Somebody set up us the laptop

A Dell laptop blows up at a Japanese conference. Excerpt:

At a conference in Japan, a Dell laptop suddenly exploded into flames, and lucky for its owner the fiery blast occurred while the PC was sitting on a table and not in his lap. An onlooker reported that the notebook continued to burn, producing several more explosions over the course of about five minutes.

The model of the offending Dell notebook wasn’t mentioned, but since it was of the Windows persuasion, we can now boast that we are unbiased in our reports of fiery laptops, both Mac and PC. It’s only a matter of time before something like this happens on an airplane.

What you say!

It never rains but it…

…absolutely pisses down. I am referring to the torrential downpour which touched off floods and mudslides in Nagano prefecture and the Kyushu region of Japan (don’t ask me why those specific areas had it so bad). Although the worst appears to be over, more than 20 people have died and still more are missing, while hundreds have had their homes and businesses devastated. As for Tokyo, where I currently reside, forecasters project the rainy season to drag on until the end of this month, a whole two weeks longer than the average year.

The thing that baffles me when I watch the news is the total absence of appeals for donations. In fact, not one tv program I’ve watched thus far had the good will to air the contact details of a respectable charity agency, or any charity agency for that matter. Am I missing something here? Maybe I’m just too westernized, meh.

Stratosphere Girl

A friend just sent me this flick. A German rendition of “Lost in Translation”, if you will, only a lot shadier. Judging by the trailer it seems like an interesting watch (which means little since the trailer is invariably better than the movie itself). For those of you in Japan, it’s out here under the rather bland title “Tokyo Underground”.

Greetings

So this is my blog, where from now on I plan to float odd ideas and post random stories. Why did I decide to start blogging at the risk of squandering my spare time? Probably because I wanted some place where I could let out my thoughts, recount personal experiences, or engage in honest self-reflection in English. I once read that the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr used to mull over experimental anomalies or seemingly inexplicable data in four different langauges. That was his way of peeling, slicing, chopping and dicing up hefty problems, with four sets of knives, each serving a specific purpose. Now, I can’t hope to have that kind of luxury, but then again I’m not exactly trying to make sense of data that defy classical physics (the only form of physics recognized theretofore); so I suppose two is good enough. No doubt, though, I will keep working on my Mandarin for reasons I will post soon.