunch six inches from the screen? And how do they move afterwards if they do?

This year sucked for most of its length, but I thought my luck had turned in the fall. Ah well. No. Trojan last night that refused to be removed according to internet directions. Malwarebytes kept rebooting computer when I tried to update it. Long saga involving much gin, but at last the damned thing stopped loading.

This morning computer lags terribly. Is running a process that google has never even heard of, which is scary. I run AdwareS&D. First thing it picks up is a trojan with an operating system name. Wait for Adware to be done so I can remove it. System crashes. Reboot. Windows will not load. Kaput, finito.

Must go see if old Win98 system still works. And buy a Mac laptop, except it's snowing and getting around is no longer the easy bike-borne thing it was.

No no no, Weather network. It is not 'slightly overcast'. It is *snowing*. And if this winter is as it looks to be, I shall be buying my third pair of new boots in as many years to ensure ankle support and happy orthotics fit.

bk1 regrets their supplier cannot supply my missing Yakumo volumes. S'OK, I have scans, and felt a mean (all senses of the word) relief at saving the money. The scans alas just got us to Kumano, dark and atmospheric again, and um yeah I would like a paper copy of same. (No. Am supposed to be letting go of the own-the-book habit.) But still there's beNippon. (There's also another visit to NY maybe...)

There are umbrellas that look like ninja swords. Am fiercely fighting the temptation to buy one, because I could never hold on to it.
( Cut for various weirdnesses )

Came across someone referring to the supporting cast in a fic as 'all of the other reindeer', which amused me. Discover it's a TV Trope.

Handel's Largo is an aria. And Ann Murray is not to be confused with Anne Murray, but I so did.

Dusting your long-undusted bedroom in November will get you three hours of hacking fluid-filled lungs when you go to bed. As at any season, take an antihistamine before doing so.

We have both tonight. I haven't smelled city night fog since-- I swear-- 1962, when the Grey Cup got fogged out. This was because the Grey Cup was played at Exhibition Stadium, a time I can now scarce remember. So scarcely can I remember it, I thought it was 1963, but that was Kennedy.

(There was fog in England in 1975, I'm sure, but it was London fog and smelled of... diesel, I think. Or the tube. There was mist in Japan occasionally, but I remember my classical Japanese prof explaining that fog comes down and mist rises up and Japan gets the former but rarely the latter. Which I'll believe, conch shell blowing armies in Hidden Fortress notwithstanding.)

However many things make an entry.
( Cut for same )

My heart sinks within me.

Otherwise, last night I had a Pinot Noir, rated 4.5 stars out of 5 at the LCBO/ Bureau des Alcools, bought solely because it comes from Wayne Gretzky Estates. More Canadian than that they do not come. (Nice enough wine, but I'm not a fan of reds unless they're the real French thing drunk in France.)

( More stuff from New York )

( One goes to shop )

My 100 Demons came Wednesday night. I read the first stories right away and the rest on the train to NY next day, surprised by the sudden access of joy and energy. Oh yes, *this* is what fandom is like, this is why I do it. And how long it's been since I felt that way.

But I still don't know what 'this' is exactly. Just the trip to another world, away from here-- an analgesic against the pain of everyday life? Drugs, in a word, which is what manga was for me in Japan. Or is it the lure of the different, stuff one wouldn't and couldn't think of one's self? Or simply a matter of old friends met again after a year apart? Dunno. My usual reading feels-- well, at worst medicinal-- good for you and necessary but not intended to be pleasant-- and at best, undistinguished. I read Aubrey/ Maturin because it goes down easily and at least gives me a talking point with other readers (though the other readers then engage in character-bashing or book-bashing or at the very least spoilers) and only occasionally do I feel that sense of 'new and useful' that makes reading worthwhile. Certainly it gives me nothing like the intense pleasure that 100 Demons does.
( Further considerations, occasionally of a personal nature )

Monday I went down to Queen St to get money. Beautiful blue and gold evening, and I discovered an unexpected street in Kensington Market full of lovely looking restaurants. Oh, fall is the best time to do anything, yes, with a backdrop like that. But my mind was full of the current workplace follies and I had no heart to stop on this enticing street, especially alone.

