Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

After nearly 2000 miles of driving the rental car here in Japan I’ve passed quite a few electronics and household goods stores, my favorite being a chain called “Big House”.  This has gotten me thinking that it would be fun to buy a super high tech toilet seat with at least 10 buttons labeled only in kanji.  After I install this at home it should give friends something to think about.  I know that some simpler “washlet” seats are marketed by Toto in the U.S. to U.S. specs.  But these have labels in Roman characters and English explanations.  I want it all to be in Japanese.

One thing really troubles me, however…  line voltage here is 100V.  The electronics in the highest tech seats might have a switching power supply and therefore be indifferent to our higher voltage of 117V.  But the washlets also contain a water heater, a fan, and maybe some other stuff that is run directly from the AC power.  Will it fry if I plug it into US power?  Have any of the readers tried this?

I’ve long been curious to visit Africa as a tourist.  Theroux’s Dark Star Safari seems to have some practical value for trip planning.  Theroux reports the following facts relevant to the sightseer:

• travel by road is extremely slow and uncomfortable
  
• conversations with typical Africans can be interesting but only for guys like Theroux who speak several local languages
  
• interaction with Africans can result in severe illness and/or becoming a victim of crime

Why not address these issues by renting a small airplane?  Here’s my tentative plan for a beginner’s trip to Africa:

1. fly to Cape Town, South Africa and spend a few days poking around what sounds like Africa’s only livable large city (learn something about the old colonial culture in its last bastion)
   
2. during the time in Cape Town pick up a South African pilot’s license so that I can legally fly a South African-registered airplane
   
3. rent a workhorse of an airplane such as a Cessna 182 and load it up with bottled water and packaged food
   
4. fly over all the interesting landscape, stopping only at public airports and exclusive private game reserves with their own strips
   
5. venture onto roads and into towns only in thinly populated and orderly regions (Namibia?)
   
6. return home after 3 weeks

Even in countries where crime and disorder are rampant the public airports are usually very well protected.  Governments like to keep track of who is coming and going, which is essential if they are to maintain their monopoly on weaponry.  In Mexico, for example, even the most out-of-the-way airport is staffed with multiple officials and an Army guard.  I remember landing on a sand-and-dirt runway owned by a litte hotel in Baja.  As soon as I landed three soldiers toting assault rifles came over to inspect the airplane.

One can’t see everything in a first trip to such a big place so why not start by staying mostly 500′ above the heads of all the guys who cause trouble for tourists?  There is always Trip #2 for getting deeper and/or lower into things.

The worst book that I’ve read during this trip around Japan is William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.  I finished it only because it is difficult to find English-language books in rural Japan.  I’m confused because I think that I bought it because of some positive reviews in newspapers or magazines and I’m wondering if I missed something.  Here’s the review that I posted to amazon.com:

This is like one of those trashy “sex and shopping” novels but without the sex.  And the shopping isn’t very interesting either, being mostly for stuff that was worth buying in the early 1990s such as a Machintosh laptop computer.  The main premise of the book seems pointless.  Some people make videos that they want to release anonymously on the Internet.  Instead of doing the obvious thing of transferring from camcorder to PC and offering on some peer-to-peer network they hire the one company in the world that can add some coded info down in the noise and then stick the filmmaker’s email address into the footage.  Ignoring the fact that this idea goes back about 50 years, why would someone who wanted to remain anonymous do this?  Gibson never explains that.

The book also talks about traveling to London, Tokyo, and Moscow.  None of this seems relevant to the story, all of which could just as easily been set in Indiana.  Maybe putting it in enabled the author to deduct some airfares and hotel stays.  There is a lot of stuff about brand names in the book, some of which might impress a peasant who had recently moved to Shanghai to work at Pizza Hut.

Any fans of the book want to educate me as to what I missed?