Ninja Crisps, traveling in Nihon, yeah!

Well, just got back from J-land and what a trip! Six of us left in late October and came back early November. The weather in Japan was terrific (it only rained two of the ten days) and we packed in a lot. For the most part, I was there to train in my martial arts (you can see a post on that here), but even so, I was able to take the shinkansen with my girl to Osaka (where we ate the best takoyaki ever), and found time to visit friends in our home-town over-seas, Kunitachi. We also went to one of my favorite places on the planet, Kichijoji (where we ate a lot of delicious food, but the certainly the best bowl of ramen that I have ever had and perhaps the best bowl of ramen in the universe). I was also able to get a bag of Ninja Crisps at a train station.



My girl, Saudade, has done an excellent job documenting the delicious food and wacky hijinx of Japan--so I shall leave you with her, here.

Oakland poems

I've been thinking about Oakland lately, and the sort of illusory and plastic nature of "place." Here are a couple of poems stemming from that:



This must be more than just

us, these words upon you.

Stories climb out as veins;

pave our roads, carve clouds

from sky. Oakland...we have

yet our obligations. There is

more there than here, and no

index has been imagined. A

woman in an evening coincides

with violence, skirting briefly

along its edge. She walks

home, still in love and aware.

...

A city invoked becomes

every city to subtle senses

until we cannot leave—urwilderness

denatured, newly flowered

with glass and glancing light.

The alphabet of trees has been

bombed, made strange, but one

cannot escape environment. We

leak complexity, our borders

flicker. Send me a letter and I

will reply with sutures, drifting

stories, digital photographs.

Banned Books! Creative Librarians! See it now!

Mark (aka Bad Librarianship) posted this over at his place, and I liked it so much I thought it deserved a re-post:

Water and dinosaurs

So today I read on Saudade's blog about how on the Economist debate site Steve Hoffmann, Managing Director, WaterTech Capital & co-founder, Palisades Water Index Associates, is arguing that water should be commodified (yeah--of course he would. I know this is an ad hominem logical fallacy, but how can one trust this guy's intentions? They seem pretty obvious to me), and then I learn that Palin thinks we humans once rode around on dinosaurs. Goddamit.

*sigh*

Chad VanGaalen

Saw this today on bridging the atlantic (a really good music blog--five remote friends sharing their musical discoveries) and saw fit to share...



Check out the eyelids--they rule!

Consumption, Books, and Reproduction

So this week I discovered two things:

1. ABE.com has been purchased by Amazon.com. Read more here.

and

2. Isabella Rossellini is into insect sex and is wonderful and mad.

The first piece of news distresses me. I have worked in an independent bookstore, Diesel, A Bookstore, for a few years now, and have sadly watched other incredible independents go out of business around me. Most people don't really realize the great benefit independent bookstores bring to their community--indies are so often the places, like public libraries, where public discourse occurs, and where new ideas are introduced and disseminated. I very much hold online book-sellers like Amazon responsible for irrevocably damaging independents.

The second discovery delights me. I have known for quite some time that Isabella Rossellini is a wonderful actress who makes interesting choices. These videos on the Sundance channel have cemented this knowledge and, indeed, have lead me to the new understanding that she is, in actuality, a genius.

You can watch her episodes of insect-on-insect interaction here. One must give respect to any artist who creates life-size paper replicas of bugs, and then does what she does. The Bee episode is probably my favorite.

Perhaps there is a relationship between the often cannibalistic sex of life of insects and the uber-capitalist society in which we now live. Perhaps not, but the discovery of both the above topics nevertheless leads to intriguing juxtapositions.

Knowledge and Security and Openness

My pal Saudade floated this to me the other day: an article by Matthew B. Stannard on Wardriving in SF Gate.

What I really liked about the article was the emphasis on correct levels of network security. As an example, if you are a using a home network with little information-of-interest on it, there is no real need for a 16 hex password. If you are a bank--well then you better have a full-time team of security professionals online and ready.

That said, the librarian-hat goes on. And what does said hat look like? Well, it's different for each librarian, invisible, and can only be recognized by others with similar hats; anyhoo: there is a lot to be said for keeping as many networks open as possible. If you have secure info, store it in an external and hermetically selaed hard drive, or better yet: don't keep sensitive info on your network.

But here is the tension: we all want freedom of information (information wants to be free, right?), but at the same time we want safety. So which to choose because true freedom is not always safe, and true security rarely includes very much freedom. Maybe we should look to the Tao te Ching:

9
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.


But back to the Stannard article; Check this out:

"I got like 135 (access points) off the freeway on my way up here from Santa Cruz," said Seric, as he adjusted his equipment - laptop, Wi-Fi antenna, GPS antenna - in the parking lot of Stanford Shopping Center.

After a five-hour cruise around the Bay Area - including residential and downtown sections of Palo Alto, San Francisco and Oakland before returning to Palo Alto across the Dumbarton Bridge - Seric's list included more than 2,600 individual networks, spotted at businesses, in homes, on campuses and within moving buses.

Open networks appeared every block or so, beaming from homes in West Oakland and near the Hewlett-Packard garage in Palo Alto, from Stanford University to Oakland's Federal Building and San Francisco's City Hall, along freeways, on tree-lined streets and in dusty industrial parks.

Wow!