When I went back to Japan a few months ago to introduce my sister to that country, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to pack in as much of my previous life in Japan into a week that I could. I wanted to buy lots of pretty Japanese things, eat lots of good food, sop up my favourite train jingles, and melt into as many onsens as I could squeeze into a mere few days. Plus, I wanted to bring back part of Japan with me to Canada. Not to share with anyone, just to revel in after my vacation was done, to extend as much Japan as I could into my boring, middle-aged life, to re-live my exciting jet-setting youth again.

The above photo is of a box of manju I bought at one of my favourite hot springs resorts in Japan, the little village of Ikaho in Gunma’s mountains. When I lived in Japan, I would drive over to this resort, take a bath and eat a gourmet lunch. Usually I stayed overnight at other, more affordable onsens in less-touristy parts of Gunma, eating whatever local specialty they had there, whether from that morning’s wild boar hunt or from the proprietor’s afternoon mushroom foraging. Or I would tend my two apple trees in Gunma, a twice-a-year trip during blossom season in the spring and harvest in the fall, that always ended with me somehow detouring through Ikaho for that bath.

Before the end of every trip to Ikaho, I would buy some manju: a Japanese pastry with red bean paste inside.* Manju tastes subtle and is thus perfect for a delicate green tea. In Japan, I usually shared my manju or simply awarded whole boxes to the people who got wind of my mini-vacation; no vacation-goer in Japan is polite unless he or she returns with souvenirs for the poor souls back home. This time, the manju was mine. All mine.

Upon return to Canada, I had this box filled with six manju. I decided to pace myself, one each for six days, eaten with a cup of the best green tea I could muster. The first five days were tremendously happy. My pre-work ritual was to shower, dress, then boil a pot of tea, seat myself down with the tea and the day’s manju, and remember Japan as I ate it, perhaps peruse one of the art catalogues I also brought over from Japan. During the rest of the day, whenever I got down, I would daydream about the next morning’s manju ritual.

When I got to the last manju, I decided that the best way to approach it was to use my dad’s letter-reading method, akin to the save-your-virginity-for-marriage method. My dad told me that when he went away to chef school in his early teens, he wasn’t like the other teenagers who ripped open letters from home immediately. He would put my grandmother’s letters under his pillow and make himself wait until, say, the following Sunday. He said it built character.

I liked my dad’s method in the past, saving the best for last, or putting off what I could have today so that I would absolutely lust over it tomorrow when I finally got it. Waiting until Christmas night, say, instead of opening presents on Christmas morning. Or foregoing impulse buys for a month until the temptation to buy was overwhelming. I thought I could put off eating the last manju, savouring the wait, until, when I finally ate, I would orgasmically explode or something.

A week went by. I checked every day on my last manju, that saucy little tease.

Finally the day came when I said to myself, Today is the day you can eat that last manju, Maktaaq dear.

What you are looking at is a rotting manju. It is covered with some sort of mould and fuzz arrangement. I am pretty certain no part of the manju was salvageable.

I did learn a lesson. The lesson is: screw patient waiting, carpe diem already!

I ate the Vicenzi Mini Snacks I got for my birthday in record time.

*Some manju have other flavours. I am partial to red bean paste because, when I was in Taiwan, they promised me that red beans helped menstruating women get their iron back.

The best aspect of the Yoville game is that it engenders creativity, particularly in terms of using a limited palette of virtual furniture to do interior design. Yoville could certainly use a little more variety: in an alarming move, I got myself a profile for the Yoville.com forums and I piped in on ways the game’s development team could move, including adding my voice to the Yovillian Serbians clamouring for Serbian household goods and clothing. However, with a few hundred chairs, plants, carpets, tables, sofas, knickknacks and wallpapers, there are pretty neat stuff the average Yovillian can do.

