The Blog From Another Dimension

We're Back

OK, let's hope that was the last time we're going offline for a while. I still have one domain offline, but at least it won't affect this blog. One can only hope that these troubles do not occur yet again; if they do, I'm going shopping for a new web host.

Web Host Issues

Well, my main web host has been jerking things around recently. They're going through a bit of a transition and have been moving things around, and their method of alerting customers needs serious work, ergo the downtime for teach-japan.com where this blogs photos are stored as well as other issues unrelated to this blog.

This morning I got a warning about shutting down "dynamic" pages, of which this blog might be one, and getting ready to be moved to another server. This means that BlogD.com may be temporarily unavailable for a short time, and may lose a few posts; I might also temporarily lose the ability to post for all I know. Frankly, I don't know if I *can* shut this blog down, depending on what they mean by "shut down."

All this is incredibly bad timing--I finally get going seriously on a blog, and my web host chooses this exact time to start going whacko on me. Rrrghh. Hopefully, we won't miss much--but watch for possible updates on what might have gone missing and where it can be found. Thanks.

Day 3 of the Spain Trip

April 11th, 2003

The next morning, we woke up and felt somewhat refreshed. The hotel (the Hotel Galicia Palace, a very nice place despite the relatively low price) served a buffet breakfast including scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, fruit, cold cuts and cheese, various breads and croissants. After taking our time and having a good meal, we were in a much better state to see the city.

In addition, the weather cooperated with us nicely; despite a predicted forecast of several days of thunderstorms and rain, we got partly cloudy weather with only scattered rain here and there. So when we started out, it was a rather nice day. My father's cousins, Mellie, Margot and Maria Carmen, along with their husbands Amelio, Melucho and Chano, who joined us later, gave us a wonderful tour, and afterwards, took us to lunch.

One thing I noted about Spain is that there are quite a few ruins. Even driving on the highways around Madrid, you can spot many buildings in various states of disrepair or ruin, some looking like they've been that way for a few centuries; Pontevedra is no different. Some of the major attractions of the city are the architectural remains from 500 years past. The first we saw was the Santo Domingo convent, but soon after and much more spectacular was the Santa Maria Basilica, a wonderful and ornate structure both inside and out. During our walk through this place, Karen quipped that the word "ostentatious" probably came from the Latin "ostentador," meaning "I think we can cram one more angel in here." Much more true in what we saw at the cathedral at Santiago the next day. From the basilica it was on to my grandfather's old school.

A word here about my family history. The Poza clan, it is thought, originated from the Valencia area, and by the start of the 20th century my family line of the clan had settled in the Galicia province, in the town of Pontevedra, at the mouth of a beautiful estuary leading to the Atlantic. Pontevedra is some 50 km north of Vigo, which itself is just north of Portugal. The Pozas had the reputation of being the intellectuals of the town, and though not rich, were relatively well-off. They were also liberal, and were anti-fascist and anti-clerical (the Church of Spain had aligned itself with the fascists).

My grandfather, Papa Hernan, established and ran a school in town that, though small, was very highly regarded. There was one issue he had to decide on, however: whether or not to allow a cleric to teach courses in religion at my grandfather's academy. In the end, my grandfather decided to do so. The reasons could have been both practical and ethical. Papa Hernan was a great believer in civil liberties, in freedom of religion as well as all the others we now accept; from a more practical angle, however, allowing these courses would help business, as the influence of the church was strong. This did not sit well with the family, however, and caused a bit of a rift.

The Spanish Civil War, however, swept over everything else. When the fascists took over, the Poza family went through somewhat of a Diaspora, those who survived the conflict and its aftermath. Being anti-fascist and anti-clerical, most had to run for their lives and resettled in Mexico and, as in my grandfather's case, the United States. My grandfather, who had spoken and written openly against the fascists, almost didn't make it. He was put into prison and would have died, thrown into the back of a truck and driven to the mountains where he would have been shot in a ditch. This was prevented, however, by some of the parents of the students at his school; some were soldiers and guards in the new fascist regime. They respected him to such a degree that they took shifts guarding his cell at the prison, making sure that he was not killed.

Eventually, he was released, but he heard that there were plans to re-arrest him, this time taking him to a prison elsewhere, a place where he could not be protected. So he fled through Portugal and eventually settled in New York, where his family (his wife and four children) followed a few years later.

So here we are, nearly 70 years later, a hundred years after his birth in this town, and we visit the site of that school he ran. It now houses some agricultural ministry office, and unfortunately we were not able to visit inside, as it was Holy Week when we came. Still, it made an impression on me just to be there and contemplate the history that happened there, punctuated nicely by the children in school uniforms playing soccer in the plaza in front of the building.

A little later, we were shown a third-story window that was the apartment my grandmother moved into less than a day after my father was born; we learned a story about it. My grandfather had been taken away by then and so my grandmother was alone with her three children and the newborn. On the day before, there was some kind of water damage in the building. People in the damaged apartment, apparently on a grudge, blamed the Republican family living above and got them kicked out. My grandmother had to scramble to find a place to live on that of all days.

We also saw the sanctuary of La Peregrina, standing tall above a plaza, another of the very old buildings of the city on the estuary. All of our tour so far was in the old section of town, kept consistent with the old styles very well.

