I posted some background information and opinions on I Am a Cat in my Backlist books post on Asian Books Blog.
Below are some quotes from the book and explanations for why I chose them.
Tag: Japan
Rerouted!
What should have been a twenty-four-hour, three-airport trip from Atlanta to Singapore turned into a thirty-plus-hour, five-airport trip.
I watched another seven-and-a-half movies.
The reason my trip got longer was that at some point while we were flying over Canada, someone on the plane had a stroke. We backtracked to Minneapolis/St. Paul to get him off the plane and then the plane had to be refueled and paperwork filled out.
I missed my connecting flight at Tokyo Narita Airport because of the delay. Delta issued new tickets, but I had to collect my luggage and wait for Delta to put me on a bus to the Tokyo Haneda Airport (about an hour away). Delta gave me about $20 in meal vouchers which I used to buy a nice dinner at a katsu restaurant.
It was a lot of extra travel time, but it wasn’t really so bad for me. I spoke with a guy who had been on a flight from Florida to Atlanta before being re-routed on the flight from Atlanta to Narita, and his new flight to Seoul took off a couple of hours after mine.
Obviously the one with the worst luck was the man with the stroke. I hope he’s okay…
I remember what they said to us at Mammoth Cave: once you start the tour, there is no magic button to get you out if something goes wrong underground. Similarly, it takes time to come back from the sky when something goes wrong on a plane.
See below for photos taken at Haneda.
SIN > NRT > ATL
My trip to visit my parents in Atlanta looked like this, more or less. It took me over 24 hours to get there.
I watched two movies on the way from Singapore to Tokyo and another two and a half on the way from Tokyo to Atlanta.
I made the map using http://myflightbook.com.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)
Jiro Dreams of Sushi is an amusing, eye-opening, and well-produced documentary about an exacting Japanese sushi chef named Jiro Ono, whose dedication to his craft is remarkable as much for its relentless lifelong perfectionism as for its world-famous success.
What I least liked about it was seeing dead or soon-to-be-dead sea creatures being inspected, bought and sold.
Visually, what I liked best was seeing each individual piece of sushi placed on a lacquered, rectangular dish on the softly-lit counter top, where gravity briefly, subtly altered its shape in a kind of slow, glistening ooze.
The strongest impression I’m left with, though, is Jiro’s seemingly unflagging sense of purpose: to make the most exquisite sushi he possibly can. Nothing else seems to matter in the slightest.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/jiro-dreams-of-sushi/id542088376
Sunflowers of what?
This is an advertisement for a movie called Sunflowers of Inferno, which I know absolutely nothing about but which looks like an anime film about a Van Gogh painting… further proof that the world does not make sense in the slightest.
EKIT
Oops.
It’s not like English needs the letter X anyway. Anything with an X in it could be spelled with some other letter or letters, usually ‘ks’ or ‘z’.
Of course, it’s possible to go too far in trying to simplify English spelling. It’s pretty much impossible not to, in fact, which is why no one since Noah Webster has really succeeded. (You have him to thank—or curse—for most of the differences between American and British spelling.)
