Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

At the age of two and a half, my daughter, Aiko Cornucopia Nishikawa, has clearly formed a concept of death.

This fact emerged when my wife and I were returning home on foot with our daughter, having just received flu shots at a local clinic. (For me, my first-ever flu shot in my life.)

Cornucopia discovered an impressively large kamakiri lying in the road. My wife asked me what a kamakiri was in English, and I explained that it was a praying mantis.

Since the mantis seemed to be in a bad way, I suggested that it would be appropriate to rush it to the nearest hospital, but my wife nixed this suggestion, asserting that the mantis was dead.

My wife has absolutely no background as a veterinary surgeon, and, what's more, had made no move to physically examine the patient. But she was, as ever, Lady Confidence, claiming, on the basis of a cursory glance in the direction of the casualty, that it was dead.

She mad this pronouncement on the basis of two facts:

a. The mantis was not moving; and

b. It was lying belly-up.

If these criteria were used on any busy beach at the height of summer, there would be any number of unsuspecting sunbathers bundled willy nilly into the corpse wagons at collection time.

As my wife was not responsive to the notion that we should take on the role of Good Samaritan, I reflected on the fact that, in all probability, a trip to the hospital would be useless, since the mantis was highly unlikely to be enrolled in the Japanese national health scheme.

So we walked on by.

A few meters down the road, my daughter discovered a second kamakiri, and this one was emphatically dead. I could tell because it had lost one of its dimensions, ie had been squashed flat.

Although the substrate of Known Reality consists of ten dimensional space, for practical purposes we make do with three, and, if you're a three-dimensional lifeform, then three is all you need. But if you lose one of your dimensions then, sorry, that's it. Curtains.

The praying mantis had definitely carked it.

My daughter remarked on the fact that the two-dimensional praying mantis was dead.

"Shinjatta," she said, a compressed colloquial version of "Shinda shimatta," a statement telling us that this is an ex mantis.

The following day, Sunday, I was in the living room when one of our household spiders attacked, killed and ate a very tiny ant, doing this in front of my wife and daughter. They both saw the whole thing.

My wife apparently decided that it was time to have a Serious Discussion About Death, and she approached the subject by talking about an apple, using the English word "apple" to denote this item.

The talk was in Japanese, and, translated, went (very approximately) in this direction:

"You eat an apple, don't you? And that isn't a smile happy for the apple, is it? But you have to eat the apple. You need to eat so you can grow big and strong.

"And, just as you had no option but to eat the apple, so the spider had no option but to eat the ant."

Shortly thereafter, my wife left the house for a rare Sunday lunch with friends (the first in six months) and I and my daughter were left to fend for ourselves.

For lunch, I cooked two-minute noodles, boiling them up with green peas, a can of tuna and a can of scallops. There were some cardboard pizzas in the fridge, so I cooked one of them, too, in the toaster.

For the sake of domestic peace, my wife permits Cornucopia to enter the kitchen and spectate, standing on a small stool for the purpose. But I, being somewhat accident prone due to my health circumstances, thought it unwise to have Miss Energy Bundle in the kitchen while I was busy with a saucepan containing, amongst other things, a quantity of boiling water. I did not think that would be a good combination.

So I kept the young barbarian outside the kitchen's security gate, and she did not protest, apparently understanding that when I'm cooking in the kitchen we play by my rules.

The cooking went smoothly, since two minute noodles are no big challenge when you've been cooking them for decades, and so food was duly delivered to the table.

And we had music with the meal, Cornucopia having demanded music. I let her choose, and she, being in a "the hell with Humpty Dumpty" mood, opted for TECHNOSTATE, which, as the title suggests, is a techno album, one that I bought a few years back at a flea market held on the terraces outside of Yokohama Stadium.

My wife doesn't like this album, deeming it to be "noisy," which it is.

We had plenty of stuff to do on Sunday, such as blowing bubbles and playing with the neighboring kid's trike.

For a moment, then, the world is at peace, our vital three dimensions intact and our lives, at least for the moment, on track.

At peace, sort of, while the house, bit by bit, takes on the aspect of Battlefield Earth.

Given that the spilt vase did not break, I figured that it would be sufficient to mop up the mess then push the soaking wet chair into the sun where, in all probability, it would be more or less dry by the time my wife got home. I figured that there was no need for my wife to know more than, say, a tenth of what had gone on while she was out.

When my wife got home, Cornucopia's chosen music was cranked up a little loud, but my wife made no comment on the volume, perhaps just relieved to see that the house had not burnt down in her absence and that nobody had been kidnapped by Madonna.

Escaping the Bell

My daughter
Quirks free of norms,
Eludes the bell-shaped curve.
Patiently, I explain to her
That people-poking,
A dead insect the device of choice,
Is not quite etiquette.
Though, admittedly, a praying mantis,
Dead,
Is perfectly ideal for the purpose.

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

At the age of two and a half, my daughter, Aiko Cornucopia Nishikawa, has clearly formed a concept of death.

This fact emerged when my wife and I were returning home on foot with our daughter, having just received flu shots at a local clinic. (For me, my first-ever flu shot in my life.)

Cornucopia discovered an impressively large kamakiri lying in the road. My wife asked me what a kamakiri was in English, and I explained that it was a praying mantis.

Since the mantis seemed to be in a bad way, I suggested that it would be appropriate to rush it to the nearest hospital, but my wife nixed this suggestion, asserting that the mantis was dead.

My wife has absolutely no background as a veterinary surgeon, and, what's more, had made no move to physically examine the patient. But she was, as ever, Lady Confidence, claiming, on the basis of a cursory glance in the direction of the casualty, that it was dead.

She mad this pronouncement on the basis of two facts:

a. The mantis was not moving; and

b. It was lying belly-up.

If these criteria were used on any busy beach at the height of summer, there would be any number of unsuspecting sunbathers bundled willy nilly into the corpse wagons at collection time.

As my wife was not responsive to the notion that we should take on the role of Good Samaritan, I reflected on the fact that, in all probability, a trip to the hospital would be useless, since the mantis was highly unlikely to be enrolled in the Japanese national health scheme.

So we walked on by.

A few meters down the road, my daughter discovered a second kamakiri, and this one was emphatically dead. I could tell because it had lost one of its dimensions, ie had been squashed flat.

Although the substrate of Known Reality consists of ten dimensional space, for practical purposes we make do with three, and, if you're a three-dimensional lifeform, then three is all you need. But if you lose one of your dimensions then, sorry, that's it. Curtains.

The praying mantis had definitely carked it.

My daughter remarked on the fact that the two-dimensional praying mantis was dead.

"Shinjatta," she said, a compressed colloquial version of "Shinda shimatta," a statement telling us that this is an ex mantis.

The following day, Sunday, I was in the living room when one of our household spiders attacked, killed and ate a very tiny ant, doing this in front of my wife and daughter. They both saw the whole thing.