After the walk through the old town, we got into our cars and drove out on the peninsula to have lunch at a very nice seafood restaurant. Later, we walked off the meal along the beach, finding shells to bring back home (dad found a good cuttlefish bone for his canaries), and then we took a scenic drive back into town, where we retired for the evening.

-- Photos from the day are thumbnailed on the Day 3 Photo Page.

Coming Soon: Day Four: Lunch with another cousin, and the cathedral at Santiago.

Day 2 of the Spain Trip

April 10th, 2003

So we wake up on time and have a lovely breakfast. The plan is to get out by 8:00, drive to the train station where my sister Karen, her husband Randy, and their two boys Sam and Will are scheduled to arrive at 8:58, then start our drive up to Pontevedra in northwestern Spain (just north of Vigo and south of Santiago).

When we leave the apartment, Vicente and Berta call out to us from the 7th floor window (8th floor by U.S. terms, in Europe there is a ground floor before the 1st) and tell us that we have forgotten the Chorizo and other items that they had packed for us. So Vicente tosses the baggie down and, by startling chance (it seemed highly improbable), the bag gets caught in the branches perhaps 30 feet above us. I get out a Ziploc I have with some lotion and deodorant, which I figure is compact and heavy enough, and toss it up to dislodge the most excellent chorizo. As you can guess, there are soon some toiletries keeping the food company up in the branches. We all have a good laugh, but time is running out, so we leave the industrious Vicente to rescue the trapped items as we leave for other parts. (A sad note: I had a wonderful series of photos showing this sequence of events, including one of the chorizo coming down--and they appear to be lost. Ah, well....)

My father and I navigate successfully to the airport to discover two things: the Hertz rental van we got has a near-flat on the back right side, and my sister's train is late by three hours (a train worker's strike somewhere in Spain, apparently). So my father and I take advantage of the time to exchange the rental car at the airport and then go back to Berta and Vicente's to see if the bags have been brought down from the branches yet. Vicente has approached his 3rd-floor neighbor and convinced him that deodorant is hanging outside his window, and has successfully gotten the chorizo down, but apparently the toiletries are all too happy where they are and refuse to budge. OK by me, the chorizo is great stuff.

We get back to Chamartin Station just as Karen and the gang walk out, and after various small chores and trips, we get it all together and are off to the province of Galicia. We stop for lunch (not the best place we ate to be certain) and carsickness (not necessarily cause-and-effect) along the way, and eventually arrive in Pontevedra; I'll spare you the details of how Spanish highways do not mark exits or provide directions well, suffice to say we had a few small detours and asked for directions a lot, but by God, we got there.

Then began what we later jokingly dubbed the "death march."

Understand that we were all traveled out. I had just flown from Japan, had gotten just six hours sleep (four hours the night before), was jet-lagged, dehydrated and felt like I was getting a sore throat. My father, having arrived a few hours before me (though he always upgrades to first class, so he was in better shape), was not in too much better shape--but Karen and her family were the most haggard, having traveled from Paris by train from 7pm to noon, then directly piled into a crowded van for an 8-hour trip--well, you can imagine how everyone felt, especially the kids, who were amazingly well-behaved throughout.

We expected to just meet and say hello to our cousins (children of my grandfather's siblings and their families), get a quick bite to eat and then get right to bed. But the cousins, being very generous and proud of their hometown, wanted to take us for a bite to eat at one of their houses, just five minutes away on foot, they said. But the cousins decided on their own to take us on the tour of town just then, without waiting for the next day when we planned, and before we knew what was happening, we had taken half an hour to walk in a very roundabout fashion through the streets of the old town. I was exhausted and feeling sick, but was not in nearly as bad shape as my nephews, who despite their good behavior were starting to fall apart. Finally we got through to our relatives that this was not the time for the tour, and at least the my sister and her kids got guided back to the hotel. My father and I were taken then to the apartment, where we found a several-course meal waiting for us. It was lovely, but we really were not in shape for it, especially not the great deal of wine they wanted us to try. Begging off for a phone call from my mother we were expecting (truth), we walked back to the hotel, unfortunately for me, at a frantic pace (we were late for the call).

By the time we got back, I was practically dead on my feet. Things had gone rather unwell that first day and evening. But fortunately, the worst was over, and the trip got very much better from then on.

-- Photos from the day are thumbnailed on the Day 2 Photo Page.

Coming Soon: Day Three, where we actually see stuff.

Pictures Are Back

Finally, the photo server has come back online. Day 2 report on the Spain trip coming in a short while.

No Photos? Server Out

If you happen to come by this site and no photographs show up, that's because the server with the photos is down--that's been happening quite a bit as of late, it seems.

Now, this blog is on BlogD.com. For some reason, if I place the photos on the same domain, this blog doesn't display them. The only way I can get it to work is to put the photos on another domain of mine (in this case, www.teach-japan.com), and then it works fine.

However, whenever teach-japan.com goes down, so do the photos. Sorry 'bout that. My web hosts say that the server will be back up sometime soon. In other words, who knows?

NightCap

Well, the trucks are silent, now that it's past 8pm and has been dark for a few hours... but not before a big parade ending. On top of all the trucks and cars blasting away, one candidate got a dozen kids in festival outfits to parade through every parking lot in the area and down all the streets waving light wands and shouting. Followed closely, of course, by an adult with a portable-yet-large loudspeaker (one the size of a tuba, roughly) screaming political slogans.

