Busy Edition

5 October 2025

I have a lot going on these days and this is a bit of a rush, but hopefully not much less coherent than usual. I know a lot of people consider Sunday the start of the week but I guess because I am sending the newsletter out on Sunday which is looking back, I considered it the end of the week.

Monday

Mina’s Matchbox is a novel by Yoko Ogawa, who has apparently written a lot of novels in Japanese but only had a few translated into English so far. I suppose I chose to borrow the audiobook from the library based on the cover of a girl riding a pygmy hippopotamus. I liked the quiet weirdnesses of this book. They had a room with a special orange light. The presumably fictional soft drink Fresi (since I heard it as an audiobook I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be spelled) was said to contain radium?! I thought they were all going to develop some kind of cancer, but nothing came of that. And they went to see a meteor shower, but that turned out to be underwhelming as well. Maybe that’s what makes it feel realistic.

Tuesday

When people lived in smaller groups, you knew who you were dealing with on a regular basis and you probably developed a greater sense of trust, other then for the people you knew to not trust. But living in a city and facing nothing but online scams all the time, it can feel like everyone is awful. Nonetheless, I ate a bun and it was fine. I don’t feel confident generalizing beyond that experience though.

Wednesday

I have been listening to some philosophy podcasts to pretend that I am a deep thinking once in a while. A problem with going through philosophy historically is that you also have to hear about all the really dumb ideas. I suppose it is to put the good ideas in context, but it can be kind of distracting. Now the idea that you never step into the same river twice seems reasonable if you are a nit picker, but meeting up with old friends makes me think that I haven’t changed that much in any substantial ways, which I suppose is both good and not so good.

Thursday

I was actually in the middle of drawing the philosophy comic when the alarm went off. At first I wondered who the idiot was that let the car alarm go off and then I realized it was ours. Our daughter was the one so keen to get the security camera and all that installed. But if you don’t have a separate battery for it, then it can run down your battery when it is reacting to things when your car is off, especially if you don’t drive that often. Kind of an expensive mistake.

Friday

I did not even know that speed puzzling was a thing, although I had heard about it for Rubik’s Cubes. This championship was in Spain, and I guess a pretty big deal. I occasionally do jigsaws around Christmas time. I suppose adding a time element can make anything more exciting, like eating hot dogs. When I was in high school I remember writing an essay about how I thought competition was a good thing, but nowadays the idea just tires me out.

Saturday

Collectors are supposed to be different from hoarders, but it might just be that they are more organized. My Mom used to collect spoons. It seems that having something to focus on when you go somewhere can make it feel more like a quest. The thing I have the most of are books, but I had to get rid of some due to pressure from minimalist fascists.

Sunday

Another episode from my work-in-progress graphic memoir Not Made In Japan about the time I did my Master’s degree in marine ecology at Kyushu University back in the 80s. All the Japanese students had to write their thesis in English. I had not written scientific papers before, so I started reading books on how to write them so I could be more useful when I was editing the English in the papers of my colleagues and professors.

That was my week. I hope you had a good one with a better one to come. If you feel so inclined, you can click on one or more of these buttons, though I cannot guarantee that they won’t eject you from your seat.