My wife apparently decided that it was time to have a Serious Discussion About Death, and she approached the subject by talking about an apple, using the English word "apple" to denote this item.

The talk was in Japanese, and, translated, went (very approximately) in this direction:

"You eat an apple, don't you? And that isn't a smile happy for the apple, is it? But you have to eat the apple. You need to eat so you can grow big and strong.

"And, just as you had no option but to eat the apple, so the spider had no option but to eat the ant."

Shortly thereafter, my wife left the house for a rare Sunday lunch with friends (the first in six months) and I and my daughter were left to fend for ourselves.

For lunch, I cooked two-minute noodles, boiling them up with green peas, a can of tuna and a can of scallops. There were some cardboard pizzas in the fridge, so I cooked one of them, too, in the toaster.

For the sake of domestic peace, my wife permits Cornucopia to enter the kitchen and spectate, standing on a small stool for the purpose. But I, being somewhat accident prone due to my health circumstances, thought it unwise to have Miss Energy Bundle in the kitchen while I was busy with a saucepan containing, amongst other things, a quantity of boiling water. I did not think that would be a good combination.

So I kept the young barbarian outside the kitchen's security gate, and she did not protest, apparently understanding that when I'm cooking in the kitchen we play by my rules.

The cooking went smoothly, since two minute noodles are no big challenge when you've been cooking them for decades, and so food was duly delivered to the table.

And we had music with the meal, Cornucopia having demanded music. I let her choose, and she, being in a "the hell with Humpty Dumpty" mood, opted for TECHNOSTATE, which, as the title suggests, is a techno album, one that I bought a few years back at a flea market held on the terraces outside of Yokohama Stadium.

My wife doesn't like this album, deeming it to be "noisy," which it is.

We had plenty of stuff to do on Sunday, such as blowing bubbles and playing with the neighboring kid's trike.

For a moment, then, the world is at peace, our vital three dimensions intact and our lives, at least for the moment, on track.

At peace, sort of, while the house, bit by bit, takes on the aspect of Battlefield Earth.

Given that the spilt vase did not break, I figured that it would be sufficient to mop up the mess then push the soaking wet chair into the sun where, in all probability, it would be more or less dry by the time my wife got home. I figured that there was no need for my wife to know more than, say, a tenth of what had gone on while she was out.

When my wife got home, Cornucopia's chosen music was cranked up a little loud, but my wife made no comment on the volume, perhaps just relieved to see that the house had not burnt down in her absence and that nobody had been kidnapped by Madonna.

Escaping the Bell

My daughter
Quirks free of norms,
Eludes the bell-shaped curve.
Patiently, I explain to her
That people-poking,
A dead insect the device of choice,
Is not quite etiquette.
Though, admittedly, a praying mantis,
Dead,
Is perfectly ideal for the purpose.

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

At the age of two and a half, my daughter, Aiko Cornucopia Nishikawa, has clearly formed a concept of death.

This fact emerged when my wife and I were returning home on foot with our daughter, having just received flu shots at a local clinic. (For me, my first-ever flu shot in my life.)

Cornucopia discovered an impressively large kamakiri lying in the road. My wife asked me what a kamakiri was in English, and I explained that it was a praying mantis.

Since the mantis seemed to be in a bad way, I suggested that it would be appropriate to rush it to the nearest hospital, but my wife nixed this suggestion, asserting that the mantis was dead.

My wife has absolutely no background as a veterinary surgeon, and, what's more, had made no move to physically examine the patient. But she was, as ever, Lady Confidence, claiming, on the basis of a cursory glance in the direction of the casualty, that it was dead.

She mad this pronouncement on the basis of two facts:

a. The mantis was not moving; and

b. It was lying belly-up.

If these criteria were used on any busy beach at the height of summer, there would be any number of unsuspecting sunbathers bundled willy nilly into the corpse wagons at collection time.

As my wife was not responsive to the notion that we should take on the role of Good Samaritan, I reflected on the fact that, in all probability, a trip to the hospital would be useless, since the mantis was highly unlikely to be enrolled in the Japanese national health scheme.

So we walked on by.

A few meters down the road, my daughter discovered a second kamakiri, and this one was emphatically dead. I could tell because it had lost one of its dimensions, ie had been squashed flat.

Although the substrate of Known Reality consists of ten dimensional space, for practical purposes we make do with three, and, if you're a three-dimensional lifeform, then three is all you need. But if you lose one of your dimensions then, sorry, that's it. Curtains.

The praying mantis had definitely carked it.

My daughter remarked on the fact that the two-dimensional praying mantis was dead.

"Shinjatta," she said, a compressed colloquial version of "Shinda shimatta," a statement telling us that this is an ex mantis.

The following day, Sunday, I was in the living room when one of our household spiders attacked, killed and ate a very tiny ant, doing this in front of my wife and daughter. They both saw the whole thing.

My wife apparently decided that it was time to have a Serious Discussion About Death, and she approached the subject by talking about an apple, using the English word "apple" to denote this item.

The talk was in Japanese, and, translated, went (very approximately) in this direction:

"You eat an apple, don't you? And that isn't a smile happy for the apple, is it? But you have to eat the apple. You need to eat so you can grow big and strong.

"And, just as you had no option but to eat the apple, so the spider had no option but to eat the ant."

Shortly thereafter, my wife left the house for a rare Sunday lunch with friends (the first in six months) and I and my daughter were left to fend for ourselves.

For lunch, I cooked two-minute noodles, boiling them up with green peas, a can of tuna and a can of scallops. There were some cardboard pizzas in the fridge, so I cooked one of them, too, in the toaster.

For the sake of domestic peace, my wife permits Cornucopia to enter the kitchen and spectate, standing on a small stool for the purpose. But I, being somewhat accident prone due to my health circumstances, thought it unwise to have Miss Energy Bundle in the kitchen while I was busy with a saucepan containing, amongst other things, a quantity of boiling water. I did not think that would be a good combination.

So I kept the young barbarian outside the kitchen's security gate, and she did not protest, apparently understanding that when I'm cooking in the kitchen we play by my rules.

The cooking went smoothly, since two minute noodles are no big challenge when you've been cooking them for decades, and so food was duly delivered to the table.

And we had music with the meal, Cornucopia having demanded music. I let her choose, and she, being in a "the hell with Humpty Dumpty" mood, opted for TECHNOSTATE, which, as the title suggests, is a techno album, one that I bought a few years back at a flea market held on the terraces outside of Yokohama Stadium.

My wife doesn't like this album, deeming it to be "noisy," which it is.

We had plenty of stuff to do on Sunday, such as blowing bubbles and playing with the neighboring kid's trike.

For a moment, then, the world is at peace, our vital three dimensions intact and our lives, at least for the moment, on track.

At peace, sort of, while the house, bit by bit, takes on the aspect of Battlefield Earth.

