Against all odd, I’m done packing and still have 30 minutes to go catch the Narita express.

I could just go now and insure that I am actually early to catch a plane once in my life, but why bother.

Actually, when taking a flight out of peak-season, it’s always a better strategy to show up fashionably late for check-in. This may sound like dubious advice, coming from the guy who missed a few planes in recent years, but on the other hand, I have also boarded hundreds of flights without hassles. Check-in employees are way less stressed once the rush is over, it’s easy to make small talk and get whatever you want, whether it’s a potential upgrade, or just a seat on an empty row (there’s always one or two fully empty rows on off-peak flights, and getting them at the end of check-in means you stand good chance they’ll remain so).

So instead, I’m running a last-minute assessment of current situation, before moving on for the month.

  • Neighbourhood cats seem a bit worried to lose both their main source for food distribution and access to the dry shelter of my room, which I understand can suck, especially when monsoon season is geared to start in a week or two. They have been following the packing process closely and, as I speak, there’s a fair chance I might be about to smuggle unwittingly some of Tokyo’s finest stray cat on the European continent. I guess it’ll be the surprise on arrival.
  • Herb garden is going through another rough phase: while the cat problem has been successfully dealt with, my once flamboyant arugula is suddenly showing signs of decay. Simultaneously, I couldn’t help but notice that caterpillars in the vicinity seemed particularly healthy and well fed. If the situation hasn’t somehow stabilized by the time of my return, I am afraid we will have to consider chemical warfare. Napalm or agent orange are the two top options at the moment.
  • Underwears are packed. I had a strange dream last night that essentially involved forgetting to pack my undies. My subconscious really has fucked-up priorities. The socks supply dearly needs replenishing (single socks have been disappearing at an alarming rate lately: I suspect the cats. Wouldn’t put it past these thieving bastards). Good thing, you don’t have to remove your freaking shoes to eat in a restaurant where I’m heading.
  • Passports are packed in separate places, and color-coded, which will avoid repeating embarrassing mistakes and having to spend unnecessary time with an immigration officer convinced he has caught Al Qaida’s number 4.

Ok, see you on the other side!

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Skies had that strange surrealistically yellow color that you usually get before storms… I’d keep asking Nordine if he didn’t think there was something strange about the sky color, and he’d look at me as if I had completely gone insane and was about to start chasing imaginary bats away. [needless to say, when I took the picture, it came out a rather ordinary blue]

When the apex of your kanji reading abilities is being able to handle automated furikomi (money transfers) on your own (the mere action of paying my monthly rent, fearlessly navigating 50 screens of instructions on the local ATM machine, is enough to bring me a deep feeling of achievement for the remainder of the day), it is dangerously easy to fool yourself into thinking you can actually read some of this barbaric language.

Lucky for me, just when it might happen, something comes up to remind me that I’d still get my ass kicked at japanese crosswords by any 5-year old.

Even if that reminder is some utterly stupid technical detail of tear-inducing banality. The fact that it resulted in the waste of a complete afternoon and nearly failing to secure my plane ticket in time for my departure, sure helped giving it due attention.

For those of you wondering, just note that Sumitomo Trust (住友信託) and Sumitomo Mitsui (三井住友) most definitely aren’t the same bank. And moreover: Sumitomo Mitsui is spelled freaking backward in Japanese (Mitsui first), thus appearing under the マ (‘ma’ and other ‘m’ sounds) section, not the サ (‘sa’ and other ‘s’ sounds) section. As such, even if 住友信託 is the only bank appearing under that section and your brain tells you it looks close enough to be the bank you are supposed to make your transfer to, believe me: It’s not.

Well, all that to say that I’ll be off the island from the end of this week until the end of next month. Please feed the Godzilla when I’m away and take him out for a bit of city-stomping at least once a week, his cans are in the top left shelf in the cupboard. Rie is taking care of the garden and the cats.

bipppu no ato ni, messeiji wo rekohdo shite kudasai…

ERROR, CONTENT ERASED

Yesterday, a session of the French senate was interrupted when a young man suddenly jumped from the public balconies, onto the actual senate floor, wearing but a thong, adorned with the colors of the French flag.

This [somewhat prudish] streaker managed to briefly voice his position on an upcoming national referendum, before being manhandled to the door. For added visibility, said position (a very unequivocal “NON” to the adoption of a European-wide constitution) was written all over his body, including his bare buttocks.

The man got out with only a few bruises (it’s a good 10 feet drop), a stern warning from the authorities and a newfound popularity on the evening-show circuit. Quite a good deal, if you consider how many bullets the coroner would currently be extracting from his corpse, had he tried a similar trick in the US.

Laurent, tu sais ce qu’il te reste à faire

Picture faceanalysis.png Yuki recently blogged her experiments with FaceAnalyzer.com. It sounded fun, I decided to go see for myself.

FaceAnalyzer is a website that claims to be able to give you, from a mere picture, an automated breakdown of your “race” (which, may I remind you people, in the case of humans, is mostly a social construct, with hardly any ground in biology), along with an estimate of your “Intelligence”, “Ambition”, “Risk” (whatever the hell that may be), “Gay Factor”… complete with, I kid you not: Income bracket

Now I know what you think: quite a bit of pseudoscience, mixed in with a whole lot of outright quackiness…

Only one way to know, right?

Upon submitting a fairly broad sample of my likeness, in various states of drug-induced haze, hair color and cheekiness, the results were rather mitigated:
While I can certainly accept the possibility that I may have a fair share of East-Indian or Chinese blood in me (please no “ever had some [insert ethnicity] in you?” joke here), I find it a bit harder to accept that I’d be a woman (as the system insisted on pointing out, in every single case)… Although that would explain a certain fascination for lace undergarments and a secret passion for knitting I always attributed to my deviant morals… But in that case, wouldn’t all the lesbian action give me a “Gay Factor” at least somewhat above average?

Obviously not very conclusive. But science makes mistakes… One should not draw hasty conclusions and bluntly discard such breakthrough technology as “money-making snake’s oil scheme” without at least a second chance…

So I bravely submitted a picture of my brother’s cat, and I must say the results are troubling.

  • Indeed, the cat is FEMALE! Most definitely has a good deal of middle-eastern ancestry, in fact, her lineage can probably be traced to every other urban slum of the Eurasian continent, with the odd pedigreed tomcat here and there…
  • Frankly not sure about that “Low Promiscuity” rate: I mean, before she got spayed, the girl could be quite a little trollop around the neighbourhood.
  • It is a bit disappointing that she only displays “Average” ambition, but I guess we will have to find solace in the fact that she is destined to make at least $30,000 a year… not bad for a cat who doesn’t even have her high-school degree.

I’ll be contacting my brother shortly and urge him to stop wasting her talent on stupid things like chasing rats and rummaging around the neighbourhood: that cat has potential (Beta Academic potential!), she needs to be put to work!

By the way, physiognomy is not a new idea. It hasn’t been given the slightest bit of scientific credibility over the past 50 years, though.

As for how the website gets its “uncanny” success rate regarding geographical phenotypes: any first-year computer science student can get the same results with a big-enough sample database and some very low-grade face-matching algorithm. Any rating merely suggest a match with existing pictures of a certain ethnicity, which is well below the crease of scientific procedure, hence the wild margin of error. In fact a properly trained neural network would probably give vastly superior results on some criteria (such as gender, for example).

Needless to say that detection of personality traits such as “Gay Factor”, “Promiscuity” or even “Intelligence”, through face analysis, is complete and utter bullcrap. The last people with an academic background to have given it some sort of scientific credence ended up cracking capsules of cyanide in their mouth, approximately sixty years ago.