a place for my stuff.

IKEA Japan Storage Problems campaign: Dance to the beat!

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:59:00 +0100

In 2009, IKEA Japan ran a marketing campaign called Shunoumondai (Storage Problems). “Storage Solution Experts” from IKEA would go to the homes of people with major storage problems, install a bunch of IKEA stuff, and solve it. The theme of the campaign was this catchy song with calypso beat, and the accompanying dance. (Katazuke means ‘to put [stuff] away’).

Catchy, isn’t it? I have to restrain myself from breaking out in song and dance at our local IKEA in Avignon.

IKEA held in-house auditions for the campaign, where their employees had to demonstrate their…dance abilities? Well here are some of the auditions.

Some of the employees are suspiciously good. This guy here must be an ex-ballet dancer or something…

And finally, here are a couple of the Storage Problem Solving visits. They do the dance as warm-up and cool-down exercises, reminiscent of Rajio Taiso (radio exercises and the morning assembly exercised performed at some Japanese companies.

It’s even funnier when a platinum blond Swede does it!

You can see the rest of the series here.

I just love this Apple Japan New Years 2012 image.

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:25:00 +0100

I just love this Apple Japan New Years 2012 image.

RRcherrypie’s Advent calendar RRcherrypie is a Japanese...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:30:08 +0100

RRcherrypie’s Advent calendar

RRcherrypie is a Japanese person who uploads videos to YouTube that show off various food related toys and such. She’s put a variety of shokugan, or toy prizes that come in food packages, in her advent calendar box. Some are from Re-ment, such as the little box of chocolates. Adorable!

I used to be a big Re-ment fan, before the company changed its lineup to emphasize licensed character items over realistic miniatures. You can see some of my Re-ment related postings on JustHungry and JustBento here.

Jazz piano Silent Night

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:52:00 +0100

Jazz piano Silent Night:

Jazz Piano Small Pieces is the musical podcast (RSS link) of a Japanese guy (changee) who is a ‘fan of Bill Evans’. His latest upload is Silent Night. I like his style - he is very good, but not totally polished like a seasoned pro, so you get the feeling you’re sitting near a piano while it’s being played by a good friend on a quiet evening. Enjoy.

The Advent calendar got rudely interrupted because on the day I...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:41:00 +0100

The Advent calendar got rudely interrupted because on the day I posted my last Christmassy link, I got thrown back in hospital due to my surgery wound getting badly infected. Boo. So, no more advent calendar this year. ;_; But I’ll post some Xmassy stuff anyway. Here’s my real advent calendar, that I made a couple of years ago.

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 2: Take 6 is a gospel a...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:25:00 +0100

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 2:

Take 6 is a gospel a cappella group. They’ve been around since 1980, and despite some member changes their sound has remained consistent - rich, layered yet quite laid back. I love good a cappella, but no group is as soul-satisfying to listen to as Take 6. Here they are singing I’ll Be Home For Christmas. Keep in mind that rich sound comes just from six voices, no instruments. Amazing.

You can find a lot of their other Christmas and other songs on YouTube, Spotify, etc.

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 1: This is a short film called...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:13:00 +0100

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 1:

This is a short film called Tanghi Argentini. It was nominated for an Oscar in 2008. The payoff is wonderful. Enjoy.

A bit of Christmas cheer every day.

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:10:22 +0100

What with the operation and my father dying and all, I know I’ve been depressed and making people around me depressed too these days. So, to compensate a bit I’m going to be bringing a bit of Christmas cheer every day until the big day. Sort of like an advent calendar.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Things you can do with a paper book that you can't with an ebook.