One of my favourite activities is discovering these secret Yoville nooks and crannies, by checking out the events. Recently, I saw in the game section one listing that invited visitors to find the jack-in-the-box. Once I arrived, I understood that it would not be so easy to find the silver-and-red box. The place was a jungle:

I had no idea even what kind of house, from Yoville’s six house types, that it was. So I really had no idea how many rooms I was about to explore. I later realized that it was the biggest house in the Yoville roster and one of the houses that players can only get by credit card (in the words, by paying real money for it). I personally find this house a little too big and labyrinthine. Usually big and labyrinthine is a good thing, while in Yoville it gets a little hard for visitors to tramp through each room during sightseeing trips. Nevertheless, this particular house had some surprises.

For those of you who play Yoville, you’ll notice that they used the windows looking onto greenery to make the whisperings of a fence.

Once inside, the living room continued with a woodland meadow theme:

The tiki torches and central pond are pretty good. I’ll also have to invest into about two dozen of those unruly ferns.

The kitchen:

The bathroom with a stream:

Another bathroom:

The game room:

The jukebox room:

A sort of sitting room:

The bushes with the white blossoms give the dark room a feeling that the blossoms are fireflies. I am keeping these in mind for a future marshmallow-roasting room - I think there is a bonfire available in Yoville.

Another sitting room:

A third, busy sitting room:

Finally, a change in all the greenery:

This upstairs hallway introduces an autumn feel, with the dead trees, perfect for a Halloween look, but rather jarring after the lush look of the previous rooms.

Here’s the autumn bathroom:

I never liked autumn, so this room makes me kind of sad.

However, then things got really, really good.

The first of the spring flower rooms!

The combination of the free gifting premium flower arrangements, the housewarming flower arrangements, the now obsolete purple and blue roses, mixed in with flowers available only through purchase, is now my goal. I experimented a little with this look so far. Luck shaved off a few days from my flower-gathering activities: I have been gathering free floral arrangements from the missions on Yoville.com profiles for a few days when the gift-collecting broke down on Saturday.

Here is the second of the spring flower rooms, albeit a little too overpowering:

I never did find that jack-in-the-box.

I could survive for 41 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Ever since a car accident in 2004, I haven’t really liked music. I don’t know if it’s because I prefer silence after the crash or if I really just hate running into that annoying B-52s song “Love Shack.” I mean, I was listening to music at the time of the accident, and I remember liking music before the accident. The accident was the dividing point in my life between liking music and not liking music.

Now I try to understand all the time why people actually like music. While I could live with just the near-silent whoosh of air going past my ears, other people obviously can’t. So it’s been a philosophical and anthropological mystery I have been trying to figure out for the last four years.

I just realized I was looking at the reasons for the importance of music from the wrong angle. It isn’t some psychological need that people have. It stems, instead, from physiological reason, or rather the masking of a physical condition.

Recently, at a gathering of individuals where there was no music, someone’s stomach grumbled. The person was embarrassed and apologized. If there had been music, this normal human bodily noise would have gone unnoticed. The same for any resulting loud (yet unsmelly) farts or other fart-like sounds (for example, getting off a leather couch in vinyl pants).

Thus music masks something we would rather hide, in the interest of easing social relations, much like dim lights at parties hides physical imperfections in one’s skin and aids sexual friendships.

Biscotti, I believed since their initial appearance on the Canadian culinary landscape, were stupid, stale cookies.

Coffee, meanwhile, smelled nice but tasted like something you’re meant to vomit. (That’s what bitterness indicates in the wild.)

No one told me you were supposed to dip biscotti into coffee.

Holy moly!

That makes both of them not merely palatable, but downright delicious.

My life has just a little more meaning now.

In 2007, as a countdown to my comics pilgrimage in Belgium coming up later this year, I started reading all the Tintin comics in chronological order. (Apart from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo - good luck finding those issues at the public library.) I took nearly a year’s break from Tintin to read up on my other projects. Now, however, with only four months remaining, the Tintin project has a new urgency. Not only do I have to finish reading all the Tintin books, but I also have to read the six Herge* biographies available at our local libraries. I also want to read other books for side trips in Belgium: a book on Waterloo, a guide to World War sites around the places I am visiting, King Leopold’s Ghost for my visit to Tervuren’s Museum of Central Africa, and probably History of the Low Countries.