Let's hope that was the grand finale. I don't know if I could tolerate another day of this....

Day 1 of the Spain Trip

Finally got around to it!

April 9th, 2003

All goes well, save for the few hours of sleep that night. But I wake up, have a bite to eat, finish packing, and then I am off. I expected to take a larger suitcase, as the luggage allowance I am used to (trans-Pacific) is two times 70 lb. Suitcases. It turns out that to Europe, on Air France at least, you are only allowed one bag, and a limit of 23 kilos (50 lbs.). Seeing as how even my small suitcase is 5 kilos by itself, I repack into the smaller one, but there's enough room.

So it's out the door to the bus, then the train, then the express to the airport, then to wait for the flight. At the airport, I try to use the wireless Internet access points they have set up, but it seems that you have to sign up for some kind of roaming service to get on the Internet proper. But I do find out that they have power outlets, and if I bring my charger, I can use my laptop as I wait for my flight without draining the batteries.

The flight goes well--the food is good, and time flies despite the cramped seats. At least Air France has little touch-screen videos on the back of all the seats so you can watch the movies, TV shows or other things at your convenience (on rotating schedules), along with game-playing and the ubiquitous where-is-the-plane-now chart. The couple next to me is from Japan (Koji and Ryoko, newlyweds), and we chat amicably; Ryoko even gives me a nice origami star box, which she made during the flight, for my family in Spain (which they later enjoy).

At Charles de Gaulle airport I have to change planes, and it's the usual madhouse rush to figure out where you go. None of the flight boards has my flight posted (the main board is about 6 hours behind, in fact), and I am not even sure which gate to go to. When I arrive at the (unmarked, of course) gate which I think is correct, I ask a gentleman sitting in the area if I am in the right place. "I'm so sorry," I begin, "but do you speak English?"

It is time for my first rude Frenchman it seems, as he looks up at me and, sighing and rolling his eyes as if to say "this is the tenth time I have told you will you just go away you annoying person," he answers, "Yessss, I speak Eeenglish" (with an "isn't it obvious, you moron?" attitude), after which I ask and he resentfully tells me that this is where I catch the flight to Madrid. I swear, I am not exaggerating.But it all goes well from there, everyone is lovely and I get to Madrid on time and in one piece.

I expect customs, and was not aware that when I passed through passport control in Paris, that was customs, so I just have to walk out of baggage claim in Madrid. Okay. My father (who preceeded me into Madrid by 4 hours), my aunt Millie, and my very vivacious and gregarious uncle Vicente (married to my aunt Berta) greet me warmly, take me to the car and drive me to Berta and Vicente's place for the evening. We gnosh on cold cuts, particularly some excellent chorizo Berta got (the Iberico chorizo is the best!). My father and I must get to sleep soon, because we wake up early tomorrow. The plan is to go to our ancestral home of Pontevedra, a 6- to 8-hour drive from Madrid, from early the next morning.

-- Photos from the flight are thumbnailed on the Day 1 Photo Page.

Please Merciful God

One can only pray to a merciful God that these clowns stop doing this by tomorrow. I read on a few other Japan blogs that the election is then, and can only hope that loudspeaker trucking is prohibited on election day. At least, it should be over by Monday. But then, sometimes other elections follow soon after. I hope not.

A few images of the latest offenders parading by, stopping up traffic and barraging all of us with endless noise. Note the trucks with four loudspeakers, like one isn't enough.

Proposal to any Japanese people reading this: start a movement in which you publicly proclaim that if you hear a politician making noise from a truck, you will purposefully not vote for them.

Coming Soon

Please bear with me, the Spain Trip blogs will be coming soon. I am still recovering from jet-lag, am dealing with router problems, and attended the opening ceremony for my college's new group of students for the year. I hope to get installment #1 out by end of today, and to go through the whole trip bit by bit.

It's not hard to tell...

It's not hard to tell when there's an election in Japan. You cannot miss it unless you are blind and deaf. No television, radio or newspapers needed--the politicians come to you, and in a big way.

You see, in Japan, politicians are limited in how they can campaign. They can put up posters in only on specially placed boards; they cannot advertise on television, and they cannot go door-to-door. So that, apparently, leaves them with no choice but to ride around in roaming, incredibly LOUD vans with huge loudspeakers on top, as many as four per truck, shouting things like, "I'm Ito Masami! I'm hanging in there! Vote for me!!" I swear. Listen to them yourself, and remember that this goes on all day long, sometimes for weeks, almost without a break--at least in my neighborhood, where there are lots of large apartment buildings.

But that's not all. They're not content with driving back and forth at 10 kph (holding up traffic) in your neighborhood endlessly from 9am to 8pm, day after day, drowning out your TV even with volume on high. Turning into your building's parking lot and driving around it casually for quite some time is not enough, either. No, they also have to stop there for 15 to 20 minutes at a time, get out, and make long speeches right in front of your building.

Did I mention that this can go on for weeks at a time? I do not think that I mentioned that there are several candidates for any one area, and they're all out there; if one is not annoying you right now, there seems no end to the others who are. Often, two or three will be in your neighborhood at any given time, playing a game of "Who's Louder And More Obnoxious?"

