Atsushi’s plane should be landing in the next half-hour, and since it’s not a three-day weekend, he’ll only be here until tomorrow. That means we have to celebrate the Fourth of July tomorrow, and planning to do anything picnicky is probably a bad idea. (It’s the rainy season right now, and even though it’s been uncharacteristically rainless, the weather’s supposed to be iffy over the weekend.) There’s no question of a cookout, so I’m thinking something from my upbringing. The Pennsylvania Dutch are big on the kinds of meaty, fatty, sugary foods that serve as a constant reminder that they’ve prospered after emigrating from the old country, which is always a nice all-American sort of message. I’ve nearly settled on chicken pot pie, which would have the additional resonance of being what my mother made for dinner the first night I brought Atsushi home to meet the family.

I don’t have access to a wet-bottom shoo-fly pie for dessert–you should see what molasses costs here, and I actually think the little Mennonite bakeries make them better than you usually can at home. Of course, summer fruits are starting to come in, so we’ll be covered. Cherry pie, maybe? There’s always something satisfyingly lascivious about sharing a plate of that with your sweetie.

I also have to go to the office today, so I don’t think there will be much posting until Monday. Fortunately, Japan seems to be in its usual groove:

• Emerging facts in the bridge-building scandal indicate that not only bid-rigging but also unlawful revolving-door employment is a pervasive problem at Japan Highway Public Corporation.

• A man who murdered five members of his family has explained that he only really wanted his mother dead, but, of course, he couldn’t let the rest of the family live with the shame of being a matricide’s relatives. That an expedient way to avoid such a problem would have been to refrain from murdering his mother in the first place doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
• An enterprising Sapporo man has been charged with stealing women’s underwear so he could sell it door-to-door, with the ultimate intention of launching a web-based retailer. In an interesting twist, this was new, unused underwear shoplifted from stores–the idea was to sell it to women to wear, not whatever else you may have been (understandably) expecting. Wonders never cease.
• The government plans to introduce biometric scanning of foreigners at immigration to help deal with the problem of visa overstays and crime. The WOT, interestingly, hasn’t really been mentioned.

And Atsushi’s flight was delayed, though he’s on the train from Haneda as I write. Have a good weekend, everyone.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 1st, 2005 at 21:26 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.