Musings - Tuesday July 10th

Here begins another round of my mini-posts, stuff I feel the need to share with my audience but that I don't want to spend a whole post on. OK some of these will be a little long today, so I'll stick to only 5.

• If you shorten Japanese or Japan with the 3-letter abbreviation (no, I'm not talking about Jpn) then you are telling people you're a racist. If you need a shortened version just use JP. When non-Japanese people use the old 3-letter version it's like a white guy telling a black joke who then claims to be too hip to be a racist but still has a twinkle in his eye like he just got away with something. You're not fooling anyone.
• Similarly, I don't think it's a good idea to call a friend or family member "gay" or "a Jew" or any casual racist/sexist joke even in fun, because you run the risk of one day getting old and senile and suddenly believing all the stupid comments you made when you were young.
• It's OK to save money for a rainy day but not food or drink. If you get your hands on a nice cigar, bottle of wine or whatever, just drink/eat it. Better to waste half of it because you can't finish it all than to notice it rotting in the fridge a year later.
• It's OK to stop watching a shitty movie or reading a bad book halfway through. Just because you paid for it doesn't mean you have to ritualistically torture yourself by finishing it.
• On the same train of thought, it's also fully acceptable to admit that a restaurant you chose turned out to be a piece of crap. And this one I'm very serious about, because if you lie and say the place was "all right" or "pretty good" you run the risk of clouding your own memory about it and might end up going there again.

Hmm, I kinda got a little theme running this time. Just remember, your memory works in strange ways, and it's very easy to be manipulated and inadvertently manipulate yourself.

Wait, that didn't come out right...

Anyway, here's a link to my previous post of rambling thoughts.

That's all for today. Oh, and the picture above is of a Japanese Giant Weevil (thanks for the call on that one, JJK), also known as an Oozoumushi (オウゾウムシ - which literally means giant elephant bug). I spotted it chilling outside the station on the way home the other day. Ick.