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    Last 3 books you read?

    in General off-topic discussions

    Posted

    You're wrong there Ocean11.

     

    The remake of the movie last year was almost universally highly praised as being a really good entertaining movie romp - and not trying to be more than it is.

     

    It was the original movie that got slammed as being a pile of puu. And rightly so.

    Interesting Japan articles cropping up....

    in General off-topic discussions

    Posted

    Check this out:

     

    Thanks to the Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk

     

    ==========================

     

    A survivor's guide to Japan

    by Joe Joseph

    You may think that you know Japan but, this is a land of paradox - as well as baffling poetry, obese sportsmen and the smelliest breakfasts around

     

     

     

    Geisha? Sumo? An obsession with cherry blossom? Raw fish for breakfast? Grown women who dress in Hello Kitty outfits? Yes, the Japanese have a reputation for being inscrutable. But they’re actually pretty easy to figure out. That’s providing you’ve ingested one of those hallucinogens that delude you into thinking that you have searing insights into the universe. For the rest of us, it can still be very tricky.

    Most people in the West know as much about Japan as they know about photosynthesis. Can you even name ten Japanese people (“Of course I can. Let’s see now, there’s Emperor Hirohito, Mishima, Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Issey Miyake, um . . .”)? So why is it so hard to fathom what makes the Japanese tick? Japan’s startling paradoxes, for one. Take the attitude to cash handouts: tipping a waiter or a cab-driver is thought peculiar. Yet politicians always have their palm open. And those taxi drivers whose cabs are always gleaming, and who wear white gloves at the wheel? They also think it unremarkable to stop on a street corner to have a pee.

     

    What does Tokyo look like? Willow trees and willowy women shuffling under lacquered umbrellas? Actually, it’s an intensively urban landscape, jangling with noise and neon, where overhead expressways thunder through the s****iest parts of the city, and where town-planners seem to have taken their inspiration from a tipped-over pile of Lego bricks. Yet these same people, who seem not to mind living in houses that remind you of Portakabins, will take enormous pains to drape a sliver of raw tuna over a cherry blossom twig so as to make it as appetising to your eyes as possible, and will spend as much time ornately wrapping a present as they spent choosing it.

     

    The Japanese can be prudish. On the other hand, Japan’s “sports dailies” — with their frank reviews of the latest massage parlours — make the Sunday Sport look like an Amish newsletter. The live sex shows in Tokyo’s Shinjuku quarter would make even Hugh Hefner blush.

     

    Getting the hang of the place yet?

     

    Geisha

     

    Tell the average, liberal-minded Western male that there’s still a major capitalist country that openly and shamelessly maintains geisha, whose key purpose in life is to subordinate themselves to a man’s happiness, and he’ll just shake his head in astonishment and disbelief and he’ll ask, a little angrily : “Why the hell don’t we have them, too?” (Obviously, only if his wife isn’t within earshot).

     

    So the question is: do they or don’t they? Well, many do, but it’s not like you think. It’s true that a geisha’s pronounced red lips confect a state of sexual arousal. But geisha aren’t the high-class prostitutes that many Westerners assume them to be (some do have “sponsors” who “look after them”), even if they do live on the kindness of strangers. Their role in life is to pamper a man — whether through pouring saké, singing, dancing, or playing roles that his wife no longer does.

     

    Of course, there are women all over the world who perform much the same service, without the historical baggage. But what is striking in Japan is that mothers don’t make their children look away when a geisha passes in the street. A geisha isn’t embarrassed to walk around Kyoto in full kit, wig and face paint. Here’s another possible surprise: some of the most prized geisha are older than your granny.

     

    Sumo

     

    What would you call a pastime in which two men force-feed themselves to a point where a) they need Playtex trainer bras, and B) only a container lorry can knock them off their balance, after which they enter a small ring and try to shove each other out of the circle?

     

    The Japanese call it sumo. Sumo wrestlers may look like tubs of lard who get their kimonos run up by the local tentmaker, but they are actually quite athletic and graceful (don’t consider saying anything other than this, to their face at any rate). Sumo bouts can be hypnotic. Ringside seats are as sought after as a geisha’s virginity. Wrestlers do occasionally diet: for instance, before a long plane flight, so as to lessen the chances of their needing to use the plane’s lavatory cubicle, which can roughly accommodate a sumo wrestler’s thigh.