(This is in addition to my ongoing medieval reading list and my shelves of birthday and Christmas presents and friends’ loan books. But I can possibly do it if I apply myself and stop goofing off on the internet.)

When I last left off Tintin, I had read The Seven Crystal Balls. This month, to refresh my memory, I re-read it.

Ramon Zarate, whom we know as General Alcazar, the president of San Theodoros, shows up in this book as a knife-thrower. Other recurring characters are the Milanese nightingale Bianca Castafiore, professor Calculus, and inept detectives Thompson and Thomson, the latter without a P, as in Venezuela.

The book begins with Captain Haddock squandering his new found riches on monocles and poor horsemanship. He soon becomes his normal self, with some great insults: bashi-bazouks, body-snatchers, cannibals, caterpillars, gangsters, hi-jackers, hooligans, iconoclasts, jackanapes, kleptomaniacs, mountebanks, nests of rattlesnakes, numbskulls, nyctalops, parasites, pirates, pock-marks, road-hogs, sea-gherkins, steamrollers, tribes of savages, troglodytes, vagabonds, and vampires.

Snowy, meanwhile, has a slightly less painful adventure than in previous books:

• He crashes into the butler Nestor’s foot,
• a black cat attacks him (leaving him with a black eye),
• water is spat into his face,
• he is gagged and removed from the opera,
• he is scared by Rascar Capac’s mummy,
• chased by a fireball into a fireplace,
• gets his face sooty,
• is shot at and has a bone shot out of his mouth,
• chases Haddock’s tough Siamese cat, knocking down a suit of armour and getting the helmet stuck on his head,
• and gets drunk on Haddock’s whiskey.

The sequel, Prisoners of the Sun, has a few new Haddockian insults: anachronisms, guano-gatherers, imitation Incas, pithecanthropuses, politicians, poltroons, savages, terrorists, tin-hatted tyrant, tramps, and Zapotecs. His venom is spared particularly for his nemeses, the llamas of Peru: cushion-footed quadrupeds, filibusters, morons, moth-eaten imitation camels, Patagonians, perambulating fire-pumps, raggle-taggle ruminants, slubberdegullions, and weevils. He does spew a little at other Peruvian animals. The condor gets bald-headed budgerigar, doryphore, and gobbledygook tossed at it; the monkeys are gibbering anthropoids and pithecanthropic mountebanks; an anteater is a four-legged Cyrano, the alligators become loathsome brutes and at one point, a distressed Snowy becomes a sea-lion.

Snowy goes through a few mishaps (a head bonk, a jump from a runaway train on a trestle bridge, a condor kidnapping, a fall over a waterfall and a newspaper wad hit on the head). Most important is that he begins to talk again.

The history of these two books took place during WWII in Nazi-occupied Brussels. The Seven Crystal Balls ran from December 16, 1943 to September 3, 1944, with its sequel starting only two years later on September 26, 1946. Rather like me pausing my Tintin reading binge in late summer 2007 and starting up again in spring 2009. Herge based professor Hercules Tarragon’s house in the first part on a real villa in Brussels. He sketched the seemingly empty house and, as he was about to leave, two grey cars full of Nazi soldiers pulled up to the house. The Germans had requisitioned the house for themselves: it was lucky that Herge didn’t have to explain why he was sketching it.

*Annoyingly, Wordpress has recently mutilated all the accent markings I have ever written in my blog posts. I still have no idea how to correct this problem. I can’t save the accent markings, no matter how I insert them. I tried following instructions from those unicode info sites and Wordpress help pages, but nothing. And once I do figure it out, this means I will have to re-edit hundreds of posts to un-mangle the accents. I really don’t understand why people keep muttering about Wordpress being some sort of god. I find it harder to use than Blogger. The only good thing is perhaps that comments are moderated in a better way. Still, my to-do list since I switched to Wordpress, in terms of working out all the kinks, is now so monumental, I almost want to switch back to Blogger. Anyhow, what this all means is that Herge has no accent marking. Boo for Wordpress.

