I Think It's Pronounced "Yo-ging"

Seeing as how it uses a different set of leg muscles from cycling, and I'm a larger than average dude, jogging tires me out so much after only a mile or so that it requires a huge mental effort to continue going. So far my distance record is about three measly miles.

Anyways, I just got back from a jog of just short of that distance and noticed afterwards that my mind drifted in and out of moments of lucidity--times when everything was just so plain and understood. Some personal truths were laid bare and other prickly decisions I've been procrastinating on were resolved. Is this the oft-mentioned "runner's high," or what Janissaries felt after a blade dance? No, I doubt it, but certainly something of that nature.

Whatever the case, it's nice to have clarity sometimes.

--Matt

That's Why They Call Me Mr. Fahrenheit, Baby

It doesn't matter that the levels were specifically manufactured to produce a desired effect. It just doesn't matter.

Prepare to be wowed by Queen's Don't Stop Me Now done up with backing sound effects from Super Mario Bros. 3. Not just the effects though; no, the author has tweaked it so that four different meticulously designed levels are being played to the tune of the track. Seeing is believing:

I am all aflutter. Sorry, but I must excuse myself and go take a cold shower or something.

--Matt

I Coulda Been Millionaire!

How's this for a concept: to better manage your appliance's power consumption each household device's has a bluetooth transmitter that feeds info on its energy use to a central control panel that decides when and when not to turn something on. The control panel gives you readouts on your month's estimated power bill and where to shave cost. In time this panel could also utilize flow sensors hooked into water and gas lines to better manage those utilities too.

Sound good? I conceptualized it a couple months ago at Cafe Nomad, down the street.

Unfortunately for me, a man named Seth Frader-Thompson already invented it and started a company around it a couple years ago. His EnergyHub Dashboard smart thermostat will be undergoing trials next year.

Don't you hate having a million-dollar idea and then seeing some schmuck reach the pile of gold just a bit before you do (two years isn't that long in the grand scheme!)?

It's Nuke-U-Leer

Last Thursday I took a nice little Berkeley Hills ride up Euclid, past Cragmont Park and finally to Grizzly Peak Boulevard and the summit. The day was crisp, cool and wonderful--even the Golden Gate was free of fog in the late afternoon. While coming down the mountain I decided to buzz by the Berkeley Hall of Science and take in the vista one last time for the day, but I noticed something that demanded my attention even more. Right in the roundabout passenger drop-off loop at the museum sits the original electromagnet core of Ernest Lawrence's 37-inch cyclotron.

The importance and gravity of this device can not be overstated. Among its more critical discoveries are the production of the world's first synthetically created element, technetium, and the viable refinement process for uranium-235. The latter is the whopper to me: without this device the uranium refinement calutrons at Oak Ridge could not have been built and, along with them, neither would the atomic bomb. That rusting hunk of metal in the middle of that roundabout was a crucial cog in the research machinery that invented The Bomb. Wow.

It blew my mind.

It's strange to come face-to-face with such history, to be able to reach out and touch it. To some people that artifact is either awash in the blood of tens of thousands or a symbol of freedom and saved lives. You never know what you're going to find on a bike ride, for sure.

--Matt

Our Latent Appetite for Blood

Do you recall the first time you laid eyes on Total Recall, the 1990 adaptation (ever so loose) of Phillip K. Dick's short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale? (Funny-to-me trivia: I read that story on a cold winter night in Kusu at Joyfull, where I often went to escape the sub-zero temperatures of my own apartment. If you ever go to Joyfull you'll understand. That place is what the inside of one of Dick's LSD-induced hallucinations might look like.) It was summer break my first viewing, I was maybe 12 or 13 and borrowed the VHS cassette from my neighbor to watch over and over on those languid days.

No, I didn't just continually watch, rewind and watch again the three-breasted hooker scene.

So I came across a YouTube post from a user who has distilled all the gory violence down into a single video coming in at 3:40. 3:40! Of just straight murders! Willikers! Considering the movie is only 113 minutes long that is a sizable chunk of killing. The editor here included every death, even the Johnny Cab exploding and Cohaagen kicking over the goldfish in his Martian office. Genius.

