Recommended Read

A good read from an up and coming author: In Hiding

Excuses, excuses

It was nearly noon by the time I managed to find my way out of my apartment. The air was already thick with the sticky heat that daily grips this little island. The night before had been nothing short of restless; mosquitoes kept up a ceaseless raid on exposed skin and the damp stench of the hovel I was held up in would have allowed no rest anyway.

Now tired, hungry and entirely agitated by the swelling red bites that covered me, I found myself stuck in traffic because of a giant whale. The beast was laid out on the back of a truck, being taken somewhere for something. At this point, however, it was only succeeding in slowing traffic and drawing gawkers from the stores, cafes and dirty alleyways. They, in turn, slowed traffic to an unmerciful crawl. A traffic cop was trying in vain to open the lanes of traffic once again.

A stench rose from the drying beast and mingled with the smell of exhaust, roasting chickens and ducks, frying fish and rotting garbage. I was no longer hungry. I was growing more impatient with each passing second. The little motorbike I was on normally made most traffic problems irrelevant, but then again, I had never encountered a whale in traffic before.

The signal ahead of the truck turned and the cops hurried to push children and their parents from the lane and the whale lurched forward. With a clear line along the curb I hammered down on the throttle and threw myself around the side of the trailer on which the leviathan lay. I found myself coming along the underside of the beast and made my way forward to just about the midpoint. My progression along the beast was halted by another motorcyclist and his camera-toting passenger who seemed intent on taking every inch of the whale’s underbelly in close detail.

Already angered by my own tardiness I found this an unnecessary annoyance. I blew my meager horn, but to no avail. I looked for ways around them, but we were once again slowing as the crowds came into the street.

It may have been my eyes, but I nearly swore the whale was growing larger, as though it were drawing in a final breath. The skin looked stretched, taut as a painter’s canvas. As we stopped I heard a creaking noise and thought the truck bed must be splintering beneath the weight. Then a force I cannot describe threw me from my bike and sent me sliding into the storefront to my right.

I found myself unable to rise; not from pain or broken bones, but from slipping on something slick when I tried. I couldn’t see through the visor of my helmet from the same slime in which I sat. As I raised it clear of my eyes I couldn’t believe my eyes. Before me on its bed lay the whale with a gaping hole in its belly, burst like a balloon.

She looked at me in disbelief, as though I were making it up. I had to return home to shower, I protested, she wouldn’t have wanted me arriving a stinking pile of whale blood, guts and half digested tuna! But she would not be convinced by such a flimsy story. She got up from the table, announced she had finished her lunch and left me the bill as she walked away.


Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction: http://www.etaiwannews.com/Taiwan/2004/01/27/1075168255.htm

The sky is falling!

Snow began falling again in Tokyo Sunday afternoon causing area residents to panic and repeated tell one another that ‘it’s cold!’ The snow clouds gathered over the western horizon early in the day, but left the city untouched until later afternoon. The arrival of the clouds would have been nearly entirely unnoticed had it not been accompanied by a frigid wind of about 5km/hr. With the ensuing draft came the exclamations of cold and eventually some spots of moisture resembling snow were spotted. These melted quickly, but conversations about the cold lingered well into the night.

Commuter Comfort

Good news for those venturing into the heart of Tokyo’s concrete jungle by subway. The Teito Rapid Transit Authority, the operators of about half of Tokyo’s subways, have announced that from the early part of this year they will once again provide toilet paper in station toilets.

Toilet paper has long been absent from these public facilities. Though readily available in the stations from the reconstruction following World War II, the paper distribution was discontinued during the oil crisis of the 1970’s.

Teito officials point to the hording of the precious paper that gripped the city at that time, and what some described as plain wastefulness on the part of subway users.

The new distribution of toilet paper throughout the system will commence by the latter part of January. At first the paper will only be available at a handful of the larger stations in the metro area. By June or July officials hope to have the paper available in all of their facilities.

There was no word as to a similar action being taken by the other main subway or train operators in the city.

Warming Whines

With the second largest economy in the world, and some of the most advanced technology in the world, it is somewhat surprising to find that most houses in Japan do not offer the comforts of central heating. As the weather has gone from fall to winter, the foreign residents of Japan unite in ceasing their denunciation of everything else Japan, with the exception of the bank machines, and focus their complaining skills.

The intensity of complaint is in direct inverse proportion to the air temperature. This is a defensive mechanism which foreigners possess to keep the body warm, according to a theory proposed by Dr. Ken Hashimoto. Dr. Hashimoto’s research team, comprised mainly of students seeking to improve their English skills without having to pay money for it, surveyed a number of foreign residents as they went about their own business.

Eavesdropping on and entering into conversations in which they were not particularly welcomed, the researchers compiled a list of the most common complaints they heard. The team then went through and calculated the rate that the complaints were issued, and what time of year the complaints were most frequent. Using what he termed a ‘complicated formula involving big numbers’ Dr. Hashimoto found that there was a significant decrease in the number of complaints about most aspects of Japanese life when the weather cooled and that in the place of many general complaints central heating was then the target.

In a giant leap of logical thought, Dr. Hashimoto’s team came to the conclusion that this switch in complaints allowed foreigners to channel their ire into heat, thus keeping the foreigner warm without central heating.

The report also noted that complaints about ATMs remained fairly steady, but peaked around the time of national holidays. Asked for a reason for this, Dr. Hashimoto’s spokesman replied only that ‘it is very difficult'.