Given that the spilt vase did not break, I figured that it would be sufficient to mop up the mess then push the soaking wet chair into the sun where, in all probability, it would be more or less dry by the time my wife got home. I figured that there was no need for my wife to know more than, say, a tenth of what had gone on while she was out.

When my wife got home, Cornucopia's chosen music was cranked up a little loud, but my wife made no comment on the volume, perhaps just relieved to see that the house had not burnt down in her absence and that nobody had been kidnapped by Madonna.

Escaping the Bell

My daughter
Quirks free of norms,
Eludes the bell-shaped curve.
Patiently, I explain to her
That people-poking,
A dead insect the device of choice,
Is not quite etiquette.
Though, admittedly, a praying mantis,
Dead,
Is perfectly ideal for the purpose.

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

Death Concept at Age Two and a Half

At the age of two and a half, my daughter, Aiko Cornucopia Nishikawa, has clearly formed a concept of death.

This fact emerged when my wife and I were returning home on foot with our daughter, having just received flu shots at a local clinic. (For me, my first-ever flu shot in my life.)

Cornucopia discovered an impressively large kamakiri lying in the road. My wife asked me what a kamakiri was in English, and I explained that it was a praying mantis.

Since the mantis seemed to be in a bad way, I suggested that it would be appropriate to rush it to the nearest hospital, but my wife nixed this suggestion, asserting that the mantis was dead.

My wife has absolutely no background as a veterinary surgeon, and, what's more, had made no move to physically examine the patient. But she was, as ever, Lady Confidence, claiming, on the basis of a cursory glance in the direction of the casualty, that it was dead.

She mad this pronouncement on the basis of two facts:

a. The mantis was not moving; and

b. It was lying belly-up.

If these criteria were used on any busy beach at the height of summer, there would be any number of unsuspecting sunbathers bundled willy nilly into the corpse wagons at collection time.

As my wife was not responsive to the notion that we should take on the role of Good Samaritan, I reflected on the fact that, in all probability, a trip to the hospital would be useless, since the mantis was highly unlikely to be enrolled in the Japanese national health scheme.

So we walked on by.

A few meters down the road, my daughter discovered a second kamakiri, and this one was emphatically dead. I could tell because it had lost one of its dimensions, ie had been squashed flat.

Although the substrate of Known Reality consists of ten dimensional space, for practical purposes we make do with three, and, if you're a three-dimensional lifeform, then three is all you need. But if you lose one of your dimensions then, sorry, that's it. Curtains.

The praying mantis had definitely carked it.

My daughter remarked on the fact that the two-dimensional praying mantis was dead.

"Shinjatta," she said, a compressed colloquial version of "Shinda shimatta," a statement telling us that this is an ex mantis.

The following day, Sunday, I was in the living room when one of our household spiders attacked, killed and ate a very tiny ant, doing this in front of my wife and daughter. They both saw the whole thing.

My wife apparently decided that it was time to have a Serious Discussion About Death, and she approached the subject by talking about an apple, using the English word "apple" to denote this item.

The talk was in Japanese, and, translated, went (very approximately) in this direction:

"You eat an apple, don't you? And that isn't a smile happy for the apple, is it? But you have to eat the apple. You need to eat so you can grow big and strong.

"And, just as you had no option but to eat the apple, so the spider had no option but to eat the ant."

Shortly thereafter, my wife left the house for a rare Sunday lunch with friends (the first in six months) and I and my daughter were left to fend for ourselves.

For lunch, I cooked two-minute noodles, boiling them up with green peas, a can of tuna and a can of scallops. There were some cardboard pizzas in the fridge, so I cooked one of them, too, in the toaster.

For the sake of domestic peace, my wife permits Cornucopia to enter the kitchen and spectate, standing on a small stool for the purpose. But I, being somewhat accident prone due to my health circumstances, thought it unwise to have Miss Energy Bundle in the kitchen while I was busy with a saucepan containing, amongst other things, a quantity of boiling water. I did not think that would be a good combination.

So I kept the young barbarian outside the kitchen's security gate, and she did not protest, apparently understanding that when I'm cooking in the kitchen we play by my rules.

The cooking went smoothly, since two minute noodles are no big challenge when you've been cooking them for decades, and so food was duly delivered to the table.

And we had music with the meal, Cornucopia having demanded music. I let her choose, and she, being in a "the hell with Humpty Dumpty" mood, opted for TECHNOSTATE, which, as the title suggests, is a techno album, one that I bought a few years back at a flea market held on the terraces outside of Yokohama Stadium.

My wife doesn't like this album, deeming it to be "noisy," which it is.

We had plenty of stuff to do on Sunday, such as blowing bubbles and playing with the neighboring kid's trike.

For a moment, then, the world is at peace, our vital three dimensions intact and our lives, at least for the moment, on track.

At peace, sort of, while the house, bit by bit, takes on the aspect of Battlefield Earth.

Given that the spilt vase did not break, I figured that it would be sufficient to mop up the mess then push the soaking wet chair into the sun where, in all probability, it would be more or less dry by the time my wife got home. I figured that there was no need for my wife to know more than, say, a tenth of what had gone on while she was out.

When my wife got home, Cornucopia's chosen music was cranked up a little loud, but my wife made no comment on the volume, perhaps just relieved to see that the house had not burnt down in her absence and that nobody had been kidnapped by Madonna.

Escaping the Bell

My daughter
Quirks free of norms,
Eludes the bell-shaped curve.
Patiently, I explain to her
That people-poking,
A dead insect the device of choice,
Is not quite etiquette.
Though, admittedly, a praying mantis,
Dead,
Is perfectly ideal for the purpose.

Free Legal Mp3 Downloads

Free Legal Mp3 Downloads

When I went in search of free legal mp3 downloads, my Google searches were initially frustrated by the fact that, in large measure, the sites which have captured terms such as "free mp3s" are fraudulent, and do not have what they purport to offer.

Having gotten frustrated by clicking my was through advertising hell in the search for non-existent mp3s, I blogged about the problem, and got help from people who were kind enough to send me links. Some of the links were, of course, broken, that being the nature of the Internet, but with help from the wider world I did make progress on the free mp3 problem.

I found and have sampled the large archives of the site WWW.SOUNDCLICK.COM, which hosts the mp3s of many bands and artists. Some of the music is available for free download and some for sale. Every imaginable kind of music is on the site, with the quality ranging from the exceptionally good to the laughably bad.

Some of the free mp3s can be downloaded without formalities but some require you to go through a free signup procedure, for which you will need to supply a valid email address.

My take on SoundClick.com is that it would be the natural site of choice for any band which is still at the "aspirational" level, as it's clearly a band-centered site, with bands able to post (for download or for sale) not just their mp3s but a bunch of other stuff as well, for example information about the band and song lyrics.

Another site with a large archive of free downloadable mp3s is mp3-center.org. If you go there, you can enter the archive by clicking on the link, top left, which says FREE MP3 ARCHIVE. I downloaded a sample mp3 just to make sure that this site works, but at present have no idea how to go about finding what is good, bad or indifferent in any of the alphabetically-ordered pages.