Today I'm finished work until next Tuesday and have New York up and coming, and my new 100 Demons arrived with an enticing first story, and I had half a litre of wine at dinner. And though the evening greys and the wind blows like a Yoshitoshi print, I'm extraordinarily happy.
( Cut for the apposite Housman )

Truly, I used to fly to Japan with fewer lists and less anxiety than attends a train trip to New York. Mind, when I went to Japan I could see-- or rather, read maps-- with no difficulty. That may be what makes the difference. But I suffer a new and 21st century anxiety, which is that when I get there it'll all be so difficult and I won't speak the language. And yes, I'm talking about New York.

Otherwise, I keep mourning that no one here shares my fandom, and then mourning that other people elsewhere do share my fandom and oh how I wish they didn't.

Here it is, anyway--

Sitting Alone on an Autumn Night

I sit alone sad at my whitening hair
Waiting for ten o’clock in my empty house
In the rain the hill fruits fall
Under the lamp grasshoppers sound

White hairs will never be transformed
That elixir is beyond creation
To eliminate decrepitude
Study the absolute.

They aren't grasshoppers, as

feliciter has pointed out elsewhere, and the Zen moral rather passes over me; but I'm very fond of the first four lines.
( Cut for domesticities )

Here is Housman's poem:

When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.

Last encountered in The Thirteen Gun Salute, and wasn't I surprised to see it there, in a novel set forty years before its author was born. I rather liked that-- one doesn't expect shout-outs from mainstream authors. Whatever, there's a paper on the subject, for anyone interested.

O'Brian, however, was not above amusing himself by peppering his work with unexplained, untranslated foreign phrases; unattributed fragments of literary works, both ancient and modern, known and obscure; and elusive, unsubstantial references to actual people and events.

*My* kind of writer.
( Not the best Housman around, of course )

Went up mid-province to see a friend yesterday. Blue tinted windows in bus made the fall colours look mescaline or LSD or atanyrate stunning but not at all natural.

Did the same run on Labour Day with no hitches. Yesterday... dear god. Crawl crawl crawl on the Don Valley Parkway. Crawl crawl crawl on the 401. Crawl crawl crawl bumper to bumper on the side roads of Whitby because someone's tractor trailer was having engine trouble, by the look of it. Expected to be an hour late because, well, places it took fifteen minutes to reach in September took forty-five plus now. Arrived on the dot. Do not ask me how.
( Read more... )

This morning I got a Nigerian scam letter in Japanese. 'My rich father died a few months ago and my brother and I have been squabbling over the inheritance and just the other day I was in the house and found $500,000 in cash hidden under the tatami. Want it?'

This would be more convincing if the email hadn't been erika@gyaku.love, which had me expecting the usual 'want to meet hot housewifes in Saitama?' sort of thing.

Other mail was that my Hundred Demons 19 has shipped. By air, so I hope it comes quickly, but my last air order came at the same speed as SAL.

Put poison out a month ago. Mice ate and vanished. A ten day afterwards mice came back and ate some more. And more. And more. I carefully tidy every evening and every morning there's more seed cast broadside on the paper where the boxes rest. This morning the box itself had been shoved against the wall, the better for burrowing, one supposes. I mean, I'm glad mice no longer run around the counters, pooping as they go; they don't even poop around the boxes, which is a blessing; but I wish they'd all go die already.

In other news, saw eye surgeon today who put me on the waiting list for surgery. Ballpark four months, which is pretty good. It means surgery will happen in 2011 and not this tetra-cursed year, which pleases my superstitious soul. But surgery will happen in an odd-numbered year, which offends my tidy soul. My surgeries have also happened every four years, but waiting till 2012 is silly. (And I wish I could find an eye doctor who thinks cataracts are in fact a fairly big deal and their removal a necessity and an improvement. This one was all, 'To say you have cataracts is like saying your hair is going grey. It's just something that happens when you get older.' No it is not. Greying hair has never given me headaches trying to read Japanese.

When I was fourteen on this day, they piled us into a bus and drove us off to Stratford and enchanted us beyond words with Richard II. Golden kings in golden velvet on a golden September afternoon. This may be why I think the entire Middle Ages happened on an autumn afternoon, and that-- pace many famous Books of Hours-- it was never summer then.

A little over a quarter of a century later I got on a train in Tokyo in spitting rain and rode down to Kamakura under a washy grey sky. The rain was disconcerting, because one didn't get wet in it. The hills of Kamakura from the Runaway Temple were soft muted greens and browns, a vista of serene melancholy. This may be why I think the Japanese middle ages (and all of Japanese Buddhism) happened on an overcast autumn afternoon, and that the sun only shone on Shinto occasions.