One of the complaints about Yoville is that it is a silent world. Well, not quite. The Yoville landscape beyond one’s apartment has background music; the factory has vaguely industrial sounds (of the rather cute sort). There is also expensive merchandise one can buy that emit sound.

Last night, I saw a notice for “Loudest Party Ever OMG.” I checked it out.

The guy in the purple asking us to rate the place (it’s a Yoville popularity thing) is the owner. Notice that his apartment living room has:

• five tyrannosaurus skulls (one obscured by people entering the apartment)
• two cannons on the bottom of the screen shot
• a rare king duck on the coffee table

These all make sounds when you click on them: the cannons boom (you can see the smoke); the skulls growl; and the rare king duck squeaks.

All that’s missing is the harp.

Note: the fish are called “Cheech” and “Chong.”

With people nonstop poking the squeaking, growling, booming things, it was quite cacophonous. And brilliant. This is the first Yoville party that really felt like a party. Of sorts.

(Some people wanted the duck to die. Personally, I kinda want to save up for one.)

Then suddenly, the owner shouted that the cops came:

Amid the noise, only one person heard:

The pigs!

In Yoville, I have a sense of urgency in making money to buy stuff because the stores eventually stop selling stuff. You see, I missed buying a rookery of penguins. I snagged only one lone penguin before the penguins went bye-bye. I’ve also missed buying the lamp I wanted and the zebra rugs disappeared. Since then, I have been aware that things come and go, and that I better buy now.

When Easter accouterments made their debut at the Yoville florist, I made myself a wishlist with prices and calculated how many days, working at the Yoville Widget Factory at 6-hour intervals, it would take to make enough funds. I coveted and got the egg vase, the marshmallow rabbits, the box of Easter eggs and the chocolate bunny. Matt presented me with the cupcake tower, which you can see below in my living room, and I eventually decided that the Easter basket was too much pastel for my taste.

Here’s my kitchen:

Someone gifted me a parrot, probably by accident, at a Yoville gathering. (The parrot’s name is Snowy, in homage to Tintin’s canine sidekick.) Matt also gave me the hanging flowers and the red microwave, which decided the colour scheme of my kitchen. I am now saving up for a red fridge. The leaf table, I bought on whim. I may save it up for my eventual real estate expansion. Once I decorate the apartment, I am buying a house which can have some theme, perhaps an animal refuge - I can use my apartment for living and for Yoville parties, my house will be a fantasy hangout.

Now here’s my living room:

I have nearly completed my arabesque living room set, just one desk left to buy. I am not so sure what to do with the ottoman on the bottom right hand side. There’s something else that’s missing, maybe more vibrant wall paper?

As for my bedroom, I am not really sure in what direction to take it:

The screen and the dead tree (from the trailer trash decorating theme) are a start. Matt is constructing a bathroom in his apartment, so that’s an idea. However, Matt is giving up Yoville for this mobster game. Oh well. I will probably start using his account to make money that his avatar will donate to my cause.

I go to a lot of Yoville parties these days. Tonight I saw one advertised: “Chicken fight with beer.” My kinda thing.

It soon broke down into chaos:

Everyone was rather pissed there were no chickens. The crowd began chanting for the host’s place to be rated down:

Some people were really vocal about it, others worried about the non-existant Yoville chickens. Water balloons flew at the host.

Meanwhile, someone got into the host’s meth lab:

Yeah, that was a good way to spend a Romanian Easter.

From the October 5, 1935 issue of Woman’s Own magazine.

The fine print reads:

Allenburys Humanized Milk Foods Nos. 1 and 2 are made from fresh cows’ milk by an exclusive process which renders them almost identical with mothers’ milk. They contain added Vitamin D to prevent any possibility of rickets and to ensure the formation of healthy bones and teeth.

Human milk - except one’s own mother’s milk until a reasonable age - sounds as repulsive as other body secretions. (Except perhaps for lactation fetishists, I suppose.) For that matter, even drinking anything but cow milk (or goat or horse milk, depending on your geographic location) sounds just as blech. Which is why one of my favourite practical jokes is when I tried to convince my sister that this:

was milked by little milkmaids yanking on cat nipples.