I have to tell you, it may be good for the rice, but I don’t like the long grey muggy rainy season. The long-grey-muggy-rainy season gets me down. Last week my genial colleague Kou-sensei, told me that Gion Matsuri marks the end of the rainy season. “You only have 7 days to wait” he said. The Japanese never cease to amaze me in their belief that they can tie the different seasons’ beginnings and endings down to such specific dates. Maybe they could in the past, but the weather certainly isn’t behaving this year. It rained every day through the festival and on Monday it proceeded to bucket. It bucketed all over Yamaboko-junko, (the climax of the festival in which the Gion Matsuri floats are dragged up to Yasaka-jinja). It bucketed on the floats with their precious tapestries and antique ornamentations, it bucketed on the crowds of tourists who came to watch and it bucketed on the hapless participants pulling the ginormous floats down Shijo-dori. I watched the whole thing on TV, while sipping coffee from the comfort of my room while the rain continued to bucket down outside. The TV commentators said they couldn’t remember a Yamaboko-junko that had been so badly bucketed on. It’s been bucketing down pretty continuously ever since. It was so bad this morning I thought “Sod it! I’m not cycling through this.” and took a taxi. On arriving at school, I was busy getting my final lessons of term ready, when my colleague Jules said to me “I wish we got rain days, eh.” Then I went to the office to get the key to my classroom and one of the staff told me all lessons were cancelled because of the rain. It was bucketing down see? I reckon that boy Jules has special powers.
Anyway, that’s it then. Term has ended. My last lessons were cancelled so it was a bit of a damp squib but I’m not complaining. Six weeks of (fully-paid) freedom stretch before me. Time to write? Time to study? Stay tuned.
Oddly enough, it stopped raining quite soon after lessons were cancelled. But the forecast for tomorrow: buckets.
I finally got around to seeing the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line”. It got a lot of good reviews, eh?
(see reviews here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/walk_the_line/)
But to be honest I didn’t like it. This is how it goes: haunted by the loss of a beloved sibling in his childhood, this naturally gifted singer-songwriter becomes addicted to the drugs so freely available “on the road” but finally overcomes them through blah blah blah… Wait a minute, I’ve already seen this movie! It’s called “Ray”! Admittedly, Johnny Cash did have a drug problem (and an alcohol problem – strange they edited the alcohol out of the movie). But that shouldn’t be the chief focus of his life-story. He was so much more than that. And “Wa-keen” Phoenix made him look like a big doofus too. I didn’t like that. Johnny Cash had sass. He was a chap and a half. He was hard. He was complicated. He was deeply cool. I didn’t get that impression from the movie.
Anyway, make your own minds up. Trailer here:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/walk_the_line/large.html
Comics and short stories from the Philippines here:
http://fullybookedonline.com/eventdtl.php?id=10
I like this one：
http://www.fullybookedonline.com/defiant.pdf
But then I would.
Finally, the serious stuff. I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the latest Middle-East crisis and here are the key-points I’m eager to share.
Propaganda and prejudice in our media here:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10591
“The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention.… That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.”
Scary stuff here:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10590
“Even the most partial reports in the Israeli press of what was proposed by the army to Ehud Olmert’s government as possible operations in the coming days, indicate clearly what enthuses the Israeli generals these days. Nothing less that a total destruction of Lebanon, Syria and Tehran.”
(I really hope that’s just a bit of leftist scare-mongering. I really do.)
Some statistics from the Lebanon here:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10589
“Every airport has been attacked and rendered unfit for travel…Every port from the south to the north has been attacked by the Israelis…. Several major gas stations and electrical stations have been destroyed…. The major bridges in the country have been destroyed. 64 to be exact…. The main arteries of the country have been destroyed — from the south to the north. … This means that travel between main cities *throughout Lebanon* is physically impossible….”
And the worst part: “Homes in the South have been deliberately targeted and attacked. How can we prove intent? Several ways. First: In open fields, the bombs have hit the homes and not the fields surrounding the homes. … Entire families, entire families, have been killed thus far in the South. In separate attacks, four families — father, mother, and their children — have been massacred.”
And I think this article gives a good overview:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10581
“Israel takes entire populations hostage; it has done so with the Palestinian population and is doing the same now with the Lebanese.”
