I just wrote a proposal to do a presentation at a conference called "Demanding the Impossible: 3rd Utopias Conference," which will happen in December at Monash University, in Victoria, Australia. I came across it because I was considering applying to Monash to do my PhD. I recently got a paper accepted for publication, on utopias in Melville’s early novels, so I thought I ought to put my recently acquired knowledge of utopian thought to use. Also, it would be nice to check out the university in person.

My presentation aims to look into the moral questions raised by Iain M. Banks’ novel, The Player of Games. Haven’t read it? Right, off with you, then–go find a copy and read it. I’ll wait.

OK, so as you now know, the first part of the novel is set in Banks’ "Culture," his anarcho-communist utopian SF society that he has written several novels about. Only in this one, the Culture has come up against an aggressively imperialistic society that might prove a threat someday. So they pull a bunch of strings to destabilize it and cause it to come crashing down. This dangerous society sounds suspiciously like a combination of the USA and Iraq, though the novel was written almost 20 years ago, near the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

I wanted to examine the morality of a beautiful utopian culture basically destroying an ugly hierarchical culture that does not pose any threat to it, at least not for centuries to come. Sounds like a fun way to spend my free time, anyway.

Japan’s space agency has successfully launched a lunar probe. Woot! Hopefully this means the interminable technical problems with the launcher rockets are over, and Japan can get its whole space program back on track. I want my orbital love hotel!

In other local news, Abe is resigning. No, not Abraham Lincoln, I mean Prime Minister Abe (ah-bey). Everyone’s been expecting it for some time now, almost since he became PM after Koizumi. Put simply, he was always just a poor-man’s version of Koizumi, without the charisma and forcefulness and rock-star hair that allowed Koizumi to last so long as PM.

That’s something that had caught my attention long before I ever even dreamed of living in Japan: when Japanese politicians get caught screwing up, or even just honk the public off, they resign. They, like, take responsibility and just frickin resign. I always thought, wow, what an alien concept. American pols have to be hypocritical sponsors of anti-gay laws, caught soliciting gay sex in a bathroom, before they’ll resign. Even starting an unnecessary war without planning, and then ignoring history to mismanage it in the worst imaginable way, is not enough. Well, it’s enough to get rid of a few flunkies, but not the bosses.

This is not to say Japanese politicians are perfect–in fact, they’re just as corrupt as American politicians, if not moreso. But instead of hanging on forever and denying, denying, denying that they ever made any mistakes, once they see that they’re becoming a problem for their party and constituents, they just apologize and get the hell out. I can’t help but wish we’d take a lesson from that. Americans might not feel quite so cynical about the political process.

So I just wrote up all this for my custom block on the sidebar, and then found out that this blog template doesn’t display the custom block. I thought about changing the template, and then thought, "Nah–I like the monkey." So since I don’t want all that time to be a waste, here is what I wrote for my self-intro:

[  Mood: Amused ]
My friend Jan is going to visit us in Japan soon, and I wanted to show her why she’ll actually need training to use our sci-fi toilet. So I googled "Washlet," and found the Toto company’s American website. It is a trip. I never knew butts could be so happy! And why do those people seem like cultists?

Warning: Not safe for work if your employer considers a bunch of attractive naked butts with smiley faces on them to be pornography.

[  Mood: In Love ]
I’m not much of an Apple guy. I certainly don’t hate Apple–in fact, I often think maybe my next notebook computer will be an Apple, and then I think, "Damn, for the price difference, I could buy two Dells with the same power." And I wouldn’t be stuck with a useless one-button touchpad.

And I kinda like my Sansa MP3 player, especially the MicroSD card port, that lets me add a gigabyte of storage for $20. Soon that’ll be 2 gigs.

But I tell you, I may finally be ready to buy an iPod. The just-announced iPod Touch, to be exact. It’s a little pricey at $399, but that’s the 16GB version, and it (finally!) has a full-face screen, like the iPhone, so it competes with my PSP as a video player. Plus it has WiFi, which means I can check Gmail without booting up my PC at home, and check it in some places while I’m outside. And it has all the neato features of the iPhone, without, y’know, being a phone and forcing me into some multiyear contract with a different company that I don’t have a family plan with.

I really groaned when the iPhone came out, because I figured Apple wouldn’t make a full-face-screen video iPod, as it would compete with the iPhone. But they’ve gone for it. This is the iPod I’ve been holding out for for about 3 years! Bye-bye PSP.

Now if only it had a memory expansion slot…