The perennial Japanese photo pose. And me.

The perennial Japanese photo pose. And me.
Originally uploaded by decentred.

Let's get one thing straight from the start. I've clipped the beard. In a move to prove that I wasn't just neglecting to shave, I let it grow without croppage for about 3 weeks with the result that, whilst full, silky and lush, I looked like a full, silky and lush hobo. In Nakatsu, where boho probably means something like 'the stick you use in ceremonial onion-tethering', I took a look in the mirror the other day and decided to have a bit of a trim. I must say, however, the temptation to pop on a 1970's headband and aviators and try to pass myself off as Luke Wilson did briefly cross my mind (I wish, eh...)

Anyway; The other day was Emma N's leaving party/Marcia from the Kao Academy's Birthday, and we all went out to say goodbye. Perhaps the most fun to be had that evening was Paddy's game, which involved us insulting each other (in increasingly convoluted English) by proxy - Kumi passing on each message and inevitably adding her own inimitable slant. One such example: "Err, Jon, You are inflated plastic tentacle-ish balls. OK?" Go figure.

It's still raining here - we went to Joyfull for breakfast this morning, for the final, never-to-be-repeated goodbye to Emma N. In traditional English fashion, I had a Caesar salad at 9.10am, and Em had pancakes with butter and garlic dip. I still don't really understand why, but the coffee was cheap.

After the two days of torrential rain, the turnout was just as expected - 4 people (Mike M, Dan, Paddy and myself) but we managed to have a great time anyway: Paddy 'just one more rule' Madigan managed to create a game so complicated that 4 teachers, stone cold sober played it for over an hour without really being sure of the rules. Here's a rough idea:

Fault One - a fun game for four idiots

1. Find four idiots. Any four will do, but preferably four that don't mind playing in the rain.
2. Find a sandy area, such as a beach, Japanese soccer pitch or children's sandpit, and mark out a tennis-style court roughly 18' long and 12' wide.
3. Aim of the game: Score points by heading/volleying the ball over the 'net' (line in the sand) to the other team without it touching the ground in your half of the court. Two attempts are allowed to 'serve' - ball must pass between both players before going over the net. If service is buggered up by either team but the ball does not go over the net, that is 'Fault One' (to be shouted by all), and another attempt can be made.
4. Between each point, attempt to add a new rule (or a refinement of an existing rule) until the game descends into abject confusion.

Congratulations! You are now a master of Fault One. Why not play in the World Series? All you have to do is to prove you fully and completely understand the rules, and you win. No winners have as yet been found...

Subsequently, after a nice (albeit brief) chat with Friar Luke of Wells Priory, I went to get some food and watch the England game with Paddy, but after eating, the game was so dull that we left before half time (mainly because I'm off to Kokura tomorrow to do some training/buy a guitar). Fun indeed.

...and it rained

...and it rained
Originally uploaded by decentred.

and rained and rained and rained and rained. Seriously, I've never seen so much rain in all my life as the amount of rain that rained today. Like, wow. I mean, people said that the rainy season was, well, rainy, but they never said anything about sheets of water from the sky like the world's largest power shower.
Case in point - I'm cycling up to the nearest supermarket for some stuff, and it's raining, so I'm wearing my snowboard jacket. After i do the shopping, and start to come home, the rain starts to hammer down so much that the pavement is almost immediately an inch underwater. I'm wobbling all over the place, trying to get home, and a big truck ploughs past me, throwing up the sort of water that I assumed was one of those film tricks and could never exist in real life. I'm covered in about 5 gallons of water, which would have been a real arse had I not been completely drenched already.

At least it's good for the plants...

Dragnet

Dragnet
Originally uploaded by decentred.

Not, perhaps, one of the world's greatest artistic offerings, but it's a funny 80's movie nonetheless. We've been watching Dragnet tonight, mainly because Em hadn't seen it, but partly because of its gritty portrayal of Los Angeles life, amidst morally ambiguous, real-world predicaments faced by Angelinos on the edge. Or perhaps because seeing Tom Hanks and Dan Ackroyd in goat leggings will never, ever get old. I can't decide.

Some of the interesting things that happened today:

1. I found a copy of Q Magazine dated January 2002 in the voice room. Not perhaps interesting in itself, except for the fact that I'd read the issue when it came out, but now was interested in completely different things than when I'd first seen it. Who'dathunkit?

