Category Archives: Random

Shop Shopper Shoppest Doubt Doubter Doubtest

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I’m about to enter a camera hunting cycle. This isn’t necessarily good news. It also isn’t necessarily going to end in me buying a new camera.

Part of the reason that I hang on to stuff well past the replace-by date is that I don’t particularly like shopping. Specifically, I don’t like the way that a big a purchase tends to lead me into a temporary all-consuming obsession.

One of the things I’m good at as a shopper is not looking back. By that I mean that I’ve accepted that, when it comes to electronics, whatever I buy will be a lot cheaper in the future. I tell myself it’s cheaper than it was (more on that later), make the purchase and then never look back to see what the price became.

However, in the initial stages of a big purchase, I make a list of basic requirements and then go research crazy. I check specs and reviews and compare prices. One time a review of a camera I wanted was so negative I actually researched the comment and the commenter and found out the problem being described was caused by people accidentally activating the point and shoot camera in their bags and breaking the lens extender mechanism when it couldn’t open fully. The commenter had commented on several different sites using roughly the same language.

During the process, I change my mind several times, have doubts on the specs I require, make a solid decision and start price hunting, change my mind again, have doubts about whether or not I should just keep what I have, and then after running that cycle a few times, make a decision. However, I have learned to impose a one or two month wait before making a large purchase which leads to more soul searching. It also, on occasion, has led to an item no longer being available which resets the process back to the start.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always stop me from making questionable choices, but for the most part I’ve had good luck. My biggest mistake is, oddly, not going big. Because I’m going to keep the item for a long time, I should get the best I can get for the money I want to spend, but that one month wait usually causes me to scale back.  I also tend not to be a first adopter. I wait until whatever tech I want is a few months old and has dropped in price.

The other thing I’m good at is not being brand loyal. I tend to use HP/Compaq laptops because they have a button that lets me turn off the touch pad when I’m typing. If another brand has that feature, I’ll give it a look. I’ve generally stuck with Canon cameras, but that’s probably going to change.

Or maybe not. I may just stick with the gear I have. That’s part of the process, too.

A Culture Day With Lots of Spice

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My first November in Nou-machi, I was drafted into cooking gumbo for an entire town.

This happened because every Thursday night I taught a community class made up of adults from various walks of life. I told them that I liked to cook and, at times, was pretty good at it. I’d even worked in a pizza restaurant for a while.

Because of this I was recruited into showing them how to make a version of Paul Prudhomme’s Gumbo Hazel. I do not remember why I chose gumbo, but I think it’s because Nou-machi is part fishing village and has excellent seafood which I thought would make excellent gumbo. Also gumbo is close enough to curry I thought they’d understand it and like it.

This led to shopping and evening cooking and everyone in the adult English class speaking Japanese instead of English. I somehow managed to pull it off, and the class was impressed enough by the gumbo that it got around to some people in the city office and I was invited to cook for the annual culture festival in early November.

That was more nerve wracking as I had to translate the recipe into Japanese and into larger portions so I could prepare the food. Once again it was a hit and I ran out of gumbo and gave away all copies of the recipe. Even old ladies were giving me a thumb’s up over the gumbo.

My only complaint was that I didn’t get a chance to try any of the other food being offered at the festival because I was too busy serving.

Over the course of the next few years I taught the adult class to make a better spaghetti sauce, peach cobbler, chili, pizza and chocolate chip cookies. Not all of the meals went perfectly, but they were all reasonably tasty. Most of the time it was fun, although I was annoyed that my adult English class always spoke Japanese and not English during the cooking lessons, even after She Who Would Eventually Be Obeyed joined the class.

During my time in Nou-machi, and for a couple years after, I heard from people that they were still making gumbo. If I leave no other mark on Japan, I taught them that much.

Now I need to teach them how to make Andouille sausage. (Once I learn how.)

Waiting For Goodness Knows What

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I’ve mentioned before that although I dabble in fiction, plays are the only things I can sit still for when they’re done live. However, I’ve rarely been blown away by a play to the point I was left speechless. That happened, oddly, in Albania.