I really do not know how or why the Japanese people put up with this. We're not talking about this happening just in the business district, no, this is concentrated in populated areas, with sleeping infants, people just trying to enjoy some peace and quiet at home, and some people trying to sleep in late on weekends (like me, alas). In the U.S., anyone who tried this even for a day would be shouted off the streets and elected out of office so fast their heads would spin. I would MUCH rather have them be on TV all the time--at least then I could turn them off.

Back From Spain

I just got back... alas, I was unable to access the Internet in Spain again. Currently I am jetlagged and trying to get myself back on cycle. Over the next several days, I will be posting a LOT about the Spain trip, with many photos. Stay tuned!

Welcome to Spain

Well, here I am in Pontevedra, in the Province of Galacia in Spain. This may be my only chance to blog in while in Spain as the DSL we were going to install at my aunt's place may not get installed. I am taking tons of photos and will try to log the best I can while on the road, then I will catch up big-time when I get Internet access. Have taken maybe more than 300 photos so far, thought that's not too hard with a digital camera. The big challenge there is with keeping charged batteries and running out of space on the flash memory cards.

My first day was mostly travel--after landing in Madrid late at night and getting up early the next day, my father and I met with my sister, her husband and two kids and we all piled into a minivan for an 8-hour trip to my ancestral homeland, Pontevedra. Here, we met up with several cousins and their families and got great tours and eating throughout the area. Highlights included the local landmarks as well at the building which housed my grandfather's academy school, which he ran before being exiled (given the choice of leaving or being killled, that is) by Franco's people.

Remind me to tell you the story of how Christopher Columbus was really born here in Galicia.

Today we went up to Santiago and saw the cathedral there, a thousand years old and counting, reportedly the resting place of Saint James. We got some great photos. Tomorrow it's back to Madrid and for some more relaxed sightseeing.

So far, it been great... lots of logs to put in. Sometime soon....

DVD Review: Galaxy Quest

The idea is not new, but it is served up absolutely fresh in this movie: a troupe of actors who did a sci-fi show many years ago as a short-term gig find themselves only able to get work at conventions and computer-store openings ("By Grabthar's hammer... what a savings."). Then suddenly, without warning, they find themselves on a real spaceship, with real aliens, fighting real bad guys.

The characters are closely modeled after not just the Star Trek roles, but also by the actors who played them. Tim Allen is the egocentric, washed up ham actor who played the captain. His alien first officer is portrayed, with a delightful deadpan performance, by Alan Rickman ("Give him a hand, he's British!"). Sigourney Weaver is similar to Star Trek's Uhura, in that her job is basically reporting what someone else says ("Look, I have one job on this lousy ship. It's stupid, but I'm gonna do it, okay?"); Weaver's character throws in gratuitous cleavage. The cast if filled out by Tony Shalhoub as the almost eerily calm engineer ("Hey guys, I just wanted you to know that, the reactors won't take it... the ship is breaking apart and all that... Just FYI."), Daryl Mitchell as the navigator who was a kid (can you say "Wesley Crusher") when the series was filmed, and Sam Rockwell (now starring in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) as the nameless security officer who gets killed off in the first five minutes of the episode he was in (a "red shirt" in Trek parlance).

At one convention, Allen's character is asked to fight aliens, and thinking that it is just a gig to perform for a private video in someone's garage, he takes them up on the offer--only to find out afterwards that he was playing captain for real. Excited at the idea of being a space captain for real, he tries to convince his co-stars of his adventures with the "Thermians," but they think he's just gone around the bend ("They were Termites, or Dalmations. I can't remember, because I was hung over"). But soon, they're all caught up in the action, helping the Thermian race to battle the evil tyrant Saris. The Thermians, you see, received and watched all the TV episodes from Earth--and believed they were all real, even "Gilligan's Island" reruns ("Oh, those poor people!"). Basing their culture on the "historical documents" of the sci-fi TV show, they find they cannot operate their hi-tech machines well, and so they recruit the "real" space veterans to help them.

The Thermians are played wonderfully as rather awkward, inept squids in artificial human form, with suitably wooden and bizarre behavior. Saris is almost over the top as a villain, with elaborate and quite convincing makeup; you'll understand when you see him. But the main cast gets credit for playing the Star-Trek-like cast spot on; you can easily believe they've been going at it for years as a group. The writing is also perfect, scoring on all the weirdness and well-known detail from TV shows like Trek ("I'm not doing it--this episode was badly written!"). Great care was also taken to define the sharp difference between fantasy and what would be reality: the spaceship sets for this movie were mounted on machines that shook and tilted the entire room so the actors didn't have to fake being thrown about. And the actors make understandable mistakes, such as when Laredo, the navigator, cannot even leave drydock without scraping the ship against the edge of the dock for a full ten seconds (or more), or the security officer monitoring battle activity ("Hey guys... there's a red thingy moving toward the green thingy.... I think, I think we're the green thingy!")

As a bonus, the DVD includes several deleted scenes, which, in my opinion, should have been left in, and in a bizarrely funny twist, the entire movie, on an alternate language track, was dubbed in Thermian--essentially, 100 minutes of people blabbering in an insane gibberish ("Blooble BEBEBEBE FWING DedleDEE!"). You'd think that it would get boring after just a few minutes, but it took me about 15 minutes to finally stop the craziness--the people who dubbed it really threw themselves into it, matching tone and babbling to the characters and their situations.