     

    Life in a sumo stable is a feudal existence, especially for the apprentices who have to fag for the star wrestlers: their duties include swabbing a senior wrestler’s backside after he’s visited the loo, because apparently they can’t reach themselves. On the brighter side, sumo wrestlers are clearly sexy: they attract pretty popstars and actresses as girlfriends, most of them smaller than a sumo wrestler’s lunch.

     

    Business cards

     

    A crucial part of Japanese life is sizing up other people’s position in the social hierarchy by means of coded signs; how deeply they bow, where they sit in a meeting, who speaks first in a group. Much Japanese etiquette relies on knowing one another’s place in the tribal pecking order. Usually the first step in this waltz is the orchestrated exchange of business cards, or meishi.

     

    You’re as likely to walk into a business meeting without a wad of meishi in your wallet as to walk in wearing only your boxer shorts. Even Yakuza gangsters hand them out, detailing their rank in the organisation. Reckon on collecting a tree’s worth of meishi per annum.

     

    The key piece of information on the card is not your name, but your employer’s name. Then your rank in the organization. Then your name. In Japan, you are who you work for. However, even if the recipient of your meishi decides that — in the great scheme of things — you rank only slightly above pigeon poop, he will nevertheless study your card with reverence — marvelling at each line; asking pertinent questions; nodding thoughtfully — as if the card is an extension of you. It is. Don’t ever write on a Japanese person’s meishi.

     

    Haiku

     

    A haiku poem traditionally consists of 17 syllables, usually divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and generally bearing some reference to nature or the seasons. This is technically accurate. But it’s like saying Marilyn Monroe was two-thirds water, with the balance made up of various chemicals and minerals. It doesn’t quite convey the venerated position of haiku in Japan’s cultural consciousness.

     

    Yet those unfamiliar with this elliptical verse form might struggle to guess why it sends the Japanese into such raptures. Here’s a haiku:

     

    Carefully looking,

    Blooming shepherd’s purse,

    Under the hedge.

     

    This was composed by the haiku master Basho, a Zen Buddhist monk, in the 17th century. Here’s another of his:

     

    How still it is!

    Stinging into the stones the locust’s trill.

     

    There are related Japanese verse forms, such as senryu: here’s an 18th century example:

     

    A horse farts,

    Four or five suffer

    On the ferry boat.

     

    It’s the way they tell them.

     

     

    Pachinko parlours

     

    Little in Japanese life progresses at a more sedate pace than a Noh drama (even a Zimmer frame moves faster than a Noh drama). Except maybe pachinko, Japan’s bewilderingly addictive version of pinball arcades.

     

    Pachinko looks as though it’s a helter-skelter kind of activity, because of all the bangs and bells as the balls ricochet around the machines. The din inside a pachinko parlour is like a campanologists’ convention being held inside a printworks.

     

    But this is how it works. You buy a tubful of shiny steel balls, feed them into a tray at the bottom of a vertical bagatelle machine, and you watch them shoot upwards to the top of the board and then jiggle their way back down. In the old days you used to have to actually use your own fingers to propel the balls upwards, but now most machines do this automatically. This leaves your hands free to smoke, do the crossword, read the newspaper, watch TV, knit or just enjoy the deafening military music that blares from loudspeakers all day. If you know semaphore, you could converse with your neighbour above the racket. It’s hard to think of a more inactive pastime.

     

    In his book Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes, the French semiologist, saw pachinko parlours as “a hive or a factory — the players seem to be working on an assembly line”. That’s fun, Japanese-style.

     

     

    High-tech lavatories

     

    The Japanese have a knack for freighting even the simplest actions with opportunities for extreme humiliation. Take going to the loo.

     

    First you must change out of your house slippers into the special “toilet slippers” parked outside the bathroom. If you rejoin your host still shod in toilet slippers (you being an idiot foreigner: a Japanese would no more forget to change back than he would forget to breathe), the blood drains from your host’s face. As you exit hastily to correct your footwear, your host calls a hygiene contractor to fumigate his house.

     

    Then the Japanese invented the computerised superloo.