First some background. During my undergraduate and Master’s Degree days I was smitten by the works of Samuel Beckett. He’s an Irishman who wrote in French, translated his work back into English (changing it along the way) and apparently used to drive Andre the Giant to school. His works are generally very bleak and darkly comic and feature old men who talk a lot (i.e. me) and are slowly running out of things to say (again, me).

After I got to Albania, the work that most reminded me of Albania (after William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming“) was the play Waiting For Godot. It’s the story of two old bums who are waiting for someone named Godot. They don’t know what he’ll do when he arrives, they don’t know if they’re waiting in the right place, and they don’t even know if he’s already been there and left. All they do is wait and pass the time by talking about random things and complaining about their various physical ailments (which, by colossal coincidence, is pretty much what happens when a group of Peace Corps volunteers get together).

Albania, when I got there, was like that. Things had fallen apart. Everything was broken. Everyone was waiting for this thing called “democracy”. They weren’t sure what it was and they weren’t sure what it was going to do when it got there. They just knew they were supposed to wait for it. They’d been told it was a big deal.

Then, during my second year, a local theater put on a production of Waiting for Godot in Albanian. Because I had an odd connection to the Open Society Fund for Albania (Soros), I managed to score a ticket in the second row. I ended up sitting next to a fellow expat I didn’t get along with very well (well, he didn’t like me much anyway), but the ticket was free so I didn’t care.

Waiting for Godot has only five characters who actually appear and Godot who is only talked about. The set is usually bare except for a dying tree. The Albanian set had a tree made out of pipes and was uncomfortably bright as they never turned down the auditorium lights.

Although it was in Albanian, I knew the play well enough to follow along. At one point, the main bums Vladimir and Estragon are joined by the pompous Pozzo and his slave, victim, friend Lucky. As part of Pozzo’s attempt to impress the other two, Lucky is encouraged to “think” and gives a long monologue that is 90% gibberish (but still more interesting than most State of the Union speeches). The actor who played lucky killed it. He actually got a show stopping ovation in the middle of the play. (I think I was standing, too.)

At the end of the play, the audience couldn’t stop applauding and the guy I didn’t get along with and I were suddenly temporary pals (mostly because all we could say was “wow”). The cast just stood around simultaneously looking uncomfortable and soaking in the applause as if they didn’t know what they were supposed to do next.

I somehow managed to acquire a poster of the event which I still own. I wish someone had made a recording of it.

 

 

The Spirit of the Law is Not the Rule

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All the talk of deflated balls and questionable tactics by the New England Patriots has me thinking about Japan and its attitude about rules in games and sports. Those attitudes can be very solid and yet kind of flexible.

In 1951, for example, Nobel Prize in Literature winner Yasunari Kawabata published The Master of Go which is a docu-drama about a famous match between a young Go player and a fading master. The match turns on a move that, while fully legal, is still kind of dirty.

This idea of fully legal yet kind of dirty also effects the sport of Sumo. In Sumo there’s a move called a henka. Basically what happens is at the initial charge, one of the wrestler’s jumps to the side and uses his opponent’s momentum against him. It is considered a desperation move and is very much bad form. Wrestlers are supposed to meet each other, in this case literally, head on. Wrestlers who do a henka are supposedly reprimanded and get a black mark in their permanent records. On the other hand, a win is a win and if it takes a henka to get a winning record then that’s a small black mark compared to being demoted because of a losing record.

Smaller wrestlers use the move a lot and it’s been argued that a henka only works if your opponent is charging out of control. In fact, I once saw a large sumo wrestler catch a smaller wrestler in mid-henka and slap him down with one arm. The smaller guy was notorious for doing the move which meant it had lost its element of surprise. I’ve also heard that on at least one occasion two wrestlers did a henka at the same time and end up facing each other from a different direction.

Perhaps the most notorious case of legal but kind of dirty involves Japanese baseball. In 1964 Sadaharu Oh set the Japan home run record of 55 home runs in a single season. After that, on three different occasions foreigners tied the record with enough games left to break the record. In each case they came up against teams coached by Sadaharu Oh himself and were intentionally walked from their first at bats. Randy Bass was so frustrated he started holding his bat backward. In 2001 I remember “Tuffy” Rhodes swinging at pitches a full meter outside the strike zone while the catcher grinned at it all. The next year Alex Cabrarera tied the record and although Oh claims he told his pitchers to throw strikes, not a single strike was thrown.