2. I did the same lesson three times today. Each time it went very well, and each time it went in three different directions. It doesn't happen often, but when it does...

3. It was hotter outside than it was in work by 11 degrees today. At 6pm, it was so hot outside that the average person would sweat 11 cubic centimetres of water per meter of skin, per metre of distance travelled, and as such would have to replace said fluid by drinking (which at an efficiency of roughly 55.6% means that they'd have to drink about 2.32 litres of water on a trip to the Post Office at 5.55pm).

4. I made that last one up. It was hot though.

5. I found out that not only do I know very little about Cascading Style Sheets, I have very little inclination to learn. Leave that to the lego people...

6. People in Japan don't understand how to play 'Just A Minute'.

Anyway, it's still really hot. I'm off to bed. In the fridge.

Spruce Goose Sluice.

Spruce Goose Sluice.
Originally uploaded by decentred.

Off sick today (not entirely true - I am sick, but, being both stubborn and a bit dim i thought that I'd be ok to teach 8 lessons when I could barely walk across the room this morning), so I've spent the day watching QI and drinking a horrible-tasting (and thus patently healthy) mixture of lemons, ginger and chillies. Ouch.

I took this photo the other day, on the way to work. There's a lot of water round here. It's not like home, where theres not much run-off (spot the GCSE geography term), round here only sewage pipes are underground because of the earthquakes. Power and phone lines are all on poles, and the gas (as far as i can tell) is distributed in huge bottles, rather than being piped directly. This makes obvious sense, but i don't know that it's completely true, because Nova sorts out all the bills in the house - all we do is stick the little reciepts in a box!

This sluice gate is one of many round here - but there doesn't seem to be a pattern to the level of water in the channels - it doesn't seem to be related to the amount of rain, or the level in correspinding places. It may be in order that the newly-planted rice fields are suitably covered in water, or (perhaps) just because there's some bloke in the city office who rolls a dice/flips a coin every few days, then gets roaring drunk and goes round Nakatsu pulling all the levers on the sluice gates.

It's anyone's guess, really...

banzai beer gift

banzai beer gift
Originally uploaded by decentred.

This little fella is one of a plethora of little plastic ornaments which are gradually encroaching on the limited space in our apaato. You can get these little people (and Toucans, tiny dog-pens, little models of Pinnochio and other such nonsense) when you buy certain brands normally beer but some other things too. So anyone who wants any of this plastic crap - you know where to come...

I'm an idiot - I've managed to give myself a cold. I posted the other day that I cycled up Hachimen-san in the rain; what I neglected to mention that I spent the rest of the evening in wet clothes. How dumb am I? I thought it was all a myth about that stuff anyway, and anyway it was so hot that it didn't occur to me that it might make me feel crappy. Ho hum - live and learn...

We went to GoFu last night for Emma's leaving/birthday party, (see flickr) which was good fun - lots and lots of people there, and then on to el Tropicoco for the first half of the England match, which we didn't bother seeing the rest of as it wasn't exactly our finest hour.

Oh, and say hello to rhombus - he probably won't be there for that long (my A.D.D will get sick of him pretty soon).

happy cycling

happy cycling
Originally uploaded by decentred.

I just got back from a looong bike ride to the Hachimen-san peace park - it's about a third of the way up mount Hachimen, and is really beautiful. There are no photos yet, for two reasons; first, it was getting dark by the time we got near the park, and it was raining. Raining enough for the temperature to be clement enough to really enjoy the cycle, and just enough to dampen down the mosquitos. However, it was really beautiful - there are loads of statues and a lovely little waterfall which (despite being almost empty) was pretty enough.

Nice one.

gangsta snackin'...

gangsta snackin'...
Originally uploaded by decentred.

how good are these? they look bloody awful, but the name (which is yet another case of 'great idea, slightly wrong') more than makes up for it. However, I'm not likely to try one; they seem to be the equivalent of those 'microwave in 70-second' burgers that you can get in service stations. Yukk.

I had a really good voice class yesterday; I learned that, in Japan, horses say hee hee while roosters say (and I'm not kidding) Kokk-Ki-Kokk-Ko, which was a delight to have shouted in the voice room by four middle-aged ladies, to the astonishment of the 25-year-old office worker also present. Also, I learned that 'boing', despite being a lovely, onomatopoeic word used when something jumpes or is elastic, is also (again, not kidding) 'the sound made by large breasts moving'. I ask you...