The site gives you no guidance.

Intelligent guidance is provided by webmaster Brown of www.ecbrown.org/textlinks.html, where there are links to online mp3s.

Following one of these links I downloaded an entire album, WARM COURSING BLOOD by Ian Nagoski, electronic music which is probably not to everyone's taste.

Since Brown is enthusiastic about this artist, I thought I'd give the album a couple of whirls to see if it would grow on me, but so far it hasn't.

I downloaded Nagoski's album from the spartan page at

phobos.server.com/ian_nagoski/

To circumvent frustrating forays into the wild unknown, Brown's page would be better than either SoundClick.com or mp3-center.org.

Because I am visually impaired, I was very interested when someone sent me a link to the archive of audio books that Project Gutenberg has available for free download. The link is:

www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project

Here there is a stash of free audio books.

The Gutenberg page gives thanks to another site, www.audiobooksforfree.com.

The link for that is simply:

www.audiobooksforfree.com

This site has free downloads, and I downloaded ALICE IN WONDERLAND, available as a set of eleven files at 8 kbs/sec. This is very poor wound quality, but the site deems it to be "bearable," and, after I had gotten used to the badly-tuned-radio effect and the background hum, I found "bearable" to be the case.

If you want better quality audio, you have to pay for it, either paying by the download (prices seem to range from about US $2 to US $7, depending on what quantity you want), or by paying US $100 for a one-year membership which gives you the right to better-quality audio downloads, or by splashing out and spending US $120 to buy the site's entire audio archive in mp3 form on DVD.

If you're strapped for cash, this site will let you have free audio books, books which have been read by human beings who know what they are doing. Even the free downloads do not carry audio ads. And some of the free stuff is at better quality, for example some stuff about Chinese legends, WHITE COW, for which the download was in the form of mp3 files at 16 kb/sec, which sounds a bit like someone speaking in a marble bathroom, which the site bills as "tolerable," and which is certainly much better than the ALICE quality.



Whether you go for the free option or opt to pay for better-quality stuff, I recommend this site.



When you first attempt to download something, which you do by clicking on the button for agreeing to the copyright terms, you are confronted by a signup form. But for this you only need to invent two pieces of information: a username and a password.

If you want to provide extra information, such as your true name, email address and telephone number and so forth, then the site gives you that option, but doing so is not compulsory.

Having gotten this far, I'm satisfied with progress to date, particularly with the discovery of the online audio books. I wasn't thinking about audio books when I went looking for free mp3s but, now that I've been directed to where they've been hiding out, I'm glad to have found them.

My thanks to all those people who generously sent me links, including those whose links, unfortunately, did not pan out.

Drilling for Oil in Yokohama, Japan

Drilling for Oil in Yokohama, Japan

Sunday 22 October 2006, my two-year-old daughter Cornucopia spent part of the afternoon drilling for oil in the desert.

This being Japan, where space is at a premium, it was a titchy little desert, a scrap of sand tucked away in a sidestreet near the supermarket. But it was authentically hot and Cornucopia was out in the sun for a long time.

In the evening, at the dinner table, Cornucopia complained of pain in her eye. Then it turned out that the pain was not actually in her eye but in her head.

My wife is, as a rule, the one who is best at keeping track of my daughter's condition, but on this occasion I easily diagnosed the probable cause of my daughter's distress, naming it as dehydration.

My wife agreed that this was a reasonable supposition and, water having been given, our daughter was soon as right as rain.

My insight into my daughter's condition stemmed not from the rudimentary medical training that I had all those years ago back when I was a part-time medical assistant in the army but from my own experiences with thirst.

Although I survived six cycles of high-dosage chemotherapy, in consequence of which I lived rather than died, the chemo seems to have trashed my body chemistry. I start feeling thirsty any time I am put under stress and I feel a need to drink water through the day.

I generally start the day by drinking two large mugs of tea at breakfast time. I always get into the same carriage at the station, and get off at Waniguchi Station precisely where the drinking fountain is. As a matter of routine, I drink sixteen mouthfuls of water, this when I get off the train at 0925.

Before I start teaching my first class at 1000, I drink another six mouthfuls of water. And, after each 40-minute lesson, I routinely plunge into the toilet to get another six mouthfuls of faucet water from the basin.

Just in case, I carry around a bottle of drinking water.

While my daughter was wild catting in the desert, seeking oil, my wife used my water bottle to transport water from a nearby public drinking fountain to the hole in which my daughter's oil rig was set up.

The rig was not hers. Rather, it had been abandoned by some rich kid (by global standards all kids in Japan are rich) and it was a pretty neat toy. The idea is that there's oil in whatever hole you're prospecting for (with water standing in if mum doesn't have cans of oil she can pour into the hole) and, all going well, the theory of the toy seems to be that you should successfully pump oil (or its substitute, water) out of the sand.

But all Cornucopia's pumping resulted in nothing, because the portion of Japan's potable water supply that we were pouring into the desert vanished tracelessly into the sands.

Before tackling the day's oil explorations, we ate at a ramen restaurant, "ramen" being noodles. This was about Cornucopia's fifth restaurant experience (though on one of the four earlier occasions she had slept right through the meal, so that one doesn't really count) and, this time, she did not do gauche things like crawl under the table.

My wife had purchased a ticket for a child's meal from the restaurant's ticket vending machine so the waiter offered Cornucopia a choice of orange juice or apple juice. Without hesitation, she chose the apple.

The waiter then offered her a basket of toys, cars and trucks in plastic packages, and she chose one to keep, choosing decisively, pretty much instantaneously. Chose a truck with a crane on the back.It wasn't an elite toy truck, but I thought it was pretty good for a giveaway freebie.

On the way home, we stopped at the park which has the really big slide, or, in Japanese, "suberidai." Cornucopia played there for a while then we pushed on to our destiny in the oil drilling business.

While wife and daughter were at work in the sun of what had become a genuinely hot day, I, urged by my wife to get out of the sun, took a seat on a shaded bench. There I saw a truck lying discarded in the sand. Cornucopia's brand new truck? No, some other kid's truck, a perfectly good toy neglectfully discarded.

The discarding, intentional or otherwise, of an affluent society.

A married couple I know found themselves living up to the Nepali stereotype of the affluent Western tourist when they, absent mindedly, discarded a perfectly good high-quality camera when they wandered off leaving it sitting on a touristic rock beside a trail somewhere in the Nepal Himalaya.

The discarded truck by the microdesert here in Japan was, whether purposeful or neglectful, a symptom of the kind of affluence demonstrated by the camera-discarding.

That got me to thinking about this kid that Madonna wants to adopt from Africa. Apparently there's been a bit of a stink about it from human rights organizations.

I can see why, from the point of view of political correctness, this is a no-no. Rich white woman from an affluent country goes to a poor country and hijacks a kid (presumably a black kid) straight out of that country.

