It happened in...
What brought you here?
TUES 18 SEPT
Yes it's time to lighten the mood with some of the best of the search terms that have turned up in the site stats recently.The most popular search term by a long way was of course KitKat. But three separate searchers had similar concerns -
why was the kit kat given its particular flavour?Probably something to do with the ingredients. Another searcher had a rather narrower buy equally pressing concern.
why does a kit kat have its particular flavour
where does kit kat get its flavor from
ive got 5p what can you get with 5p caramacI can't begin to imagine what sort of pickle this person is in -
fled scene of care accident drunkPerhaps an alcoholic nurse put the thermometer in the wrong hole?
I've not been able to formulate a helpful response to this person.
response to osaka and the stolen smellErr... put it back? Sorry, baffled by that one.
Regular readers will of course be screaming "But what about the rubber catsuits?!" Well, there hasn't been a catsuit enquiry for a while, but patience is rewarded...
fill rubber catsuit with custardI'm not kidding.
Bob's yer uncle
TUES 18 SEPT
Mr Fukuda, the likely next Prime Minister of Japan, is the son of Takeo Fukuda, former Prime Minister of Japan. Wow, two Prime Ministers in one family! What are the chances? Well, seeing as you ask - very high, actually.What's democracy? Government of the people by the people? Or "Government of the people by dynasties of a political class for whom government is the family business"?
Having been in power (for all but 30 months) since its formation in 1955, the Jiminto (LDP) have had a fair bit of time to build up their hugely incestuous networks of reciprocal back-scratching. And incest isn't at all too strong a description. As Shin Fukushige (writing in the blog from the inside, looking in) points out
"Aso and Abe are of course distant relatives (Aso's aunt married the cousin of Abe's grandfather and great-uncle). Abe's grandfather was PM Kishi, whose brother Eisaku Sato was also PM. Aso's father-in-law was PM Zenko Suzuki, and both ex-PM Kiichi Miyazawa (Aso and Miyazawa's cousin both married PM Suzuki's children) and ex-PM Ryutaro Hashimoto (whose wife's grandfather was the brother of Abe's paternal grandmother) are also connected."What?! I'm as mixed up as the gene pool isn't. But if you lost count, that was 6 Prime Ministers in there.
And so this is the local version of democracy. Yes, they hold elections. But all that means is that every now and again, the good folk of Japan take the chance to go out and vote LDP yet again and then complain that nothing ever changes. And with such a small and inbred group to choose from, who can blame them? "But the Minshuto (DPJ) won the recent upper house elections," you may say. True, but don't discount the fact that that was far more a firm telling-off for the government than it was a demonstration of support for the opposition. It would be entirely unsurprising to see the voters revert to type next time the lower house is up. Or perhaps the voters really are coming to the end of their tether with their masters' seemingly endless mismanagement and corruption. But I wouldn't bet on it.
It's Aso... no, wait! It's Fukuda next
MON 17 SEPT
Almost as soon as PM Abe had thrown in the towel,
share prices of manga (comics) publishers leapt on the stock market for what seems to me the rather tenuous reason that Taro
Aso (right, partying with some large semi-naked men), the LDP Secretary General, likes manga, and everyone had kind of assumed
that his bum would be the next in the hot-seat.While most had focussed on Aso, the 'lesser' players (Fukuda, Tanigaki, Nukaga) seemed there only to make up the list. Fast forward just 48 hours and it all looked rather different.
Former finance minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, who had
made noises about standing for the leadership, had instead stood down and shifted his support to Yasuo Fukuda (left), held
to be a 'moderate' within the party. While some sections of the media began to rumble with rumours of a Koizumi come-back,
he personally came out not only to scotch those rumours but also to endorse the candidacy of Fukuda, rather than Aso. And
when potential candidate Fukushiro Nukaga, the current finance minister, also stepped aside and pledged support to Fukuda,
it seemed the tide was turning.The LDP will vote for a new leader on the 23rd. And each member of the Diet will almost certainly vote for who he's told to vote for. The LDP, you see, is split into openly factional groups, each of which has a senior member at its head. Fukuda himself is a member of the 80-strong Machimura faction (led by Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura), the biggest faction. Mr Aso's faction, by contrast, has a mere 16 members. Most factions have now made public which way they intend to vote, and it looks like a pretty easy win for Fukuda with little more to play for. But there are also the 'grass-roots' votes from prefectural assocations around the country.
So the 'election' has pretty much been decided in advance by the bigwigs, Aso has more or less conceded defeat, but said in an NHK interview yesterday, with no apparent irony intended "Yes, but if I drop out, the party would be criticised as having chosen a prime minister through backroom deals." And isn't that exactly what's happening, Mr Aso? Why for example Mr Nukaga decide to step aside? Was it because, on second thoughts, he thought hey that Fukuda guy's alright, or was it because his faction (the Tsushima faction, with a not inconsiderable membership of 67) refused to unite behind him and the faction leader instead finally endorsed Fukuda.
!
We've already said...
THURS 13 SEPT
Goodbye.Since you gotta go, oh you had better...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might've been hearing that song for a while now, but he's finally heeded its call.