Three years later I was riding along the sidewalks of Nerima-ku and Suginami to one of the Zenpukuji parks (though now I wonder if it wasn't Shakujii with the castle ruins?) I came home along the canal and as I crossed a bridge, the westering sun turned the water golden at my feet under the broad cloud-flecked sky. I was scarcely past my first month of fandom, the world was glorious and marvellous, and Tokyo obliged by being the same. This may be why I think my early fandom days were all ones of triumph and glory, forgetting that the other half of the time I was a hair's breadth away from despair in that popoloso deserto che appellano Tokio.

In my mind, O'Brian belongs to the fall.
( Cut for dry chronicles )
And then it seems I read no O'Brian for two and a half years, until a sudden whim started me on The Far Side of the World on the Labour Day weekend. Finished it last night, and promptly went out to get the next volume. It always vaguely surprises me how O'Brians can be so different from each other, while often being so much the same. I found the international politics of The Ionian Mission and Treason's Harbour tedious; but this one-- oh dear, so many doujinshi moments. Castrating Amazons and near-death experiences, plural, oh my my.

There is also, as Jack remarks, an awful lot of weather in it-- weird and violent weather. In an instance of pathetic fallacy, the cool fall weather we've been having for two and a half weeks changed last night, as I bicycled over to BMV, to an uneasy greasy warm mug, which was followed at 2 am by violent thunder and lightning. Very tropical tempestuous indeed.

And The Reverse of the Medal turns out to be the book I've been avoiding all these years, and now I suppose I have to read it. Or possibly, skip to The Letter of Marque.

Happy birthday,

nojojojo!

My mother and aunt, were they alive, would be 98 tomorrow. That feels all wrong somehow: but then, I know (of) children of 65 year old fathers, so, well, yeah.

As an oddity: yesterday I bought a chair at a yard sale so today I stuck the ancient crumbling chair it replaces out on the sidewalk. Then I went grocery shopping. Down the street had put a chair out too-- a very nice serviceable living room chair. Around the corner had put a chair out-- a small white velvet armchair. Along *that* street someone had put out a papasan complete with err bedding. Two other places had garden chairs stuck out for the gomi-hunters. These sunny late-September days seem to conduce to throwing out furniture-- but why all chairs?

And as I came home, I scarfled down-the-street's chair and put it in my living room as well, because y'day's chair is elegant but uncomfortable, and my comfortable chair's rattan is unravelling from the arms and sticking me most painfully.

My refrigerator has started to go tick-tick-tick when the motor or compressor or whatever that thing that goes vroom is called, is on. The other day it started to go tick-tick-tick when that thing wasn't on. This worried me enough to call the repairman, because the fridge is still under warranty. He comes today, tells me it's the timer, says he'll replace it since it worries me, does. It still goes tick-tick-tick. He says it's supposed to, and doesn't believe me that for a year it *didn't* go tick-tick-tick. Have put a call in to the Sensible Repairman, because I'm willing to pay money to have someone who doesn't mansplain tell me the timer is supposed to go tick-tick-tick.

Female repairman. I wants them.

Happy birthday,

incandescens!

Picked up a book at a yard sale Saturday, In My Father's Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer, on account of never having read any Singer. Owner's name is scrawled illegibly on the flyleaf. Owner's name is... I.B. Singer. Well well well. Go me with the signed copy.

Strange world, that of the Polish Hasidim. Feels far more foreign than, say, Qing China, if Red Chambers and Shen Fu are anything to judge by. But then, maybe it's only Singer's vision itself that registers as magic realism. For sure, this memoir feels more MR than Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone, the latter's angels and daimons notwithstanding. In fact, the presence of defined angels and daimons makes it *not* MR in my books; the fantastic ought to be inherent in the mundane, not a separate identifiable fantastic element.
( Cut for reminiscence )

Spent the last two days looking after a slightly feverish little girl. Little girl had no other symptoms beside the slight fever, and is also at an age when she pretty much wants to be left to her own amusements. ("Don't *talk* to me.") Hence I spent much of the last two days reading the September issue of Vanity Fair. And as soon as I was free, ran to the store to buy a copy, only to discover that the October issue is already on the stands.

