Wackiness Level: Red. Severe!
There'll be some physics stuff coming up soon-ish, once the Week From Hell ends. Also, as Trent Goulding has caught up to and passed me, I'll be updating the book log soon, so as not to look like a complete slacker.
Until then, though, I leave you with frivolity from the "Sidelights" section at Electrolite. I used to read Slate regularly, but it's fallen off my regular Web rotation unless someone points out a particularly good article. As Patrick did, linking to their travel series on visiting Japan.
This is a topic near to my heart, and the author, Seth Stevenson, does a really nice job describing his various adventures, and really nails some of the weirdness of being a Westerner in Japan. I particularly like this bit from Tuesday's entry on anime:
On the seatbacks in the express train to the airport, there is a three-panel cartoon strip. In Panel 1, a frog is reading a book to a tiny, humanoid hot dog. In Panel 2, the frog is driving a truck. In Panel 3, the frog is sitting on a suitcase, crying, while the hot dog looks on in dismay. What does this mean? I'm not sure. (This is a great thing about Japan. At least once a day you see something, or someone does something, and you cannot for the life of you figure out the purpose or meaning. It's refreshing, at times, to have no idea what's going on.)
Other good bits include musings on the lack of addresses in Tokyo ("[P]eople don't give you addresses here to find things (because there are no addresses). They give you schematics."), and reflections on eating in a whale-meat restaurant that strongly reminded me of my own experience at a place that served only eels. He also mentions ba-sashi (raw horse meat), which I had several times (it was the strangest thing on the menu at my regular Friday hangout, and other patrons would amuse themselves by sending me orders of horse sushi to see if I would eat it. It's not as bad as you might think.).
But enough of my yakkin'. Read the whole thing.
Posted at 11:15 AM | link | follow-ups |