It’s always some kind of garbage day, so it seems. Just wanted to give a quick view of what that looks like. Note the green webbing over the burnable trash at left, that’s the keep the crows and cats out. This is actually a much more tidy trash drop point than most.

And, for balance, a picture of some cherry blossoms on the other side of the apartment building, a sign of the season. Too bad many of the blossoms will get stripped in today’s storm–rather high winds, and strong rain to come later, the reports say.

Just saw a bit on CNN where they talked about propaganda, and had a spokesman from Al-Jazeera facing off with David Gergen. Paula Zahn, who conducted the interview, was on the face of things trying to determine whether either side was engaging in propaganda and using “loaded words.” The charge against Al-Jazeera was that it used the terms “invaders” and “martyrs” in its reporting, and was that inappropriate. The spokesman defended Al-Jazeera, noting that it sometimes used the term “invading forces,” but did not refer to Iraqi casualties as “martyrs.” Gergen was at least honest enough to note that American news outlets used words like “liberaters” and “Iraqi Freedom,” examples of just a few of the heavily jingoistic terms bandied about casually on a regular basis by American broadcasters. Of course, Gergen was mostly critical of Al Jazeera and of course, Gergen was given the most on-air time, while Zahn overtalked and interrupted the Al-Jazeera spokesman several times.

Now, I am hardly on the Iraqi side, but “invading forces” is not what I would call “a loaded term,” as Gergen put it. I have not watched Al-Jazeera, so I don’t know all the language they use, but I cannot imagine the U.S. reporting to be much more propagandistic and full of loaded words as it is.

Call me nuts, but I thought that the great American tradition of journalism was supposed to be that the press would present unbiased facts so that the American people could make rational, objective decisions based upon that information. You bias the news, you limit the ability of the people to come to a balanced decision. So even in times of national strife–hell, especially in times of national strife, there should be no bias. And yet we see tremendous bias.

Chalk it up as item #374 in the list of reasons not to trust what you hear on the news…

When it rains, it pours.

My web sites have been going down like the stock market. First my main domain, and now a secondary domain–one which supplies the images to this blog. So if you see no images, that’s the reason. Email is down then up then down again, and people who depend on these sites are being let down. And these are different web hosts, too. I thought that there was just some general Internet security breach, so many separate and diverse services are being arbitrarily cut off… So my apologies to those who need to get these services, I am trying my best.

Here are a few pictures from last New Year’s celebration. I go home for Christmas, but I am always back for New year’s, I like the ambience at the local shrines. The one near my home, pictured above, shoots off rather impressive fireworks (for a small shrine) and has the usual festivities, including bell-ringing-and-praying (naturally), sake-tasting (pictured above left), shi-shi-mai dance, traditional band, and a bonfire (above right).

If you’d like to see a movie of the experience, visit my Inagi New Year’s site.

Here is a nice shot of Fuji from a bridge nearby where I live. That’s a train going by below, it’s a 15-second timed exposure on my Canon Powershot S30. The shot overlooks the Tama River, and the city to the right is Seiseki Sakuragaoka, a stop on the Main Keio Line.

I thought I might throw in a few photos on the page. Here’s one of a new toy I just got, a handheld PDA. Sony makes some nice ones, this is the new TG50.

In addition to the usual PDA standards (address book, calendar, memos and so forth) this model has some nice features. It sports a backlit thumb keyboard, with the handwriting-recognition Graffiti still included as on on-screen virtual mode; it can record your speech for quite some time if you have a good-sized memory stick (I got a 128MB card), and it plays back movie files and MP3s. There’s a nice jog dial and the look is nice. One of the best features IMHO is the Bluetooth connectivity–I can hotsync the device with both my Mac and PC without the cradle or USB cable, and it syncs nicely with iCal and Address Book on the Mac (I hate entering all sorts of data on mini-devices). For the Mac, it needed a $30 software program called Missing Sync, but it work great once you’ve got it going.

If you own a Clie, there is a great forum to peruse.

This is a few hours to burn for me… I teach a Computer course at an American college in Tokyo, and today is the final exam. We’re in the lab right now, and everyone is busy getting the questions out.

If you’d like to see the web pages generated by my students, visit their private domain, www.tokyolaker.com. Some good pages in there!

It’s here! Every two weeks we get to throw out “moenai” or unburnable garbage, all the non-recycleable metal and plastic that accumulates.

Gotta hand it to Japan, the recycling is done well. You throw out burnable garbage twice a week, then glass, almuinum cans and PET bottles all have their day. Every two weeks you get unburnable garbage, and perhaps once a month there are days for newspapers and paper products, cardboard, and containers near the garbage area for batteries, light bulbs and other special items.

