It just breaks your heart

From today’s Herald

Li was happily eating and taking everything everyone gave her. She prattled away: “A rock this big” - stretching her arms - “smashed Grandma in the eyes and nose. There was lots of blood. I called Grandma but she didn’t say anything.”

Where was Grandma now?

“She’s dead. What does dead mean?”

After a bumbled adult explanation, Li asked if Grandma would come back to make her some food. The first thing she wanted was some meat, then an apple and a banana.

Next Up! Space Travel! Wow!

I find space travel immensely exciting, the thought of exploring such dangerous places so far from safe haven is, really, the stuff of dreams. So when I tripped across this video of NASA’s new martian lander Pheonix, I was really looking forward to it. But what’s with all the hyped up music and the jump cuts and the graphics? I realise these videos are made for a generation for whom space travel means Star Wars and computer games, but space travel is already exciting, and the interviewees are obviously excited — and I think making those extra graphics and cuts to make the video more exciting actually sends the opposite message; that it isn’t exciting, we had to make it seem like it is.

But then I’m the sort of guy who likes watching those old, crusty, experts-speaking-to-a-camera type of docos, so maybe it’s just me being a grumpy old man.

Road rage retard takes out 50 cyclists

From the Herald:

Witnesses to the crash have told smh.com.au the group of about up to 60 professional cyclists were riding south on Southern Cross Drive, just south of Dacey Avenue, Mascot about 6.30am when a driver, agitated with being held up, accelerated in front of the pack and then slammed on his brakes, giving the riders no time to stop.

Who does that shit? Seriously? The worst thing is that this idiot would probably only be charged with reckless driving, when he deserves at least an attempted murder, and he’ll probably be back on the road with a full license in a few years. If I had my way the only thing he’ll be driving for the rest of eternity is a meal tray at Long Bay Gaol.

Spotted in the Jetstar in-flight shopping catalogue

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You can now buy my photos!

Thanks to redbubble.com. Cards, prints and posters, as well as tshirts and calendars, at great prices and international delivery. Have a look now!

I carried this all the way home

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Yup, you should’ve seen the looks people gave me at Shin-Osaka station.

Lost

I watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night, I’d never got around to watching it when if first came out, and I found a copy at home so I popped it in. It started a bit slow for me, but I quite enjoyed it in the end. But there was one moment in the film that grabbed me; it was a line from the older Sayuri, narrating (and me paraphrasing):

There’s a poem carved into a rock in the garden called “Lost”, made up of three words that the author had carved then scratched out; you can’t read “Lost”, only feel it.

Despite all the inaccuracies of the book and the movie, I think that line really captured one part of what it means to be Japanese. Loss is part of life, it is an inevitable conclusion of having had something. I think the Japanese take loss more philosophically than we do; certainly more than I could. And it’s such a beautiful phrase, I confess I could feel the tears welling up inside.

You don’t get TV like this any more

On Return

I’m afraid I’ve become one of those people.

You know, the type that goes overseas only to complain that “it’s not like back home blah blah”. Except in my case it’s the other way around; “It’s not like that in Japan….”

And it isn’t: public transport is expensive and shit, it’s more dangerous in parts of the city (like at the Town Hall bus stop at 2am when the Riot Squad showed up), and even the produce is not as good as I remembered it to be. All week I’ve been eating tasteless vegetables and wondering what went wrong — admittedly my vegies were bought at Coles, but I used to shop at Coles and it was fine two years ago.

That and all the other things added up, and I’ve been talking up Japan so much that even I wanted to tell myself to just get the hell back over there if I like it so much!

I’ve got the post-holiday blues bad, that’s for sure. Let’s hope I get a job soon so I have a distraction from how un-Japan everything is.

(Apologies for the lack of activity here, evidentially I’ve been too busy whinging and have been neglecting this blog.)

Things I have learnt since coming back to Sydney

Sydney is annoyingly large geographically.

The trains worked better than I remembered.

But the seats are just as uncomfortable as I remembered them to be.

Sydney is more expensive than Tokyo, no lie.

I live out in the freakin’ sticks, and I need to get the hell out of the Shire as soon as I can.

But given how expensive everything is, that is highly unlikely.