Even if you're not a Star Trek fan, you'll probably like this movie. If you are a Star Trek fan, you'll love it.

Book Review: The Amber Series

Between 1970 and 1991, Roger Zelazny wrote a series of ten novels based upon a mythical fantasy world. At first, it was a series of five books, the first being called Nine Princes in Amber, following the adventures of Prince Corwin, who has lost his memory and must struggle to regain his past as well as his position. Corwin and the other princes have special powers, including the ability to move between an infinite number of universes, called "shadows." The second set of five books, begun in 1985 after Zelazny took a seven-year break, followed the adventures of Merlin, the son of Corwin. This collection, The Complete Amber Chronicles, puts all ten short novels into one, long 1258-page volume.

I am not usually a fan of fantasy; I have read a little of it outside of the Amber series, and found it not to my liking. The Amber series, however, is very well written for the non-fantasy reader, in the same way the Harry Potter books are; that is, they take the story more seriously than the fantasy element, and there are rules and rationales which keep the fantasy from become too surreal and unbelievable. The characters, though cardboard at times, are engaging, and the possibilities suggested by the universe Zelazny has constructed are intriguing to the imagination.

SPOILER ALERT:

Do not read the following paragraph if you wish to remain completely in the dark about the backstory. The following does not take away from the story in my opinion, but if you're finicky about it, pick up reading in the paragraph after. To read the spoilers, simply select the text of the invisible paragraph (magic!), and it will invert colors and show the text.

SPOILERS:

The basic idea is this: in the beginning, there was only Chaos, where practically anything could happen, and the world had little order or recognizability. This world was lead by a royal family, who were able to harness energies existing in their world to construct spells and devices which would perform tasks they desired. At one point, a man named Dworkin left the realm, found a creature of order outside the realm of Chaos, mated with it, and created the Pattern of Amber. Once created, the Pattern became an opposite pole to Chaos, and between them ranged all the possible universes that could exist, populated by infinite varieties of beings. Dworkin had a son, Oberon, who later took the throne; Oberon, in turn, had many sons, numbering nine by the time Zelazny's first story begins. By that time, Dworkin had vanished, Oberon had disappeared, and one son, named Eric, claimed the throne. This is where the first book picks up.

OK, START READING AGAIN HERE.

Our main character, not knowing his name or anything else about himself, wakes up in a hospital. Slowly, he discovers more and more about himself, including the fact that he is stronger than most people, heals faster, and is in some sort of undefined trouble. The people at the hospital have been instructed to keep him there under sedation, but somehow he has returned to consciousness and therefore is able to escape.

The opening technique Zelazny uses here--amnesia--works very well for this story. In addition to the standard purpose of allowing the author to fill in the exposition needed in any story (introducing characters, situations and story parameters) while at the same time keeping readers in suspense, the amnesia angle has an added bonus: it allows us, as readers, to slip into the role of this fantasy character before we find out about his powers that would normally place him distant from ourselves. Waking up in the hospital, he thinks of himself as a normal person, and only slowly, bit by bit, finds his special nature, giving us time to grow comfortable with his character before we see him as a mythical member of royalty.

The story quickly turns to intrigue, with family members plotting against family members, with the magic and mystery of the world thrown in for spice. There are secrets everywhere, unanswered mysteries galore, and strange new worlds filled with various people and creatures at every turn. Zelazny takes some basic myths and legends, such as King Arthur's court, and runs off in a direction of his own. Underscoring it all is (according to many writers) the foundation of fiction: conflict. Even the most trustworthy of siblings seems suspect at some time; as Corwin says at one point, "I trusted him as I would a brother, which is to say, not at all."

The first five books are quite good, right up to the ending. Zelazny was obviously talked into writing more books due to the success of the first series, and at first, the second series of five novels stands up well. That series follows the adventures of Merlin, Corwin's own son, torn between the two main cultures of the story, belonging to both, giving his full allegiance to neither. Possessed of greater magical skills and training than his father, he takes us deeper into the method and ways of the powers Zelazny mostly just hints at in the first five books. Merlin's story begins on the shadow Earth (the place where you and I live, and also where his father started out), where he is trying to figure out who is trying to assassinate him every April 30th.

Like the first set of books, this series quickly gets entangled in character mysteries, plot twists, and of course, intrigue, this time by two sets of relatives rather than just one. And for the first few books, it does an OK job of keeping the quality close to the first series. However, as the story goes on, it gradually deteriorates, and in the last two books, things get harder and harder to accept. Merlin enters worlds too confusing to comprehend, characters completely change course without much reason, and the story jumps around without much cohesion. It is as if Zelazny either lost his skills or his interest in those last few years of writing.

Nevertheless, the story is interesting enough and bears through to the end, and the first seven or eight novels more than make up for the weaker ending of the second half of the ten-book saga. Enough for me to buy this larger volume and read it again, after having gone through my brother-in-laws set of separate books many years before.

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Note: I am backdating these reviews so that they do not appear in the main blog, otherwise cluttering up the end of August too much. This review was written on August 28th, 2003.

