Busted!

i was just asked for the first time ever what i was doing while sitting at the computer. I was actually looking at this blog, albeit a text part of it. But the question addressed to me turned out to be rhetorical, as the lady who asked looked at the screen, noticed it smothered in English, and giggled, "I wouldn't have a clue even if i looked!"
i do have things to do,and am doing them ... gradually ... i jsut happen to be doing a lot of other things as well (e.g. procrastinating, websurfing, etc...)

If anyone is actually reading this, please let me know! I will (i promise) fill in (some of)the gaps ... eventually...

taifuu (lack thereof)

Well, the 台風 seems to have blown away.
So it's back to normal (whatever normal means)

台風 part 2

Well, typhoon #14 blew all night, getting stronger and stronger, and when i awoke in the morning, it was wild and wildening outside, and we still hadn't been reached by the main part of the storm (big red blob on TV map).

As well as being very big, this typhoon is very slow-moving. Which means that the strong winds and heavy rain hang around for a while! I wonder if everyhting will be cancelled tomorrow as well...

The office is abuzz with people taking actions of various sorts, occasionally rushing outside to secure a bit of something that has blown loose, and slightly fretting about the comfort of the refugees, who are steadily trickling in. Tempers fray from time to time, amid discussions of such things as the relevance (or otherwise) of who wants what kind of packed lunch, etc.

The small television in the wall behind me is blaring a constant running report of the current state of various parts of Kyushu and Shikoku. i am sure that the constant noise generated by this is not helping to de-stress the environment at all.
The news report includes information about who has been injured by the typhoon, but i wonder how different the figures would be if there was such a report on injuries sustained every day regardless of the weather.

The big red blob on the TV map is now upon us - covering the whole of Kyushu!
If there were not so many buildings, trees and electricity wires around, it would be fun to go outside and physically experience the awesome power of nature.
But i am in the office, and here i must stay until i brave the journey across the carpark to go home for lunch.

As the storm approached...

... Daniel and i were messing around with a camera in my appartment:

台風

Yarr, there be a typhoon a-comin'!
and it be a big'un!

Forecast to hit/pass over here sometime in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Wind is getting stronger,

Lessons / events are being cancelled,

Old people are starting to gather for shelter at the For You Kaikan where i work.

All very exciting really.

Took my paraglider out to the riverbank for a bit of ground handling.

it's amazing how much attention this generates... on top of me being foreign and not exactly normal-looking anyway...

Some cars stopped to watch, some people called out to me, and after a while a guy driving past in an expensive-looking white car took a detour and drove down onto the riverbank beside me. He came up to me and asked in pseudo-wakariyasui semi-gestured Japanese if he could be my friend. Slightly wary, and not 100% sure how to deal with the situation, i said, "er... so what's your name?"
"Ah, yes;" he took out and handed me a busines card with very little info on it, "So, i really want to try paragliding. Where can I get one, how much for?"
I still had absolutely no idea who this guy was, and he kept hinting that if/as we were friends i could/should let him try my wing out...

He was also keen to find out where i live, and said we should meet up some time. For some reason he seemed surprised that i live in the town we were standing in. i didn't give him any more details.

I told him about the paragliding schools i knew of nearby, and he said "Oh, it's alright, i taught myself to drive, so flying one of those should be pretty easy to pick up, too."
When i stressed the necessity of getting proper training (in weather observation, and a certain way of thinking), otherwise it's really really dangerous, he said it was the danger that he found appealing...
He then asked what was in the pouch in the back. When i told him it was a reserve parachute, he said, "Oh, I've always wanted to try skydiving!" and went on and outlined his idea of flying up really high on a paraglider, cutting himself loose, and freefalling for a while before pulling out the parachute and gliding to safety...
Nice idea in theory, but i don't think it's a particularly good one to try in practice.

This is not the kind of guy i would ever dream of letting anywhere near my paraglider. Nor anyone else's. Not even if he paid me.

He eventually wandered off, to be replaced by a couple of junior school kids, whose presence was pleasantly refreshing in contrast. But by that time, the wind had died off.

Linguistic Observation

Spending time talking to Americans has led me to discover some interesting gramatical developments in trans-Atlantic English colloquialisms.