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 21:09:00 +0100

Lend or borrow it easily to/from someone else (Damn DRM)
Read it in the tub
Quickly riffle through it to find something you want (for me at least, looking for something in an ebook takes much longer, unless I know the exact word/phrase to search for)
Turn back/forward to/from specific pages easily
Use it to prop up your wonky table leg
Put flower petals within its pages, to surprise you years later when you’ve forgotten about them and they gently flutter into your lap
Cut random letters/phrases out of to form a ransom note
Cut out the middle to conceal a revolver
Line up on your shelves to give your room a a bookish air, as well as provide some sound and heat insulation
Provide an excuse for having a bookcase that hides a secret door leading to…your hidden lair, your secret dungeon, your stash of gold, an escape route for your heretic priest friend, or a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis
Use the pages as emergency toilet paper

The boring stuff: why I made this list

I am very glad that Amazon has decided to update the Stanza reading app for iOS5, even though the update doesn’t work on older iOSes and is probably the last update ever to the app, as Amazon ~~forces~~ encourages people to switch to the Kindle. They want you to buy a physical Kindle, but they’ll settle for you using the app.

Anyway, I have been reading books on ereaders since…well, since the days of the Newton. (Yep I’m the one who bought a Newton.) I read them on my computer screen, and I read them on my Palm Pilot device. I remember getting through a boring couple of days of jury duty by reading Star Trek novels on my Palm. Ebooks are great, especially for someone like me who likes to read English or Japanese books, but lives elsewhere. Shipping costs for books internationally are either super-duper-slow (you’ve forgotten you’ve even ordered the book by the time you get it) or ridiculously high. I don’t have to pay shipment for ebooks.

Still, I’ve been getting quite grumpy about the ebook world lately. For one thing, why do I have to pay extra for an ebook if the reader app/program it was on, or the online bookstore that sold it, is no longer? That’s the situation people that relied on Stanza thought they were facing for a month. Stanza is now back, but now I’m wary about the status of the eReader app. It used to be the Palm eReader (before that the store itself was called Peanut Press) but Barnes and Noble bought it, and the app hasn’t been updated in zonkers, and the store itself seems to be slowly bled to death. If/when the eReader app stops working on my iPad/iPhone, what then? I have about 80 books I purchased there. I’m supposed to re-purchase them in another format? Not quite fair. (There’s a workaround, but still.)

So, I still continue to buy books, especially Japanese books (the ebook market in Japan has not taken off yet, mainly because publishers are dragging their feet). I suppose the ebook market will continue to expand, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.

It's not even perpetual.

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:53:00 +0100

This is a solid gold 2012 calendar made to commemorate Walt Disney’s 110th birthday. It was unveiled by a jewelry maker in Ginza, Tokyo called Ginza Tanaka.

The calendar measures 41.66 cm x 66.6 cm (about 16.3” x 26.2”) and comes in a frame. The total weight of the gold is 6 kg (about 13.2 lbs). The description doesn’t specify, but since 18K is the standard for gold jewelry in Japan (14K is not really considered to be solid gold) I’m assuming the calendar is at least 18K.

The calendar costs 60 million yen, or about US $768,250.

Also available: a small 5 gram gold calendar for 45,000 yen, a 1 gram version for 11,000 yen, and a larger gold leaf calendar for 35,000 yen. (Japanese page)

Now, I have been pondering who the heck is the intended customer for this line of gold calendars. It is sort of hard to imagine a lot of Japanese customers buying these, even if Disney fandom runs deep in Japan, since they are so ostentatious. Especially not this year, the year of repeated natural disasters (besides the earthquake and tsunami, there has been record breaking flooding too) and continuing economic woes. Besides, rich Japanese people these days do not like to flaunt their wealth anymore, unlike in the show-off 1980s.

I suspect that the primary target for these calendars are wealthy Chinese customers. Ginza is apparently a mecca for Chinese tourists with money to burn - so much so that the venerable department store Mitsukoshi remade their store to appeal more to them (a move which drew a lot of criticism and ire from their Japanese customer base).

Maybe that’s the role Japan is going to play in the near future: a shiny little playground and shopping mall for rich dilettantes from other Asian countries.

90th Anniversary 90-color Sakura Coupy colored pencil set, in a...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:26:00 +0200

90th Anniversary 90-color Sakura Coupy colored pencil set, in a limited edition of 5,000 sets. It costs 9,000 yen, and so far I’ve only seen it for sale in Japan.

As an adult I prefer Caran d’Ache, Faber-Castell and Mitsubishi Holbein pencils, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Sakura Coupys.