There was a some controversy about these but those of us who’ve been here too long knew that the record would never be broken as long as Oh was still managing. The record was finally broken in 2013, five years after Oh retired, by Curaçaon Wladimir Balentien who would end up with 60 home runs.

All this tends to sour people on sports. Like the master of Go, we are so disheartened by legal but dirty moves, it hurts our enjoyment of the game. At least if it’s our team that loses to them.

This is What We Was When We Was Them

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Around the start of my second year in Albania I got see what I was like when I was still new. It wasn’t pretty.

For reasons I don’t remember, my friend Eddie and I were walking from the bus station past the Hotel Arberia, which was the hotel we stayed at upon our arrival in Tirana and which frequently served as our home-away-from hour Albanian homes. As we walked past, we stumbled across the fresh-faced and still foolishly hopeful faces of the members of Albania 002 unloading their stuff from vans and moving into their rooms. (They’d eventually be assigned host families, but for at least one night, they belonged to the Arberia.)

We immediately introduced ourselves and got a surprising amount of dirty looks. This was probably because 1) we were haggard old vets full of venom and cynicism; 2) they were in denial about what they were about experience; 3) being new, they already knew it all; 4) they were business advising volunteers meaning they really did think they knew it all and Albania was finally getting real help and 5) at least one of us old vets tended to be an asshole (hint, not Eddie).

Our main job that day was to tell them they’d just missed afternoon water and wouldn’t have running water again until around 2-3 a.m.

Later, as Albania 002 settled in, the best of them were a lot of fun to be around, but the worst were always convinced they were the real volunteers and we were just riff-raff that blew in from Italy. My favorite moment involved having drinks with a couple members of 002. One of them was pontificating about how some business volunteer in Russia had complained that although he was an experienced businessman, the Russians had him making copies.

My friend Robert said something to the effect of “What’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t he make copies? He’s there to do what the Russians want him to do.” I thought the guy from 002 was going to burst into flames.

In the mean time I was also thinking “They have access to a copier? Cool.”

Now, of course, I understand how lucky we were to have been part of Albania 001. Even though we were the experiment, we got to be the experts without anyone else around to burst our inflated delusionary bubbles. If we’d been Albania 002, we’d have probably been jerks too. Or at least I would have.

Beautiful Plus Musical Equals Madness and Insanity

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It started out like a forum post from a men’s magazine; it ended with musicals.

During my second year in Albania I had a chance to attend a Peace Corps conference in Slovakia. This involved pretty much the entirety of Peace Corps Albania 001 and 002 flying to Budapest and then scattering to the winds for a few days and eventually assembling at a ski resort somewhere in Slovakia.

I ended up traveling with two friends, let’s call them the Beautiful Miss A and the Beautiful Miss B (although their names are similar they were not related). From Budapest we caught a train to Prague. This involved all of us sharing a berth that consisted of two benches and just the three of us.

My brain started processing impure thoughts and possibilities and ways to get past all the baggage involved in order to act on the impure thoughts and possibilities. (I’m a Peace Corps volunteer currently serving in a developing country. I never thought these stories were real until one developed in a foreign country. Etcetera.) Unfortunately, there was way too much baggage involved: One of them was the right woman; the other was the wrong woman. Instead, we processed through the usual small talk and periodic fits of silence.

Somehow musicals got brought up. This triggered an impromptu karaoke session involving the Beautiful Miss A and the Beautiful Miss B who have apparently memorized the lyrics of every musical ever made and they proved it by singing most of them.

I was entertained at first because both of them were good singers, but eventually the male brain rejects musicals, even when sung by beautiful women. Somewhere during the second act of A Chorus Line I huffed/sighed and earned a “Well, why don’t you sing something you like?” To which I responded “Because I’d rather slit my own throat.” (something like that. Remind me again: why don’t I get invited to parties?). Eventually they ran out of songs and we all got a few hours sleep before our short yet complicated adventures in Prague. (Which are another post.)

Eventually we also made it to the ski resort in Slovakia and the conference.

I don’t remember the purpose of the conference and I don’t remember attending a single seminar. All I remember is cross country skiing with a different friend and almost the entire soundtrack to A Chorus Line.

