- Arrival: Plane is 2 hour late. A dozen obnoxious sunburnt thirty-something, straight from Club Med Pataya, manage to ward 200 people off the whole luggage area thanks to their skillful use of carts and an utter disregard for basic courtesy. Oblivious to the sign reading “Information” hanging over his head, counter guy basically laughs in my face when I show up to ask where bus #305 departs. Finally sends me in the opposite direction. Welcome to France.
- Caffeine consumption for last 3 days before turning in paper: Regain Black (3 bottles), Black Black chewing gums (2 packs), Red Bull Extra (1 can), Pure Arabica ground coffee (approx. 2 gallons).
- Monkeys: Of course, aforementioned caffeine dosage made it somewhat difficult to sleep, even after report was finally completed. You wouldn’t believe the sort of useful stuff you learn, watching French TV at 4 in the morning. Did you know that, when you put a baboon in front of a large mirror, said baboon will never tire of attacking or threatening its own reflection, whereas the only other primate, beside Man, able to finally realize it is standing in front of itself, are chimpanzees. These critters are so smart, it’s crazy! Never will I call the POTUS, “chimpy”, ever again: that’s just mean to our brother chimpanzees.
- Schoolmates from way back then are all finished or finishing with their studies. Most of them have embarked on lucrative careers in finances abroad. Some are getting married. A frightening number has already started investing in real estate. All in all makes me feel like I’m growing old backwards.
- Picnic: The monastic life ended just in time for a delicious picnic organized by a bunch of French bloggers, blessed by one of the last few days of sunny Parisian weather for the year, and amidst the gorgeous setting of the Parc Floral de Paris. The oddities of my own internal clock, conjugated with the counterblow of two months of frenetic studies suddenly screeching to a halt, made for a rather contemplative, slightly sleepy and altogether not very talkative dr Dave, but it was nice to see the sun again after all this time.
- Partying did take place. Maybe it was jetlag kicking in, or maybe my body had learnt to metabolize caffeine on its own by then, but I finally regained enough energy for a couple long evenings, busy arguing over world domination plots, drinking champagne and checking out the mind-blowing view of the city from Pierre’s terrace (technically the highest appartement within the limits of Paris, and definitely showing). Some much-needed comforting that Parisian life can be more than grey skies and malcontent cab drivers.
- Language: Pierre noted that my French was substantially better this time around. Granted, “better” here, is the difference between a masterfully trained foreign spy and an authentic native, but Pierre’s notorious anal-retentiveness toward the French language gives extra importance to such compliment. I hang it on spending my entire month in French textbooks and going additional lengths to stay immersed in the language, so as to avoid some of the distracting back-and-forth that usually goes in my head when I try tackling a Math question in French. It’s a sad reality that, no matter how fluent a language, you will lose it if not practicing daily. Conclusion being that I ought to do something to keep things going in that direction, especially if I’ll be residing there in three months. Expect a special announcement very soon.
- Airport: I now officially hate Paris CDG airport with a passion. I might even contemplate running over a few employees with my cart, next time I’m there. On the other hand: props to the lovely Cathay Pacific airline employee who did her best to get me on next-day’s flight back, at no cost, and even though they were in no way responsible for the retarded information counter agent who sent me to the wrong terminal on the other side of the airport (a grand total of 80 minutes to get there, realize his mistake and rush back to the correct one: enough to miss my plane).
- Home sweet home. It’s good to be back in Tokyo. Three more month to come to terms with it and prepare psychologically to move to Paris for a more substantial duration.
Category: Places
Closed for the week…
Alright boys and girls,
In ten minutes I’ll be heading out for Narita with twice the limit in luggage, and the hugest smile I can summon to convince the employee to let me board without supplement (not an option, seeing how it would probably cost the price of a full ticket). Especially hard to smile when you have more grams of caffeine floating in your body than hours of sleep over the past two weeks, but if I can manage to freeze my muscles in the appropriate position, the twitching may complete the illusion.
Although I hear they have internet access in even the most remote Parisian neighbourhoods nowadays, you likely won’t hear from me until next Thursday, if then.
But I promise that, once the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation of having my ignorant ass handed over to me by my professors, subsides, I will be back and regaling you with the wondrous adventures of my final three months in Nipponland.
To keep you busy until then, here is what I have to offer:
Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Dr. Dave, But Were Afraid to Ask…
I am sure all of you, my faithful readers, have many unanswered questions pertaining to the author of this site, sitting somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind while you read these lines…
How old is dr. Dave? What is dr. Dave’s favourite colour? Why the fuck does he keep writing “favour” and “colour”, yet spell it: “organize” ? How many billions sit on dr. Dave’s Cayman Islands bank account? What crème de jour does he use to keep this youthful looks about him, no matter what time of the day? Is he for real? Is he really that full of himself or is this just an elaborate act? What’s the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything? Mac or PC? Shaved or natural? Boxer or tighty-whities? Heroine or Cocaine? etc. etc.
