Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

Editor’s note:

After this point, the posts are more than three years old, recovered from an old blog export file.

This is a kind of obscure thing, so a little background:

Often, to type Japanese characters into a computer or cellphone, you type the word in phonetic characters, either the the “Romaji” (Not “romaNji”, by the way…) or the Hiragana and then use another key to select the proper Chinese character-based word.

Since this can be a bit slow, different systems use shortcuts for entering words quickly, kind of a speed-dial for text entry.

Apparently, one suspicious housewife went through her husband’s phone and was able to get a sense of what kinds of text he was tapping into his phone, even if he had deleted the messages themselves.

Yuki from Pineapplemonade has some fun with this and shows what her own texting reveals…

pineapplemonade: Mojihenkan

The woman thought her husband was cheating on her, so she looked into his cell phone. I don’t know how it works in English phones, but in Japanese cell phones, if you write a word and then push a convert button, it shows up the words you wrote in cache memory. She went through all of the words alas, and came up with horribly perverted words.

Just yesterday, I was talking to my sister Leslie about how much less people rely on cars here in Japan Tokyo than they do in the states - as an example, I told her how I had seen on old man making deliveries for a Chinese restaurant. He was in his seventies and made his deliveries by bicycle. He had a half-dozen bowls of soup in ceramic bowls balanced on a wooden tray, balanced on his shoulder, on a bicycle.
Today at lunch, I saw a much younger delivery guy with a couple of bowls and I happened to have my camera ready, so I got this picture:

It’s not uncommon to see a woman with two or three children on a bike, or perhaps a business man with an umbrella riding in the rain. Police, of course, do most of their patrolling by bike.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the longer average lifespan in Japan?

Time Magazine used to have an article that made Bush look foolish. They have recently removed it from their website.

This is an unethical and wrong move on the part of Time.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for the quality of writing at Time over the years, but this goes beyond anything of which I would have imagined them capable. It of course brings to mind the famous phrase by Orwell:

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.

—- 1984 by George Orwell

TIME: Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam
By GEORGE (H.W.) BUSH AND BRENT SCOWCROFT

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.

Via slashdot

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