May be a Westerner cliche to still be impressed by them, but seriously...

...if Japan doesn't have the first permanent toilet on the Moon, there ain't no justice.  Look at this beauty, in a shop window on a street in Kyoto, looking about as futuristic as a toilet possibly can:

Still looking at leaves

And shrines/temples:

And eating (sometimes) like this:

More soon...

Holiday snaps, continued

As you can see on the right hand side of this photo, even Buddhism can't escape kawaii in Japan:

More detail here:

Anyway, this temple has a family connection, and I think I have visited each time  I have been in Japan.

The gardens around it are very well maintained, and the different colours to be seen today were very pleasing.

Down the road, another temple uphosts a pretty spectacular set of ginkgo trees:

And to the side:

Also, an unusual but of signage:

And tonight, a nicely dressed local:

I have high hopes for some more autumn photos tomorrow, as a result of venturing into the countryside.

Starts with T

Guess the city...

No bears have yet been sighted.

More....

The central station has quite a fan base...and in fact I reckon more so amongst the locals than the foreigners.

Here's a more distant shot..

Behind here, you run into the grounds of the Imperial palace, which you can't see.  But there is a park near here too, which was busy today because it was a public holiday, and about 22 degrees.  

But if course, a nice day outside can't keep me from a good bookstore, and Maruzen, right beside the station, probably has the biggest English section I have ever seen in Japan.  I mean, look at this - this is just the philosophy row!

This is where I found books that ask the big questions:

Indeed.

And:

Tonight I have ventured North, and the wifi in the otherwise modest hotel is about 10 times faster than what I get at home on the NBN.  

At those speeds, I'll be posting more. Seems a waste not to.

Pretty accurate satire

Odd details of madness

CNA talks about the guy with schizophrenia who killed 18 in Maine:

The Reserve unit told the sheriff's office that Card, a 40-year-old sergeant, had reported "hearing voices" that tormented him with accusations of paedophilia and of having a small penis, and that he had threatened to "shoot up" the Saco drill centre and other places, according to an incident report released by the sheriff's office.

At least one soldier who was friendly with Card told his unit leaders that Card's behaviour was so alarming that he feared "Card was going to snap and commit a mass shooting", according to the Army Reserve unit's September email released by the sheriff's office....

In the Sagadahoc County sheriff's account, his office agreed not to make direct contact with Card after his teenage son and ex-wife reported their concerns on May 3, in which they told a deputy that Card's anger and paranoia worsened after he got a hearing aid in February.

They said Card had recently picked up 10 to 15 handguns and rifles he had stored at his brother's house and that they feared his anger if Card learned they had contacted the police, an incident report said.

You can read the rest of the report to hear how half-arsed was the attempt to find him and remove access to a mini arsenal of guns. 

But it is interesting how his "hearing voices" worsened after he got a hearing aid.   It's a common feature of modern schizophrenia that sufferers rationalise a technological reason why they can now hear what they couldn't before.  I'm pretty sure that's what happened to Evelyn Waugh when he had a bout of hearing voices and put it into mildly fictionalised form in a book.   I did a brief post about this once before - back in 2011 - and it links to an article about this.

This always makes me wonder about how it's odd that this rationalisation is not recognised by the sufferer as a clear sign they are starting on a mental illness.   (Along the lines of "hey, I never used to believe telepathy was possible, and I have heard that people with madness often think it's a new technology, just like I am wondering.  Am I going mad?)   Although I guess it's also quite likely that most people who come down with schizophrenia have not read accounts of it.   

I know, that's not how mental illness works, but I still like to hope I would recognise it...

Hurricane damage

It stills seems that war in Gaza has sucked most of the attention away from the remarkable amount of destruction in Acapulco.   These photos at NPR give a pretty good indication.

I wasn't sure how big a city it was - Google tells me about 850,000.   A great many of them no doubt without any livelihood now due to what appears to be the complete destruction of tourist infrastructure.

Can we just ban reality TV?