Crucial existential questions indeed…
Well, wait no more: ask ahead, and in ten days, when I come back, I will personally post my reply to each and every question asked through the comment section or sent through the contact form.
Time for some transparence around here.
L’Anglais, Cette Langue Mystérieuse
Watching a small online condensate of worldwide TV programs, I stumbled upon a bit of French national news wherein a journalist comments, in French, over footage of flooded NOLA streets.
At one point, the camera stops on a man laying on the ground, zooms in, and we can hear the following voice-over:
Voiceover: “… Un homme a terre, qui dans un souffle parvient à peine à dire à une équipe de reporters…” [“… a man on the ground, barely manages to tell a team of reporters…”]
Offscreen (in English): “Are you alright?”
Man on the ground (in English): “I got a kidney stone…”
Voiceover (allegedly translating from English): “… qu’il est affamé.” [“… that he is starving.”]
Yea… Next time I see somebody with a kidney stone, I’ll just cook them some food, ’cause they must be hungry…
Could they actually hand their reporters a dictionary before they send them abroad?
On y voit des scènes filmées en Louisiane, après passage de Katrina. Commentaire-bateau sur fond porno-médiatique standard… Puis, la caméra s’arrête et zoom sur un homme au sol, visiblement pas en bonne santé, alors que la voix hors-écran continue:
Voix hors écran: “… Un homme a terre, qui dans un souffle parvient à peine à dire à une équipe de reporters…”
Voix interviewer hors écran: “Are you alright?”
Homme au sol: “I got a kidney stone…”
Voix hors écran: “… qu’il est affamé.”
Est-ce que quelqu’un peut offrir un dictionnaire Anglais-Français aux journalistes de France 2 avant de les envoyer à l’étranger la prochaine fois?
A défaut, s’ils cherchent d’autres volontaires pour scénariser les dialogues de leurs prochains reportages: j’ai plein de supers idées originales…
Time for a few changes round here
A bit short on the news front lately, I know… And not likely to get any better soon. In fact, consider this the official seasonal warning about the usual 3-week writing slump to be followed by lengthy catch-up, once I’m done strangling the manes of Mssrs. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen with my bare hands, once and for all.
But before we dim the light, turn off the gas and put this page in energy-saving mode for the rest of the month, it’s time for a bit of ego rambling and life status update, for the benefit of the three people (cat and genetically-invested relatives included) who give a damn.
Yes, you may have noticed: next Friday is that day again, and thus, this year’s edition of Existential Week is under way.
Please come back: no longwinded self-serving cheese and whine party, this time around. To tell the truth, we were tittering on the edge for a few days, but doubled the meds, resumed intraveinous vodka doses in the morning… and now the sun is shining and the future bright again! [insert Absolut Zoloft sponsor message here]
What you will get though, is a world-premiere announcement of Dr Dave’s Life Projects for the Fall 2005 Season: hang on to your mouse, it’s earth-shattering stuff we got here. Particularly if you are my mom and wondering if I am still attending seminary or been ordained yet.
OK, first, gotta break the bad news to my affectionate otaku readership (I know you exist, I can smell you all the way here):
Dr Dave is leaving Japan!
The Marvellously Entertaining World of Kanjis
Clicking through some stuff this morning, I stumbled upon somebody’s account of life in China, and in particular, a funny observation about hanzis:
Turning now to Chinese characters: We are learning them again at last, and many make me pleased. The character for “to endure” is a knife held to a heart. A tomb is required to draw “antique.” There are other things, too, of course: the local glyphic idea of “peace” is a woman in a house, while that of “family” is a pig in a house. This surely explains either less or more than it purports to.
Like most people, I too struggle to give more or less apocryphal interpretations to kanjis in order to make them more memorable. Some of my findings are quite far-fetched. Yet, this particular set never occurred to me before (as usual: mouse-over to get kanji pronunciation and meaning):
- 忍, as in 忍ぶ, is made of 心 and 刃
- A woman (女) under a “roof” (宀), becomes 安… Though in japanese, the 安 character doesn’t really hold the meaning of “peace” as in “war and peace” (usually written 平和), but rather a “spiritual, inner, peace” (安心). Interestingly, it is frequently used to indicate “cheapness” or “easiness” (安い).
