Pardon?

All seems a bit quiet at the moment, and I’m not just talking about this house now that the young ‘un is in bed and snoozing away (though he did just wake up for his three hourly ‘where’s my food?’ grizzle, all quiet now).

No, Japan itself seems on the quiet side, perhaps it is the weather. The Livedoor thing that I wrote about last week is still rumbling on and Horie has decided to go with the cunning defence of ‘I’m not guilty of anything’, which seems to have temporarily stumped the inquisition and so who are getting their best man onto it (whoever he may be, though the Yomiuri did allude to the fact that the person investigating was a super top dog in the investigative dept, usually the sort of bloke who investigates war crimes and terrorist activities – obviously a dangerous man then, Horie...)

Also the construction scandal is ongoing – this was a little bit cooler today as they inspectors went to one of the suspect buildings that is located about 200metres from this very computer desk. The Guru saw it on telly was tempted, only for a second mind, to go down and wave at the camera. Anyway I may well walk past the block tomorrow on the way to work, just to be nosy of course, see if there is anything interesting going on – though I doubt it as that was probably today and, more importantly, it will likely be snowing tomorrow morning so I fear the inspectors with their hard hats will be holed up somewhere with a nice cup of tea.

Japan also seems quiet in comparison to the rest of the world, especially in connection with the whole Danish cartoon imbroglio. I don’t know if there is a large Moslem community in Japan, I figure there must be as there seem to be a community pretty much everywhere you go, but I have yet to see of any demonstrations outside the Danish embassy here (just noticed that word capitalises the major religions of the world – never knew that). Perhaps if there is a Moslem community here they have been influenced by the Japanese laissez-faire attitude to religion and so just go with it, I don’t know, but seems a little odd to me. Not that I am complaining, of course, as has been said before there is enough hate in the world already without people adding to it, but I feel it is being taken a little bit too far when some radical cleric starts on about trying and executing the cartoonists for blasphemy, especially in a secular European country – no sense of humour, obviously. Then again the western world realises (or at least should) that doing something like drawing cartoons of Mohammed is going to provoke a pretty serious, negative reaction. But of course that shouldn’t mean they don’t do it, if that were the case then freedom of speech would go out of the window (where if may be going anyway). Anyhoo not much of a reaction that I have seen on these shores.

So, what with all this deafening non-committance going on I thought ‘well, if George W can have a state of the union speech about what’s going in his life, I shall do the same’.

Er...

The young ‘un is coming along a treat, right now. He is slowly but surely becoming more mobile, when we were back in Blighty for Christmas it looked as if he was making very rapid progress towards crawling, but since we came back he sort of gave up the ghost. Until this last week gone by, really, when I think he decided enough was enough and he’d better get moving. So he started scooting about on his arse, pushing himself backwards and moving happily from sprawling to sitting and back again, but always in a rearwards direction. This weekend he started lifting his tummy off the floor in a kind of press-up (or push-up, for our US audience) pose – not crawling, that, but only a small leap, as it were, from there to standing on his own. He hasn’t managed that leap, yet, but with a help he is standing quite happily, supporting himself (though holding on to who or whatever is closest) and smiling mightily at the enjoyment of it. Indeed he is a most smiley baby and seems to be enjoying himself almost all the time – some kids sound like they are ultra hard work but Marcus just looks like he’s having a ball. His motor skills are also coming on a treat, picking stuff up, throwing stuff at mum and dad, exploring what he can do and getting into activities like ‘open the cupboard door’ and ‘what happens if I pull this cord really hard?’ – and no, it doesn’t matter how much you think you have baby-proofed your house, they’ll always find something else to pull/push/shake/etc. He’s also very much enjoying his food, onto three square meals a day now, which means that the poor Guru is either cooking, or thinking of things to cook, pretty much all day.

Talking of the Guru she is doing very well except for the fact she is tired and shagged out by the end of each day. This would be easier to cope with if the little ‘un was able to sleep through the night, but this has so far eluded him and he still awakens around midnight and 3 am, looking for a tasty morsel to get his chops around, something which due to biology I cannot help with, if you get my drift. Thus the Guru’s days, and nights, seem to be spent dealing with food for him in some respect. And thinking of things to feed him isn’t easy as for about 10 days he had diarrhoea, which might have been to do with what he was eating, but it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest and then the doc said it was because of a cold (er, so let’s get this straight, it’s a cold that involves no snot, no fever, no cough, just lots of watery shit? Right...). Anyway that meant he missed his polio shot at the beginning of Feb as it would have gone straight through him, apparently, and will miss the next available one in May as he will be having another shot, MMR perhaps, so will have to wait until September as for some reason you can’t just pitch up and get a polio shot in Japan, they are only given at specific times by specific doctors. No idea why it is (dis)organised like that, but it means that our trip to west Africa has had to be postponed.

As for yours truly, my dissertation is uppermost in my mind at the moment (well, uppermost in what’s left of my mind that isn’t think ‘I don’t want to be here, I want to be at home with Marcus’, which isn’t a lot). The studying is going at the moment, but I’m not sure if it going ‘well’ or not. I know what the theme of the dissertation is, that’ll be teacher recruitment, selection and induction, but what I don’t have is a conceptual framework to hang it all on at the moment (that’ll be nonsense jargon for not knowing how to structure my research, what exactly to research or how to go about it). Still, at least I know what I want to look at, which is a start, but I need to get a bit more focused as the research methods module I’m doing has to be submitted in May and is essentially two sections of the dissertation itself (how the research will be done and the literature review), so better get some ideas soon or could be a little stuck in a couple of months – I think having 6 months off, a month back on then a three weekend holiday to the UK has meant I am out of practice and the stop-start return hasn’t helped. But mustn’t whinge as it won’t help and, looking on the bright side, it will all be over by December.

Right, that’s enough for now, off to bed for me.

Oh, and well done England for stuffing the Welsh on Saturday evening! A fine performance all round (and well done to Scotland as well, what a result), shame JSkySports has got such piss poor coverage of the rest of the 6 nations.