Is it just me getting cranky as I age, but this is my second complaint about a reality TV format - this time, Alone.

I've barely seen it - but my main objection is similar to that I have with respect to SAS Australia:  I find the idea of people completely unnecessarily punishing themselves for money or "fame" to be a semi-offensive waste of time.   In the case of Alone, I can throw in some general animal cruelty misgivings too.  Yeah, that rabbit, possum, or (apparently, in the case of overseas version of the show) beaver, moose or wolverine (!) is being hunted and killed for entertainment purposes, basically.  (Well, it seems the wolverine was killed when it came to eat some of the moose the dude had killed.)   

Now look - some hunting of animals I'm not going to lose sleep over, provided it's done humanely and it is put to good use.   But deliberately going out in a competition where you have to kill something to live, which might turn into a "clean kill" or might not, when you could stick to your day job and eat a farmed animal killed in pretty humane conditions ... yeah, I have a problem with that.  Why don't more people?  (This topic did get a run on Reddit, I see. A lot of people defend it by saying that the contestants eat a lot less meat than they would at home - so it's a net benefit to the animal kingdom.  I remain very dubious.)

As for people punishing themselves - well, it probably helps explain why I don't have time for any extreme sport.   Running through deserts, even marathons strike me as a waste of time and effort.  The biggest punishment in Alone is apparently contestants starving - or being cold and wet.  How entertaining.  (Not.)

I'm going to sort this all out when I am crowned benefit dictator by our new alien overlords.  (According to Twitter, they are about to arrive any day now.  I wonder how I get them to pick me?)  

This seems under reported

On NHK, the Japanese government news service:

Bear attacks in Japan are on the rise, with the number of incidents reaching a record high for the period from April to July this year. Amid the escalating cases, the environmental ministry is calling on people to be on alert and take extra precautions.

Bear encounters led to 53 reported cases of injury across the country, including 15 in Iwate Prefecture, nine in Akita Prefecture and seven in Fukushima Prefecture. The overall number represents an all-time high since record keeping began in fiscal 2007.

Some attacks have been fatal. In May, a fisherman went missing while out on a lake in Hokkaido. A search party found a bear with waders in its mouth and partial human remains nearby. A hunter in the search party shot dead the 1.5-meter-long bear. Later, DNA testing confirmed the remains belonged to the missing person.

Ministry officials warn that more bears are likely to appear in residential areas in the northern part of the country this autumn as they forage for food. The acorns that make up their diet have become scarce in their natural habitat.

 I'm going to be in one of those prefectures soon!  

There's also an 8 minute video on the problem, which towards the end features one of those very unintentionally funny to the rest of us Japanese idea where a man in a bear suit is used for educational purposes. 

On a side note

I've only see ads for it on Channel 7 while watching the news or a bit of breakfast TV, but surely I can't be the only person in Australia who finds it truly bizarre that there is a reality TV show that is inspired by the exploits of the SAS despite the ongoing revelations from the Ben Roberts-Smith trial and elsewhere that the organisation has been a dysfunctional mess for many, many years, and has hosted members who will eventually (if a puzzlingly slow investigation will ever finish) result in war crime trials?  

Words means whatever they want it to mean, apparently

I've been interested to note that the indigenous victimhood professionals are very, very onside with Palestine:

 

Of course, the situation is very, very messy, and I have no doubt innocent Palestinian lives are being lost. 

But I still have trouble taking seriously any commentary that does not start with a call for Hammas to release civilian hostages.

Speaking of windbaggery, I see that Stan Grant has gone pompous to the max in his complaint about the outcome of the Voice referendum:

"Reconciliation is not a word. Not any more. Healing is not a word. Not any more. Unity is not a word. What once were words are now antiseptic," he said.

From another source:

“The Voice was never about resentment, it was never about identity – it was a release, it was a moment to lay our burdens down,” Grant said.

“But Australia would not shoulder that load.

“Instead, we got a lecture about unity.

