As I write this most news agencies are now confirming that Michael Jackson, after suffering from sudden cardiac arrest, being rushed to hospital and falling into a coma, has passed away at the age of 50.

Michael Jackson was the iconic entertainer of my childhood. I have never seen a greater talent. I owned a VHS tape of the Making of Thriller video, and wore it out, practicing dance all the dance moves. I grew up wanting to move like Michael and sing like Michael.

I remember sitting on my father's shoulders and watching Michael and his brothers perform on one of their big reunion tours, when it came here to Toronto.

Despite all the weirdness, rumours, financial, legal and medical troubles that plagued him later in life, Michael Jackson is, and always will be, the King of Pop.

Here is one of my favourite Michael Jackson songs, and one of his most poignant.

One of the random silly things I did last week on my birthday, was to a rent a real blast-from-the-past DVD.

Voltron!



Okay, so Voltron's no Gatchaman, but still, it was a hugely successful cartoon when I was a kid. My set of Voltron lion toys was absolute jewel of my toy collection.


Not mine, but a reasonable facsimile thereof

Actually, I hadn't been planning to watch Voltron, but I just happened to notice the DVD sitting there when I was in the library last week and decided to borrow it, for old times' sake.

Here's a fun fact; did you ever wonder why in the first season of Voltron, the robots where all in the form of lions, and in the second season they were all in the form of cars. That's because the series we know as Voltron was actually based on two completely unrelated Japanese series'! (check Wikipedia for more details).

Yes, cartoons in Japan in those days were so similar that you could actually mix two of them together and still have it make sense. They were pretty much all based on the notion of teams of five, each with their own vehicle, which assembled into some sort of mega-vehicle, which has one, never-fail killer attack (which they never use until the end of the episode). Oh, and one member of the team must be a woman, and one must be a kid.

For verification, note that Gatchaman fits this formula as well.

Incidentally, Voltron also features the censorship that was rampant at the time, where American TV producers felt that they had to "clean up" these shows to remove any suggestion that people died; despite the fact that these were all stories about massive wars. In one of the Voltron episodes on the DVD I borrowed, there was a scene where an ambassador steps off of a plane, is immediately blown apart by a tank, along with his whole entourage. But never fear! There is a narration explaining that the nefarious villain has intercepted the real ambassador, replaced him and his entire party with ROBOTS so that he can blow up the robots in front of the heroes, as a demonstration of his power.

The crazy thing is that when I was six, these kinds of plots actually made sense to me.

Here's another TED Talk (actually, this talk wasn't given at the TED conference, but it is on the TED website and podcast).

Dan Ariely is a Behavioural Economist (a field I had never heard of before today). He has done a lot of research into the ways that people, in trying to make rational decisions, can be predictably influenced to make irrational ones. He refers to what he calls cognitive illusions, which, like optical illusions, mess with our ability to make accurate perceptions.

I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating. I know virtually nothing about psychology (the educational psychology course I took at OISE is the only psych I've ever studied), but I love issues related to metacognition; thinking about how we think, and how accurate our ideas about our own cognitive processes are.

I think I might check out his book, Predictably Irrational.

(I just checked; the Toronto Library system currently has 86 copies of this book, and 12 CDs available. I requested one of each)

Those who lack a taste for the banal can stop reading now.

So I was Skype'ing with Saki, when she decides to have some breakfast. Here is what she ate:



It's a grilled cheese sandwich... with mayonnaise and seaweed.
When I failed to make my "delicious" face upon hearing this list of toppings, she started trying to convince me what a taste sensation it really was.

Of course, later, when I told her that I slather ketchup on my grilled cheese sandwiches, she was similarly unimpressed.

In the end, we both conceded that neither of our sandwiches were as awful as they seemed to the other at first hearing. We never got around to thinking that they sounded good, but accepted that they were probably less than horrendous.


Bridging culture gaps, one weird sandwich at a time.

Only two days left to go in my internship, my last official act as a teacher candidate at OISE (okay, I have to go in and hand in a couple of forms on friday, just to prove that I actually finished, but that's it).

Of course, it will still be a while after that before I can officially call myself a "teacher"; I still need to get certified by the OCT (Ontario College of Teachers), which means there are transcripts to be sent, criminal records to be checked (again), and uh.. time to be.. um... waited.