When I first read of his intention to resign, I
wasn't surprised. I just thought "About time". But on reflection, it's rather odder than it first appeared.If he was going to go, why not six weeks ago, straight after the disastrous upper house elections saw the ruling LDP take a good kicking? Instead, he built a new Cabinet, and only days ago gave his policy speech to parliament. He stakes his job on passing a resolution to commit Japan further to assisting the US in Afghanistan, but before it even becomes an issue, he's thrown the towel in.
So while few were shocked by the fact of his resignation, it was the timing that caught most on the hop. And in trying to work out the reasoning behind it, there have been many rumours. Some have hinted it's a health issue. Indeed Abe was sent for medical checks this morning. Others suggested it was the opposition leader's (Ichiro Ozawa of the DPJ) refusal to meet him and discuss the resolution that showed him the writing on the wall.
A far more interesting possibility came about a few hours after the PM's press conference. This story appeared in the online Mainichi.
"Weekly tabloid magazine Shukan Gendai had been investigating Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on suspicion of tax evasion before he announced Wednesday that he intended to resign as the nation's leader, it has emerged.
A representative of the magazine's editorial department said that when Abe's father Shintaro died, Abe donated the estate he inherited to a political organization. This reportedly raised suspicion that he was avoiding paying inheritance tax.
Shintaro Abe died in May 1991, and the total value of his assets was estimated at about 2.5 billion yen.
The weekly magazine's editorial department had sent Abe a list of questions in connection with the matter, and had set a deadline for a reply at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.
Abe's resignation announcement started at 2 p.m. the same day. The magazine planned to carry an article in an edition due to be released on Saturday."
Japan blogs pounced on the article of course, and
linked to it, only for the Mainichi to yank the article moments later.The article hasn't returned to the Mainichi site since, nor has any other news site run the story. I wonder if the Shukan Gendai will go ahead and publish their piece at the weekend, or whether whatever caused the Mainichi to retract their story will have the same effect on the SG...
England hat-trick
SUN 9 SEPT
European Championship qualifierEngland 3 Israel 0
Rugby World Cup
England 28 USA 10
International One-day cricket
England 188-3 India 187; England won by 7 wickets and won series 4-3
I couldn't get the cricket, of course. But I had the rugby on TV, and the football on the computer. Which confused the issue a little. Particularly as it was heading for three in the morning and I started to drift in and out of sleep. Who was doing what and who they played for and which sport was which... Basically, we won.
Playing detective
SUN 2 SEPT
It's been an uncomfortable week. Recently we've been waking up covered in itchy red spots. Yeah, nice.We ruled out allergic reactions as it was affecting us both equally. Next, attention turned to the cat, to see if she was carrying any little jumpy passengers. That too turned up a blank.
Various internet searches suggested we might have to resign ourselves to the horror of bed-bugs. So we took the entire bedroom to pieces and searched and sprayed. But not once did we see anything bug-like. Further online investigation suggested that though it may not be bed-bugs, evidence of which we should at least be able to see if we look hard enough, it could be an infestation of some sort of mite.
Lovely. So we re-washed every bit of fabric, treated all bedding, all tatami flooring and figured it was all slowly get better. Next day it was considerably worse. My back already looked like I had chickenpox. Now my arms had broken out, leaving me looking like some down-and-out heroin addict.
Nothing seemed to add up. Why were the spots only appearing at night? How could anything bitey survive the chemical warfare we'd unleashed in the bedroom? If there was an infestation in the bedroom, why was I being affected more than Mrs C when I was mostly wearing clothes straight from the clothes line?
With the weather a little cooler, I sat on the back step giving the problem a good ponder. And my mind wandered as I looked at the three bushes at the end of the garden. We'd let them overgrow to give the garden a more closed-in feel. But I could see the car through the middle bush. When I walked up to it, I saw it had almost no leaves. They'd all been eaten away. On the few remaining pieces were huge numbers of ravenous, and hairy, caterpillars. Very hairy caterpillars. Right next to the end of the washing line.
It all started to add up now. They weren't bites, but a dispersed rash. If caterpillar hair on the laundry was the problem, then our repeated washing of towels and bedding was probably only making it worse. Sitting wrapped in a towel after morning and evening showers? In hindsight, not a good idea.
Everything's been washed again, but this time dried elsewhere. The bush is under quarantine until it gets a near-terminal pruning in the autumn. We keep applying the magic daub to our spots, and finally life returns to normal.
10 in a week
SUN 2 SEPT
After sticking 4 past Toulouse midweek, Liverpool
demolished the early candidates for this year's Premiership whipping boys, Derby, 6-0 last night. And I got to see it on
telly. With English commentary. So for the first time in 5 years, it's Liverpool at the top of the table (with Everton in
second?!), and the new line-up's starting to look really good.The only shadow on the week is the departure of Paco Ayesteran, Rafa's right-hand man for the last 11 years. Everyone's tight-lipped on the reason why, but nobody's talking in glowing reference terms, and Rafa himself used the phrase "No individual is bigger than the club", hinting at trouble behind the scenes. That kind of language suggests to me that an ultimatum was issued for some reason or other, perhaps a big pay-day elsewhere, and Paco's bluff was called.
Back to August?