SkypeIn

0121 288 1267 is my new phone number. Anyone in the UK can call me using this number and you will only be charged for a local call, not an international one. If I'm not in, the voicemail should pick it up.

Cheers!

Who's calling? Oh, just my washing machine...

So there I was, louging at home, playing some Go, when my phone rang. Not so unusual, you might think, but I didn't recognise the caller, and when I answered I got a chirpily clinical Japanese voice informing me that my washing had finished, would I like to pick it up now, and thankyou ever so much for using our service...

Yup, my washing machine had called me up.

Long-term readers may remember my previous post about coin laundries over a year ago, but that was then, and they've evolved! What next? Shirt pressing? Dinner dates? I await the next generation with eagerness and not a little trepidation...

Pants!

Perhaps the finest pair to ever grace my table, courtesy of an ultra-cute student and her talent for spotting outstanding items.

Random comment: I'll probably never buy another DVD unless things change for the better. The frustration caused by being unable to even play the copy-protected paid-for-in-full DVD of Willow on my computer is nicely mirrored by the ease of acquiring and playing the movie for free off the internet. I could buy DVDs, leave them in the wrapping and download something I could certainly watch, but that seems kind of daft.

Grr.

The Pretz kid, Mah Jong and sheep

This for James (James, are you out there?!): Literally, 'The guy who has Pretz' or 'The Pretz kid', complete with attachable arms for the holding of, well, just about anything really, and an afro to put many a man to shame.

A Mah Jong game in the background there, at which I cleaned house (well, scraped a win, to be honest, but it's a winner-takes-nearly-all kind of game).

In 'I didn't have a camera handy' news, I'm regularly amused by the way people react at the pedestrian crossings on my way to work. There's one in particular where there's a period during which all the lights are red, and a tiny side street flashes green for a bit (so many drivers miss that, and sit there for several cycles, but that's beside my point). Anyway, if there's no traffic merging from said tiny street, I usually cycle over the crossing while everything is stationary and red-lighted.

The number of people who will automatically start across with me, then see the red lights, catch themselves, and leap/stagger/fall backwards towards the perceived safety of the pavement they just left is just staggering!

The other day two old Japanese ladies in kimono at another crossing did exactly this after some young Japanese cyclists bombed it over the crossing ahead of an oncoming tram. As it thundered slowly towards the crossing these two ladies were heads down shuffling after the cyclists, totally oblivious to the tons of oncoming metal and the red lights. About halfway across it clicked, and I bet they haven't had occasion to move so fast in decades...

Thankfully they were laughing about it once they got over the shock =)

Futility

This has to be the best Japlish T-shirt I've ever seen, courtesy of a teenage student who had no idea what it said. I know this would sell well in the UK. Not much to add here, except that it's snowing again...

My loot

An impressive haul last weekend, the likes of which has never been seen collected in one place before, but displayed here for your viewing pleasure!
Finally, a Japlish T-shirt of my own! My favourite bit is the 'serial number No...................' on the label.
More sake than you could shake a dozen sticks at, mostly consumed and discarded, these two kept for posterity.
Candied crabs and squid strips, the perfect accompaniment for sake consumption.
A fine strawberry hat, for those ichigo moments in life.
A PMX-001 PALACE-ATHENE, complete with "Mega Beam Cannon, Double Beam Gun, Diffusion Beam Cannon, Beam Saber etc. [sic]" in a dynamic pose.
A long-overdue manbag, with all the brand labels recently picked/filed/cut off, to replace the carrier bags I usually tote my junk around with.
Yay! A rare delicacy on this side of the world.
Last but not least, cuter-than-cute cards, a handkerchief (which as Andre pointed out is quite handy given the lack of towels, soap, or just about anything else in most public/restaurant toilets) and a killer hangover which still lingers a good 30 hours after I stopped drinking (60 hours since the session began!).

Japlish

Just a random selection to illustrate the varieties of English mauling over here: the verbose, the word collisions, and the wonderfully nonsensical.

Got a shiny quiet new computer as a birthday present to myself, realised I didn't have a hub and the hard drive cables weren't compatible with each other so spent a good half-day transferring all my music over in itty bitty chunks using my iPod nano. Joy.

Having said that, silent running makes it all worthwhile!