Steak Glorious Steak and the Glories of Steak

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I’m from Kansas and grew up in Colorado. This means, by default, and perhaps by genetics, my favorite food is dead animal flesh.

My favorite form of dead animal flesh is beef, in all its various forms, from a freshly wounded steer. Cooking is barely required. In fact, when asked how I want my steak cooked I usually say something like “just stab it and bring it to me”. Quite frankly, if a good veterinarian can’t save the animal’s life, my steak is overcooked.

The problem I’ve had when I travel is that very few countries know how to cook steak. The Albanians didn’t; the English just boiled the flavor out of it and put it on sandwiches; the French drowned it in cream sauce; and the Germans, well, I don’t know, I slept through Germany.

The only people who do steak well, oddly, is the Japanese. I’ve even seen a woman from Western Kansas try Japanese beef and then struggle to try to figure out how to tell her father, a cattle rancher, that he’s no longer the best at his job.

The problem with Japan, though, is that for reasons too complicated to go into–short version: an absurd number of steps between rancher and consumer–domestic Japanese beef is more expensive than imported beef. Japan tries to defend its beef by periodically banning US beef and setting odd rules–for example, T-bone steaks are illegal because of fears of BSE. All those bans do, though, is open up the market for Australian beef.

(Note to Aussies: you’re beef is good but since I haven’t tried it in your country, it doesn’t count.  Officially, therefore, Australian steak sucks.)

This means that it’s very rare to find Japanese beef in a restaurant or in the grocery store for less than the price of a new car (more or less). Every now and then local stores run a special and it’s possible to acquire the lower end versions of high end beef at a cheaper prices. I once had Matsusaka Beef steak for only eight dollars or so. (It’s usually 100 dollars a pound.)

Even with a too good to be true price, it was still one of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten.

Tonight we took our oldest to Steak Gusto which, for a family-style chain restaurant has good steak (as long as you don’t go to the one closest to our house) and a very rare all-you-can-eat salad bar that, lately, has been a not-much-for-you-to-eat salad bar.

I cheated a bit, and got a hamburger steak topped with foie gras. (Note: a place like this serving foie gras is a bit like Taco Bell serving Cristal with a Locos Taco and you are allowed to question its authenticity. Faux Gras?) The reason it was cheating is I knew I’d eventually get samples from the steaks ordered by She Who Must Be Obeyed and the girls.

Sure enough, although the girls did an excellent job without much help from me, the steak I didn’t order arrived on my plate. It was all good.

 

Ring in the New Forget You Forgot the Old

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Oddly, after a season that includes the Forget Year Party and special food and lots of drinking, the Japanese ring in the new year with a fairly boring party. Alcohol is involved, of course.

Sometime after the new year, a lot of Japanese companies hold the Shinnenkai or New Year Party. This is a much quieter affair that is supposed to celebrate friendship and team and teamwork. Like all Japanese parties, it is timed to the minute and the theme is “I love you guys. Let’s have a great and productive new year and let’s never forget to forget what happened at the Forget Year Party and never talk about it again. Cheers.” (Something like that.)

In my experience, the Shinnenkai is the only time I’ve seen a break from traditional party food like sashimi, cooked fish, and some kind of meat (a technical term) but even those had issues.

At one party we had Chinese food, including shark fin soup (which is way overrated for the price and the amount of cruelty involved; give me fresh tuna and dolphin any day).

At my favorite party, thoguh, we went to an Italian restaurant in Nou-machi that is one of the best restaurants in Japan especially if you’re there during crab season. Our menu included different kinds of pasta, including the restaurant’s specialty of crab sauce pasta, and lobster thermidor. We also had wine instead of beer, although some beer was served and I kept having to explain that I’d much rather have the Samuel Adams and not the Budweiser because Bud isn’t worth six dollars a bottle. Actually, very few beers are worth that much.

My principal wasn’t a big fan of the food as he enjoyed the traditional Japanese party dishes. He also, somehow, managed to track down a bottle of sake, which I shared as well.

There were no silly games and no men dressed as ballerinas, just a couple extra speeches.

Actually, I think the men dressed as ballerinas would have been more interesting.