A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses: A review of Judith Krantz by Clive James

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:50:00 +0200

A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses: A review of Judith Krantz by Clive James:

I recently discovered that Random House has released the the entire oeuvre of Judith Krantz in Kindle format - 10 in all, (I somehow thought there were more, but there you go.) In a fit of nostalgia, I downloaded them all, and have been having a fun time reading through them.

In case you’re too young to remember, until the early to mid 1990s or so, Judith Krantz was the queen of blockbuster romantic fiction, otherwise known as the “sex and shopping” genre. (She published her last novel, The Jewels of Tessa Kent, in 1998, but neither it nor her previous 2 books, Dazzle and Spring Collection, did nearly as well as her previous 7 novels, though they still did better than most. She was no longer the dominant force in her field though.) Current day authors that probably fit into this genre are the Shopaholic books, obviously, and…well I can’t really cite any others since I stopped reading these kinds of books some years ago. But you get the idea. All of Judith Krantz’s books got huge advances (the one she got for the paperback rights to her second book, Princess Daisy, set a record at the time) and most were made into TV miniseries, mostly produced by her husband (who was a legit movie and TV producer anyway, so it wasn’t entirely nepotism I’m sure. Incidentally, their son Tony Krantz is a producer slash director now; he was executive producer of the first 5 seasons of 24.)

Anyway, as I read through her books, conflicting thoughts came to mind. First, she was not such a bad writer, on the surface - but she was given to some pretty crappy overblown prose too. There’s a lot of rather random sex in her books, which made her books naughty back in the day, but these days…well I don’t know, maybe they’ll still be good for some people. And her characters…well. I think that she actually came up with her best set of characters in her first book, Scruples, then gradually ran out of decent ideas.

In essence, Judith Krantz was absolutely in love with the 1980s - even if her first book came out in 1978. She loved the values of the moneyed classes of the 1980s, which she seemed to have seen as a return to the elegance of the era she grew up in, the late 1940s to 1950s, but with more, ostentatious money. If she were just a bit better writer, her books could even be seen as an interesting look at that decade. As it is though, she was just incapable to digging much beyond superficial things. (I also read her autobiography for the first time. Yikes. A woman just steeped in upper-middle-glass-American privilege and snobbery, and not even realizing it, is the impression I came away with.)

Anyway…while I was doing a bit of idle research, I ran across this hilarious review of the aforementioned Princess Daisy by none other than Clive James, for the London Review of Books, back in 1980. He basically nailed a lot of things wrong with her writing. The stuffy comments that start with Sir: are funny too.

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:37:11 +0200

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

Cool or silly? You decide. (source)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:42:31 +0200

Cool or silly? You decide. (source)

The pure joy of the iPhone 4S.

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:57:00 +0200

I got my iPhone 4S today. (No hassle at all, no lining up at our nearest Orange store. Mr. Guy was the 2nd person there for the 4S.) And I’ve already been having such fun with it! The much improved camera (the photo above is an unadjusted pic taken with it), Siri (love Siri, quirks and all), the lovely crisp screen. My favorite apps look so much nicer. And it’s such a gorgeous object, a pleasure to regard and to hold. I loved my previous phone, the 3GS, too, and may still slightly prefer the curviness of that, but the iPhone 4/4S form is beautiful too. And of course, even the box it comes in is gorgeous. (The picture below was taken with the 3GS, under similar lighting conditions as the egg and toast. You can see the difference in camera quality.)

This is the experience I’ve gotten with almost every computer or gadget I’ve gotten from Apple - that’s quite a lot of computers and gadgets. There are so few obejcts that I own that bring me this rush of pure and simple joy. I suppose that this is what differentiates people who buy Apple products from people who never will and deride those who do. Who cares how a phone or a computer or whatever looks, or feels (how stupid is that?), as long as it has awesome technical specs and works*, right? Well, some of us do care, a lot.

If this is drinking the Kool Aid, bring me more. Now when are the next line of MacBook Pros coming out…

[* the iPhone 4S does have awesome specs etc. of course, but I leave that discussion to others.]

What are some great stories about Steve Jobs?

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:28:36 +0200

What are some great stories about Steve Jobs?:

Some great personal anecdotes on Quora.

(OK I’ll stop posting Steve Jobs stuff now.)

