A week of shite
Apologies for the absence. They fed me pins and made me tell them everything.
I’ll split the last week down into a series of bite-size chunks.
Volleyball: The kuma-gun school staff volleyball tournament is coming up at the end of the month and I have been asked to join our staff team. And so, whilst this last week of practices has been an enjoyable time of back-slapping camaderie and one-for-all-all-for-one type ganbaru spirit, it has also managed to highlight how stunningly shit at sports I am. I should already know this, seeing as almost every day I am thrashed to pieces in Basketball, Football, Table Tennis and Badminton, by Junior High and Elementary students alike - my level of willingness to try new sports in the hope that I might actually be good at them, matched only by the inevitable display of utter pants-ness I flawlessly execute. I’m not sure when exactly I lost the ability to coordinate my limbs and perceive the depth of balls correctly, but I imagine that a lot of this stems from my childhood.
See, I was a fat kid. Fat kids don’t tend to bother playing sports as they are too busy thinking about chocolate, so as a result of this I have bugger all experience. Of course, to look at me you wouldn’t think I was that bad at sports. I am no longer fat - I am rather toned, in fact. A contradiction that my colleagues are slowly beginning to understand. Sensing my passing and attacking crapness after observing me during practices, I was told merely to mark one man on the opposing team during a friendly match - their main attacker. How amusing it was as I SMASHED all “tall gaijin man ideal for blocking!” stereotypes when my cack-footed jumping technique seemed to launch me straight into the volleyball net each time, giving away a point.
“Jon! No touch net!” “I FRICKING KNOW. MY FEET DON’T WORK”
Unsure of what to do with me, I was moved about until they found a spot on the court where the ball NEVER goes. They found my sporting niche.
ADSL: And on the 8th day, the Lord created high speed unmetered internet access. And he saw that it was good. And he downloaded porn. And he saw that it was good. Then he closed the door and took the phone off the hook.
I have been willingly catapulted back into the 21st Century, with the arrival of ADSL in my village. What this means is I can surf for as long as I want, for a price about 10 times less than what I was paying for my monthly dial-up bill. Although this wont affect you, the reader, very much, you may notice is a slightly less obvious amount of sexual frustration in my articles.
Newspaper: Sick of reading online news at school whilst all the other teachers flick through newspapers and assume I am just looking at bestiality porn, I have taken out a subscription to the English version of the Daily Yomiuri. This gives me a much needed window into what is going on in the world, even if the articles do tend to be rather Japan-centric, such as “WE SOLD THEM MISSILE PARTS BUT WE DIDN’T KNOW THEY WOULD MAKE MISSILES WITH THEM” and sports news that comprises entirely of articles about how great Matsui is.
Matrix: Possibly because of an enormous disruption in the space-time continuum, I have managed to watch Matrix: Reloaded at the cinema in Japan, before my friends in the UK. Those of you who live in Japan will know that movies take a very long time to rotate round here from the real world - usually by a gap of a few months at least. By a huge stroke of luck, me and a few friends stumbled into our nearest cinema (60km away) this weekend and there were special preview shows all day. Clutching my ticket and foaming slightly at the mouth, I entered the cinema and sat down to probably one of the most spectacular movies I will see this year. If you ignore the wanky philosophy-lite that the writers have annoyingly wedged in between action set-pieces that are a blatant mechanism to make an already culty film even more nerdy and culty, what you have left is an exciting film with some of the most amazing-bordering-on-gay effects you will have seen. A small part of me thought that the ENTIRELY CG scene where Neo fights hundreds of Agent Smiths was a bit iffy, but the SCOPE of some of these effects is just mind-blowing, even if the actual visual impact isn’t- .if that makes sense.
Java: I have been developing an application in Java and XML that runs as an application on your (mac) desktop and displays the last 5 diary entries as links, all in a yongfook-style interface. Once it is ready it will be added as a download into my new experiments site (not online yet), which will be my online platform for displaying little applications for Mac OSX and iMode that I will be making in the future.
Kobe: I’m off to Kobe tomorrow and will be there until wednesday for the 2003 JET re-contractors conference. We are taking the bullet-train there, so I will most likely have a video to upload when I get back.