Then, as if that weren't enough, one of the related links from that video are to this fight scene from a campy '80s martial arts flick called Undefeatable. Yes, it's really called that. It's a solid gold fight scene from the knife-licking opening to the memorable one-liners at the end.

Such beauty!

--Matt

Popular in Japan

Pink Tentacle blog has the lowdown on publisher Jiju Kokuminsha's ("Free Citizen") recently released 2009 installment of its annual sixty most popular Japanese phrases list and, as always, the entries are a little strange. I had a good chuckle earlier this year at #3 on the list ("...to Venus on a UFO"), the one that talks about Prime Minister Hatoyama's wife being a loony alien abductee, and got major cred when I told people I knew what a "grass eating boy" was (#5, sōshoku danshi). But really it's #39 that takes the cake for me.

The Yamba Dam project in Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo, is a massive construction project costing over $5 billion that's been on the drawing boards since just after the cessation of WWII. Or, rather, it was. Hatoyama and the DPJ kept their campaign promises to eliminate pork from the budget and this overpriced, unnecessary dam was damn near first on the cutting block. One major problem with the dam--at least you'd think it was an issue--was that the lake it would create behind the dam would inundate an entire town, Naganohara. Oddly enough, the people of Naganohara aren't praising the cancellation, they're ruing it. You see, to keep costs down and public support high the contractors hired local residents to work on the project, ensuring plentiful employment and prosperity in the town. Now, with the contractors out of work the people are also out of work, so the citizens can't help but want back the thing that would have destroyed their town.

This is life in Japan, folks: they getcha coming and going.

--Matt

Japanese Movie Madness

My neighbor from Tottori, Japan, Edward, lent us a few movies from that Land of the Rising Sun and I'm now, after watching them, kind of dreading returning them to him and getting embroiled in the subsequent film talk. Films are, I believe, one of those intensely personal thing that easily rile people when naysayers rip into one's favorite flicks. I admit freely that I'd claw out the eyes of anybody who spoke poorly of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Lost in Translation. The fact of the matter concerning the movies lent to us by Ed is that I didn't terribly like any of them and, in fact, downright hated one of them, wishing there were some sort of bureau I could appeal to in order to get the life I spent watching it back.

In order of least to most unpalatable the movies are Cha no Aji ("The Taste of Tea"), Kazoku Gemu ("Family Game") and Megane ("Eyeglasses"). Actually, I could only stomach Cha no Aji because it was the least bad of the three. Your mileage may vary.

But are they really bad? Probably not. Probably it's just a matter of different sensibilities. From my perspective each movie failed utterly at characterization and plot development. Viewers hardly get to know each character's name by the halfway mark, let alone their motivations or even what they're striving for. Cha no Aji was the only movie with a discernible plot, but even then no introduction of the players was made, no indication as to what they are doing or why. It's enough to make you go blind with frustration.

The key, I think, to understanding Japanese movies is that Western movie-making techniques and devices do not apply in that film industry. The movies are about feeling who the characters are and what they're doing. Since the lifestyle of a typical Japanese citizen is pretty much homogeneous around the country the challenge confronting a filmmaker there is to draw the viewer in with scenes of traditional Japanese life and inject subtle surrealism into the mix. Take Cha no Aji, for example. We are presented with a spot-on typical family that resides deep in the countryside and spends their home time relaxing on the veranda overlooking the garden, playing igo, eating together and doing other slow lifestyle activities. As the movie progresses we discover that mother is a talented amateur animator, father is a hypnotherapist, grandfather is batshit nuts, daughter has visions of a giant version of herself wherever she goes and so forth. Sure, it all sounds pretty interesting, but the way it's presented and the pace of things is infuriating. Oh, I didn't even mention the story threads that are picked up and never resolved!

That movie won multiple awards in Japan somehow. Like I said, different sensibilities.

--Matt