In a completely unrelated note I borrowed materials at my local library for the first time in a long time. Will technology never cease? The system was entirely automated, and so high-tech it was ridiculous. I started by pressing the "start" button on a touch-screen, holding my library card under a barcode scanner, then laying my materials flat on the counter, where a camera scanned them all at once and listed all the titles and barcode numbers on the screen. I touched once to confirm that everything was correct, a receipt was automatically printed with all the due dates on it and I was done.

Very, very cool.

Oh, and I also ordered some other stuff from other branches, which will all be brought to my local library for me to pick up. I ordered them from my laptop, using the free wireless internet access that the library also provides.

VERY cool.

Glaciers move faster.

I finally went and joined an Air rewards program, and had miles credited to my account from my most recent flight. My most recent flight, for those keeping score, was last August, when I flew home from Japan.

I'm now officially a member of Mileage Plus, the rewards program started by United (although it includes all members of the Star Alliance, including Air Canada and ANA (All Nippon Airways)).

I actually sent in the tickets and application form months ago, but got a response that they couldn't locate my account. I was confused because I thought the whole idea was that I was registering for a new account at the same time that I was sending them the tickets to request credit for the miles. Actually I think the problem was a name mismatch; possibly because when I booked my flight in Japan they smushed my first and middle names together into one ridiculous mega-name.

Anyway, I just went online and cleared it up, easy-peezy. I now officially have over 7000 Air miles (although, I shouldn't call them "Air Miles" since that's a separate incentive program

Now I just have to make sure that I do something to earn miles at least once every 18 months, so the account doesn't expire. I'd like to do this without getting a new credit card. I'm not great with credit cards.

I think I'll go the dining route; you can sign up so that whenever you eat at participating restaurants and use your regular debit/credit card (which you register with the folks at Mileage Plus, you automatically get miles).

That, or I'll just have to fly more often.


Oh, incidentally, I'm ashamed to admit that this is the first time I've joined such an incentive program; which is to say that I didn't get credit for my flight to Japan in 2003, or my flight home and back to Japan when Becky and Rob got married. And you have to do it within 12 months if you're going to do it at all. That's right, I had 12 months to figure out how these incentive programs worked, sign up, and get credit, and I failed. On two separate trans-pacific trips.

Foolish, foolish I.

As a person who frequently loses stuff, I found that this article gave me a lot of hope.

It's an experiment that my dad told me about in which the Toronto Star intentionally left wallets with cash and some other important stuff at various locations in and around Toronto, to see what would happen.

The score right now:
12 wallets returned with all the money inside
2 wallets returned without the money
6 wallets still "lost"

Not a bad score, I think. Perhaps there's hope for humanity yet.

I wonder if the fact that whoever found the outstanding wallets may now know that they were part of a social experiment influences their likelihood of turning them in; and if so, in which direction?

By the way, if anybody finds a keychain, with one room key, one bike key, and an engineering ring on it, please let me know by leaving a comment on this blog. The keychain was last seen somewhere in southern Osaka.

Names omitted to protect the silly.

I attended a presentation at OISE last week, to hear about some potential teaching jobs. It was relatively small; about 10 people in attendance. One of those attendees struck me as familiar; I couldn't figure out where I knew him from, but I was pretty sure we'd met before, probably many years ago.

Later in the week I was attending a workshop at OISE and the same guy was there. This time I decided to say something. The conversation went something like this:

ME: Hey, I'm sure I know you from somewhere, but I'm not sure where. I think it's music-related. Did you ever sing in any choirs?

HIM: Yes, I was in [lists a bunch of choirs]..., Hart House Chorus...

ME: That's it! I was in the Hart House Chorus too, briefly, a long time ago. I graduated in 1997.

HIM: Yeah, that would make the timing about right.

ME: That's amazing. When I saw you at that presentation earlier this week I thought we'd met before, but I couldn't place you.

HIM: Earlier this week... that was YOU?!? You look very different in a suit!

Here I am trying to connect back to the time we met a decade ago, without checking to see if he'd connected me with the guy he met earlier in the week.

I've started to realize that all of my stories start this way.

This was particularly true last Saturday, when, in one day, during a workshop I:

• Played rock-paper-scissors to decide which member of our group would present [じゃんけん]


• Played Fruit Basket [フルーツ・バスケット]


• Drew my name in the air with my butt [しりじ]

None of these activities were initiated or suggested by me, but in each case I was unable to restrain from making a "You know, when I was in Japan..." statement.

Tonight at 8pm on the Discovery Channel:
How William Shatner changed the world

A documentary hosted/narrated by... William Shatner.



It looks pretty fun-ducational (if that's a word).