Getting Closer...

This may be my last post for a week or so. I leave for Spain tomorrow morning and may not have access to the Internet until next Tuesday I will try my best to post as much as I can from Spain, with photos if possible. I may even do some backposting, if I have the time. Please be patient, I'll do my best, but I may be limited by unforeseen technological problems. Wish me luck!

Also, keep in mind that you can post comments back to me. At the bottom of every entry, there is a link for comments. It will open a window in which you can type a message or comment in response; the comment will be viewable by visitors to the page, and each response will generate an email to me. Try it out!

And Behind The Curtain...

So far, after most of the country has been invaded and many thousands of troops have been going through and seraching uncounted buildings no doubt on special watch for any kinds of weapons stashes, the entire unvieling of Iraq's chemical weapons holding amount to one holding at an agricultural complex which may be pesticides.

If Hussein is truly the ruthless sadist we hear about (and I don't doubt that he is), then why didn't he use any of the massive array of chemical weapons he was supposed to be hoarding as U.S. troops rushed into Baghdad? And why haven't the coalition forces found more than just some chemicals at an agricultural complex?

One of the major justifications of the war was not just that Saddam had huge amounts of chemical and biological weapons, but that he was also just a few months away from developing an atomic weapon. When are we going to find that particular weapons plant? The Bush administration claimed that it had solid evidence (but never gave any clue to what it was) that this bomb was nearing completion, so one must suspect that they at least had an inkling of where it might be--so why haven't we heard of the storming of this facility?

Gee, you don't think that we were lied to, do you? That's never happened before.

Regular Garbage Day

It's always some kind of garbage day, so it seems. Just wanted to give a quick view of what that looks like. Note the green webbing over the burnable trash at left, that's the keep the crows and cats out. This is actually a much more tidy trash drop point than most.

And, for balance, a picture of some cherry blossoms on the other side of the apartment building, a sign of the season. Too bad many of the blossoms will get stripped in today's storm--rather high winds, and strong rain to come later, the reports say.

Unbiased... right.

Just saw a bit on CNN where they talked about propaganda, and had a spokesman from Al-Jazeera facing off with David Gergen. Paula Zahn, who conducted the interview, was on the face of things trying to determine whether either side was engaging in propaganda and using "loaded words." The charge against Al-Jazeera was that it used the terms "invaders" and "martyrs" in its reporting, and was that inappropriate. The spokesman defended Al-Jazeera, noting that it sometimes used the term "invading forces," but did not refer to Iraqi casualties as "martyrs." Gergen was at least honest enough to note that American news outlets used words like "liberaters" and "Iraqi Freedom," examples of just a few of the heavily jingoistic terms bandied about casually on a regular basis by American broadcasters. Of course, Gergen was mostly critical of Al Jazeera and of course, Gergen was given the most on-air time, while Zahn overtalked and interrupted the Al-Jazeera spokesman several times.

Now, I am hardly on the Iraqi side, but "invading forces" is not what I would call "a loaded term," as Gergen put it. I have not watched Al-Jazeera, so I don't know all the language they use, but I cannot imagine the U.S. reporting to be much more propagandistic and full of loaded words as it is.

Call me nuts, but I thought that the great American tradition of journalism was supposed to be that the press would present unbiased facts so that the American people could make rational, objective decisions based upon that information. You bias the news, you limit the ability of the people to come to a balanced decision. So even in times of national strife--hell, especially in times of national strife, there should be no bias. And yet we see tremendous bias.

Chalk it up as item #374 in the list of reasons not to trust what you hear on the news...

Web Server Down

When it rains, it pours.

My web sites have been going down like the stock market. First my main domain, and now a secondary domain--one which supplies the images to this blog. So if you see no images, that's the reason. Email is down then up then down again, and people who depend on these sites are being let down. And these are different web hosts, too. I thought that there was just some general Internet security breach, so many separate and diverse services are being arbitrarily cut off... So my apologies to those who need to get these services, I am trying my best.

New Year's in Japan

Here are a few pictures from last New Year's celebration. I go home for Christmas, but I am always back for New year's, I like the ambience at the local shrines. The one near my home, pictured above, shoots off rather impressive fireworks (for a small shrine) and has the usual festivities, including bell-ringing-and-praying (naturally), sake-tasting (pictured above left), shi-shi-mai dance, traditional band, and a bonfire (above right).

If you'd like to see a movie of the experience, visit my Inagi New Year's site.

Love That Fuji

Here is a nice shot of Fuji from a bridge nearby where I live. That's a train going by below, it's a 15-second timed exposure on my Canon Powershot S30. The shot overlooks the Tama River, and the city to the right is Seiseki Sakuragaoka, a stop on the Main Keio Line.

A New handheld

I thought I might throw in a few photos on the page. Here's one of a new toy I just got, a handheld PDA. Sony makes some nice ones, this is the new TG50.

In addition to the usual PDA standards (address book, calendar, memos and so forth) this model has some nice features. It sports a backlit thumb keyboard, with the handwriting-recognition Graffiti still included as on on-screen virtual mode; it can record your speech for quite some time if you have a good-sized memory stick (I got a 128MB card), and it plays back movie files and MP3s. There's a nice jog dial and the look is nice. One of the best features IMHO is the Bluetooth connectivity--I can hotsync the device with both my Mac and PC without the cradle or USB cable, and it syncs nicely with iCal and Address Book on the Mac (I hate entering all sorts of data on mini-devices). For the Mac, it needed a $30 software program called Missing Sync, but it work great once you've got it going.

