I’ve just been prescribed a cough syrup called Grilinctus. The name sounds less like a cough syrup and more like a large, furry animal that’ll crawl out of the Forbidden Forest at night and will be fed and befriended by Hagrid.
The label on the bottle promises that the concoction is non-narcotic. This factoid hasn’t stopped it from inducing spells of sweet slumber that all cough syrups are so good at bringing you down with.
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
—Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (via)
38ºC. At 10:30 PM. The arrival terminal is always overcrowded at night. The conveyor belts are too close to each other and the space between them always cramped with big trolleys that were definitely not meant for this airport. You must travel lock, stock and barrel to this city must be the unwritten diktat somewhere. The luggage always arrives on one of the two conveyor belts adjacent to the one that the airlines actually announces. One out of 3 taps in the loo don’t work. The queue for taxi at the private taxi counter moves at a glacial pace. Poor souls looking to commute to the satellite towns don’t have any other choice. The pre-paid taxi queues at the government provided counters move fast but once you are outside with your receipt, the cabs don’t come. If they do, they refuse to board you; numbered bays not withstanding. Of course, it’s all supposed to give an impression of order without actually being orderly. I am completely in awe of flying. That we can cover distances that took months to traverse in mere hours is indeed fantastic. It is the ordeal that I must go through every time I get down the plane at this city is what gets my entire goat pen.
While I knew that Japan was driven to such desperation during World War II that they resorted to Kamikaze, I had no idea that a similar suicide unit existed for navy as well. The unit was called ‘Kai Ten’ and basically used torpedos modified to accomodate human ‘drivers’ who would ram them into the enemy ship.
I came across a fictional autobiographical account of a Kai Ten ‘driver’ in David Mitchell’s Number 9 Dream. Each paragraph of that account sent a chill down my spine. And to think that someone lived through it…
Wikipedia has more if you have the stomach for it.
As an aside, the Kanji for Kai Ten (the phrase roughly means ‘the turn toward heaven’) is 回天. While I am not sure I can explain 回, it’s quite easy to logically explain the origin of 天. The Kanji for big (huge, enormous) is 大. It is simplification of drawing of a man with his arms outstretched. (How big? This “大” Big). Add a bar or ‘roof’ on top of it and you get Kanji for ‘big-roof’ or (figuratively speaking) sky though it’s used more in the sense of ‘heaven’.
I don’t know where I am with my phone’s camera. It’s 5 MP – which is a good deal more than my first point and shoot (and I used to be *quite* happy with that once). But now I am too used to a real view-finder and a real (satisfying) shutter release sound to be able to compose properly with this one. We’ll see how it goes in the coming days.
I imagine a mirror between two posters that turns reflections into sketches.
Stick no bills.
