Five billion years ago when I was in college, a friend and I drove in a 9,500 mile (15,500 km) circle around USA (dipping into Toronto) to see as many baseball games as we could in a month. We did it on the ultra-cheap in a way only college students can pull off without shame–and without sanity as few people would risk taking a painted-up 1969 VW Bug on such a journey. My friend didn’t even have his driver’s license yet.
We lacked no reserve in chatting up every bridge and highway toll booth worker or parking lot attendant to try and get everything free; “Isn’t this the coolest car you have ever seen? We’re two poor college guys driving around the country and…”
Every night when we needed to find a place to sleep, we drove to the nearest university and asked if we could sleep on a couch or behind a couch or anywhere warm.
Late one night after a game in Chicago we rolled into Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and parked the car in a noticeable spot so we could point to it from inside a dorm building and lend credence to our otherwise semi-unbelievable story. We needed anything to ingratiate ourselves as I looked like a bushy-haired, wooly mammoth.
We weren’t getting anywhere with the severely reticent guys in the dorm who seemed nervous about our presence and ready to call campus security, but a guy named Bobby overheard us telling our story and he volunteered that we could stay with him at his sister’s place.
We never turned down anything offered, so we gladly took a spot on the floor in the living room by the front door. Only problem was, it was late when we arrived and his sister was already asleep, so the next morning I awoke to an agitated woman staring down at me, arms akimbo, demanding to know who I was and what I was doing in her house.
I could only stammer, “B-B-But Bobby said it was OK.”
Bobby turned out to be a sales representative for Hershey’s chocolate and he loaded us down with a big box of chocolate bars as we left for Detroit. Unfortunately, it was a hot day and we couldn’t keep it from melting. Hot day + eating too much chocolate = nausea.
This story appeared in the school newspaper—bribery (cough!)—and is on my website here. I bring it up now because through the power of the internet, after a zillion years Bobby found me last month. He has emigrated to Australia.
Bobby, this photo’s for you!
There’s been some scuttlebutt in cyberspace that my volleyball skills are less than exemplary, so let me put that to rest with this photo, a classic from my UC-Santa Barbara days. (To paraphrase an old joke: I didn’t go to college; I went to UCSB.) That’s me about to receive serve, showing steady form and good balance as I pass to the setter. Case closed.
Count me as aghast that such a refined-sounding establishment as The Dirty Donkey might have a less-than-sophisticated clientele.
This is a sign at my local shopping center. America, she's a funny place.
It's good to be home so I can wear my own clothes, you know, to feel like myself again
It’s hard to sleep in the wild animal kingdom. The last two days I thought I was beginning to turn the corner but I get awoken by a lone wild turkey at exactly the same time. He(?) steps slowly on the rocks outside my window at precisely 7:22am. I don’t mind that wake-up call if I had been sleeping all night, but I haven’t managed it yet.
This turkey looks like good eating, doesn’t it? Um, I mean, if I wasn’t vegan, of course. (Cough!)
There are all kinds of wildlife up here. Once I came home from a year-long trip and I showered and then eagerly put on some old jeans–fresh clothes!–from my closet when a little scorpion that was hiding inside the pant leg bit me on the inner thigh. Inch-long scorpions aren’t uncommon around these parts.
This morning I saw the deer in the photo below. Usually the deer have a keen sense of who’s around and amble away, but this young buck just sat against the house. I could see it breathing heavily and then I saw the real reason: a bleeding wound in its chest. Poor thing doesn’t have long to live.
I can’t sleep in the best of times, plus now I have jet lag. Everyone assumes that since I am home I can sleep better, but I can’t sleep well anywhere. Last time I came home with jet lag, for more than a week I slept from 12-4am and 12-4pm, and fitfully at that. I like that no two friends have the same remedy for this. Someone recommended valerian root. I took 350mg and the only result was that it made me drowsy all the next day with my eyes barely half open. I lumbered around like an early stage cro-magnon man.
What animal is this? This photo is from Yosemite National Park just before I left on this trip. This trip? It was USA-Colombia-USA-Europe-Bangkok-Japan-USA, six and a half months. No new countries! Shameful.
Is anyone interested in the technical aspects of the trip? Stuff such as a 4GB memory card for my camera was just the right size for the entire trip? That a few ziploc baggies are invaluable to keep documents dry? That I changed my underwear exactly 12 times? No? OK, I will move on…
I wish I had bothered to install Google Analytics earlier on my website. The amount of information about the traffic I get is amazing. In fact, it is a little too much info. It seems like an intrusion of privacy to give out the detailed information about where my visitors comes from–Google breaks it down to the smallest of towns–and I can see which of my friends has really seen my website.
I will say that of the top ten cities where I get the most traffic, three are Winnipeg (Canada), Leeds (UK), and Astana (Kazakhstan). Huh? I can’t think of anyone I know in those places and thus I feel like Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti trying to figure out who my secret admirers are. Unfortunately, in my case, it is probably all dudes with beards–not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I am proud that I have visitors from 61 countries and that the average time spent on my site is 6 minutes. Six minutes seems impressive, a lot in this age of attention deficit disorder. Of course, it can also mean that people are instantly falling asleep to my site on their keyboards and waking up hours later, skewing the average.
