*

Kissing not allowed on American Airlines at least, if you happen to be an undesirable couple.

Traveller writes that head of the TSA is an idiot

but he wrote it on his luggage, at an airport.  So they authority figures present detained him, rather than laugh at the TSA screener moron that thought this was a problem.
What do our rights mean if men with guns act like they don’t exist?

When you buy a car in Japan, you have to provide proof that you have a parking space available to you. This is because there are virtually no places you can legally park a car without paying a monthly fee, and most of those spaces are full.

There is no such requirement when you buy a motorcycle, because anywhere you look, on the sidewalk, on the edge of the road, next to traffic lights, in front of closed shops, there are motorcycles and scooters parked everywhere, blanketing Tokyo and most everywhere else I have been in this country.

This is because, clearly, parking in these areas inconveniences no one, especially when the sidewalks are generally wide enough for several people to walk abreast, even if a motorcycle is parked.

The one exception to this is near the entrance to a subway or train station, where so many people descend with their *bicycles* that even parking a bicycle there for 8 hours will probably result in a warning sticker, and two days will almost certainly get you a ticket.

Given all that I have said, once a month EVERY month since I bought a motorcycle, I have received a single parking ticket around the beginning or end of the month. Every time has been when I was parked in a place where several other bikes had been parked the entire month, with not a single warning or ticket posted the entire time. Clearly this seemed to me to be the police just meeting some kind of arbitrary and avaricious quota to fill their coffers, since no one was complaining.

This all changed this month, as we are experiencing a city wide “Campaign” by the police to put the screws on the population, with myself and several people I know seeing dramatically increased police presence throughout the city. I have seen a breathalyzer roadblock on the major street between Harajuku and Omotesando at 1am on a friday night, two teams of police randomly searching people walking through a popular street in Shibuya, also at night. I have even seen teams of parking police fanning out to ticket people.

This hit and run approach to policing does not provide actual safety. It simply provides the false impression of police power, while providing extra income for the local police. The incentives here are all wrong. What is the point of a police force, if not to protect the population? When the budget of the police force is linked to how many people the police harrass, I don’t see how this will ever change.

In voicing my frustration aloud, someone suggested that if I feel that way, then I should live in another country that has a legal system that I agree with.  In the long run, maybe this is true, but more than likely I will just give up and sell my bike, rather than change the rest of my life just to be able to enjoy a hobby.

I was really excited by the prospect of a lively and wonderful new H.264 movie download experience, until I realized that there will be no Japanese subtitles, forcing me to sit back and wait for Hollywood to spoonfeed new releases at their usual glacial pace over to Japan, if ever.

If some enterprising young bilingual japanese kids decided to sell VLC compatible subtitle files for hollywood new releases…. I am sure they would find very few paying customers.

Oh the fun of being a very very marginalized market.

My only knowledge of surf-rock comes from Pulp Fiction, to which I would normally think Takeshi Terauchi’s music is not an homage. But it is actually inspired by The Ventures, who I must now seek out.

I wonder if this actually finally alerts yahoo readers who want to receive alerts.  Bubblegum and tape makes the internet run!

I listen to my readers!

Update: I posted this yesterday, but even though Will had subscribed to my RSS feed in Yahoo alerts before I posted, by the following morning he had received no notification.  As of this update, I’m trying out having wordpress just directly ping Yahoo instead.  Go pingomatic!

I wrote this maybe a year ago, meaning to write more, but in the mean time why not just put it up:

What is the meaning of engaging in life path behavior gravity sinks that are so completely already explored in their action and outcome that you could just google for the results of other people’s experience and skip the whole endeavor.  To wit: photos of tourist sites, harajuku girls (unless they are actually truly NEW styles, which is rare)…
Related: that dread feeling of “why record this experience or blog it or diarize it when it *should* have been done by others already”?  Sometimes the already might just be “well, I’m sure someone is going to see that and do it within the next near term, so why bother?”  In business, the answer is, to be the one who makes the money for doing it!  But in choosing how to spend our personal time, really, what is the point?  Whuffie?  Would it in any measurable way actually even boost my woofie to have blogged the “Love Jam” billboard in Shibuya the week or so before whoever finally put it on BoingBoing?

I first wrote this in writely, but writely as of the first beta has a bug that converts its file links from writely.com/File.aspx to your blog’s url/File.aspx, which won’t work at all, obviously.  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  I would prefer that the image resided on my server anyway, since now using writely to post means the article content is split to two locations.  Conversely, this is kind of like having akamai for free.
Having a decent in-browser blog posting tool that includes drag and drop insertion of images is so simple it might be enough to make a blog into a useable low-friction tool for me.

Just to see how this all feels, here’s a photo from january or february 2006, what seems like millenia ago.

My certificate of eligibility to get a Japanese work Visa:

But more than that, it is incredible just to be editing this in an editor that is always on (unless you go offline) and has incredibly robust remote networked data backup capacity.