But, thinking about that, as I sat in the park, I found that I was on Madonna's side.

Although I have forgotten the name of the country, the name of the presumably black kid and the name of the kid's father, I did read about the situation in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE recently, and it seems that the father is in favor of the deal.

The father, a poor man, was left without childcare help when his wife died, and decided that his son's best option was to be consigned to the local orphanage, where the child has been languishing ever since.

The father thinks it would be good for his son if his son was to be adopted by Madonna. And the father asks: where were all these human rights people when his son was sitting in the orphanage? Who was concerned about his son's fate then?

Thinking about this situation, if I was the impoverished father of a motherless child in a brutally poor nation somewhere in Africa, and if my son had the opportunity to grow up in the household of a middle-aged millionaire, I'd want my son to end up growing up in Madonna's household.

And if I was the son then I'd want that option for myself.

And if my own daughter were to face the bleak prospect of growing up in a Japanese orphanage or being adopted into Madonna's household, then I'd want her, too, to be taken in by Madonna.

Madonna is not a kid. She's a woman who has entered into her middle age, and I'm sure she knows the difference between buying a cute puppy dog from the local pet shop and taking on the responsibilities of a kid.

In fact, I think it's a gutsy thing for Madonna to do, and I hope, if only for the sake of the father of this kid otherwise destined to grow up in an orphanage in Africa, that Madonna's plan pans out for her.

So that's part of what I thought about on our family Sunday, the world for the moment at peace, and our lives, it seems, on track.

The last time we drank wine, which was either Friday or Saturday (my memory is really terrible) my wife made a toast.

"We survived," was the toast.

I have not been keeping track, but it seems that we have been back in Japan for six months. And, yes, it seems that we have indeed survived.

A closing note on a medical issue. I've written in this blog entry about my own recurrent thirst in the aftermath of chemotherapy. I have a reason for this thirst. My body was poisoned, deliberately and systematically, and for a long time, and consequences of one kind or another are to be expected.

For people who are otherwise in good health, however, and who have not been chemically damaged, it should be noted that unexplained and persistent thirst is sometimes symptomatic of diabetes. Something, then, that should be taken to the doctor and checked out.

Living a Visually Impaired Life

Living a Visually Impaired Life

One of my students recently criticized me in front of three other students. Her complaint was that I had failed to remember her name, despite having taught her on several occasions.

I had her name written down in my notebook, just as I had the names of the other students written down, but I did not recognize her face for the simple reason that I could not see it.

In class, I wear my reading spectacles, which are sharply focused on the exact distance at which I read. This pulls even the finest print in the company's textbook into focus, but throws the rest of the world out of focus, so the faces of my students are just a blurred jumble.

I habitually wear my reading spectacles all through the working day, which, for me, is only three hours long, because on a couple of occasions early in my teaching at Waniguchi Gakko I dropped my spectacles, having popped them into my shirt pocket so I could see the surrounding environment clearly while I was moving from the teacher's room to the upstairs classrooms.

Having been attacked by the student, I took off my reading glasses so I could have a good look at her face, and beside her name I wrote "ugly old bat" so I would remember her. But I wrote it in the simple variety of shorthand which I learnt long ago on a journalism course, so my message was inaccessible to her.

I then realized that I'd better start learning these people's names, or, more exactly, had better start learning to match their names to their faces. So I've started making it a rule to take off my reading glasses when the students are engaged in other activities, such as debating each other, and studying their faces.

Once I've taken off my spectacles then I can (to the extent that my damaged eyes can see) everything which is further away than my outstretched arm.

My eyesight is okay for getting through the working day, though I occasionally bump into chairs which other teachers have left lying in the middle of the narrow teacher's room, and on one occasion I actually sat on another teacher. Didn't see that he had taken my favorite chair.

I'm usually first into the teacher's room so I make a point of shoving spare chairs up to the far end of the room.

I also recently inadvertently sat on someone in a commuter train going home. The guy, startled, threw up his hands to ward me off before I actually landed in his lap, and since then I've made the habit of sweeping the presumed free space with my hand before I drop my body weight into it.

Yesterday, being in a hurry, having been delayed at the end of my working day by two people, one a student who wanted to know how to improve his listening skills and he other Wanigakko's one remaining trainer.

Being in a hurry, I ended up walking slap bang into a concrete pillar which I failed to see, and ended up with a scab on my forehead which my wife noticed at dinner time.

However, usually I'm not in a hurry and I'm traversing known territory, so as a rule I don't have accidents.

The trainer wanted to talk to me about my holiday requests for Friday December 1st and Monday December 4th. Would it be possible for me to work at Waniguchi Gakko on those days?

I explained that it would be totally impossible for me to work on either of those days, as I would be going to hospital, and hospitals control your schedule, not vice versa, and you never know how the timings are going to work out.

He accepted that.

On the Friday, I will have yet another magnetic resonance imaging scan to see if my decayed brain has decayed any further. I will also meet with my ophthalmologist.

The last time I went to Meijin Hospital, I had a bunch of tests which my ophthalmologist had scheduled.

One was an eye chart test. The second was a visual field test, this one done not with the "click-when-you-see-the-flashing-light" technique that I was familiar with but with a light that came snaking in from the margins of your field of vision, emerging unpredictably from assorted angles. Again, your mission was to click when you saw the light.

The third test measured, I think, what my brain could actually see, getting an objective measurement which sidestepped my subjectivity. But I'm not sure of this because nobody explained this test to me.

For the test, my eyes were dilated and then something was applied to my left ear and something to my forehead. I can only pressume that the things which were applied were electrodes, since, as far as I know, neither the ear nor the forehead has any visual capacity.

(I am prepared to stand corrected on this point if in fact I am in error on this point.)

Suddenly a blinding flash went off, and my assumption is that the electrodes recorded the extent to which my brain perceived the flash.

I don't have even a fuzzy notion of how this might work. But, when reading AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS, a book by Oliver Sacks, I gathered from a piece that he wrote on a visually impaired person that there does exist equipment which will give you an objective measurement of what someone is seeing, making it impossible for someone to fake blindness in the face of technology's imperial triumph.

After the tests, I got to see an ophthalmologist, but he was not my regular ophthalmologist, who was on holiday. Instead, I saw a substitute, who my wife afterwards referred to as the "pinch hitter," this (or so she alleges) being a term used in baseball for a substitute batter. (I'm not American so I know nothing about baseball so I can't challenge her expertise on this.)

The pitch hitter did not seem to know anything about my case and did not seem to know, either, why my regular ophthalmologist had ordered the tests which he had.

So this was not really a satisfactory outcome.

But the pitch hitter did give it as being his opinion that no degenerative process was in train in my eyes at present, and that was good news.

At home, where I control my environment, my visual problems are generally small.

The big problem I have is with baby poop.

