On the streets of Vancouver, one often runs into activists, whether they are egg-throwing anti-abortionists, Tibetan-supporting dreadlocked granola munchers, pro-pay increase nurses or brain-hankering zombies. Of course, Monica assumed this was a pro-laundry movement.

However, a commenter suggested a different analysis of the alcoholic’s warning:

Perhaps she was missing a comma. Like, “Take laundry, seriously!” Perhaps you should be stealing people’s undies.

This laundry talks reminds me of a joke that only I, as a quarter-Russian, can tell:

A panty company studied the international underwear habits of women across Europe.

A company rep asked an English woman how often she changed her underwear.

“Why, every day,” she said.

The company rep also asked a French woman how often she changed her underwear.

“Never,” she said. “I don’t wear panties.”

The company rep then sought out a Russian woman to ask her how often she changed her underwear.

“Twelve times,” answered the Russian woman.

“Twelve times?” asked the company rep in amazement.

“Yes, twelve times: January, February, March, April, May….”

The Moomins being so lovable, who can hate them?

The Germans, that’s who.

Until I remembered my German.

So many good bloggers are deserting the place. The ones that are left behind are running out of things to say. Or, they are just commenting on the latest gadgets and blogging conferences and metablogging conferences and conferences to plan metablogging conferences.

Blogging has become a way to sell ad space, to impress people, or, I dread this the most, to brand oneself. Yeah. I’m unique. Like everyone else.

Little. Yellow. Different. published a conversation on the origins of the demise of blogging:

1. There are too many of us now. In a pool of 20 million, a blogger’s voice is diluted. Not like the good old days when there were a mere 2000.

2. If a blogger does have an audience, he or she needs to keep them happy. Flagrant airing of opinions might alienate them and reduce readership.

3. It’s the age of mega-blogs. Personal blogs will just have to wait for a meteor to crash to the earth, fill the atmosphere with clouds of dust, bring down the climate, and kill off the dinosaurs so that small furry creatures can evolve in peace.

4. Personal blogs are brands.

Little. Yellow. Different. goes on say that he no longer wants his personal experiences archived online. Plus, there’s the whole thing about living in the moment.

My friend MaikoPunk gave up blogging recently for other reasons, namely that blogging is getting in the way of more serious writing - writing that pays the bills and gets more credibility.

A few years ago, Neil Gaiman I believe it was, quit blogging because blogging got in the way of his more serious writing. He suddenly reappeared one day, saying something like, well, there is something I get out of blogging. Maybe he still blogs, maybe he doesn’t again. He’s quite accessible as a writer, whereas so many decent bloggers who quit…are just gone.

Though my RSS feed has over 200 blogs, I only regularly read five of them. About once or twice a year, I remember that I have a burning interest in abandoned rusting tea kettles. Yet, these specialist blogs are taking over: my collection of personal blogs, which I read because I like the people and want to see what’s happening in their lives, shrinks every month.

I do maintain a dead bloggers folder on my RSS feed. All the dead blogs go there. One day, when one of them stirs, I will be ready to read their blogs.

As for myself, I have bored or alienated all but a few loyal friends. My stats are depressing: during the last month, I had 2000 visitors, in August 2007, I have 12,000 visitors. In addition, there are many personal things I cannot or will not write on my blog.

I’ve thought about coming up with a schtick, a niche where I can dole out my expertise and gain some measure of internet popularity.

What’s the point? I have a dozen hobbies, I read widely, I go through phases of learning about xyz then switch to abc. Five million blogs already do photos better than I ever can or aspire. I’ll leave real illustrators to show off their art and real connoisseurs to document every meal. I am not even sure if I will stick with my museum career any more, so I cannot specialize professionally either. Nor do I have a hamster in the household anymore, so my slim claim to internet fame is gone there too.

About two years ago, when I first realized I’ll never be anyone in this internet pond, my first reaction was to delete my blog and purge all mentions of Maktaaq from the internet. I still believe that I am not at all relevant to anyone. In fact, in real life, I have almost no friends and my life is just the mere cycle of sleep, eat, work. There is no point at all in me writing. I have nothing original to say nor can I even write my thoughts in a fresh way.

Only about every five posts or so do I get comments. The commenters are always the same five people.

I keep writing to practice writing. I also keep writing because, even though only five people comment, at least someone is reading. If these five feel compelled enough to give me any feedback, I am that much less alone in the world.

