munky.net

I recently upgraded to a shiny new graphics card (NVIDIA 7900 GT) and was bummed when the DVI connection on my ViewSonic VA2012wb LCD monitor couldn’t detect a signal from it and just stayed in standby mode. At first I thought the card was just dead, until I tried using the DVI to D-Sub (analog VGA) adapter to send the monitor an analog signal, which worked fine. This mystified me, since the card and physical port were apparently working, but refusing to output a DVI signal. I’d just unplugged the monitor from my old DVI card, so I figured the monitor wasn’t the problem. Turns out the monitor was indeed (partially) the culprit.

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This photo caught our monkey friend with his mouth open, since he was yelling something about expecting a really big banana for having to pose with these two idiots.

Now, anyone who knows me is certainly aware of my affinity for all things simian. Everything is better when you add monkeys, right? So imagine my surprise and delight when, upon exiting the train at Arashiyama station just outside Kyoto, I spot a large, colorful advertisement for the “Arashiyama Monkey Park”, adorned with cartoon drawings of various cherubic monkeys obviously enjoying themselves and beckoning me to join them. The ensuing conversation with my wife went something like this:

“Where should we go for lunch? How about that zaru-soba place?”

“Monkey park.”

“We’ll see that if we have time after the other stuff. Should we go to the shrine first?”

“Monkey park.”

[Various threats and admonishments in Japanese]

“Mon-kii-paa-ku!”

“Hai, hai.”

“Monkey park!”

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Most machiya, including that housing the Nunoya ryokan, include a nice enclosed garden.

Finally managing to get out of Saijo for a few days of travel before returning stateside, we spent a few days in the old Japanese capital of Kyoto. We split our stay between a fairly expensive (for our budget) traditional ryokan, and a very inexpensive (by Japan standards) guest house. I’d expected a pretty wide gap in terms of quality of service and accommodations between the two, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the latter very nearly matched the former in terms of overall quality of experience.

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I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get this one up on Engrish.com

Yesterday was the beginning of the O-bon holiday in Japan, during which most people go home to the countryside to visit their families and pray to their ancestors. That being the case, the population of Saijo has now doubled or tripled, and I enjoy grumbling about all the “damn foreigners” with their fancy out-of-state license plates overrunning the highways.

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In honor of the Willie Winkie bakery’s answering my “needs” with good combustible sandwiches, I have adopted their name as my new euphemism for the male genitalia.

There’s definitely been a change in the retail environment here in Saijo since my last visit two winters ago. Just like in the U.S., the big stores are moving in and pushing out the Main Street shops. So far I’ve counted at least three new supermarkets and four or five new giant drugstores, most of which are part of a chain called “Mac” (coincidence?). That basically increases the city’s allocation of each by more than double.

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