My wife leaves for work at 0730 Monday through Friday and my two-year-old daughter routinely baby poops beween 0800 and 0825. We depart for the daycare center at 0830, and if I deliver my daughter to the daycare center in a baby poopy situation then they will make a note of the fact in the notebook which travels between our house and the daycare center, and so my wife will learn that I messed up.

So I must tackle the problem of baby poop, or, as we say here in Japan, unchi. (For an adult, if you're talking to a doctor about your bowel motions, not poop but excrement, ie not unchi but daiben.)

My daughter's unchi is sometimes smeared, but usually, I'm very pleased to say, more or less spherical.

Ezelota Lazamora tells us that if the unchi is spherical then this is a sign of high intelligence. She delivers this information in her book SOCIALIZING THE ELITE EMBRYO, in which she writes that "the unchi of the hyperintelligent child should be taken as a treasured sign if it is spherical, because mastery of the spherical form is a sign of the precocious embryo's mastery of her world."

I'm glad, then, to see a spherical (or more or less spherical) ball of unchi sitting in the diaper. (Or, as we say in New Zealand, the nappy.)

But there is a problem with this elite sphericality.

Smeared unchi, being plastered to the paperwork of the diaper, will not plop forth into the wider universe. But a ball of spherical unchi happily will, if you let it.

And that's a problem for me because, if it has plopped free, which it sometimes does, I can't see where the brown of the wooden floor merges into the brown of stinky little smears of unchi. So cleaning up becomes a problem.

Consequently, I've gotten very, very careful about tearing open the diaper.

My wife has also taught me that to clean up my daughter properly I should get her to stand up on all fours, not try to clean her while she is lying face down on a cushion.

I know that deunchification is part of the morning routine, so I can plan for it and avoid mishaps.

I can control my environment.

I can also control my environment, to an extent, on my computer, but a lot of Internet sites have been put together with absolutely no regard for visual ergonomics, and I sometimes hit trouble online.

Recently I've been looking for free mp3s online, which is difficult because most sites which advertize that they offer free mp3s either

(a) have mp3s that you can listen to online but cannot download, which does not interest me, or

(b) are cunningly engineered to look as if they have mp3s so you click round in frustration, being exposed to all manner of ads while you click, without ever finding any mp3s, downloadable or otherwise.

I've tried to play "smarter animal" with Google searches, but nothing I've tried seems to work.

As an example, I'd seen online that you can get the Bible in mp3 format. I recently downloaded the text of PARADISE LOST and I thought it would be nice to listen to this through my earphones rather than to try to read it. So I did a search for "paradise lost mp3". And got a bunch of sites offering to sell you mp3s for a modern music group named PARADISE LOST.

So I refined the search by adding the words "John Milton," only to get a bunch of sites telling me that name of this modern music group was inspired by the poem PARADISE LOST written by John Milton.

I did find one site which does have a selection of free mp3s, this being SoundClick.com, and I've been exploring this huge, sprawling site slowly, and plan, at some stage in the futute, to upload a page which will explain how to access some of the stuff on the site.

But, after a lot of searching, I failed to find a second free site with a substantial archive of mp3s. Someone did send me a link to "all the music of Mozart" but the link proved to be broken. I did go to the BBC to see if they had any mp3s and found that, currently, they don't. They did recently experiment with offering Beethoven downloads, but that experiment has run its course and they have no plans to repeat it for the moment.

Finally, I decided to subscribe to a free newsletter which purported to offer a list of sites which have free, legal, downloadable mp3s. As expected, the newsletter, when it arrived, was trying to sell me on something, but it did include a list of mp3 sites.

And, though the first few that I sampled did not pan out, one did, and that was

www.mp3-center.org

I clicked on the link at the top left, FREE MP3 ARCHIVE, and got through to what seemed to be page after page of free, legal, downloadable mp3s.

I experimented by downloading one, and it downloaded just fine, and I played it okay.

There are two problems with this site.

One, there is no easy way fot the uninitiated stranger to know what is worth looking at, though they do have a link for the most popular mp3s on the site, which I haven't explored yet.

The other problem is visual ergonomics.

The font for the links is small and it's a pale blue and I can hardly make it out even if I use a magnifying glass.

Then I remembered, vaguely, that browsers can be modified. So, using Mozilla, I went EDIT -> PREFERENCES, clicked on the plus sign that unfolded APPEARANCE and saw an option for COLOR.

I set my default color for links to black, and consequently my world became more monochrome than it was. I also used VIEW -> TEXT ZOOM to boost the font to 200 percent.

For some sites this will not work because the webmaster, indifferent to the needs of people who are not young and sharp-eyed, has engineered the site so you are forced to view it at a font size which presumably works just fine for him but which may be unworkable for you.

So my search for free mp3s has resulted in an improvement in my Internet experience, because all the links on all the sites I view are now sharper.

I also, a couple of weeks ago, remembered that Mozilla's email facility had a spam option. Once you've marked incoming junk email as JUNK, you can set Mozilla to automatically remove your spam to the directory of your choice, and then most of your junk email does not arrive in your inbox.

Or, more exactly, it all appears, then is sent, moments later, into the dumping directory which you have chosen for it.

As indicated above, I hope to eventually upload to the Internet a page which has links to a decent archive of free and legal downloadable mp3s. But so far I only have two sites that I know of, SoundClick.com and www.mp3-center.org.

Someone did kindly send me a link to a site where you can download mp3s from Fat Freddy's Drop, if you go through a slightly technical process to get at them, but, having thought about this, I've come to the conclusion that, because the process you have to go through is technical, maybe you're not supposed to be downloading those mp3s in the first place, so I'm not planning to feature a link to that site on my projected "free mp3s" page.

Meantime, if you're interested, at the foot of this blog entry there's the URL for a direct link to a SoundClick.com page where you can freely download a couple of contemporary classical music pieces by a modern Japanese composer.

His name is Hiroshi Yamaoka and most of his stuff is to buy, not for free. Little dollar signs clearly indicate which mp3s are for sale rather than for free.

But he has two free mp3s on the site and I downloaded both, the two being CHILDREN OF THE SUN and MUSIC FOR SOLO GUITAR MVT.2 DANCE ALONE.

For some of the SoundClick.com downloads, you have to first make a free sign up, which will require giving a valid email address, so you can get a user name and a password. But for other pages the sign up procedure is not required, and what is downloadable you can download right away.

So here is a link to a page with a couple of tracks which I, personally, think are of high quality. You can copy it, paste it into your browser and then download.

For me, when I scan down the page wearing my computer spectacles, which are optimized not for reading distance but for the arm's length distance at which I do my computer work, the little dollar signs, each in a circle, stand out clearly, so it's very easy to tell where the free downloadable mp3s are.

Here is the link. I've just checked that it works as of the present moment, which, here in Yokohama Japan, is 1005 on Saturday 21 October 2006. My two-year-old daughter is at the daycare and will be there until I pick her up (which must be before 1400 on Saturday) and my wife has gone out for a massage (therapeutic massage being a big and entirely respectable part of Japanese culture).

