Cheap, fast sushi bowls right downstairs.
]]>]]>What is the biggest lie you've told?
I've never lied. ;-)
About to see Eddie Izzard!
Funny video where they talk about what my company's name, CA (formerly Computer Associates) means...
Masa loves reading odd stories about Japanese happenings: there are lots of things that are never translated and certainly never make news outlets outside of Japan.
Several times during the day, he'll pop into where I'm working, and without any preface:
"Forty years old man. Three years ago...he tries to steal a dog. Corgi dog..."
So the guy is arrested and sent to jail for 18 months (?!! seems kind of harsh, but I've long ago given up trying to line up Japan with logical conclusions); finally, after doing his time in the choky, he is released and almost immediately returns to the same apartment and attempts to steal the same dog!
The dog is now "missing." When asked, the guy reported that he was lonely and thought the dog was really really cute. I imagine him pining away for all those 18 months, planning his attack. Obviously, he didn't think it through very carefully...
So now he's back in prison.
A sad, desperate, and wicked world we live in.
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God, the news is so depressing lately. I am tempted to just tune out and cocoon myself in books and DVDs, banish news sites from my "Favorites" menu:...rising gas prices, falling home prices, vanishing sea turtles, banks doing belly flops, terrorism, disease, war...where does it all end?
And it's easy to say that "greed" is the cause of all this (and that's the consensus among most journalists, it seems) but it's so much more complicated than that: was it wrong of people with bad credit to want to own their own homes? Was it wrong to think that they could pay those enormous mortgages some day in a vague future? Maybe they made poor financial choices, but these were working people buying their first home. That doesn't seem like greed to me. I don't know: it's an urge I only half sympathize with (buying a home), but it's not like these were 2nd or 3rd homes in Cabo or Hawaii.
I guess big US companies got greedy, but that's kind of how our system works, isn't it. I mean, when you have shareholders demanding not just that you make a profit, but that your profit increase each year, there are bound to be decisions made which are short-sighted and self-serving.
Journalists use phrases like "Changing times" and "Hard times" and I suppose that things are changing and have changed. Gas will never be cheap again. That in and of itself might change North America, but in Europe, gas has been expensive for a long time, very expensive. They managed to survive. And even thrive. True, we have more land and population density is less, but that is easily altered over a couple of generations if living and driving in rural America and Canada just gets too expensive. Anyway, why can't "rural" just mean something different than living 100 miles from your nearest neighbor? Anyway, there are people who live in rural Europe, too, who drive cars. They just drive less.
It will change "car culture" hopefully, something I've never really "gotten." Remember when people would drive beater cars, old crappy rust buckets, because they couldn't afford anything else? Even people who could afford something else often did that. Now we have this idea that your car is some of extension of yourself, that it reflects who you are, which is just stupid. If you have a shitty old car that costs $2,500 this means somehow that you "failed" in your life. That is such an idiotic way of looking at it, but surprisingly common.
This "wealthy European" on some dumb TV show I was breezing past the other night was talking about his $500,000 car and I was reminded of that adage: "That's $500,000 that guy doesn't have."
The same goes for the phone. Or the apartment. Or the brand of shoes you wear.
I think that celebrity culture is so apparent and hard to escape from that we all secretly try to live like we're celebrities. We all want to live like the wealthy, whether or not we have money, because everything around us tells us that wealthy people are somehow better people: they have better hair, they have more fun when they go out, they have better friends, they travel to better places, they drive better cars, etc. So we buy things we can't afford, we go into debt for the things that our peasly little salaries won't allow.
But the fact of the matter is that only a tiny fraction of our population can live like wealthy celebrities. The rest of us have to slog through with our beater cars, crappy old mobile phones, $3,500 second-hand sedans, long hours at work...the more things change...
I guess we have to try and rebel against the system en masse: companies are always going to want us to spend more money than we can afford: they make billions off of our very debt. All we can do is tune out the entreaties, re-establish that line between need and want which has become blurred.
Hopefully, this mess won't all just clear up in the next 18 months and everyone will go back to where they were...
]]>only i could blog creatively about a ball i bought for fifty cents at CVS.
a return to childhood, for a moment.