Midaregami

I am heading back to New Mexico via Tokyo. Internet access will be sporadic for the next few days while I screw around in Their Nation’s Capital—send messages to my phone or call me. I leave for New Mexico on Thursday.Departure: United Airlines flight 838 from Tokyo to Denver, 7:30 PM, March 25.Arrival: United Airlines flight 729 from Denver to Albuquerque, 6:17 PM on March 25.I hope to be met by somebody willing to help carry my ridiculously heavy suitcase. If I have to call for a ride after 20 hours of international travel, I shall be very put out.

It’s St. Patrick’s day, but more importantly, it’s my parent’s 30th wedding anniversary. Happy anniversary to Mom & Papa! Thanks for setting a great example.

In other news, I sent in my audition CD. This would have been nerve-wracking, but then I started worrying about the end of civilization, and after that, a little music uncertainty seemed significantly less dire. I’m fairly certain that they’re going to listen to my clumsy flailing and snicker derisively, but at this point, I just don’t care.

Why doesn’t Mana, formerly of Malice Mizer, ever talk? What could “he” be hiding? This is what the Visual Kei community doesn’t want you to know.

Some of you may have been subjected to semicoherent screaming because of this band. On my part, I mean, not the vocalist’s. And the screams are screams of love, love, for this band, The Back Horn.

“Ningen Program” was their major label debut album, and it has kicked my buttocks three weeks past Wednesday. A Wednesday in 2008.

• NingenProgram.tar is a tarball of MP3s I reencoded from my AAC files, so there may be some slight quality degradation. They sound okay to me. They have translated filenames and tags. (About 50 megs.)
• NingenProgramAAC.tar is a tarball of my own AAC files, with Japanese filenames and tags. As the French say, caveat downloadeur. (Also about 50 megs.)

The above large files are hosted by Ventoozler, for the finest in obscurely-named, enlightened webhosting. I make no guarantees for how long they (the files, I mean) will be available. Not forever.

Dear Apple,

If OS X had speech synthesis this good, I’d use it for a lot more.

Love,

Paul

I sent my iBook to Apple on Wednesday evening to have the airport card and optical drive repaired. It was back just after lunch on Friday, fully repaired, with the hard drive’s contents intact.

I guess if you’re going to make computers that fail after a year of normal use, the least you can do is have an amazing, internationally-honored warranty.

This still doesn’t excuse the failure. I love my iBook, but will think very carefully before buying another one.

We did a lot of music shopping in Himeji. Jake got to the used Acidman disc before I could find it-cuuurrses-but I managed to fill in a hole in my Chara collection. Later at Tower Records I broke down and bought the latest Back Horn album, “Ikiru Sainou.”

At that same Tower, Julia found a DVD of an old Malice Mizer concert, the tour for the “Voyage sans retour” album. This is right after Gackt signed on, but before they were making the big bucks, so they’re still blowing more money on costumes than video production. It’s so campy.

There’s a bonus interview with members of the (now-defunct) band. Kozi and Yu~ki talk like, you know, normal people (normal people dressed as androgynous zombie SS officers, anyway), but as Mana-sama never talks (or even opens his mouth) in public, we were wondering how they’d manage to interview him. Miss J suggested that maybe they’d have him just sit there and look dramatic while subtitles appeared. Well guess what?

Japanese music is so wierd.

You basically can’t road trip in Japan. Doing a road trip back home, you hit your stride about half an hour out of town. The speed limit on the interstate goes up and you just drive.

Here, major metropolises are barely an hour apart, and the expressways that connect them carry high tolls. So the all-day road trip is really not a Japanese happening.

So Jake, Maeva, Julia, and I didn’t road trip to Himeji this weekend, we just drove. It differed from previous such trips only in duration, and possibly in total milliliters of ethanol consumed.

The highlights:

The backlight on Julia’s iBook has failed, so I no longer have internet access at home. I’ll be checking email at school, but that’s about it.

Life has suddenly started being awful again. It’s strange how things can turn around like that.