Tokyo’s Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize for this 120-page novel in 2004. One of the youngest people to win the so-called Booker Prize of Japan at the age of 21, she is a school drop-out with a literary father, Mizuhito Kanehara. Dad edited her work.

Lui is a Barbie girl, from a subculture that I am assuming is a kind of kogyaru, or one of those blonde Japanese bimboesque types. She shows interest in a guy with a red semi-mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a forked tongue. Next thing she knows, she’s this guy’s girlfriend. She goes with it, at least until she figures she gets completely bored of him.

Ok, don’t read any further if you think this might be the book for you. I am going to spoil it from here forwards.

Lui cheats on Ama with with the sadistic tattooist Shiba. She becomes a housebound drunk and wonders which of her two men will kill her.

What surprised me is, as I approached the end of the book, is that Lui admitted she did have feelings for her poor boyfriend.

Sure, he killed a dude with his bare hands, but his apologies after cumming on his girlfriend’s genitals - again - instead of her stomach, his tenderness toward Lui as he tries to obey her every wish, and his sincere concern about her alcoholic urges, made him into a little pathetic underdog. I felt for the guy with each time Lui cheats on him or insists to her friends that she is more in love with his tongue than him.

Once the police describe his death (patterns carved into his body, cigarette burns all over, hair ripped out of scalp, nails torn from his fingers, raped, and an incense stick poking out of his penis), I felt even more sorry for the guy. That Lui’s feelings for Ama surface only after he disappears and is irretrievably lost, makes it all the more tragic. This guy can’t win: he finally wins the girl’s heart after he dies.

I actually began to like the book at this point. Novels with characters that slowly realize something generally tend to win me over if they are well-written. (Compared to Suzuki’s Ring, this was brilliant.)

The whole time until this part, I was cringing at the thought of what could befall Lui. She’d had sex where her partner stuffed her with a light bulb and tried to smash it with a hammer; Ama ripped out a guy’s teeth; and Shiba was just gross.

Why she does what she does at the end, I cannot understand. Why I cannot understand it is probably the result of my having crossed the threshold of middle age. I’ve lost the ability to understand teenage feelings.

Time to get those squelchy thoughts out of your head, right?

Let me finish with a fun fact.

Snakes and Earrings is also notable for a reference to my favourite card game, Hanafuda:

I gave him a small nod and he pulled off his long-sleeved t-shirt to reveal a body like a canvas, with every inch covered in colours and lines, then turned around to show me his back with a dragon, a boar, a deer, butterflies, peonies, cherry blossoms and a pine tree.”An Inoshikacho!” I said.

“Yeah, I like hanafuda cards.”

“But you’re missing the bush clover and the red maple leaves.”

“I know. Unfortunately I ran out of space.”

Inoshikacho refers to a good hanafuda combination. It consists of the three cards represented by the boar, the deer and the butterfly.

Usually, when I travel to a new place, I spend the preceding months researching the place, sometimes studying the language, contacting locals for more information, talking to expats from that place, and reading many, many books about the place. For Tunisia, I spent an intense month of study; for my job in Japan, about seven months of research; for Ethiopia and the Navajo Reserve, about five months each.

Because I’ve gone through all the usual study for Japan - and because I cannot bear to pick up those daunting 1000+ page tomes on early Edo Period history - I decided to take a different approach for this trip. Instead of nonfiction books, I’ll be catching up on my Japanese horror in translation.

The Ring is one of my favourite horror movies. I love the idea of a purely supernatural creep. Those easily explicable serial killer psychopath types are everyday bores. I can read a newspaper and get the same story. But ghosts! Yowza. It turns out that before there was Ring the movie, there was Ring the novel.

Japan has quite a culture of interest in the supernatural. There are ghost-hunting tv shows, with annoying teen idols that explore abandoned buildings and exaggerate what they really see; summer horror films set in schools to thrill students during the summer heat; comics about demons; temples that exorcise evil dolls’ spirits; and a lengthy history of the creepy. In fact, summer as a whole is a season dedicated to horror stories. The chills one gets from listening to the stories is supposed to cool down the body.

When I first saw trailers for the Ring, back in the late 90s when I lived in Taiwan, I wanted to see this movie immediately. It turned out, of course, that the film was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. My Chinese was ok, but those subtitles were a little too quick. I saw the movie three or four times in a week to try and figure out what was happening on screen. Once I got the gist of the story, I took my sister, who was visiting Taiwan, and knew no Mandarin or Japanese to see the Ring. I whispered the dialogue to her as fast as I could read the subtitles during the film.