“Those who own history claimed for themselves history’s final word: ‘no’.”

And:

“We have laid the sod over [my ancestors], sealed them in,” he said.

“I thought in me they may be able to speak, that those two sides of me might find a common voice.

He's a walking word salad generator.

 

I do wonder if it's the only thing that has stopped it being nuked, though

 

I know prominence given to deaths is subject to all sorts of odd influences, but still...

...I am a bit bothered when media seems to be giving bigger prominence to Matthew Perry's unexpected death than to the equally unexpected HURRICANE THAT INTENSIFIED RAPIDLY TO BECOME INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS AS IT SMASHED INTO A MAJOR MEXICAN CITY AND HAS KILLED AT LEAST 39 PEOPLE.

From Science:

Early Wednesday morning, Hurricane Otis became the strongest storm in recorded history to strike the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Category 5 hurricane made landfall near Acapulco, where its heavy rain and 265-kilometer-per-hour (kph) winds unleashed massive landslides and knocked out power lines, killing at least 2 dozen people and causing widespread devastation.

But just 2 days earlier, meteorologists doubted whether Otis—then a tropical storm—would even achieve hurricane status. Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center expected the storm to undergo “gradual strengthening,” with most computer models predicting maximum wind speeds of about 100 kph. Instead, as Otis careened toward Mexico’s coastline, its winds increased by 180 kph in 24 hours, a record amount of “rapid intensification.”

So many books...

It was only via a Tweet today that I learnt about Anna's Archive.

It's this:

About

Anna’s Archive is a non-profit project with two goals:

1. Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
2. Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.

Preservation

We preserve books, papers, comics, magazines, and more, by bringing these materials from various shadow libraries together in one place. All this data is preserved forever by making it easy to duplicate it in bulk, resulting in many copies around the world. This wide distribution, combined with open-source code, also makes our website resilient to takedowns. Learn more about our datasets.

We estimate that we have preserved about 5% of the world’s books.

Access

We work with partners to make our collections easily and freely accessible to anyone. We believe that everyone has a right to the collective wisdom of humanity. And not at the expense of authors.

I have tried it to find something I thought pretty esoteric (1960's juvenile science fiction partly set in Australia which I read as a child, but which is little known now) and all of the books were there.

I also tried looking for a recent book on Pure Land Buddhism, and it was there!

I may (or may not) have downloaded the latter, and I may (or may not) have found that it was easy and quick.

I am impressed.

 

 

Final thoughts on Graham Greene

Looking back at this open-to-the-world diary, I see that I have read more Graham Greene than I had remembered.  I also started one of his key novels - The Power and The Glory - more than a year ago, and after losing interest, picked it up again a month or so ago, and have been slowly finishing it.

It's odd, though, that I started reading him with a couple of his later, less well know, novels, and liked them.  Yet the more I have read his best known works, especially the very overtly Catholic ones, the less I have come to enjoy him.

My basic problem is that, in his most famous early books, while often clearly "Catholic" in influence or theme,  his views about the religion don't often ring particularly true, or profound, to me.   His interest in the religion (since I don't know that he actively practised it for long), at least in his middle aged years, seems so very idiosyncratic and muddled (as I suppose befits someone who suffered poor mental health much of his life), that I don't feel he is providing anything much in the way of useful Catholic insight.   Yet I felt in his somewhat later novel A Burnt Out Case he had a more normal and sympathetic religious take, from a jaded Catholic point of view.  

In other words, it seems to me that when he was trying his hardest to "write Catholic", the less convincing I find him.  

I think this is particularly clear when he is compared to Evelyn Waugh.  In reading his books, I always felt that the Catholic influence was clear in an orthodox and comprehensible way, despite the author also being a bit of a jerk in real life.  (No where near as big a jerk as Greene, though.)

