Wife: What do we do if some large, sharp piece of stuff comes flying over and embeds itself in the (new, thus far almost pristine) house?

Me: Find its owners and sue the hell out of them for leaving large, sharp things lying around all over the place, of course.

No, I am not American, but in such circumstances what can one be but litigious? After all, we're talking about the wanton leaving-lying-around of big, sharp things here. There is a social purpose to litigating against the leaving-lying-arounders of such stuff.

Where Quechup appears to have learned its lesson is that it has, by the look of it, stopped sending invites to every non-Quechup member in your webmail address book without warning, after giving you the opportunity to search said address book for people who might already be members--which was, to put it mildly, the moral equivalent of fucking a dog in public and holding out a hat to ask for contributions. They haven't responded to a feedback mail I sent asking for confirmation that they've done so, but given the colossal backlash around the web it's an obvious step for them to have taken.

If I should prove to be mistaken and you receive a message from my gmail account inviting you to Quechup, please can it.

Great example of how easy it is to start up a web service, and how easy it is to kill it at the outset by treating your users as if their personal information is worth shit. Good job!

The Chick Magnet is ironically named, need it be said, for it is the lowliest of a certain German supercar maker's line and relatively compactly built, unlike its owner. It can, however, race heavy-footed taxis and slackly ridden motorbikes with considerable success, though how it will fare against Leo's Skyline and Teal'c's Lambo (all right, it's not even in the running against the latter, though it cost about a sixth of the price) are unknown quantities.

Again, photos to follow, maybe.

Photos to follow.

"Thanks. Hey, you know the roads pretty well, too."

(I realise the asymmetry here, in that while there's no necessity for a non-Japanese to be good at the language [though there's a strong practical incentive] there is for a taxi-driver to have some geographical savvy [at least in theory])

Honda Odyssey

Your biggest hobbies are domestic travel, family gatherings, church functions, conversations with friends and reading. Your biggest emotional desires are feeling secure, feeling safe, making smart choices, feeling in control of your life and feeling proud of your achievements.

Thom Yorke was sucking down a lot of this around the time of OK Computer, one senses.

I think I may say without fear of contradiction that moving house generates demand for junk food. Everything's stuck in boxes, you're exhausted, the fridge contains only half-used dressings, sauces, and a cooling eye mask; you order pizza. Junk food companies, realising your predicament, will generally have stocked your mailbox with their menus in advance.

Another useful sidekick in the mid-move war on hunger is a smartphone, preferably the kind that will make nice with large food-delivery websites and thereby broaden the range of junk food of which you may avail yourself. There is also something curiously satisfying about successfully ordering tacos (tasty beverages and extra toppings included) using only your thumbs.

Junk food is also welcome given the particular node in the moving process in which I find myself, namely lying on the living-room floor on a balmy summer day, fanned by a gentle breeze, while trying to calm a fairly nasty hangover, stay awake enough to revise for an exam, and ignore the fact that a crew of men with drills is busily installing alarms and sensors all over the place. A taco can bring some centering and perspective to a situation in which one is assailed by such conflicting stimuli, I feel. Or help reset the hangover, at any rate.

I hope the average thief is going to be deterred by the idea of a burly man in combats showing up on his heels should he have the colossal bad manners to break into this place once we have the security fitted. It's not as if we have anything worth stealing (we're still in whatever demographic eats tacos, after all, which I somehow doubt captures many of the nation's super-rich), more the act of being broken into that bothers me. It becomes all too easy to develop a niggling paranoia about supposed teams of blitzkrieg smash-and-grabbers from the Continent, too, what with all the reinforcement from those trying to sell you protection against them and the fact that you are, as a homeowner, indisputably in such folks' line of fire should they exist.

NEUROTHEOLOGY, by (and with apologies to) William Gibson

1: The immanence of plugged-in deities

The sky over the bay was the color of a preacher's pate, the clouds combed-over strands of hair.

Case sat in his pod fingering a cyber-rosary. To his jacked-in eyes the beads were crammed with fractal images of religious iconography and art, a choking swirl of crucifixes and Inquisition scenes that extended in depthless zoom. With a diligence born of the surety that his deity was watching, he moved along the chain, revering idealised portraits of altar boys, Blakeian oils of demons, Dantean set-pieces of the evil in torment. His forehead ached as if the console headband had been set a notch too tight. It was going to be another batshit day.

Standard console jockey lore had it that God was in the matrix, somewhere. But the NeuroCatholics knew different. To them, God was the matrix and the matrix was God; and they were plugged into their deity 24-7.

(ntbc)

The abiding impression of the process of buying a house here is, hell, what a lot of paper.

I spent two hours sitting at a bank in Shibuya today alternately writing my name and address on forms, and stamping them with my seal. They didn't provide either refreshment or hand massages, which I thought was pretty damn cheap given the colossal (to me, anyway) sum of money involved in the transaction we were consummating.

But anyway, the process of proving who you are and what you earn, of borrowing, transferring, registering, insuring and paying, is a godawful paper-hungry and repetitive one. Alien registration (both actual card and underlying data), proof of tax payment, end-of-year tax statement, salary slips, registered seal certificates, and goodness knows what else go into the hopper, mostly in triplicate, and out come contracts, powers of attorney, and all sorts of other stuff I have no idea about but which inevitably require signing and addressing in duplicate. It's the handwriting equivalent of being forced to do pushups until your arms fall off.

But we do get a decent place to live at the end of it. Provided we can find some movers in this city that don't want to screw us as much as the folks who came round to give a quote yesterday...

Attention thus far has focused mostly on the convenience stores and bookshops that are stocking the magazine, some of which are moving to withdraw it (though FamilyMart has set the deadline for doing so at a less-than-urgent week). However, Amazon continues to stock it and as far as I can tell is not taking any action. I also am unable to find an email address at which to contact them.

I would encourage Amazon to remove the magazine from its catalogue at once and dispose of any stock in the nearest landfill.

Product page: Amazon.co.jp： 驚愕の外人犯罪裏ファイル―外人犯罪白書2007: 本

[UPDATE: I found an address for Amazon's press office -- it's press@amazon.co.jp -- and emailed them to ask that they take the magazine down and dispose of their stock. Will update again if I get a response.]