The October issue is all about Lindsay Lohan; the September issue was all about Lady Gaga, who's a nonesuch, and Jacqueline de Ribes, who's pretty much what I wanted to be in life, not that I could. One has to be born a French aristocrat, after all. And her childhood sounds like hell, and the back operation, and not being able to walk for three years, and the celiac disease one could pass on; but ohh, such a beautiful woman. "She personified the idea that French women were the most elegant in the world."

No idea how long the web article will be up, and anyway I want the magazine with the pictures. Partly because I conclude that fashion advertising is the exact equivalent of mangakas' illustration collections: evocative and haunting pictures that tickle the brain with their lush suggestiveness, but that in the end have no substance, no real image deeper than the surface one.

Reasons to be happy:
( Numbered for convenience )

Went up to Peterborough Saturday to see an old friend who's just moved there after a five year gap. Had a WTF packing moment trying to find the black bag-- surely I have a black bag? with two side compartments and an outer pocket, and didn't I stash it inside the big grey monster I got on the sidewalks of New York to bring books back in in '05? No. Not there. I can't keep track of my luggage because I always go with one bag and come back with two-- black bag itself I think comes from Ikebukuro Station-- and I haven't travelled much these last years, and now must also bring a cervical pillow with me so farewell the carry-ons of yesteryear, and of course ever since I discovered wheels in '03 that's what I use.

(But didn't I take the black bag to the cottage last year with the travel pillow stuffed into one side? Am definitely remembering stuffing pillow, but that could have been any time from 2000 on.)
( Memory always lies )

Lovely weather. Lovely lovely weather. Cool; blue skies; white end of summer clouds-- the puffy undense kind I think of as whipped cream, except that that also describes the quite thick mounded clouds one sees from an aeroplane. A fall cloud that comes after rain, which we had in torrents yesterday.

I've been quite fuzzy lately, even after a week off gingko biloba. Forgot my change purse in yesterday's swim bag and so lacked Pepsi all morning to combat the inexplicably threatening headache. So midday I went to the bank and then to the drugstore down the street and bought more gingko-- and discovered I'd left my bank card in the machine. Trot back to bank, ask if anyone's handed the card in-- 'it was only ten minutes ago'-- woman asks me a slew of identifying questions and requests ID and no, the gov't issued health card with the photo doesn't count. 'Do you have a citizenship card?' I am torn between pleasure at her unthinking assumption that I must be an immigrant because everyone is, including of course her, and amazement that she can't hear my very born in Trawna native vowels (but then she's an immigrant.) Credit cards of course will do for ID and guarantee because it's not like the bank issues those to just anybody oh wait...

'Do you remember which machine you used?' 'The left-hand one.' She goes out front and comes back with, no shit, five bank cards. The machine swallows them again if you don't take it within 30 seconds, which is good to know; and good to know that four other people today have been just as ditzy as I am.

Oh, I had great plans for this summer. I was going to get off my ass and kick my don'wanna reflex and do a bunch of things I'd always half-thought about doing, like the summer films at the AGO-- Kurosawa this year!-- or used to do, like Perseid watching. And I started well enough with the Doors Open thing and the Tafelmusik free concerts and showing up for Pride, however briefly because dear god that sun was HOT. But then the mug began, and you can't see Perseids in downtown TO, even though the night was clear, and though I bought tickets for three AGO films, every one of those evenings was muggy and oppressive and threatening, and either I didn't want to go out in that or, out, felt vile enough that I came back home. So the last six weeks have been something of a bust.

( However, there are always second chances. )

Ray Bradbury is 90. I still have my 60s paperbacks of his, crumbling gently behind the Leon Garfields from the 70s. Cannot bear to throw them out, know better than to try rereading. He was a very good writer to read at 14-- sensa wunnda out the wazoo. But even then I suspected that a lot of his work was seriously overwritten.

So hippo birdies and all, Ray, but you make me feel old.

And speaking of old... ( Cut for 12K natter )

I am out of sorts. Partly that's down to TO's perplexing summer weather-- perplexing as in 'it's only 28C/ 82F, it's not 38C/ 100F, it's not **hot** by anyone's standards, so why do I feel like I've been worked over by mafiosi thugs, and why does everything ache and twinge, and why am I thinking what a relief a knife to the jugular would be?' Anyway today's much cooler and drier, so it isn't that.
( Considerations on becoming an Impressionist painter, malgré moi )

There's an exhilarating sense of well-being that comes with waking on a two-(summer)-duvet morning with cool air blowing in from the window fan and one's pillows, bean-bags, bolsters, hwb, and terrycloth sheets forming a little furry animal's nest around you. All's well with the world, roll to the other side and slide back to sleep.

