Fight! Fight!

Y’see, this is how it happens. You read a blog post the first time and make a good humoured and mildly sarcastic comment. Then you check back a little while later and read a couple of other comments. But, crucially, you than get called away to change a nappy or give the kid a bath or something. And because these aren’t the most intellectually stimulating activities, your mind rehashes and dwells upon whatever it was you were thinking about last.

When your parental duties have been discharged, you return to the post and start to write a reply containing everything you’ve been kicking around for the last half-hour or so. A reply so witty, erudite, and compelling that only the most entrenched ideologue would fail to be convinced by its brilliance. And then you realize that, for all its brilliance, it’s probably going to be close to a thousand words long. There’s a word for people who leave thousand word comments on other people’s blogs. Several words, in fact, none of them good. So then you hit delete.

Offensive Things - Number One

This is another occasional series in the annals of this is how she fight start. Part of my continuing mission: to impose some sort of coherent structure on my thoughts, to rationalize and focus the conversations in my head, to boldly yadda yadda split infinitive rousing finale.

Let’s start with a biggie, shall we?

1. Bottled Water

Water from Canadian glaciers = Import to Japan = Burn carbon
= More melting Canadian glaciers = Foolproof business plan

Snuff

Terry Pratchett, 2011

(January 2012)

The man is a genius. Simple as that really.

The Importance of Context

I know I’ve harped on about this before, but it really is so essential. The prior experiences you bring to any situation inevitably colour your understanding. And as I’ve also said before, that’s good and necessary. That’s sometimes called learning, and it would be nice if more people did it. It would also be nice if more people realized the limitations of their understanding; that their prior experiences aren’t necessarily shared by other people. Take, for example, this oft-quoted trope I regularly hear from otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people –

“Japan is a small country.”

No. No it fucking isn’t.

Leviathan

Call me cynical. Go on, I won’t mind. I’d prefer ‘sceptical’ but it’s all good. Regardless, when I saw a segment on the news the other day it did prompt a couple of less than generous thoughts. The first is that Japanese curry is pretty special, and not the good special either. I'm no foodie purist, insisting that my food must at all times be ‘authentic’; that it ‘just tastes so much better when you’re actually there.’ I love Thai food, but some of the most disappointing I've ever eaten was in Bangkok.

In fact this assumption that “authentic=good and inauthentic=bad” extends across all spheres, and is frequently wrong. There’s a real question as to whether pizzas are better in Italy or America, and I’d happily put Baltis up against almost anything India has to offer. And that’s before we’ve even gotten on to Chicken Tikka Masala.

Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum

I Want a Second Opinion

"According to an education ministry report last year, 8,627 public school teachers took a leave of absence for health reasons in fiscal 2009. Of these, 5,458, or 63.3 percent, did so due to psychological problems.

The number of teachers taking temporary leave for mental health reasons has been steadily rising since fiscal 2000, the report said. While 0.24 percent of public school teachers took a leave of absence in fiscal 2000, the percentage rose to 0.60 in fiscal 2009, it said.

The education ministry official cited so-called monster parents, who make unreasonable demands, and an increasingly digitized society as some of the reasons behind teachers' increasing stress."

The Answer to Your Question is 'Almost Everything'.

Not to sound offensive, but the author of this piece is clearly a fucking moron. That’s how it works, isn’t it? I write ‘Not to sound xxxx’ at the start of a sentence and it’s like a magic wand, completely negating all the xxxx sentiments I follow it with.

This article reads as if the author has just tossed every exhausted cliché about Japan into a sack, given it a desultory jiggle and let the results come dribbling out. Though for the full set they should have illustrated it with a picture of cherry blossom on Mount Fuji, or a ‘geisha’ using a mobile phone because, y’know, Japan is just such a unique mix of the traditional and the modern.