Some other facts about my visitors gleaned from Google Analytics:
Browser:
1. Firefox 33.48%
2. Safari 30.15%
3. Internet Explorer 22.91%
4. Chrome 10.39%
5. Mozilla Compatible Agent 1.79%
6. Opera 1.19%
My site looks awful in Safari and I’m afraid to see how it looks in Chrome.
Screen Resolution:
1. 1280×800 28.79%
2. 1920×1200 12.27%
3. 1024×768 11.07%
4. 1024×600 8.60%
5. 1440×900 6.81%
6. 1280×1024 6.30%
7. 1366×768 4.94%
8. 1680×1050 3.49%
9. 2560×1440 2.39%
10. 1920×1080 2.13%
Who cares about screen resolution? This interests me because when designing a website with a fixed width, you have to think of how big the average screen resolution is in the low end. I left all the 800×600 people behind, but there isn’t too much horizontal scrolling anyway. Now if I can only figure out how to implement simple tables…
I am surprised I still haven’t reached 100 Facebook fans or 50 Twitter followers, particularly for the former because people will “like” anything on Facebook. I don’t take it personally (sniff).
In case you didn’t know, it isn’t fun to drag 27kg (60lbs) of stuff from one side of greater Tokyo to the other and beyond to the airport. It involved multiple train transfers and I managed to make a Japanese man display rare, raw emotion. It was a train station agent and he saw the whole thing happen: I fumbled with my four bags through the ticket gizmo (you put it in on one end and pick it up on the other) and I didn’t snatch my ticket in time. Hence, it got sucked back into the machinery.
The man was upset. He slumped his head and shoulders and raised his arms a little. For Japan this passes for Tasmanian Devil-style freakout, but he had to act fast, so he abandoned his post to come over and fiddle with the machine. I felt awful, but I was fascinated by the inner workings of the machine. It’s a great piece of technology. It can work both ways depending on from what direction the last person used it. My ticket wasn’t easy to find. After he came up with it, I profusely apologized, but he was only happy to see me skedaddle.
After close to three hours I made it to the airport–and then discovered my flight was cancelled. I was pleased. I knew American Airlines would have to do something for me. I was hoping I would get a free night in an airport hotel and fly the next day, giving me a chance to look around Narita town. Instead, I was put on a Japan Airlines flight an hour later and somehow they came up with my elusive connection out of Los Angeles. That pleased me, too, saving me about 9 hours of waiting in Union Station and taking the train home.
I very nearly was able to get bumped off the full flight out of Los Angeles, too. Compensation was to be $200 of American Airlines credit, which sounded OK to me, but no, I wasn’t needed.
It looks like it is going to happen. I plan to use 25,000 frequent flier miles to fly home on a one-way ticket. I realized I made a tactical mistake with my miles. I should have bought a ticket to the USA East Coast even though I presently don’t want to go east, but I won’t discuss the reasons because Google Analytics tells me that my frequent flier miles section is one of the least viewed pages on my website.
It’s a shame more people don’t see the value in miles. I have a friend who flies to Europe from USA at least once every year on major airlines and I still can’t get her to take 90 seconds to sign up for any frequent flier program even though she would have had at least one free Europe ticket by now. What can I do?
Google Analytics also tells me that someone found my website by doing a search of “toilets in azerbaijan” which made me proud beyond words. In fact, I had to compose myself because no one likes to see a grown man cry in public. Someone also found my website by searching “woman excreting in toilet photo”. Is all traffic positive traffic?
The Finger, Day 7. What can be said about this photo other than, “Where did the middle stitches go?”
In this restaurant if you could eat a gyoza (dumpling) this big within 30 minutes, you get it free. If not, 9600 yen ($115).
Japanese ultra nationalists drive around in vans and buses looking like this and blast propaganda. Somehow they are allowed to park next to places like Shinjuku train station, the world’s busiest, where someone will stand on the roof with a megaphone and no one pays attention to them.
This is at the Yasukuni Shrine which is infamous outside of Japan because Japanese war dead are buried here together with war criminals. However, in a land without any zoning laws, no one can be surprised that everyone is lumped together like this. Every year the Japanese prime minister goes to the shrine on an auspicious day to pay respects, and every year other countries complain about it—but this year the prime minister didn’t go. I was surprised. Politically, I think that the Japanese are always aware of how they are perceived in America but are oblivious to what other Asian countries think. Japanese people don’t seem to understand that they are generally disliked in Korea and China, for example.
I saw two different ultra-nationalist groups in full uniform preparing for something (a rally?) at the same time that a big group of yakuza (Japanese mafia) was sweeping the path leading to the shrine.
My business at Yasukuni was for a humble flea market. I didn’t buy much; too many pros were selling expensive antiques, but it’s fun anyway. I like to haggle, but in Japan I don’t do it aggressively. (In other countries when I do, I am sometimes asked, “Are you from Israel?”)
On the right here is a small chunk from a large poster of the same gibberish from a chain of English schools. Japanese have a hard time learning English as it is, and this doesn’t help. Japanese are famous for not speaking English well, but you could be surprised by how well they can write and comprehend. I am always amazed at how much English is in everyday Japanese language. There was even some semi-serious discussion to make English an official second language in Japan. At the same time, there is more-serious discussion about whether to abandon the JET program that brings young native speakers over here to be assistant English teachers. I hope they do only because I wish I was accepted as a JET when I applied! But I’m not bitter…
Unless I change my mind, I am going home tomorrow. I have changed my reservation at least five times already, so don’t put it past me.
