And so a hurricane prompts me to update my blog

Haven't updated lately because there hasn't been much news, except that I'm going home for the summer (August 7th - September 17th or so). But I've been stuck indoors today thanks to a typhoon ...



In this picture, it's pretty much smack dab over Kyushu. Things peaked around 3 pm this afternoon but have since died down.

I think I mentioned this before, but the main casualties in these typhoons seem to be elderly people who, for some strange reason, go up on their roofs (rooves?) and get blown off and fall to their deaths. Maybe they are trying to fix leaks in the roof or something ... but part of me wonders if they are actually just trying to commit suicide in a way that won't arouse suspicions of insurance companies ... or perhaps they are actually being murdered by their families in a way that makes it look like an accident. "Oh good, there's a typhoon coming! We can finally get rid of your mother!"

So I've been watching a lot of TV today. I am amazed and appalled at just how bad some of it is. Today, there was a show featuring a self-proclaimed "animal psychic" (an American woman, of course, wearing a leather jacket, no less) who visited some damn bear in some damn zoo somewhere, and then started to talk about how the bear was in mourning for another bear that used to live in the cage but died ... so the psychic starts crying, and the audience is crying, and the bear is reaching through the bars (trying to kill the psychic, I'm sure) but everyone takes that as a sign that the bear is thanking her for "telling its story" or some nonsense ... argh! That woman should be put in the cage with the bear and then we'll see what the bear is really thinking. At the very least, she (and that "Crossing Over" guy) should be made to take lie detector tests ... they might just pass, though, because they believe their own BS!

The next program was actually pretty cool ... it was all about how the human brain works to interpret images, and how a lot of things you perceive aren't really there. They had all kinds of cool optical illusions and explanations (that I really didn't understand) about how our brains evolved to see things in a particular way, especially movement and the timing of moving objects.

Anyway, TV here seems to swing from horrible to not-bad, but there are certainly no big budget dramas or serious TV shows. Almost everything features a panel of barely-talented comedians and pundits over-reacting to various news items from around the world. If you've ever seen "Hey! Spring of Trivia" you have a good idea of 99% of the shows here. Sigh.

Well, sorry for the boring post ... but now you can understand why I haven't written much lately ... no news!