If you own a Clie, there is a great forum to peruse.

Final Exams

This is a few hours to burn for me... I teach a Computer course at an American college in Tokyo, and today is the final exam. We're in the lab right now, and everyone is busy getting the questions out.

If you'd like to see the web pages generated by my students, visit their private domain, www.tokyolaker.com. Some good pages in there!

Unburnable Garbage Day

It's here! Every two weeks we get to throw out "moenai" or unburnable garbage, all the non-recycleable metal and plastic that accumulates.

Gotta hand it to Japan, the recycling is done well. You throw out burnable garbage twice a week, then glass, almuinum cans and PET bottles all have their day. Every two weeks you get unburnable garbage, and perhaps once a month there are days for newspapers and paper products, cardboard, and containers near the garbage area for batteries, light bulbs and other special items.

Now all we have to do is get the stores here to stop wrapping things to death. Once at a department store I bought an item which was already wrapped in plastic and put in a box; when I made the purchase, the salesperson put it into a paper bag, then put the paper bag into a larger plastic one. Gotta wonder what's behind that.

Enough With the French Already

A report on ABC News tonight from Little Falls, Minnesota, home town of Charles Lindbergh, told of how many residents want to remove the French flag that flies in memory of Lindbergh's landing and send it back to France.

This follows the initial renaming of french fries and french toast in the cafeteria of the House of Representatives to "freedom fries" and "freedom toast," and subsequent calls for renaming french dressing and French's mustard.

First off, "French" toast is not French, it is about as American as you can get; it was invented by Joseph French of Albany, NY in 1724. Same thing goes for French's Mustard, created by George J. French in 1904.

But the plain facts aside, aren't we going just a little bit too far with the whole anti-Gallic thing? Heck, the Russians and the Chinese have not only given us more grief over things in the past including strong opposition to the Iraq war, but also sold more arms to Iraq. Why do we turn so vehemently and so irrationally against a country that, after all, has been a staunch ally practically non-stop since the days of the revolution? Especially when so many in our own country feel exactly as the French government does?

Maybe it's because we make so many jokes about the French surrendering easily, or because of the stereotype of French people being rude, snotty and arrogant; none of these hold much truth to them, but that colors our views anyway, and makes it easy to turn against them. Who is being the fickle ally here?

Let's just stop with the idiocy over France and accept the fact that sometimes allies disagree. It's not like we've never gone against the wishes of our own allies, after all.

Eyelid Twitching

NOTE: This article, vapid though it is, gets zillions of Google hits. I wrote an update that will be more helpful, and more entertaining, to twitching sufferers.

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Don't you hate that?

For apparently no reason this kind of thing happens. In cases like these, it's nice to have the Internet--trivial stuff like this is always covered. Turns out that twitching eyelid is fairly common. It starts in one or both eyelids (in my case, the upper lid), is sporadic and random, sometimes spurred into activity by tensing your eye muscles. It can last for a few hours to a few days, though in cases more rare, it can last months or even years (egad!).

There is no known cause or cure for it. Some people think it may be a sign of potassium deficiency and suggest eating bananas. Others say it's stress-related, and one person even suggested that diet soft drinks are a cause.

All I know is that right now I'm in day three of the most recent attack, both eyelids and stronger than before.

I guess as far as problems go, I should be thankful that this is the more irritating one I have, and not anything worse...

The State of the Disunion

This is something I'll be writing on from time to time--not just the current sorry state of the press but of many areas of American life and culture that I find important, as do a lot of people obviously. But there just are not enough people talking about these things, or making the points that need to be made. One thesis that covers most of these topics is that the United States of America is no longer the country I was always told it was supposed to be, is no longer the country we have always wanted it to be. There have always been times where things have slipped or where imperfections had not yet been rectified, but we have been backsliding big-time recently.

One of the ways we are doing so is with the press. At one time, the label of "Liberal Media" was appropriate to a certain degree, in that many reporters have personal liberal leanings, and those leanings would sometimes color their reporting. But what effect this had on the news media collectively was mild enough that one had to run statistical analyses for it to show up in any objective way whatsoever--it was never something that made much of a difference.

Conservatives made it an issue, however, not because it was really a problem for them or that they hated to see inequality (har), but because it profited them politically. If, after all, everyone considered the media to be left-leaning, then the general impression would be that the truth lay to the right of what reports and opinions were read by Americans, and that would profit conservatives. Many conservatives felt it was true in any case because anything to their left seemed liberal, no matter how right of center it might be.

But the idea of a liberal media today is laughable. Most editors and media owners are right-wing, and since the conservative revolution in the early 90's showed that right-wing shows got good ratings, the media has taken a conservative turn which far exceeds the extent of what liberal biases used to exist. And since 9-11, conservatives have turned patriotism into a base political weapon: we are fighting a war (against Afghanistan, Iraq, terrorism, you name it), the war is constantly on, the President is our leader in this time of crisis, what he says goes--and anyone who disagrees or criticizes him is unpatriotic and unAmerican.