Thus, for my first foray into translated Japanese horror, I picked up Koji Suzuki’s novel that was the basis for the film. Quite a few things leapt out at me: there was no female reporter - the protagonist is male; the professor is shockingly slimy; and Sadako is a bigger freak than I remember her being in the film.

Worse, the story is either awful, or the translators (Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley in my edition) only half-completed their work, or, as I suspect, both. Suzuki’s protagonist Kazuyuki Asakawa makes a few too many lucky assumptions. I am all too ready to believe in the supernatural between the covers of this book, but even I cannot believe that the answers should come so easily to the heroes. This book made me grimace many times.

Luckily for the book, it’s saving grace is that it is a quick read. I finished it in record time this afternoon, sitting in my car, at the edge of a mall parking lot under some trees. The coffee shop in which I originally intended to finish reading the novel, was too air-conditioned for comfortable reading. Just as the protagonist descends into the well to dredge up Sadako, a downpour started outside my car. Memories of the well scene in the movie still gives me the heebie jeebies. The rain pounding on my car roof helped set the mood.

Will I read the sequels to Ring? I really, really hated the film sequels. They were a garbled mess, with too many ideas thrown into the pot and no decent storyline to unify them. I will give Suzuki’s Dark Water a try, and, if his writing improves, might read the sequels out of sheer curiosity.

But not out of literary admiration.

Without further rambling, our winner for the vole’s point of view is Lee with 41.2% of the votes:

Lee was one of the first people who entered my contest way back in May. (Things move slowly on this blog.) Lee, I’ll mail you your Garlic Vampire Repelling Mints. From now on you’ll be safe from the undead.

And the winner for the hawk’s point of view is former blogger Maikopunk with 25% of the votes:

If I had known there was a tiebreaker, I would have given you your Werewolves of Millers Hollow game tonight. Well, I am sure we’ll see each other in a few days. Maybe you could invite me over for more Flight of the Conchords?

Thank you everyone for contributing captions and for voting. I bought prizes for the next contest, which, um, I guess has to happen.

For now, I am taking the rest of the weekend off - museum folks work weekends unfortunately. So no blogging until Monday. Ciao!

And, once again, thanks to photographer Steve Jurvetson for use of his photo.

Online Surveys & Market Research

First place for the vole’s point of view will get Vampire Repelling Garlic Mints:

Vote below for the best caption for the hawk - Vizu cut down one of the second to last entry, which should have read: “After carefully removing the cork, you may wish to decant the vole to allow it to breathe, thus opening up the subtle flavors. Pairs well with most fowl, snake, and gamy meats like roadkill.”

Online Surveys & Market Research

First place for the hawk’s point of view will get The Werewolves of Millers Hollow card game:

The winners will be chosen seven days from now on next Thursday at 11:00 pm. Good luck, my morbid friends!

(This video will take up a mere twenty seconds of your life.)

But I don’t want the winner to be prizeless, so I purchased two other suitable prizes.

Two? Yes. I think there were enough good entries for both the poor vole’s point of view as well as the hawk’s. So there will be two winners.

First place for the vole’s point of view will get Vampire Repelling Garlic Mints:

One hundred mints in a collectible can be yours, garlic flavouring and all.

First place for the hawk’s point of view will get The Werewolves of Millers Hollow card game:

“The small town of Millers Hollow has become infested with werewolves. The townsfolk must take immediate action and eradicate this menace before they are all devoured.”

I have never played this game, but Matt assures me that it’s a fun, easy game for you and your seven friends. In fact, you can play with up to twenty of your friends.

While I try to figure out how to put up a poll on tomorrow night, feel free to go back to the original contest and submit any last minute vole or hawk words. If anyone can recommend a blog poll tool, please let me know. Then you, my dear five readers, can judge for yourselves and I will mail a prize to one (or two) of you lucky people.

The notes begin in the introduction:

The know-it-all then refutes the author’s description of The Wrong Man:

By page 16, another reader can’t stand it:

Then, after a long silence, the two butt heads again on page 60:

After this, both readers presumably stopped reading or else Auiler stopped pissing off die hard Hitchcock fans. There is no more marginalia.

If anyone cares to expand read the marginalia, I took out the book from the Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public Library. Call number 791.4372 Ver.

I had to return this book on Tuesday, but only got halfway through it. I will take it out again soon.