Consider the true cost of living with Fear Of Clowns.
“Like all fears and phobias, Fear of Clowns is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. At some point in your past, there was likely an event linking clowns and emotional trauma. Whilst the original catalyst may have been a real-life scare of some kind, the condition can also be triggered by myriad, benign events like movies, TV, or perhaps seeing someone else experience trauma.”
(with thanks to purple_pen)
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2073207040504.gif
Such timing, its almost like he’s watching us.
Someone has just submitted a software defect against our project saying that the letters on the keytops are in upper case and that its quicker to text if they are in lower case.
Does anyone else have trouble with this?
For some reason it seems that the Scotish Indie Scene is really big over here at the moment. Is this just the Japanese getting into something obscure, or are there some really good things happening north of the border?
It must be summertime again, the bright orange girls are out with their infeasibly mulleted boyfriends. I wonder what happens to them over winter? There were a few around but nothing like the number out now.
This evening I went along with Chris to Damians street gig in Shibuya – he’d negotiated the Yamanote line with his box and drum, including a hairy juggling moment attempting to pass through the barriers out of Shibuya station.
The other half of his band was there already, and mostly set up, ready to go. They started with the singer alone, playing acoustic guitar too, then Damian joined in on his drum. Musically rather more folk than I’d normally bother to listen to, but it was interesting to have an excuse to be there for a bit.
The people behind the manga stall next to the band kept sweeping aside the crowd the band were drawing so that their punters could get to the table.
There were some rather enthusiastic flyerers who had managed to thrust a leaflet into the hands of a passing old lady who happened to be moving past slowly enough she seemed to be a part of the crowd.
After the second song we decided to make a run for it, leaving Damian drumming away, and headed up to Criston Cafe. Damian caught up with us after he’d finished beating his drum, and regaled us with tales of his conquests here.
Damian, if you can imagine it, is rather like a scale model of Dwarfy Mike, in character if not appearance. Except, its a Mike from a parallel universe where he’s recently discovered cute Japanese girls.
“Come meet my friend at this little blues bar just around the corner from here” – we were lead through the streets of love hotel hill, down a little alleyway into a basement bar. A little confusion ensued while the drum was stashed and a table was cleared in the corner so the strange westerners wouldn’t cause too much discomfort for the regulars.
We meet Damians friend and her friend, who was a dentist who had spent some time in the states but confessed to not understanding English English. He did well though.
A little while later the band started playing, their singer seemed to have a disproportionately large head but had a good voice to go with it so it wasn’t a problem.
It became clear that it was a bizarre karaoke night, as they gave us a well thumbed book of songs (published by the Zen-on Music Company) with an index in Katakana but words in English (or hiragana for those in languages other than English). Every so often someone would leave with the book and return a few minutes later with some photocopies of the pages of their song for the musicians to play.
Damian got up to sing Daydream Believer, which went down very well with the regulars, as much because he was joining in as anything else. When he’d finished it was time to head home – before they tried to pursuade me to join in the singing, there’d be nothing I’d like to sing there.
Oh, and I didn’t tell you about the dream I had the other night, where I was cursing a PocketPC for crashing while I was trying to control a space shuttle with it. It had dreadful UI lag too.
Last night was the leaving party of Okawara-san, one of the cute girls on the testing and usability team. We were a little late for the trek up to the restaurant so headed up later with Bo, who had a scruffily drawn map on a huge piece of paper.
We were in roughly the right area when we realised that none of the three of us (an Indian, a Dane and myself) could read kanji, so we couldn’t spot the place anyway. Having decided on some kind of compromise between going to somewhere that said ‘bar’ on the outside and asking someone who looked like they knew the area we were accosted by Kawagishi-san, who, while he can parse the local script, lead us down the wrong alleyway anyway.
The restaurant was quite large and seemed to be some kind of brewery as well, but I think most of that was for show. It took a little while to try to explain to the confused looking waitresses that we were part of a party that had already arrived, but Bo just strolled in anyway.
It was the usual mix of drinking (piicha no biru) and a random collection of finger food delivered over the course of three hours, with members of the party coming and going over the same amount of time.
After a bit of camera geekery, biker bravado and drooling over FairladyZ it came time to move on. Since today was a bank holiday Okawara-san wanted to go on elsewhere (her last day is technically tomorrow) – most people dispersed at this point, it was time for the last train.
The five remaining people talked me into coming along to a club in NishiAzabu, “Its on the way home”, so into two taxis and off to the Muse. Downstairs the bar has a very varied feel to it, with plenty of quiet little corners, a few pool tables, some gambling tables (I didn’t see the game) and some darts machines.
We took our place in one of the nicer corners, but were ejected since you have to pay for that corner (there was a discrete reserved sign on the table). Ok, off to play darts then.
I’ve seen these darts machines around before, but never played one, they’re basically a board with sensors in so it can figure out where your dart landed and score accordingly. Of course this means the darts have to be plastic tipped so they fit with the sensors, they’re dreadfully weighted and hardly fly, never mind aiming.
Tiring of the arrows soon enough we headed further downstairs, an epic journey along a pipe, across a small room with a dancefloor, down some scaffolding while avoiding being blinded by the budwiser sign. It was at least a little more roomy down here, there was a games room in the corner with a snooker table and ping pong (real table tennis, not the computer game).
We all collapsed in the corner after a long day. There was some more geeking about motorbikes and guitars (‘Vino, why do you have 23 guitars?’ ‘Guitars are like women, when you see a nice one you just have to have it’).
Two oclock came and our numbers started feeling the worse for wear, since most of us were working today we decided to call it a day and headed home.
While I was in McDonalds[0] earlier I had the surreal pleasure of hearing a recording of the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ sung in Japanese chorus. This is so deeply wrong that I want a copy.
[0] Yes, I know, but it was another late night at the office, following a 30minute phone call to Finland to try to clear up some of the mess we’d made during the hour long phone conference earlier in the day…never tell people their code is a hack unless you know that (a) they think it is, (b) they will appreciate you saying it, or (c) you don’t care whether they ever produce code for you again.
‘ten years for ID fraud’ headlines are being deployed to help Blunkett present a tough…stance
“So shall we recap? We will have a new, stiffer penalty for an offence that gained a new, stiffer penalty just last year. A large proportion of those caught carrying false ID will, as previously, be swiftly ejected from the country, and will therefore not be going to prison anyway. The Metropolitan Police is meanwhile is “negotiating” with the Immigration Service in order to agree procedures that will give it data on false identity documents that will actually stand up in court. Should UKIS be able to tear itself away from its Home Office targets for long enough to do this, then the police will be rather better equipped to target organised crime’s production of false identity documents.”