There exist, in Scottish and in American English, widely used plural forms of "You". Originally "You" was the plural form of thee/thou, but 'you' became used for both singular and plural. As there are some occasions when there is a need for differentiation, the new forms have developed. So the colloquial plural forms of You are:
American: Y'all
Scottish: Yous (this is possibly used by some Welsh people too, and expat borderites like myself who are nostalgic for a culture they have but dabbled their toes in.)

Update / book review pt. 2 : (more a review of my own book-reading than the book itself)

Am I gullible, or just too freely accepting? I get stuck into a book and tend to believe every word it says. (I do this with a lot of books) and think highly of the book (and its arguments) until I read something else that refutes, disagrees with or criticizes the book, then I just agree with the criticisms instead. I thought I was an independent thinker, but maybe I’m more like a chameleon.

The intensity with which I have been reading D+D is no doubt a factor in its effect on my total acceptance of it. I have left little time for thought between sections, and apart from the odd meal here and there, only once or twice have I got up off the couch and interacted with the society described in the book. D+D contains a lot of truth and valid complaints (concrete, noise pollution, etc. which DO REALLY ANNOY ME!) but there is a lot about life in Japan that really isn’t that negative – I enjoy my work interacting with people and seeing the interaction between their preconceptions and my non-Japanese teaching methods, I really love being up in the mountains (although they seem to be filling with useless roads and dams) and in spite of what Kerr says about good onsens disappearing, I still really love those – even the seedy urban bath houses have their own charm.

The book itself is somewhat repetetetetitive (and I did notice that myself) but I feel like here I am now having read these forums and adopting their viewpoints (or changing mine to fit theirs). Am I just a mollusc? Latching onto any writing and thoroughly accepting its viewpoint without discernment? Well, I guess I’m not much of a critical thinker… but why think critically? I don’t want to become cynical. Also, thinking critically (or even thinking at all?) prevents me from getting caught up in a good read (which is one of the reasons I read in the first place).

Perhaps Kerr’s image of Japan as a creaking hulk heading for the rocks (I keep visualizing it as similar to the castle monster thingy in last year’s anime Howl’s Moving Castle by Miyazaki) is somewhat over extreme / alarmist but there is certainly a lot of truth here and food for thought, as well as scarily satisfying explanations of the causes behind a lot of the
nazo one sees in Japan.

I have now been in Japan for just over a year – the longest so far at a stretch. And I can tell you I’VE GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!
This is the reaction I have to spending the last 3 days reading Dogs And Demons by Alex Kerr. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what I’m getting at – the book portrays Japan as a creaking machine heading in the wrong direction and about to fall apart at any minute. It covers most aspects of life in Japan, from the concreted rivers and seashores to the cookie-cutterization of the populace through a scarily efficient miseducation system And the thing is, you can see it. The rivers are concreted. There are more under-used cultural centres, pachinko parlours and strange shaped monuments than could possibly be needed
A big factor in my current attitude is probably the intensity with which I’ve been reading this book. It is almost 400 pages (plus Footnotes) and I started reading it on Friday evening. Thanks to a rainy day on Saturday and a train journey on Sunday, I will have finished it by this (Monday) evening. As well as being scarily readable (with a few rough bits in the economics sections that I’m not too clued up on) it is very intense, packed full of facts, examples and whatnot to explain the whole crazy system – a good summary is here. Dogs And Demons is definitely worth a read if you are even vaguely interested in Japan, but be warned: it might put you off.

doing stuff

Just a note to say (in case anyone visits) that this blog is supposed to be about stuff i've been doing, but because i'm so busy doing all the things i'm doing, i haven't got around to writing about them. So, until i do, it seems that this blog is about procrastination.

more from my diary

Sunday was a much better day - including over 2 hours of ground handling and bouncing around on the beach followed by an hour or
2 playing in the surf with bodyboards. The PGing took me back (mind and level gradually training back to the level i was last year) to awesome day bouncing around over the thermic rocks round the back of Fan G with Nick last July.
Wind was a bit too strong for a flight from the mountain, but I'm back in the zone and ready to fly again!
Sunday afternoon I had a good chat with Itonaga about life; he says he used to think that what you do was more important than money, but he says you need money, and all artists are poor. He’s an artist (like most people in Japan), in that he paints European Windows in Black and white. Also speculates on Stock Exchange. Lots of philosophizing etc. (and religion etc. in the car on the way home) with a backdrop of beautiful sunset over 福岡湾, and the slow お盆 traffic. We went to his mother’s house in 北九州 (for a big family gathering, including a mutual English/Japanese lesson with his elder brother (or someone's grandfather?) who was teaching me lots of old kanji that aren't used any more) then back to Yoshitomi (with his family, including his elder son who is at 東京外国語大学 near ICU studying French)(somehow getting lost in 行橋 on the way (they wouldn’t have got lost if I’d been navigating!))

Paragliding Weekend (sort of...) (from my diary)

i had an awesome weekend discovering that i had forgotten how to paraglide - not good! until Saturday, it was just under 8 months since i last flew...
So on Saturday it was a good thing i was only doing short hops supervised by 糸長さん（and also that character with really strong hands whos v. keen to practice English and doesn't stop talking and I’d forgotten existed）... my launch technique and control (and just about everything) had totally gone to pot. And to cap it all off i had an accidental reserve deployment - (bizarre feeling) though luckily i was only at 2m altitude.
Many lessons learned and relearned. Rehabilitation. Frustrating but useful.
(Earlier we went up to see the takeoff – a very steep dodgy looking wooden slatted ramp!)

The place was 火山in 志摩町, near 前原, west of 福岡市 – an awesome 4km long beach with muchos surf etc see here. a very reccomended location for all sorts of adventures! Sat. evening: 焼肉 but Itonaga had bought me veggies, salad and dressing on the way. Nice – he looked after me so well all weekend! I slept in the top of Itonaga’s camper van. And then a bit in the morning on the beach. If you have never slept on a beach in the early morning, do it now!

namechange

I've just realized if you had a spa in a ghetto it would be a spaghetto . . .

so i have changed the name from
Sparky's Space
to
Sparky's SpaGhetto

because
a lot of
alliteration
alleviates
all

and if i don't get some useful stuff in here soon, it'll turn out to be a blog about a blog, which is not what i want.

Ok, so this is my blog.

at last it starts.
or i start it.
or it is started by me.
or whatever.

whether this log of webbage will continue further than these first few minuscule ramblings can only be determined by anyone who chooses to visit this space.

basically, i feel that i have recently been doing stuff that is interesting enough to warrant some interest taken in it by people who feel that they have been deprived of hearing about me.
so i set up a blog and this is it.

it may also be a good opportunity to learn a bit of html

in the summer of 1997, i painted my bedroom like this :
. . . i hereby paint my blog some wallpaper

Date=unspecific. Topic=Sandwiches

First, i would like to say "Hooray for Sandwiches!"

At some point, i realized that i exceptionally loved egg mayonnaise and cress sandwiches.

I am eating one as i type (with lettuce not cress) - this is why i have remembered the above fact.
Recently, mainly due to living in Japan, sandwiches are not a main part of my diet, and i haven't been an avid e,m+c fan since the mid-late '90s (when i discovered the delights of putting between slices of bread ANYTHING that was in the fridge! or on my plate!)

When i was rowing lots at Monmouth, i used to eat chip butties (and curry butties, and butties of anything that the canteen happened to be serving) - this used to really annoy Dan Rosser - not quite sure why.

the first bit

For some reason, i can't post any dates before the start of 1990. This is presumably because the internet as we know it, blogging, etc. did not at that time exist.

So in my entry for the firts of January 1990, i will provide a summary of the previous 9 1/2 years.

Apparently, i was born.
This is alleged to have occurred on Friday the 3rd of August, 1981 at around 5-6 p.m. on or under the roof of the big red hospital in Hereford. (this hospital is now big and new, as opposed to being big and red).

Since then, i think i have always felt either soporiphic or creative or something at around that time on a friday evening. This has led me to wonder why we don't celebrate a Birthhour every week, instead of just a birthday every year.

I have just discovered that i appear to be making this up.
There was no Friday, the 3rd of August, 1981. It was a Monday. Which allegedly makes me more fair of face than loving and giving. Whatever. I must have come into existence at some point, because here i am (unless i am very much mistaken).
So thanks , Mum, and Dad! I love life ... if i had any choice in the matter of parents, i think i chose exceptionally well.


I have always had a brother. I have not (according to the linear time paradigm) always had a sister. All this will become clear in the ensuing posts. (assuming i write them).

For now, (4:46 pm 15/11/2005), ciaow.