Apparently it's also four years old.

I was listening to a news report today; following a recent incident where a man pushed two kids onto a subway track, and tried to push a third, Toronto is apparently resurrecting the idea of putting up safety barriers on subway platforms (Tokyo already has such a system). It's a wall along the edge of the platform, with doors that only open when the train has pulled in and stopped.

The estimated cost? $8,000,000 per station. Assuming there are about 30 stations in the system, that's $240,000,000 - which sounds like a lot.

Until I compared it to the U.S. $787 billion stimulus plan, and realized that the stimulus plan costs more than 3000 times as much (and that's ignoring the differences in the currency).

Suddenly a quarter-billion for subway safety guards seems pretty cheap.

I realize I'm comparing apples and oranges, but wow.

(P.S. For the purposes of approximation, I was thinking of the stimuls pack as roughly $800 billion, and the subway plan as $250 million, which neatly gives a ratio of 3200:1... until it occurred to me that the $13 billion round-up alone would pay for Toronto's subway guards 52 times.)

So I've had Google Earth for a while, and I've known about the Google Street View feature for a while, but I didn't realize until just now how much progress Google has made in taking street-level photos of much of the earth.

It's astonishing.

With the release of Google Earth 5.0, I installed it, and found myself opening the app for the first time in a long time. I decided to revisit the town I lived in when I first moved to Japan... and was shocked to find out that Katano, this little city of about 80,000 people, has been thoroughly covered by Street View!

For those who don't know, this feature allows you to not just look at satellite shots of anyplace on the planet, but actually gives you photographs, taken by vans mounted with special cameras that drive around taking pictures in every direction at once. This means you can take a "virtual" walk down the street, hopping from picture to picture, looking in all directions, and seeing exactly what you would see if you were actually there (albeit with lower resolution).

I was able to "walk" up to my old apartment, then down the street, around the corner, and see the school where I taught for three years. There were even some of my old students coming out of the front gate!!

Google completely rules.

This is a site that Markmark first pointed me toward years ago, but it's really interesting, and I figured I'd pass it along.

The site examines the idea that Asian people all look the same. To be clear, it's not about the idea that individuals are indistinguishable from each other (clearly not true; some people are just not good at distinguishing faces of particular races, particularly when they don't know many members of that race). Instead the site asks the more interesting question; are Japanese, Korean and Chinese people racially distinct from one another?

Pretty much everybody I spoke to in Japan insisted that Japanese, Chinese and Korean faces are quite clearly different, and were confident that they could reliably look at a person from one of these three countries and tell where they were from. Every Japanese friend who took the test on this site (my girlfriend included) was sure they'd get a great score... until they took the test.

I've only done the "Faces" test; they've added a lot more to the site which I'll go check out when I have time.

If you take the test, leave a comment and let me know how you did. You don't have to give the exact score if it's too embarassing.

My score was above average, but not great.

So I went to my first Dim Sum in a very long time (even longer if you count only Dim Sums I went to as a non-vegetarian) with some friends I haven't seen in a while. In part, this was a gathering to celebrate the Chinese New Year (or, more generally, the lunar new year), but mostly it was just an excuse to gather, chat and eat.

Aside: According to Wikipedia, among the many superstitions in China surrounding the New Year, it is believed that getting a hair cut in the first lunar month of the new year will put a curse on your maternal uncles.

Incidentall, the Chinese word for the New Year is written the same as the Japanese word for the New Year (I should have reversed those...), although of course pronounced differently and occur at different times; 正月 [shougatsu] in Japanese. The Japanese word for the lunar New Year is 旧正月 [kyuushougatsu]; the addtional character at the beginning has a meaning of "old", or "traditional".

In the spirit of the season, here's a nice, light TED Talk about the role of Chinese food in North American culture, and how our Chinese food compares to actual Chinese Chinese food. Fun to watch if you've ever wondered who General Tso is, why his chicken is so famous, or who the heck thought up the fortune cookie.



The speaker has the unlikely name Jennifer 8. Lee; apparently she chose the middle "name" herself.

Where were you, when Barack Obama became President?

Here's where I was; the library at OISE.


As always, click to see it at full size

I was concerned about how the professor would react to my request to leave class early, but as it turns out, now such request was necessary. There were many of us who were planning to ask to leave early, but when we arrived in class, there was a notice on the board that class would end at 11:30am (an hour early), and beside that, a list of locations in the building where people would be gathering to watch the Inauguration.
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