The cool air turns out to be not so cool as all that-- 20C or so, high 60sF-- which is doubly exhilarating. Because not so long ago the same scenario would have been 'So hot so muggy get these things off of me-- oh no, air is blowing on my arms!! so cold so clammy must cover my arms with the muggy fibre-fill duvet AKKK air is blowing on my **head** must cover my poor poor ears before they drop off ohh so hot so muggy' lather rinse repeat.

So I may hope that I'm finally into 'reboot system' following 'uninstall female program', and the world has gone back to being a rational place. Physically, at least; because otherwise it's full of people being wrong on the internet and Tantei Aoneko 5 which is... dear god, if that's her notion of story-telling (and it is: see Dog Style and SSAE) then a good thing she dropped it.

It's not hot, not really, but it's the humid mug that drains just as effectively as heat does, and makes me scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts. I didn't say, 'Well since I'm scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts anyway it can't hurt to read Tantei Aoneko 5' because I started reading it for other reasons; but Motoni Modoru does not help. At all. The obscurities of Ima Ichiko are there for a purpose (generally) and can be unravelled (generally.) Her weird tales are meant to be weird tales; her mysteries are meant to be mysteries; there are solutions and explanations if you look closely enough for them, though I still remain uncertain who Yosaburou is getting his info from in several different stories.

But Motoni's obscurities are caused by something else. And increasingly I think the something else is that she's writing witless BL (only taking it very very seriously) and would be quite surprised that you think she's writing a mystery or a drama or even a psychologically complex love story. She puts in 'notes towards' all those things in the course of the story, but the story is really an erotic fantasy about guys screwing, and that's why all these people are screwing for unlikely reasons under unlikely circumstances. Which I could live with if there wasn't all this other bumpf getting in the way, to say nothing of extended conversations about 品 and 格 in which those extremely general terms are never defined.

Hence I am scratchy and itchy and may have to drop Japanese entirely in favour of some Aubrey Maturin sunlight and common sense.

What did I do yesterday? Saturday I was active in the front garden, with the scratches and muscle aches to prove it; today I was diligent with the sewing kit, and can wear the shorts I mended in consequence. But yesterday I stayed in most of the day reading Phantom Moon, and my only accomplishment was to discover what an andon-beya is.

Andons are those papercovered squarish lights; beya is of course a heya or room. The andonbeya at the PMT is where people are always hiding from pursuers, or recovering from wounds, and where the Great Big Spoiler hangs out. I'd somehow assumed it was a store room kind of space where you kept the andons until they were needed at night.

Not, evidently. It's a windowless room where you must use an andon even during the daytime. Which is fine and good, but there in ch 1 of vol 1 we have Yosa-chan and Young Dork in the andon-beya, separately and together, standing beneath a window, not once but several times.

Unless the whole point is that there's not *supposed* to be a window in the andon-beya and it's dum-dum-dum not really there.

Everything has been early this year, so probably it's no wonder that the cicadas have been singing for a fortnight already. We now approach the season when cicada ought to be singing, and the weather is sunny and dry and cool-for-the-end-of-July, and so naturally I'm moved to nostalgia for the sunny dry and generally HOT days of Tokyo August, vibrating with the much louder cries of Japanese semi.
( Cut for PMT and Japanese )

Some forgotten summer in the last decade I'd regularly sit at my computer and smell hamburgers barbecuing in the back yards beyond the window, and then feel compelled to bicycle over to the one restaurant that had reasonably priced hamburgers-- and glacier-slow service-- and have one myself. (Somehow I never realized that Pauper's across the street had them too; I assumed my choice was between Incredibly Slow Restaurant and By the Way's organic burgers with a schmeer of hummous on them, quote-unquote.) Not that any restaurant gives me the pickle relish I really want, which is why I want barbecued hamburgers, not restaurant ones.

Am smelling hamburgers now. But the whirligigs of time allow me no more than a bulgogi's serving of beef, which might come to a third of a burger, and no fries at all. Sic transit etc. Am a little sad about that. The By the Way burger was what I ate the evening of Sept 11, as a means of asserting to myself that fundamental things in my universe were still the same. However. What we left them, trains inherit/ Trains go on and we grow old.
( And speaking of trains )

( Cut for physical natter )

How do mice get up onto kitchen tables?

