Category Archives: weird

Invasion of the Mushrooms

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I must admit to not usually feeling that a vegetable (or fungi) is worth a comment on, but I was fairly impressed, bordering of blown away, when I saw that in the two flower pots near the front door had over ten huge mushrooms in them yesterday night, where only three days earlier there had been none.

I’ve removed them for fear they may be undesirable, and assume they got in there via spores from somewhere, perhaps in the soil. I have weighed LH’s opinion that they may have grown from the marrow of some massive insect which has been buried in the bowl, but the whole concept frightens me too much. I must have cut an odd figure, stood outside my house doing some gardening, in the dark, with a headlamp on, and effectively harvesting mushrooms.

Anyway, there we have it, I’ve managed to achieve a blog post about mushrooms, and not a single hallucinogen oriented comment.

Hard Road Bento

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I needed to get a new bento box (that’s a Japanese lunch-box). Now, I’ve been here long enough to sort of filter out, or actually understand some of the interesting English language notes on some products, but this one kind of struck me as just being a little serious:

“The road of the life will become very hard. But we must overcome it.”

That’s a pretty heavy message for reading over lunch.

General Toshio Tamogami

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For those watching the news, [now former] head of Japan’s Air Force, General Toshio Tamogami recently made some claims about Japan’s Imperial past and role in the conflict known to many as ‘World War 2′ or The Greater Asian War. His claim is best summed up in this quote as :

“It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation.”

The BBC Story helpfully puts in context next to a photo of the aftermath of the Pearl Harbour attack, which according to Tamogami then, was some kind of friendly, or at worst, neutral incident. (Another link).

It seems though, his own government disagrees, and asked him if he could go and do something else with his time, which got this response from the intrepid general:

“If you are not allowed to say even a word that counters the government’s statements, you cannot possibly call the country democratic”

which makes Japan…

“It’s just like North Korea,” [link][link again]

Weird, because when the Imperial Japan Tamogami seems to think was helping old folks across the road and entertaining small children, the Tokko and Kempeitai must not have been torturing and imprisoning – and worse – Japanese who were against the war.

So here are two views of a man who rose to be in charge of the air wing of his country’s self defence force. Is he misled, or just a complete crackpot?

Scarily…it’s the former in my humble opinion. He’s quite sane, and not alone in his views.

I'm growing my beard.

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I know that’s irrelevant, but then, so is this webpage, so what’s the difference. The next post is probably going to be about Microsoft Live. Where’s the logic in that?

Thus, it stands, I’m growing my beard again. Yes, I know it’s grey in places, and no, I’m not going to do a Father Christmas stint in some department store, but yes, I am growing it.

I appreciate that I’m not consciously growing my beard, but that sounds a lot better than ‘my beard is growing around me’, but I suppose that too is accurate to a point.

In short: I’m growing my beard. Again.

Until I shave it off.

Again.

Tell me the file Apple

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Like a lot of people, I’ve been bitten by a problem syncing my iPod to my mac, in that I see the following error, and the sync stops wherever it was.

cannotfindfile-nani.png

For me, after a bit of tinkering I found it seemed to not like one of my photos very much, towards the end of the sync, and if I get a few more minutes to take a look at it, I’ll figure it out, but really, what kind of an error message is that? It knows what files caused it to stop, so why won’t it tell me what it is? Tsk. Insecurity and fear of loss of job seem to strike again.

Earthquake…back home

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Often when I post anything about earthquakes, it’s about one here in Tokyo, or somewhere in Japan at least, but it seems today there was one a stone’s throw away from where I grew up, in Grimsby on the coast of England.

It’s kind of odd to me, having been through a lot of earthquakes, thankfully all safely, here on the Pacific rim, that a real jolter happened in Grimsby just still requires me to alter the angle of my forehead to get it in there.

Well, I know my family is OK, because I called them pretty smartish to make sure nothing had fallen off or down, so I hope all the other people are OK too.

Bon Jovi dummies

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I was just going through some photos on my keitai, and found a couple from a few weeks ago I’d completely forgotten about: the Bon Jovi ‘Rock Star Baby’ line of baby products we found at Babies R Us.

it sickened me even more than a fair few of their songs. I rank these efforts up there with the horrific ‘Bed of Roses’ rather than the tolerable ‘Keep the Faith’.

What the hell is wrong with ‘Rock’ stars These Days??

bonjovi dunny

Exciting viruses!

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One of the benefits of putting your offspring into a communal setting like a play group or day care, is that they get to be host to some really exciting viruses, meaning that for most of the last few weeks we’ve been treated to various forms of flu, though this week we really did pull the long straw and were hosts to a nice stomach bug, which pretty much knocked us all sideways for a few days.

Given the symptoms, our location in Japan, time of year and stories from other parents, it looks like something akin to Noro virus or the riveting sounding Rota virus. Happy times.