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I turned 42. I don’t know if it was the hottest birthday I’ve ever experienced but it must be in the top 3. Despite the 34-degree heat, I decided to take Rowan out to Odawara and we both had a good time:
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My plan had originally been to catch the shinkansen there and back but we managed to get a train that went straight down to Yokohama and that lined up with a departing Odoriko (Wikipedia). It wasn’t as scenic as I’d hoped (we got off just before the train tracks come down to meet the coastline) but it is a train that’s in a number of Rowan’s train books so it was nevertheless one to tick off his list.
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Catching the Odoriko there meant the shinkansen home was more special. The highlight for me, though, wasn’t the train ride itself but waiting on the platform at Odawara. The Nozomi trains don’t stop there and instead pass through at speed. The first time this happened, Rowan and I were looking the other way and the sound and fury as the train burst into our view was so great as to cause us both to leap in fright. I couldn’t stop laughing at how pathetic I must have looked to the passengers in the train on the other platform.
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While in town, we visited Odawara Castle (Wikipedia). I’m not sure that was the best choice or whether we should have gone down to the shore. I would have liked to feel an ocean breeze but from what I can see in photographs, Odawara’s beaches are more reminiscent of what you’d find in Blackpool than Bondi (i.e. terrible by my snobbish Australian standards).
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Apple held their September event and announced new iPhones and Apple Watches. I’m still wearing a Series 5 so pre-ordering the Series 10 was an easy choice. The most difficult aspect was whether to stay on the ‘larger’ size (now 46mm) size or go down to the ‘smaller’ size (now 42mm). I initially ordered the 46mm before Brandon sent me a photograph from the hands-on area that someone had taken comparing the 46mm model to the Ultra. That had me scurrying away to swap out my order for the smaller one. Fingers crossed that was the right choice.
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My iPhone ordering experience was significantly more disappointing. I thought I’d get the iPhone 16 Pro Max and after the exercise in frustration that was last year’s ordering process, I even signed out of my iPad so that I could use my Japanese Apple account with the Apple Store app to get things ready ahead of time. Alas, that made zero difference and at 9 pm I was once again waiting impotently before finding out I could spend over ¥100,000 for the privilege of waiting til mid-October for a phone to arrive. In disgust, I resolved to wait until next year as a meaningless act of protest.
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I really enjoyed this ‘book review’ about the Silver Age of Marvel Comics that was submitted to Astral Codex Ten as part of its annual book review contest. I don’t know if it works at all as a book review but I recommend it for the section on artistic genius. This is spurred by an imbroglio that erupted a few months ago concerning a blog post disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried wrote about William Shakepeare back in 2012 (Bankman-Fried argued that, statistically, it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare would be the greatest playwright ever). The anonymous reviewer writes:
Was Shakespeare the greatest playwright? And if he was, what is the counter argument to Sam’s point? How could it be possible that the greatest writer of all time was born in a period when there were less than 3.5m English speakers on the planet, and only about 20% were literate? Even if he was the best writer of the 700,000 writers of the time, how is it possible he is better than the ~1.5 BILLION literate native-level English speakers alive today?
There are various answers to these questions but the reviewer’s is that the greatest practitioners are both skilled and innovative. The reviewer uses examples from Wayne Gretzky to Hill Street Blues to prove this argument and it’s easily the most though-provoking aspect of the entire review (which is still fun if you have any interest in comics).
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I loved this 36-minute exegesis on Weezer’s self-titled debut (i.e. the Blue Album) from YouTuber Trash Theory. I was a little too young and Weezer a little too alternative for me to listen to in the mid-90s but the video does a good job putting the album into the appropriate context.
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The video did bring to my attention the distasteful lyric in ‘Buddy Holly’ that I’d been ignorant of for the past twenty years or so and while I’m a little ashamed to link to it, it is the song I always think of when I think of this album (Apple Music).