- A “pig” (豕) under a “roof” (宀), becomes a “house” (家) and by extension: a “family” (家族).
Funny how the semantic oddity has been perfectly preserved in the transition from Chinese to Japanese (commonplace, indeed, but certainly not the all-encompassing rule).
Of course, there are hundred of these observations to be made, and I could probably come up with stories for nearly every kanji I know, but to stay with the farm theme, there is this one classic I really can’t get over:
Japanese kanji for “beauty” (美) is none other than a combination of “big” (大) and “sheep” (羊): makes way for all sorts of weird thought processes when a friend points out a 美人 in the street…
Always bring it back to Tea
Small quid pro quo today reminded me of an old conversation:
Tomomi: But Dave-san, is there really a difference between English and American?
dr Dave: Of course there is. British are civilised people. Americans are ruthless barbarians: they couldn’t make a cup of tea to save their life.
T: Maajii-de?!?
drD: When Americans try to make tea, they use cold sea-water and don’t even bother taking the leaves out of the box. And that’s Boston we’re talking about. The further west you go, the worse it gets.
T: Aa, so-ka, so-ka. It all makes sense now.
Anything I can do to bring greater cultural understanding between people.
Tsukubai
Decent week-end, slow news evening.
I’m sure nobody’s eager to hear the fascinating tales of my uneventful yet appropriately social week-end: birthdays were celebrated, morning were slept in, lazy afternoons sitting in the sun, sipping on drinks and writing physics were spent, ice-cream while people-watching on the steps of Shibuya’s Oy’ Oy’ department store(*) were had… Nothing quite blog-worthy, as you’ll realize: no waking up in puddles of bodily fluids in some unknown street/train station/love hotel, no unexplained whip marks in the lower back, no kidney unaccounted for in the morning. Only routine Summer week-end stuff, minus the drink-till-you-puke and hangover stories.
Luckily, I have just what we need for such an occasion!
And thus, let me introduce our generic cultural blog-filler of the day:
Manga Sucks
First off, let me officially declare Geek Week closed for good: no more stuff about databases, microformats and other cool pet projects, for a while.
Instead, I’m gonna bring a crowd pleaser to the important part of my readership who is currently saving on their weekly imported Poki consumption, to fulfill their teenage wet-dream of a pilgrimage to the fantasy land they have come to associate with Japan in their head. I know they’ve been reading ever since their google search for “japanese upskirt pictures” or “pokemon furry porn” got them here.
Today’s topic is: Manga.
Mangas can be summed up approximately thus: they suck. They suck big hairy giant mutant robots balls.
Now I know I’m causing a lot of grief among the otaku crowd here. At least those who haven’t already gone back to humping their pillows dolls or building that lifesize gundam robot…
Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
Anniversary
Not long after I arrived in Japan, I was introduced to an older gentleman, who shared a keen interests in some European authors and was altogether a pleasure to converse with. That man spoke extremely little English, but was practically fluent in both German and French, while I was, on my end, doing my best to start conveying meaningful sentences through the 15 words of Japanese I had mastered at the time.
I have been in the past ironically referring to “my Japanese lawyer“, and people naturally always assumed I was joking… Well, he is a lawyer. While he should probably have hit retirement a few years ago now, he seems well intent on pleading cases until the very last day. He has, on rare occasions, given me some pro bono advices, repaid in old whiskey and binded european books, which, I suppose, makes him my Japanese lawyer after all.
We once had a conversation about his youth: growing up in Japan during and immediately after the war. The bombing over Tokyo, where his parents lived, got extremely intensive during the last two years. Most of his childhood neighbourhood burnt down before the end of the war. He and his older sister had therefore been sent to some relatives’ house in the country, near a smaller city that had been so far spared from most of the bombings.
As if a million bytes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
A pretty bad week for databases.
After nearly killing a client’s DB yesterday (and spending most of my night restoring every bits and pieces semi-manually), I felt it wise to secure my own DB here. The one that stores this blog. Guess what happened then?
Yea, I blew the DB too. Or to be more precise: mySQL blew the part of the DB encoded in Japanese.
Here again I just spent half my night recovering everything that could be. Unfortunately all Japanese content for entries posted in June and early July is lost for good: not like it had much literary value, but still a bummer. And in case you are wondering about backups: believe me, I have backups, hundred of them… It just turns out that this piece of crap SQL isn’t even able to properly back up an exact binary copy of your tables that won’t screw up when it encounters encodings it can’t handle properly. So every single backup I have, is identically screwed.
My last personal piece of advice to any mySQL user out there, is to stay away from mysqldump do a freaking binary copy of the db files directly.