I've had trouble recently accessing my blog because www.blogger.com seems very slow to load. Today my browser did not connect in a timely fashion so I googled BLOGGER and found a direct link to the login page, and clicked for that.

I was able to log in and saw, for the first time, www.blogspot.com in monochrome, Mozilla having sidelined all the visual clutter of the background, including the photo of my brain that I usually see when I sign in.

This because the EDIT -> PREFERENCES -> APPEARANCE -> COLORS gives me the option of choosing "Use my chosen colors, ignoring the colors and background images specified."

I like it, this new, leaner, cleaner, monochrome world, the web desiger's ego shunted aside to allow pure functionality to reign.

Long live Mozilla!

I was looking at Fedora Core 5 recently, thinking of someday using it, and I see that Mozilla is deprectated in this version of the reincarnated Red Hat Linux distribution. That is, won't be in the OS any more. So if I do grapple with Fedora Core 5, which I think I may do at some time in the next 12 to 36 months, then I will have to properly get to grips with Firefox.

And here is the link to copy and paste into your browser, if you are so inclined:

http://www.soundclick.com/pro/view/03/default.cfm?bandID=361149&content=music

My Christian Daughter

My Christian Daughter

This blog entry was written to go with a photo, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to imagine the photo, because my Blogspot site has been responding very slowly for the last couple of days, and I have wasted too much time already trying to upload this photo.

The photo (which, as I've said, you will have to imagine) shows the elephant in the garden, as seen from the balcony upstairs. It shows the mysterious "fences" which my wife said she would purchase at the garden center, which turned out to be trellises. It does not, however, show the rabbit.

The rabbit is a porcelain rabbit which is out of shot, off to the right, and one day I caught my Christian daughter down on her knees in the garden, eyes shut, and praying to the rabbit.

The prayer she was reciting was the prayer she says before meals at the Christian daycare center to which she goes from Monday to Friday. She has it down pat, and I hear her praying, for example, while having a bath.

Personally, I don't think of getting down on my knees and praying to a rabbit as being my idea of a fun religion. But, that granted, I have no objection to the fact that my daughter is, for the moment, a Christian.

In fact, I believe that all small children should be exposed to organised religion as a matter of principle, and it doesn't really matter what the religion is, whether it's Scientology, the Baptist church or the Reformed Church of Metaphysical Satanic Death Metal.

The point is that if you've never met up with religion before then, later in life, possibly at a vulnerable moment, you'll unexpectedly get ambushed by this wonderful stuff called religion, which you've seen mentioned in the dictionary but which you, up to this point, have never before experienced.

So I see the devout prayers which my Christian daughter offers up to the rabbit as being a kind of mental inoculation, insurance which guarantees that she will not, one day, end up serving the Caliphate as a novice suicide bomber, or something like that.

(On a theological point, the daycare church is a branch of the Protestant church in Japan, and, unless I've got something wrong, in the Protestant tradition you pray directly to God, and you do not go through an intermediary, such as Saint George, Mother Teresa or the rabbit in the garden. But maybe in the local church here in Japan you can direct your prayers to an intermediary, a bunny rabbit or whatever.

I mean, this is what the Reformation was all about, right? We cut out the middleperson bit. We no longer go through priests and saints. Instead, we get our own broadband connection direct to God, and we go one on one with the Big Man Himself, and do so in our own vernacular tongue, not in this Latin stuff which the priests are trained to understand but which we cannot read, write or speak.

As noted above, the photo does not show the rabbit but does show the elephant. Also the grapevine, which is why my wife went and bought the trellises. The grapevine had Caliphatic ambitions of its own, and seemed bent on world conquest, and, after it started spilling over into the neighbor's garden, my wife decided that it was time to take action. Hence the trellises.

When I bought the grape vine, some years ago, I fondly imagined that we would have grapes of our own growing in the garden, and would enjoy them in the summer. But this did not happen, because two-year-old Cornucopia went and scoffed them all, even though they were so sour as to be uneatable, at least for an adult.

As a baby, Cornucopia demonstrated an incredible capacity to eat sour things, once eating half a lemon and then complaining when anxious adults withheld the remainder of the lemon from her. At the age of two, going on three, she seems to have retained at least some of this capacity for consuming the sour, and with gusto.

Cornucopia having eaten all our grapes, we benefited from a glut of grapes on the market in this the autumn season, and did get to eat grapes, though not our own.

At this stage of her existence, Cornucopia is starting to show signs of becoming a rational being. She still, however, does sometimes try to improve the world by the simple process of screaming at it.

This she did after the peach season came to an end and there were no more peaches to be had. She screamed, monotonously, every evening, for some time. Then it was the nashi season which ended, after which she screamed for nashi.

That said, she is at the stage where it is possible to reason with her. Sometimes.

Recently, Cornucopia was standing on a chair (an adult chair, not her high chair) at the dinner table, practicing the art of being obnoxious. Since part of my role is to do my fair share of the growling (my wife does not like to be put in the position of always being the one who tells Cornucopia off) I decided it was time to growl. So I laid it on the line for Cornucopia. In English.

As a rule, Cornucopia speaks Japanese and rarely says a single word of English, but she understands it just fine.

I said:

"Cornucopia, you have two options. One is to sit down and eat your rice. The other is to get down from the table and leave. Choose one. Sit down and eat or leave."

Her response was a single word of English:

"Leave."

I find I can get her to go somewhere by threatening her with this option:

"Walk or be carried."

She hates being carried, unless she is in the mood to be carried, because being carried is an insult to her independence, and she is, at this age, fiercely independent.

Although negotiating matters with my daughter is a hit-and-miss affair, I am starting to make a little headway.

Recently, my wife gave Cornucopia a jam sandwich. Cornucopia proceeded to lick off all the jam then demanded more. More jam, that is. Bread? No, I don't want to eat that bread stuff, I want jam.

I decided to take matters in hand, so I went to the kitchen and got the jar of strawberry jam from the refrigerator. I put the jam on the table.

"Here's the deal, Cornucopia. I will put some jam on some bread. You will eat the jam. And the bread. Then I will give you more jam. If you don't eat the bread, you won't get the jam."

She understood the deal, and ate the first piece of jammed bread. Seeing that I was on the track to victory, I added a rider:

"And you must eat the crust, too!"

She never eats the crust. But this time she did.

I think the deal worked because (a) she wanted jam and (b) the jam was right there on the table and (c) instant gratification was possible if she complied with my
requirements and (c) she understands enough English to get a grip on the deal.

Although she doesn't usually speak English, this evening, when I picked her up from the daycare center, when it came time for her to sit in the pushchair (into which I had dumped her unceremoniously, the "walk or be carried" threat having, for once, failed to produce the desired perambulator effect) I realised she had an autumn leaf in each hand.

"Hapa," I said, meaning, in Japanese, "leaf." Or, if you like, "leaves."