No, seriously. I assumed they were jumping from the chair seats piled high with books etc-- though there's the question, how did they get up the chair legs to the seats in the first place? But I've pushed all the chairs back. Mice would have to do a death-defying leap, diagonally upwards across about fourteen inches. So what? Do they swarm up the lamp cord? Wriggle up the table legs and use heel grips for the overhang of the table top? Parachute?

Because every morning there's a tiny turd waiting for me on the table, outside the tip-trap full of tasty flaxseeds the mouse is too dumb to go into. Rot it.

Have been spending my time virtuously disentangling Japanese words for promontory 岬, cape 崎, mountain pass 峠, gorge 峡, the various kinds of valley (谷　峪渓) and other topographic features of that rather mountainous buncha islands. In a classic case of Flow, following some googling as to the difference between the words Holland and Netherlands, I come across a web page that does the same for forest, grove, holt, hanger, and hill, how and hurst, and other topographical features of the rather wooded and hilly English landscape. ('Ware popup at bottom.)

Must go back to disentangling the varying Japanese words for ditches and caves- 溝, 堀,洞, 窟-- and that annoying one that I can't recall-- means a dip in a surface, is always used in BL to refer to the dip at the base of the throat (I think: unless it's the declivity above the collarbones) and isn't read the way I thought it was.

Fourth flat in six weeks. I know there's a lot of broken glass around these days but this is getting *old*. Have ordered puncture-resistant tires at fifty bucks a pop. Have already paid for one in inner tubes.

Went to see Babies on the weekend. Essentially nothing I haven't seen millions of times before, but I suppose it's new to some people. Was a little bemused by the Mongolian baby with his portable yurt and satellite dish in the middle of the Mongolian steppes-- where does the electricity come from? And his Lego and his Fisher-Price toys, including The Baby Killing Red Horse, which we have at work, closely supervised, because it's a baby killer. And the family's Internet-connected Mac laptop at the end (but where does the electricity come from?) Am I to take it that this is the average Mongolian life style? Roosters in the bedroom and Apple computers?

Was also impressed by the Japanese baby throwing a hissy fit because she couldn't fit the wooden rod from the stacking toy into the hole in the circular block. Impressed because most one-year olds wouldn't even *try* to put the rod into the hole; putting the circle over the rod is the best one can expect of them.

Dodged that bullet. Fingers crossed, touching wood, nado nado. Heat always makes me feel apocalyptic anyway, and other things have upped the number of horsemen today to about six. No power would have tipped me over to the need for heavy drugs.

Meanwhile lj won't give me a box to put location or music, supposing I was inclined to.

Historical Weather: June 29, 2010
Toronto City

Max Temp: 21.4°C
Min Temp: 12.6°C

Normal high: 26°C
Normal low: 15°C

So it's a little cooler than average. But you forget: this is the last week of June, that's *always* the hottest week of the month and sometimes of the summer. What happened?

Pride Day got bumped to the first weekend in July, is what happened. So Saturday is forecast to be 28, humidex 32; Sunday 30, humidex 35; recovery Monday an unspeakable 31, humidex 38 (100F for you down there.) The late-June weather anomaly is now explained. I just wish it wasn't so reminiscent of rains of fire on the Cities of the Plains.

You know, it's really stupid to be reluctant to walk into an Anglican church to attend an Anglican service simply because I'm not Anglican and during the service someone will shake my hand and grin at me oh dear god the horror! Torontonianitis: the pathological state of being a Torontonian.

(But I *liked* the days when they let you skulk in the back pews and just listen to the music, dammit.)

Truly, the Summit idiocy is worse than calling in the army for our six feet of snow back in '99. I need a sane city to move to.

Meanwhile, finished Moon Shadow etc and started Eastern Sea God. Discover that kirin stop growing at the age when they first learn to change shape-- which makes me think I'm misremembering First Taiki where everyone seemed in a taking because this ickle kid-kirin *couldn't* change shape. Or else I'm reading Eastern Sea God wrong, which is very possible. Whatever, this makes me want to drop ESG and go read Bratqueen of Kyou!! because *her* kirin is ancient, poor man. And I assume the fact that he couldn't change shape for decades must be dealt with somewhere along the way. Alas, BQoK is big thick book not suited to lugging about in the backpack, so shall persevere with the confusing and grasshoppery ESG. (Have not seen that arc of the anime, is why I wanted to read the book first.)

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