Author: admin

Need coffee! Coffee goooooood!

My arm is covered in scratches. Sadly, not all of them are from Katy. Boris got me good this morning :( Silly cat.

It has happened to many of us: you take your seat in a public toilet and, just as nature is about to take its course, someone enters next door. Cue exaggerated coughing and throat clearing in an attempt to drown out the cacophony that sometimes accompanies one of nature's great levellers. Women in Japan, however, no longer have to suffer the indignity of having their movements echo through the ladies' room.

With a flick of the hand, they can call on the Sound Princess.

Once a novelty, the device is now a standard feature of women's toilets in Japan. Its maker, Toto, says more than 500,000 have been sold and orders were up 125% in 2003.

All a woman need do is pass her hand over a sensor to trigger the noise of running water from a speaker. The device not only spares her blushes, but also saves water: embarrassed Japanese women often flush repeatedly to camouflage their efforts.

The devices can now be found in shopping centres and restaurants, but demand is greatest in the workplace, where the person next door could easily be a colleague, or the boss.

“The core of our clientele is schools and companies,” said a Toto spokeswoman, Kumi Goto. “Japanese women are very embarrassed by the sounds they make on the toilet.”

In a country that has for centuries attached importance to personal cleanliness, and where personal shame is to be avoided at all costs, exposing your neighbours to the most private sounds is almost unthinkable.

Urinals have been removed from some schools to spare boys who do not want their friends sniggering as they head for the stalls for a sit-down session. Older males, however, have no qualms. As anyone who has used a Japanese public toilet for men will attest, shame disappears as soon as the sign on the door clicks to occupied.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1319648,00.html

How to put in words the undescribable. You can't, not with any sort of coherent order. So, here's just a jumble of ideas and impressions of the past 4 days in order to remember:

1. I was late (this, reminded to me by a wet Katy who's reading behind my shoulder)
2. I never expected to be as comfortable, as quickly, as I am right now
3. Painkillers, good.
4. Sex? wow.
4b. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of sex? better. But tiring. I think I broke her, then she broke me. Lather, rinse, repeat.
5. Leaving the apartment at some point would be a good idea – after all, she needs to actually show she's been to Montreal.
6. Biting, good. Tickling, bad^†.
7. My lips chafe. This is good and not good.

That is all for now. I need energy, so food beckons.

^† Depends on the when, where and why.

I promise, tomorrow we make it outside the apartment.

Quote of the day: as soon as I can move again, I'm so biting you.

Life is good right now. Not much else to say :)

Spent a wonderful – yet tiring – weekend with Katy. She's still in Leicester time, and though I'm doing my best to bring her over to Eastern Standard, she's doing her best to bring me over to Katy time – which apparently involves her waking me up at 3 am telling me she's up and I should be up as well. Follows 4 hours of tickling, poking and biting. Now granted, all of those things are usually fun – except when you're trying to sleep. I don't know if I can keep this pace up :) I fell dead to the world at 7pm on saturday and those people who know me well will appreciate just how dead tired I was. Otherwise, things are… wow. I never expected it to go this well, this quickly.

I need my beauty sleep tonight, as I actually have to get up at a decent time tomorrow and go see a client. Blergh. Can't really avoid it, but it should be short.

wow.

The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony yesterday. The winners are:

MEDICINE
Steven Stack of Wayne
State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James
Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published
report "The
Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
PUBLISHED IN: Social Forces, vol.
71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8.

PHYSICS
Ramesh Balasubramaniam
of the University of Ottawa, and Michael
Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Yale University, for exploring
and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
REFERENCE: "Coordination
Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam
and Michael T. Turvey, Biological
Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and
then Howard University, for investigating
the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe
to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.

CHEMISTRY
The Coca-Cola Company of
Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert liquid from
the River
Thames into Dasani,
a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made
unavailable to consumers.

ENGINEERING
Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida,
USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).

LITERATURE
The American Nudist Research Library
of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone
can see it.

PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons
of the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher
Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay
close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else
— even a man in a gorilla suit.
REFERENCE: "Gorillas
in Our Midst," Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol.
28, Perception, 1999, pages
1059-74.
DEMO: <http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html>

ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing
prayers to India.

PEACE
Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo,
Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for
people to learn to tolerate each other

BIOLOGY
Ben Wilson of the University
of British Columbia, Lawrence
Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert
Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus
Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg
of Sweden's National Board of
Fisheries, for showing that herrings
apparently communicate by farting.
REFERENCE: "Sounds
Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release," Magnus Wahlberg
and Håkan Westerberg, Aquatic
Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.
REFERENCE: "Pacific
and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds," Ben Wilson, Robert
S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology
Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.

I informed my boss of the McGill job. It went SO MUCH BETTER than I could ever have imagined. I'm so relieved. It's a huge weight off my shoulders. He's uber happy for me, and agrees with me that it's an offer I can't refuse. He told me not to worry about the timing issues, because one thing he's learned is that timing is never right, always a problem, so he's learned to not care about it :) I've offered to give them a hand when needed for the next month or so to ease the pains of transition, given that I basically won't be working here anymore. I start the day after my vacation ends.

SO!

Now that that stress is out of the picture, I can now turn my attention to another stress, which is that Katy will be landing at the airport in…. less than 4 hours.

EEEEEP!

People keep asking me if I'm nervous about the fact that Katy will be here in a bit more than 24 hours. Honestly, I'm more bombed than anything else. Between my cold, mad dashes of housecleaning, and the fact that – like an idiot – I've been reading till the wee hours of the morning, I'm dead on my feet.

The job situation is making me anxious… I need to give notice to my boss tomorrow. The McGill people want me to start on the 16th. The project I'm working on is behind schedule – a situation exacerbated by the fact I'm not at my best right now. I'm leaving for 2 weeks vacation. So, in essence, I will inform my boss at lunch tomorrow that I will no longer be working for him in 5 hours. The timing sucks, but there's nothing I can do about it. McGill needs me ASAP, and with their bureaucracy, I need to start at the beginning of a pay cycle, so it's on the 16th, or two weeks later, and that's not something I want. At the same time, I feel torn about the situation. I'd have loved to have more time to do a calm switch-over, but that's not in the cards. The consolation I have is that it's not like I'm burning all bridges and cutting off any contact I have with my coworkers.

Edit: Crap! I just found out I need to send 3 reference letters instead of 2! I need to find someone else to ask, fast! Shiat!