"Leaf," said Cornucopia, in English.

She can speak at least some English, then, and, no doubt, will learn more as time goes by. I do my best to improve her English skills, and I am not discouraged by the fact that Japanese seems to be her dominant language.

I have taken a shot at trying to teach my daughter the phrase "I hear and I obey," but so far without success. But I have taught he the meaning of a countdown.

My wife asked, one day, "What's this time out business?" Cornucopia had been saying it, and my wife was curious.

So I explained. When it's time for me to take Cornucopia to the daycare in the morning, she has a count of ten in which to clip each of the two clips of her seat belt. If she can't manage it, then it's "Timeout!" and I will fasten them myself.

I got in the habit of driving kids along with a time limit when I was team teaching at junior high school in Japan. Give the kids a simple instruction like "Write your name on the handout" and nothing will happen for five or ten minutes or more. So I got in the habit of giving timed instructions. "Write your name! You have one minute! I'm timing it!"

I'm Mister Authoritarian in the classroom, and if Japanese schools went in for beating then I would happily become a child beater. But, in the absence of corporal punishment, time limits are a good way to drive things forward.

I still use time limits in the conversational English teaching that I do at Waniguchi Gakko here in Japan. And, in fact, setting time limits is one of the techniques which the company for which I work authorizes and teaches.

For example, "Think of a country you want to travel to. What do you want to do when you get to that country? Please discuss. You have two minutes."

In modeling this procedure, I gave the following example today, Wednesday 18 October 2006.

"I want to go to North Korea. When I get there, I want to meet Kim Jong Il. I see him all the time on TV, and I'm curious. I want to ask him a question. Why do you never smile? What's your problem?"

I mean, I've never seen this guy smile. Not once. So what's going on here? He enjoys absolute power, is known to eat very well, and is said to have far more than his fair share of girls. All this and he's got his own nuclear bombs, too. So why doesn't he smile?

I saw a smiling North Korean on TV recently, the ambassador serving North Korea in Australia. He was being interviewed on the street as he was walking along, and he was beatific, he was lit up, he was the happiest man on the planet. Really. The face of North Korean inscrutability had crumpled away, and happiness and delight were revealed.

But the boss man, the living god (that's pretty much what he is, in practice if not in theory), he never cracks a smile at all. Just does his ceremonial hand-clapping thing. Nineteen Eighty Four for real, Orwell's Stalinist nightmare made flesh.

I guess you're all up to speed on the North Korean nukes issue, but if by chance you aren't, here's a recap.

The North Koreans recently tested a nuke. From the seismograph readings of the underground test, the size is estimated at about one kiloton, ie the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. This is pathetically weak, so probably the North Koreans messed up the business of implosion, the initial stage where you use explosive charges to drive together lumps of fissile material to form a critical mass.

Since they messed up the first time, they're probably going to do a fresh test real soon now, and this time they'll try to get it right.

Some years ago I saw a North Korean propaganda animation showing (it was a lie, pure propaganda) a satellite which the North Koreans had supposedly launched into outer space. And what struck me about this animation was that the circle which the satellite was making around planet Earth had square corners. Their computer science was so primitive that their satellite was going round in a squared off orbit.

High tech they are not.

Even so, they have made and have tested, with partial success, one plutonium-based atom bomb. It was an underground test but, nevertheless, released radioactivity into the atmosphere, and American technology has determined that plutonium was the material that was used for the bomb.

The North Koreans are reckoned to have enough plutonium to make (to give you an approximate ballpark figure) perhaps ten atom bombs.

At the moment, however, they have only demonstrated the capacity to detonate a one kiloton device, and it is not known whether the long-range missile which they have successfully test-fired over Japan is capable of delivering an atomic warhead.

As noted above, North Korea's bomb is a pretty pathetic firecracker, good for only one thousand tons of blast. By comparison, America's first nuclear test in New Mexico back in 1945 released a power equivalent to the detonation of twenty thousand tons of high explosive.

The North Koreans have got some way to go, then, before they can unleash the kind of destruction demonstrated by Little Boy (the uranium bomb used on Hiroshima) and Fat Man (the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki).

MOZART THE DECAPITATOR

MOZART THE DECAPITATOR

I was startled to read in the International Herald Tribune of Thursday 12 October 2006 an article touching on the subject of a new version of an opera by Mozart.

The updated version was planned to be delivered to the public in Germany, and was to have included "an additional scene showing the severed heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon."

The name of the opera was not given in the article but perhaps, in its revised version, it is called MOZART THE DECAPITATOR.

The bosswoman of today's Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, deplored the fact that the opera was canceled for security reasons. She is quoting as saying "It makes no sense to retreat."

She wants to go all the way in the name of free speech, and the hell with what people in the relevant religions might think, members of the Islamic community included.

Allowed to do what she wants, she would, presumably, have the thing go ahead in defiance of religious sensitivities. But perhaps she has not thought through the potential backlash from Mozart fans, a worldwide community of which I am a member, a community which has never, so far, had its potential power put to the test on the field of battle.

Although I am not of Germanic extraction, and have no personal connection to either Germany or Austria, I nevertheless feel that I have a stake in the Mozart issue, and I do not see MOZART THE DECAPITATOR as being the right way for Germanic culture to evolve.

I mean, what's next? A new opera called MOZART HEXENHAMMER, featuring Mozart the Witchhunter? MOZART THE TORTURER? MOZART THE CASTRATOR? MOZART THE INQUISITOR, scourge of Jews and lapsed Catholics? A revamped version of Mozart's REQUIEM, severely rewritten and now entitled DEATH MARCH OF THE KLINGON EMPIRE?

Are there no limits?

Merkel has been silent, as far as I can gather from the article, on the issue of how this bloodthirsty revised opera, MOZART THE DECAPITATOR or whatever it is called, desecrates the sacred image of Mozart.

Well, this Merkel dame should, if you ask me, think carefully about the fact that Mozart's fan base numbers in the tens of millions, many of them very seriously committed to the cause. Thousands of these fans are already living undetected in Germany and neighboring Austria, invisible amongst the general population, their membership of the Claque Mozart nowhere recorded in any of the government's computers.

These Mozartians are, for the most part, highly educated people, well organised and possessed of sufficient talent and ability to do just about anything they turn their minds to. Pushed beyond their endurance, there is no telling what they could do.

And Merkel, before promoting further atrocities against the sacred Mozart, should think carefully about the fact that many thousands of members of the Claque Mozart dwell invisibly in her own country. All of them no more than one easy shopping trip away from the local supermarket, stocked as it is with an affluent society's abundant supply of user-friendly household chemicals, extremely versatile if you know what to do with them.

In local news, here in Japan, I'm pleased to say that, so far, North Korea has resisted the temptation to use its brave new nuclear bomb on foreign soil. The North Korean nuke is the number one topic in all the news bulletins, and will remain so, I imagine, for some time yet.