Most people accept this through tradition and fear. Tradition because we have in the past supported presidents in time of war. Fear because we are worried about 9-11 and terrorism and we know that people around the world hate us, and we have to do something about it. And we depend on the president for that.

But the man we have in office today doesn't even deserve to be there. His character (Republicans no longer talk about that, do they) is shoddy--drunk driver, corrupt businessman, drug abuser, hid in the National Guard in Vietnam and then went AWOL when they started drug testing, and much more... how could we accept a man with such a history? In part because too many Americans vote the party line no matter who is there, and partly because we don't want to believe that such a man could be in high office, so we are in denial. There was clearly fraud in Florida--non-felon Democrats, mostly African-Americans, forbidden to vote because of a rigged "felon" blacklist created by the Republican Attorney General of Florida, absentee ballot tampering by Republicans of thousands of ballots in two counties (solidly proven to have ocurred, confessed to by the election officials who let it happen), these just being a few examples. All illegal, each one by themselves turning enough votes to Bush to win him the election, and then the tsunami wave of political and illicit judicial action to deny a recount. Gore won by more than a half million votes. Blatantly illegal vote tampering in Florida turned thousands of votes to Bush in that state, who won the vital electoral votes for the state by just over 500 votes. But we tolerated it because too many believed the faked outrage in Florida, but more because we value stability higher than out-and-out justice.

And now this leader is thought of as a hero--not because he did anything heroic, but because in our time of crisis we needed a great leader, so we fabricated one out of whole cloth.

And the press? Not just conservative-leaning, but now blinded, and blinded by themselves. Shilling for the government is so blatant that the news agencies hardly cover it up any more. Of course, they do not focus attention on it, and so many do not hear of it and do not think of it. But it's clearly there if you look.

Take the president's last "news conference," for example. That was a news conference? No, it wasn't--it was a sham. A scripted mockery of a press conference. Here are a few things that were wrong:

1. The first two questions were pre-approved and the answers carefully scripted (considered commonplace now)

2. Reporters who were known to ask tough questions were not allowed to participate, or were seated in back and not called upon

3. Helen Thomas, Dean (or "doyenne") of the press corps, for the first time in several decades, was relegated to the third row and was not allowed to ask Bush a question (she's known to ask tough questions and would not play ball in the charade)

4. Bush had a list of 17 reporters whom he knew would toss softballs, and asked only them questions, sticking tightly to the list

5. No follow-ups were permitted; when one reported tried to, Bush shut him up, blurting out, "This is a scripted--" and then stopped short, after which the press corps, mostly in the back of the room, laughed (search this page for the word "scripted"; and here is a link to a site with an audio recording of it)

6. No reporters were allowed to stray off the White House's approved topics, even though a story about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council Members had just broken, not to mention a lot of other important stories; questions were not allowed to be overly critical

7. White House Communication director Dan Bartlett announced publicly that he knew what the questions were going to be and that only those reporters would be called upon

8. Many other small details, including items such as how reporters were closely escorted into the press room in pairs, added to the controlled atmosphere of the news conference.

Just as disturbing, the president's slip about the conference being "scripted" was audible and clear. There is no mistaking what he said if you listen to it. And yet, The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Fox News, and Wall Street Journal all printed transcripts with the word "scripted" altered to "unscripted"--some transcripts rewriting more than just that one word, editing and adding at different points.

And this is just one example. How about Fox News? I know some people whom I otherwise consider intelligent who believe that Fox is not conservative. Um, yeah. A week ago, there was a legal protest against the war, and Fox News, supposedly an "unbiased" news source, in their streaming banner, displayed the following "news items":

"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!"

"Who won your right to show up here today? Protesters or soldiers?"

"How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them."

"Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street"

And to wrap up what could be a lot more ranting if I didn't stop myself, was something that I swear to God I heard on CNN a few days ago. CNN was showing a press conference being held by the Iraqi government, their usual propaganda line, and in mid-conference, CNN cuts away. Says the CNN reporter: "We're cutting away because we don't think that the government wants to see that."

I swear to God, that's what she said.

We don't have a press anymore, we really don't. Read the Canadian news for slightly more balanced coverage.

Plain Vanilla

Well, I might not have time to get this site all gussied up before I take off for Spain. For the time being, it will have to stay the way it is, as plain vanilla as it is.

The trip to Spain is coming along fairly smoothly, in most respects. Air France tickets in hand, no nonsense about having to first get the tickets at the travel agency counter at the airport and then going to the airline counter. As if security and SARS will not be enough of a hassle for the airport experience.

Air France seems to have a much nicer Economy package than the U.S. airlines I've been using to go back home every Christmas. They claim to have "personal videos" in Economy, but the screen is applied to the back of the seat in front of you--I suspect that it will simply be a video version of the radio sets we've always had. With any luck, there will be more than one channel, and one will have flexibility in what one wants to watch.

In the meantime, I got my tickets, my neck pillow, my gauze masks, my drinking water, and sleeping pills if needed. Close to all set.

Getting Set Up...

Whew... If you're not a programmer, then it is a bit tough to figure out the specifics of setting up a cgi blog system like this. The main bumps were getting the MySQL database hooked up, the instructions were a bit hard to follow there... but here we are!

More to follow soon...