I also got a feeling in some parts of The Power and The Glory that Greene was showing a deep lack of empathy to suffering, be it human or animal.   I seem to recall reading his brief account of a pet dog of his dying after being taken on an exhausting hike, and thought it sounded like he had a distinct lack of empathy.  And this novel has a particularly pathetic scene of dog suffering, too.  Given the widespread view now that dangerous men usually have no sense of empathy with animals, it does make me wonder whether if people meeting Greene in real life ever felt like they were perhaps dealing with a borderline psychopath.

Maybe that's harsh, given the incredible number of women who were happy to sleep with him.  (Although, as noted in my previous posts, a lot of them were prostitutes!)   

Anyway, many years ago I bought (second hand) two volumes of the very famous Greene biography (the author of which I forget now), but I feel less inclined to ever get stuck into those.   Or maybe there is a sort of perverse enjoyment in reading in great detail about what a peculiar man he was?

Anyway, I don't think I will try any more of his novels.            

Movie problem noted

Hey, I wasn't wrong:  the Guardian notes that box office for the latest Mission Impossible movie was underwhelming, despite heaps of critical praise.  (A bit too much praise, in my opinion.)   

As the article notes, one obvious thing they can do for the next (final) movie would be this:

...as much as that video of Tom Cruise jumping off a motorbike on a mountain cheered us all up in the depths of Covid, there might also be a lesson to learn here. Why on earth would any film choose to lead with repeated shots of the film’s biggest stunt being executed? By the time the actual film came out, everyone assumed that they’d already seen the best bit for free on YouTube. Next time, Mission: Impossible should try saving some excitement for the actual film.

Yes, we were all so familiar with the stunt by the time we were watching it in the cinema, it felt anti-climatic.  (We also knew, from the "making of" nature of the publicity, that there was CGI involved in the version on the screen - to hide the fact that he was riding up a ramp.)   

The final one should be shorter, punchier, and (ideally, but I know it won't happen) not be directed by McQuarrie.

 

Points noted

Also, hasn't Anwar Ibrahim been a major disappointment, even allowing for the fact that Malaysian politics is a complete mess:

Thousands rallied in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday in support of Palestine, following smaller-scale protests across the country in recent days. It was organised by local groups Viva Palestina Malaysia (VPM) and MyCare, who have been behind humanitarian assistance from Malaysia, Al Jazeera reports. Huge turnout, but a bit of scandal involved — attendees say they were banned from using placards attacking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden (maybe reasonable, I’ve seen some stuff that is yeesh) as well as chanting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ or ‘God Is Great,’ which is a stretch in my opinion. You can’t tell people to abandon a well-known, frequently used phrase because it’s misunderstood elsewhere.    

No such reports, as of yet at least, from a government-arranged demonstration last night in Kuala Lumpur. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim told about 19,000 people that Malaysia won’t be backing down: “It's a level of insanity to allow people to be butchered, babies to be killed, hospitals to be bombed, and schools to be destroyed... it's the height of barbarism in this world … We are with the Palestinian people yesterday, today and tomorrow” he told the crowd, as per Reuters.

In Catholic news...

WARSAW: A Polish bishop, whose diocese was reportedly the scene of a sex party organised by priests at which Polish media say a male prostitute collapsed after taking erectile dysfunction pills, has resigned, the Vatican said on Tuesday (Oct 24).

The statement did not give a reason for the resignation of Bishop Grzegorz Kaszak, saying only that the pope had accepted it.

Was he (the bishop) invited? 

Incidentally, this is something I would expect more from Western Europe, not stick-in-the-mud Poland.

Some psychology studies sound fun

This article at PhysOrg got my attention:

Inducing auditory hallucinations in a lab environment without using drugs

It all involves a poke in the back, which makes people start to sense a person is behind them, which leads to hearing a voice too (!).

The human imagination is indeed very powerful, it seems.

Yep, "decolonising" is (relatively suddenly?) all over the place

I know that this (more or less underground?) revival of Leftist postmodernism within parts of academia has been going on for a number of years, but what with the surge of "decolonisation" talk as a result of the Voice referendum, and the Middle East conflict, it really seems to be out in the open now: