w00kie’s ramblings

I've been wondering about this for a long time: why are たこ always represented wearing 鉢巻?

I mean, I understand the mouth, but where does the headband come from? Is it because hachimaki is a symbol of hard workers and the tako with its 8 "arms" must be good at multi-tasking?

Photo courtesy of kamoda

This morning, on my way to work, my train stopped one express station after mine. Some accident had happened on the line and the traffic was stopped for 2-3 hours. No way I could get to work, and once the train would start running again there'd be no bus left to bring me from the station to my office (it sucks working in a factory out in the middle of nowhere).

So I startend to head back home. Trains were out, I decided to give the bus a try: no bus connection from this station back to my home. Taxis? The line in front of the taxi stop climbed back up the stairs all the way to the ticket gates... All that's left was to hoof it up along the tracks.

It took me 45 minutes to get back home for a 5 minutes ride of express train. On my way I passed by the place of the accident and caught some shots of the train's broken windshield. There were 5 or 6 TV helicopters circling above.

UPDATE: Jeff, over at JapanProbe.com, fished out the news article related to this accident along with a picture of the K-car that was crushed and the throngs of salarymen walking along the tracks like I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don't know if we will see any real difference here with Democrats instead of Republicans at the helm over there. All I know is this made me laugh right after lunch.

A friend of mine who works in a cargo ship brokering firm forwarded me a market report written by another broker:

Following the American erections last week, it is expected that Mr. Obama will decrease the Japanese car import ratios starting next year.
[...]
Thankfully, most Japanese cars exported to America sport an automatic transmission as most Americans are not comfortable holding a stick, according to a poll conducted few hours after the erections.

I spent last weekend, which was a 3-day holiday with 文化の日 on monday, in 軽井沢, which could be compared to the Gstaad or Courchevel of Japan. Of course, it's a pretty far-fetched comparison: the ski-station could barely be called a hill, but anyways that's where all the rich CEO's buy fabulous chalets and come chill out in the weekends playing golf, tennis and splurging on designer clothes at the gigantic outlet mall that sits next to the Shinkansen station. That's the Japanese way...

I was invited by a friend to his company's country house. That's one of the perks of working for a company that makes profits, unlike me and the automotive industry.

We spent the weekend contemplating the 紅葉 (and manically taking pictures) that has started already in the mountains of Nagano prefecture. Pictures are trickling down on my flickr photostream as I get to treat them from the RAW format of my new camera through Aperture. It's a lot tougher than what I'm used to on my Ricoh GR Digital but the result is worth the effort.