Now all we have to do is get the stores here to stop wrapping things to death. Once at a department store I bought an item which was already wrapped in plastic and put in a box; when I made the purchase, the salesperson put it into a paper bag, then put the paper bag into a larger plastic one. Gotta wonder what’s behind that.

A report on ABC News tonight from Little Falls, Minnesota, home town of Charles Lindbergh, told of how many residents want to remove the French flag that flies in memory of Lindbergh’s landing and send it back to France.

This follows the initial renaming of french fries and french toast in the cafeteria of the House of Representatives to “freedom fries” and “freedom toast,” and subsequent calls for renaming french dressing and French’s mustard.

First off, “French” toast is not French, it is about as American as you can get; it was invented by Joseph French of Albany, NY in 1724. Same thing goes for French’s Mustard, created by George J. French in 1904.

But the plain facts aside, aren’t we going just a little bit too far with the whole anti-Gallic thing? Heck, the Russians and the Chinese have not only given us more grief over things in the past including strong opposition to the Iraq war, but also sold more arms to Iraq. Why do we turn so vehemently and so irrationally against a country that, after all, has been a staunch ally practically non-stop since the days of the revolution? Especially when so many in our own country feel exactly as the French government does?

Maybe it’s because we make so many jokes about the French surrendering easily, or because of the stereotype of French people being rude, snotty and arrogant; none of these hold much truth to them, but that colors our views anyway, and makes it easy to turn against them. Who is being the fickle ally here?

Let’s just stop with the idiocy over France and accept the fact that sometimes allies disagree. It’s not like we’ve never gone against the wishes of our own allies, after all.

NOTE: This article, vapid though it is, gets zillions of Google hits. I wrote an update that will be more helpful, and more entertaining, to twitching sufferers.

————————————-

Don’t you hate that?

For apparently no reason this kind of thing happens. In cases like these, it’s nice to have the Internet–trivial stuff like this is always covered. Turns out that twitching eyelid is fairly common. It starts in one or both eyelids (in my case, the upper lid), is sporadic and random, sometimes spurred into activity by tensing your eye muscles. It can last for a few hours to a few days, though in cases more rare, it can last months or even years (egad!).

There is no known cause or cure for it. Some people think it may be a sign of potassium deficiency and suggest eating bananas. Others say it’s stress-related, and one person even suggested that diet soft drinks are a cause.

All I know is that right now I’m in day three of the most recent attack, both eyelids and stronger than before.

I guess as far as problems go, I should be thankful that this is the more irritating one I have, and not anything worse…

This is something I’ll be writing on from time to time–not just the current sorry state of the press but of many areas of American life and culture that I find important, as do a lot of people obviously. But there just are not enough people talking about these things, or making the points that need to be made. One thesis that covers most of these topics is that the United States of America is no longer the country I was always told it was supposed to be, is no longer the country we have always wanted it to be. There have always been times where things have slipped or where imperfections had not yet been rectified, but we have been backsliding big-time recently.

One of the ways we are doing so is with the press. At one time, the label of “Liberal Media” was appropriate to a certain degree, in that many reporters have personal liberal leanings, and those leanings would sometimes color their reporting. But what effect this had on the news media collectively was mild enough that one had to run statistical analyses for it to show up in any objective way whatsoever–it was never something that made much of a difference.

Conservatives made it an issue, however, not because it was really a problem for them or that they hated to see inequality (har), but because it profited them politically. If, after all, everyone considered the media to be left-leaning, then the general impression would be that the truth lay to the right of what reports and opinions were read by Americans, and that would profit conservatives. Many conservatives felt it was true in any case because anything to their left seemed liberal, no matter how right of center it might be.

But the idea of a liberal media today is laughable. Most editors and media owners are right-wing, and since the conservative revolution in the early 90’s showed that right-wing shows got good ratings, the media has taken a conservative turn which far exceeds the extent of what liberal biases used to exist. And since 9-11, conservatives have turned patriotism into a base political weapon: we are fighting a war (against Afghanistan, Iraq, terrorism, you name it), the war is constantly on, the President is our leader in this time of crisis, what he says goes–and anyone who disagrees or criticizes him is unpatriotic and unAmerican.

Most people accept this through tradition and fear. Tradition because we have in the past supported presidents in time of war. Fear because we are worried about 9-11 and terrorism and we know that people around the world hate us, and we have to do something about it. And we depend on the president for that.