Today You Are an Adult So Sit Down, Shut up and Listen

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One of the things that the Japanese almost have right is the idea of celebrating adulthood. Unfortunately, the way they do it is often the wrong idea.

This past Monday was Coming of Age Day, a national holiday where all the people who turned 20 the year before get to officially celebrate their coming of age. For those who may not know, age 20 is the age where “everything” is legal. Specifically this means 20 year olds can legally drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. (They’ve been of legal age to star in porn movies, though, since age 18. Go figure.)

Traditionally, on Coming of Age day, women dress up in expensive kimono and get their hair done whilst the men get a choice of suits or male kimono. They then go to shrines for various ceremonies and, if they are lucky, they escape and go drinking as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, it’s also a tradition that towns hold their own coming of age ceremonies which usually involve dozens of drunk men and women in kimono assembling in a bland auditorium to listen to speeches about the responsibilities of adulthood.

This is where I think the Japanese go wrong. Although I like the idea of a day that celebrates you officially being an adult (perhaps without frisking) I don’t like the idea of the newly minted adults being lectured to like children about being an adult. Having gotten in trouble during a long speech when I was sober, I shudder to think what I would have done if I was drunk.

Actually, it would probably look like an incident several years ago, when several men rebelled by making lots of noise, running up to the podium to take proto-selfies (which used to be called “photographs”) with the mayor and, in one case, fire poppers full of confetti at him. Several of the men were then introduced to concepts like “arrest” and “jail time”. (Yeah, technically that’s more my speed I’m afraid.)

The funny part of all this is, I hated being age 20. I still can’t get my head around the idea of celebrating it.

 

Raise Up a Child and Then Film Them Going

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One of the odd things that happens in Japanese television that couldn’t happen in the same way in American television is the way they mess with kids.

Right after I got to Japan, I saw a documentary about the musical Annie that showed the borderline abuse that the girls were put through, especially if they messed up the complicated hand gestures in once particular song. The director would sit back and basically call the girl making the mistakes a moron until she started crying and then he’d mock her. I saw this repeated a couple more times when the cast changed.

About the same time there were shows that were more violent versions of the games that used to be seen (and for all I know may still be seen) on Nickelodeon. My favorite involved a sending a pair of kids into a zombie themed haunted house (that was based on some video game that had just been released) and scaring the crap out of them whilst they solved puzzles or did dangerous stuff.

At one point they even had to eat things they didn’t like. The funniest boys changed plates sending their zombie guide into an angry tizzy that involved grunting and pointing (which is pretty much how I communicate now). At the end of the haunted house, they had one minute or 45 seconds to grab treasure out of a room that included games, computer games, toys, clothes and bundles of cash. Without any help from their parents they grabbed mostly toys.

Lately the trend has been more gentle but still interesting as Japanese TV steals from Lenore Skenazy  who became the worst mom in the world (at the time) for letting her nine year old son ride the New York subway home by himself. (I recommend tracking down her presentations about this on YouTube as well as her website.)

What happens in one show, called Hajimete no Otsukai (First Errand), kids as young as two years old are given an errand by their mothers. “Go to the store, buy X, Y and Z, take the Z to your grandmother and pick up W, bring W, X and Y back home by supper time or I’ll beat you. You hear me? I’ll beat you.” Well, that last part is a bit of an exaggeration but the kids are given the assignment and some money and sent out. (This video has some English captions to give you a taste of what the show is like.)

Sometimes the trips are just around a couple corners or to the other end of town; sometimes they have to take a bus and figure out where to stop and how to get back. Dozens of disguised camera people follow them around but, as far as the kids are concerned, they are on their own. In one of my favorite moments a girl had to deliver her dad’s lunch to a local museum. Unfortunately for her (and for hungry Dad) the museum had a stuffed festival devil by the door and it took her a while to get the courage to go in.

It’s interesting to see the kids do things I had to do to save my parents the trip (and I’m always aware of the level of reality in “reality” television). It still works, though, especially for our youngest as this is her favorite show.

The kids often forget things or get sidetracked by ice cream and sweets or one kid dragged the bag and ruined some of the contents when the bag broke. There are lots of tears but also the obvious sense of accomplishment when the kids get back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to send our youngest shopping.