In other (more dramatic) news, at 5am this morning we had a proper earthquake. We looked it up, and found the following information (thanks USGS Earthquake Monitoring Program):

Nst=175, Nph=175, Dmin=622.1 km, Rmss=0.91 sec, Gp= 47°,
M-type=moment magnitude (Mw), Version=6

In real-person's language, it originated about 70km south of us, was 6.3 on the Richter scale (which is strong), and made all the stuff in the house shake. Lots. Apparently, (I'm not so sure) it went on for two minutes or so, according to Em, but (and this I can believe) I slept through about half of it. Not exactly scary; the only thought that was going through my mind at the time was 'Oh. So this is what an earthquake feels like. I wonder how big this iszzzz'.

fireflies and other light-producing stuff

more lights and stuff
Originally uploaded by decentred.

Yesterday was interesting. After a pretty bad night's sleep, I got into work to be confronted by the.loudest.child.ever. Wow. Her laugh was roughly 30% Foghorn, 25% Nails-on-a-chalkboard, 24% throwing-a- bowling-ball- onto-a-pile-of- empty-bottles, 12% it-wasn't-even-funny and 8% how-can-you-not-have- taken-a-breath-yet-you-mental. Go figure. But, my crowning achievement at work was, after a full 20 minutes, getting a 3-year-old girl to say, unprompted 'It's an Airplane'. I don't really like teaching this; partly because it's aeroplane, but that's what's on the card, and partly because other than general language exposure I can't see when the poor kid will next see an aeroplane. That, and the fact that she left the lesson pointing at random stuff and saying matter-of-factly 'It's an airplane'. Job done then...

We did get to see lots of fireflies in the evening, though; Kristen and Cory took us with them to Yabakei, which is a little village up near the mountains, and we went up a little track until we saw some place to sit. Fireflies are cool. It's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't like fireflies, especially ones that are floating round your head. However, a significant growl from the nearby forest and our hunger for food sent us packing after about an hour, back home to watch England play, and to listen to the Japanese commentators try to say Peter Crouch's name without us all laughing. "Kurouchi, Kurouchi, Bekkam des, Oh-en des". It'll never get old, that one...

left foot, right foot

any ideas?
Originally uploaded by decentred.

Had a great little bike ride today after work. Ended up just being Katie and I, and we weren't entirely sure where we were, but a combination of vague navigational skills and having a massive great mountain in the vicinity to navigate by meant that we got back before it got too dark. The other day I stumbled (almost literally) across a cool little coffee shop, and we had intended to end up there - however, due to the erratic nature of opening times it was shut ('what do you mean that you're closed at 7.45pm in the middle of the week? Balls.) so we gave up. Was really good fun though.

It's actually been a good week for the cycling - having been to Buzen City last week (I wouldn't bother if I were you), I cycled round Nakatsu with Emma N and Matt, Katie's boyfriend from London who was over for a couple of weeks. It's funny, really - the more I see of Nakatsu, the more I like it; it's one thing to say that it's a small town, and that it doesn't have the great attractions of the bigger cities, but it's quite another to spend an afternoon riding around the back streets looking (in the words of the boosh moon) at all the fings.

(Jack/Steve - I saw this in someone's garden, and thought of you two.)

cakie hatto for kristen

cakie hatto for kristen
Originally uploaded by decentred.

today was a most productive day for me. I managed to get up early, get to the post office, and get some other boring things done really early, which meant that i had a shedload of freetime in the afternoon to just mooch about. As such, I decided to go for a bike ride - one of those ones which involves getting on the bike, turning right and just keeping going. I made it about 12km before coming upon a Trial Superstore, which basically sells all kinds'o'crap (from 299 yen tees to fishing rods to cake to goldfish to sofas to lamps to watches to, well, bloody everything) and picked up a couple of interesting t-shirts - one says Defunct Eon, and the other is just a whole bunch of crazy alliteration which i don't really understand - "Battliing the Cool? Win or Lose, the following is addressed to you: Our Popular Pepperoni Pizza Pie is Positively the Perfect Party Pick." Whatever...

Tonight was Kristen's Birthday meal - as you can see from the photo she got a nice hat to wear. Sadly, the 'Cakie Hatto' (as translated) was a little tight for her massive head, and she refused to wear it on the grounds of imminent brain damage.