     

    Previously, toilet technology ran to a button inside the cubicle that simulated the sound of a cistern flushing: prim women pressed this to camouflage the tinkling sound of their ablutions. But the superloo dispenses with loo paper in favour of a spray attachment and a hot-air blaster; it’s the equivalent of taking your bottom for a wash and blow-dry. Button-infested consoles adjust the angle of the nozzle, heat the seat, direct hot air, emit puffs of deodorant, and so on.

     

    Manga

     

    Japan has a near 100 per cent literacy rate, but a foreigner glancing around a subway carriage in Tokyo any morning might wonder if his fellow passengers have the IQ of navel fluff. This is because most of them are reading comics. No, not the children. The adults. These comic books, called manga, are the size of paving slabs. Hot titles sell millions per week.

     

    Manga started out as children’s books, but their influence has seeped into Japanese culture like red wine across a tablecloth. Those stylised images of humans with soup-plate-sized eyes have invaded everything from history books to government pamphlets: the circular that comes through your door alerting you to, say, your next neighbourhood earthquake drill, will usually be in the form of a strip cartoon.

     

    Archaeologists unearthing copies of today’s manga in centuries to come time might conclude a) that, among Japanese, eyes typically accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the body mass; and B) that the Japanese had a peculiar taste for sadism. The storylines in many manga focus on violent rapes of tethered schoolgirls and weeping women who, it turns out, usually discover that they actually enjoy a little degradation. Yet crime in Japan remains low, and the streets are remarkably safe for women.

     

    Giving gifts

     

    The exchanging of gifts closely follows Newton’s Third Law of Motion, about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Gifts are Japan’s currency of obligation. Everybody has debts that they incur and must repay. These are not financial debts, but social ones.

     

    Where gift-giving is concerned, it’s never the thought that counts. Actions speak louder than words; the actions being wrapped, ideally, in the paper of a top department store. Partly this is to signal the giver’s generosity, and partly so that the receiver can accurately pinpoint the gift’s value, and thereby avoid the humiliation of reciprocating with too cheap a gift (or embarrassing the giver by trumping the value of his original present). Mastering the etiquette of gift-giving takes only slightly longer than solving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

     

    There are, additionally, two annual jamborees of gift-swapping — at mid-year, and at the year’s end — when everybody gives everyone presents and Tokyo becomes a blur of deliverymen. Reciprocation is the key.

     

    Wedding presents, for example, tend to be cash; lots of it. But in return for the cash, wedding guests leave the reception with a car-bootful of cakes, cut-glass bowls, maybe even a toaster. That’s why Japanese tourists are always shopping. They’re buying gifts for friends and relatives: it’s a hangover from the days when travellers repaid those who had given them spending money for their journey by bringing them a souvenir in return.

     

     

    And finally . . .

     

    Phrases you won’t need to find Japanese translations for (because you’ll never need to say them):

     

    “Everywhere in Tokyo is so easy to find” There are few street names in Tokyo. Unless someone sends you a detailed map, you can be standing within 20 yards of their house and still be two hours away from ringing the correct doorbell. Kindly hosts meet their guests at the nearest landmark.

    “I don’t know why other countries don’t also eat natto for breakfast” Natto is fermented soybeans with a whiff pongier than the elephant enclosure in London Zoo after the animals have been struck by diarrhoea.

    “I only wish I could buy a top-shelf magazine full of pictures of schoolgirls in their sailor-style school dresses, with classified columns offering for sale soiled underwear” You can! You can!

    “Let’s travel out of the rush hour” In Tokyo it’s always rush hour. Subway trains are always so packed that you can commit a sexual assault just by getting into a carriage. Japanese would be baffled by the phrase “it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”.

    “No!” The Japanese basically find it tricky to say no outright. Instead listen out for such phrases as: “I see”, “Is that right?”, “That could be difficult”, “Interesting” and “I’ll certainly look into that”. All of these essentially mean “No” — ranging in emphasis from “No way!” to “Are all Westerners quite as fat-headed as you, Mr Sawdust-brain?”

    Now I'm angry (F1 topic)

    in General off-topic discussions

    Posted

     Quote:
    Have I got this wrong?


    You have it partly right.

    BUT, Ocean, are you pretending that such things dont happen in other sports?

    The issue here is 2 drivers going for the same team, with the same team objectives.

    Oh, what the heck, it's a farce however you look at it.

    rolleyes.gif (too much beer)

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