But the man we have in office today doesn’t even deserve to be there. His character (Republicans no longer talk about that, do they) is shoddy–drunk driver, corrupt businessman, drug abuser, hid in the National Guard in Vietnam and then went AWOL when they started drug testing, and much more… how could we accept a man with such a history? In part because too many Americans vote the party line no matter who is there, and partly because we don’t want to believe that such a man could be in high office, so we are in denial. There was clearly fraud in Florida–non-felon Democrats, mostly African-Americans, forbidden to vote because of a rigged “felon” blacklist created by the Republican Attorney General of Florida, absentee ballot tampering by Republicans of thousands of ballots in two counties (solidly proven to have ocurred, confessed to by the election officials who let it happen), these just being a few examples. All illegal, each one by themselves turning enough votes to Bush to win him the election, and then the tsunami wave of political and illicit judicial action to deny a recount. Gore won by more than a half million votes. Blatantly illegal vote tampering in Florida turned thousands of votes to Bush in that state, who won the vital electoral votes for the state by just over 500 votes. But we tolerated it because too many believed the faked outrage in Florida, but more because we value stability higher than out-and-out justice.

And now this leader is thought of as a hero–not because he did anything heroic, but because in our time of crisis we needed a great leader, so we fabricated one out of whole cloth.

And the press? Not just conservative-leaning, but now blinded, and blinded by themselves. Shilling for the government is so blatant that the news agencies hardly cover it up any more. Of course, they do not focus attention on it, and so many do not hear of it and do not think of it. But it’s clearly there if you look.

Take the president’s last “news conference,” for example. That was a news conference? No, it wasn’t–it was a sham. A scripted mockery of a press conference. Here are a few things that were wrong:

1. The first two questions were pre-approved and the answers carefully scripted (considered commonplace now)

2. Reporters who were known to ask tough questions were not allowed to participate, or were seated in back and not called upon

3. Helen Thomas, Dean (or “doyenne”) of the press corps, for the first time in several decades, was relegated to the third row and was not allowed to ask Bush a question (she’s known to ask tough questions and would not play ball in the charade)

4. Bush had a list of 17 reporters whom he knew would toss softballs, and asked only them questions, sticking tightly to the list

5. No follow-ups were permitted; when one reported tried to, Bush shut him up, blurting out, “This is a scripted–” and then stopped short, after which the press corps, mostly in the back of the room, laughed (search this page for the word “scripted”; and here is a link to a site with an audio recording of it)

6. No reporters were allowed to stray off the White House’s approved topics, even though a story about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council Members had just broken, not to mention a lot of other important stories; questions were not allowed to be overly critical

7. White House Communication director Dan Bartlett announced publicly that he knew what the questions were going to be and that only those reporters would be called upon

8. Many other small details, including items such as how reporters were closely escorted into the press room in pairs, added to the controlled atmosphere of the news conference.

Just as disturbing, the president’s slip about the conference being “scripted” was audible and clear. There is no mistaking what he said if you listen to it. And yet, The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Fox News, and Wall Street Journal all printed transcripts with the word “scripted” altered to “unscripted”–some transcripts rewriting more than just that one word, editing and adding at different points.

And this is just one example. How about Fox News? I know some people whom I otherwise consider intelligent who believe that Fox is not conservative. Um, yeah. A week ago, there was a legal protest against the war, and Fox News, supposedly an “unbiased” news source, in their streaming banner, displayed the following “news items”:

“War protester auditions here today … thanks for coming!”

“Who won your right to show up here today? Protesters or soldiers?”

“How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them.”

“Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street”

And to wrap up what could be a lot more ranting if I didn’t stop myself, was something that I swear to God I heard on CNN a few days ago. CNN was showing a press conference being held by the Iraqi government, their usual propaganda line, and in mid-conference, CNN cuts away. Says the CNN reporter: “We’re cutting away because we don’t think that the government wants to see that.”

I swear to God, that’s what she said.

We don’t have a press anymore, we really don’t. Read the Canadian news for slightly more balanced coverage.

Well, I might not have time to get this site all gussied up before I take off for Spain. For the time being, it will have to stay the way it is, as plain vanilla as it is.

The trip to Spain is coming along fairly smoothly, in most respects. Air France tickets in hand, no nonsense about having to first get the tickets at the travel agency counter at the airport and then going to the airline counter. As if security and SARS will not be enough of a hassle for the airport experience.

Air France seems to have a much nicer Economy package than the U.S. airlines I’ve been using to go back home every Christmas. They claim to have “personal videos” in Economy, but the screen is applied to the back of the seat in front of you–I suspect that it will simply be a video version of the radio sets we’ve always had. With any luck, there will be more than one channel, and one will have flexibility in what one wants to watch.

In the meantime, I got my tickets, my neck pillow, my gauze masks, my drinking water, and sleeping pills if needed. Close to all set.

Whew… If you’re not a programmer, then it is a bit tough to figure out the specifics of setting up a cgi blog system like this. The main bumps were getting the MySQL database hooked up, the instructions were a bit hard to follow there… but here we are!

More to follow soon…