….and just one more. Contrary to what has been written...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:11:00 +0200

….and just one more. Contrary to what has been written elsewhere, this doesn’t seem to be an official Pixar tribute, but rather one put together by someone at tauntr.com. Very nicely done. Woody looks particularly spiffy in his black mock turtleneck.

(No I’m not mourning for Steve Jobs all week, but just wanted to collect the best of these tributes.)

Stephen Colbert pays tribute to Steve Jobs. The last 10 seconds...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:46:26 +0200

Stephen Colbert pays tribute to Steve Jobs.

The last 10 seconds did me in.

Does Siri really mean butt in Japanese?

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:25:00 +0200

There has been a thing going about since the Apple announcement of the IPhone 4S, iOS 5 and its new voice-activated assistant thingie Siri, that the word ‘siri’ means ‘butt’ in Japanese. It’s been mentioned on several “mainstream” sites such as CNET and MSNBC, and many English speakers have been retweeting this ‘fact’.

Well is it true? Not really.

One word for your seat in Japan is “shiri” (しり in hiragana, 尻 in kanji), which, if you are unfamiliar with Japanese, may look just like Siri. However, while Siri is pronounced ‘SI-ri’ with the accent on the first syllable, shiri is pronounced ‘shi-RI’, with the accent on the second syllable. This may not seem like much of a difference to you, but in Japanese there are dozens of words like that. Besides, Siri has a “s” while shiri has an “sh” sound, which are not the same thing either.

What does complicate matters a bit is that in Japanese, there is no clear “S” sound per se when paired with the ‘i’ sound. So, when Siri is transposed into Japanese phonetically, it does because “shiri”. However, it would still be pronounced “SHI-ri” (accent on first syllable), and most people whose sense of humor is not stuck in the 3rd grade would know the difference.

I follow the Japanese Twitter universe about as equally as I follow the English one. There have indeed been a few scattered sniggering mentions of Siri being shiri. Ironically though, quite a few of then were picking up on the mention of this in the English media and commenting on that (the circle jerk of social media?). However, the vast majority of people tweeting about the iPhone4S announcement were peeved that Siri is not yet available for Japanese. The iPhone is tremendously popular in Japan, and people are gagging to try this new cool voice activated assistant.

Some are even saying stuff like it’s a ‘major embarassment’ for Apple, and that they should even change the name before launching Siri in Japan. What bullshit. I’m sure some juveniles in Japan will snigger about it, but most will not care one bit. Apple Japan has a huge number of native Japanese employees. Do you think that one of them would not have spoken up if they had thought that the name Siri would be offensive in Japan? I mean, come on now. It’s just like when Apple did not see any problem with the name iPad, but some Beavis and Butthead types did. That faded pretty fast too.

Besides, Japanese people love butts. Unlike in English, where butt-related words and phrases such as “asshole” “asswipe” “rip you a new one” - oh, and “butthead” have negative, derogatory meanings, in Japanese the ass is mostly regarded as this cute, somewhat humorous thing, whether they belong to little kids or sumo wrestlers. Chris (an American who has been living in Japan since 1997) tweeted that Apple should even think about using a cute butt icon for Siri. It’s not such a bad idea, really. ^_^

I would tell MSNBC et. al. to get a clue, but I’ve basically given up on the English speaking ‘mainstream’ media to have any clue at all about Japan or Japanese culture. (You can peruse my more serious personal site for more about that if you’re interested.)

By the way, most Japanese people would call the butt “oshiri”, not “shiri”. Here are some words for the buttocks area in order of rudeness, starting with ones that are safe to use in front of a nice Japanese grandma.

oshiri おしり
hippu ヒップ　(derived from the English ‘hip’)
bakku バック　(derived from the English ‘back’. Somewhat obscure, usually used in conjunction with other words Even more obscure and oblique would be the Japanese word for back, ushiro. )
shiri 　しり　(yep, omitting the honorific ‘o’ makes it that much ruder)
ketsu けつ

Steve Jobs narrates the first, unaired version of the 1997 Think...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:32:00 +0200

Steve Jobs narrates the first, unaired version of the 1997 Think Different commercial. (via)