Fish and gout

I have talked about gout before but I have not talked about the types of food which increase the uric acid levels and thus the chance of gout attacks.

I feel I need to write a post about fish and gout because people have mistakenly reached my blog through search engines (my blog title and post content is what got them here).

According to the guidebook my doctor gave me aji (jacks and mackerel), pacific herring, shirauo (icefish and noodlefish) tuna and salmon have the lowest purine content of all fish consumed. So if you have gout but love fish these are the types you should be eating (within reasonable portions, of course).

But whether there is a difference between sushi (raw fish) and cooked fish, I do not know. The guidebook does not differentiate between them, even though it was written in Japanese for the Japanese, the home of raw fish cuisine.

Memoru – jot it down

Here is a cool Japanese word I learnt today – memoru. It is a trendy slang verb to mean to jot something down. It comes the the English noun memo but turned into a verb by adding the verb ending -ru.

Here are some of its basic verb forms: memoru, memorimasu, memoranai, memorimasen, memotta, memorimashita, memoranakatta, memorimasen deshita, memoranakute ikenai, memoranakucha… .

Facebook video mail

Who needs You Tube any more if you can email private video messages to friends and family on Facebook. This is a great little feature and it is easy to use. All you need is a webcam. It is better than video on Flickr because there is no need for a video camera and there is no need to upload. Just click ‘record’ and talk for about 20 minutes. But this also means you cannot be emailing dressed in your sloppy joes like I am right now writing this post.

A packed train and a nation’s character

If you think the Japanese are kind people then think again.

We – my wife, children and I – hopped onto a packed train yesterday. And no one offered their seats to us. In Australia able people, young and old, would give up their seats for the elderly, disabled or people with young children. But not in Japan. Three young university students were sitting in front where stood. None of them even acknowledged our presence. They avoid looking at you in case they feel a twinge of guilt and have to get up and offer their seats.

Perhaps these words are too harsh. The offering of seats to those who need it more is simply not something done in Japan. Partly, if you give up your seat to someone that person owes you a debt of gratitude, and you should not put someone in that situation. Strange as that may seem there is a kind of logic to it that you cannot argue with.

Or can you?

More often than not the person to whom you offer your seat will refuse, not wanting to be indebted to a stranger. So in that sense the offering up of your seat is futile.

But I will argue still that it is important to make this effort because kindness to people you do not know is an important trait. In general, the Japanese are kind to two groups of people – to people they know, and to people who are obviously clueless foreigners.

To the first group it can be in an open form of kindness or one of the two set gift giving periods, the oseibo (end of the year) or ochugen (middle of the year). And to the second group this kindness is extended to them until they become clued in (for example, the new exchange student who is in Japan for the first time).

The custom is one that helps keep the social peace or wa in Japan. It is one that has worked for a long time. But in a changing world where, for the better or worse, more foreigners are coming to visit or stay in Japan this custom may not be so effective. So a change in attitude and thinking may be in order.

Japan is in a transition period. There are growing pains. Murder and suicide rates are up. Social order is disintegrating. Young people do not know what to do with their lives. Change is faster than before. So how the society will adjust remains to be seen.

But nonetheless I hope at least the Japanese will learn to offer up their seats, in an act of true kindness, to someone they do not know, and expect nothing in return for it.

Gives new meaning to ‘cyberspace’

Nasa has made tests of the first internet connection in space. Using a new technology called Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) information can be moved about through vast distances without being lost. The talk is of the information taking days , not hours, minutes or seconds, to reach its destination, the kind of time we will need for information to arrive at a remote distance, like Uranus or beyond our solar system. And here we thought the internet was slow with modems, ISDN and ADSL.

“Categories” mayhem

I have decided to transfer to tags all the Categories labels then delete them all on this blog. They were not helpful, a real mess. I will try limit them to few of the general categories and let my tags go wild.

I am a bit peeved though that the “Uncategorised” label cannot be deleted.

In terms of folksonomy Blogger has the edge. But everything else WordPress wins hands down.

[update] Actually once you get a hang of the categories/tags converter (I had just found it) you can juggle them and organize them. So WordPress hasn’t lost the battle here either.

Japanese funerals

Living in rural Japan, where the young have left for the urban areas and the old stay to continue a more traditional life, death is not far away.

I was struck by how neighbours help out at funerals of the bereaved in Japan. Like everything else this is a communal affair. The community supports each other in ways that just do not seem to happen back in Australia.

In Australia usually all the details (for the lack of a better word) of a funeral are looked after by professional funeral homes. And the service is usually in a church or the funeral home.

But here the funeral is usually in the home of the deceased itself. They do have funeral directors but the neighbours are there and stay with the bereaved for the whole day helping to console them of their loss.

Perhaps this is a rural and not a urban Japan thing. I don’t know. But I feel there is closeness in Japanese communities which I do not find back in Australia.

How to be a good-mannered blogger and blog commenter

One of the big changes on the internet in the last decade is the way we can communicate with each other. With the advent of Web2.0 we no longer have static pages to only look at but we can interact in ways which mimic what we do in the real world. Talk of virtual reality is much less today. Rather we are more realistic about the uses of the internet and its relationship with the physical space that houses that very cyberspace. So online rules must follow real world rules.

One piece of advice a technology writer on the BBC gave recently was that if there is a sensitive subject matter you want to post about regarding real people and real places – information about yourself, others or loaction – but you don’t want other do know about simply don’t write about it even if you disguise it thinly with name changes. Because no matter how much trouble you take to cover your tracks the chance that the identity of these people and places will become known is greater (much greater) than if you don’t write about it at all in the first place.

And similar rules need to be followed for blog comments as well. There is nothing more annoying than comments which are irrelevant to the post you so much effort into. As well meaning as some comments might be (be it from friends whom you told your address to or someone you have never met) if it has little to do with the post then don’t make the comment. Let me give two examples.

Example 1: I recently (re)told a friend the address of my photoblog. She posted a comment about having found the page after a long search. While I understand her delight she made no comment about the photo or photblog. From the blog owner’s point of view that is a big let down. And from the readers’ point of view that is also wasting their time. It is not that I didn’t want her to let me know that she had found the page. It is just that her statement of joy should have been in the form of a personal email to me instead.

Example 2: On another blog of mine a “fellow traveller on the path of sustainability” often cuts text from his own blog and then posts it as a comment. Often the content of the pasted “comment” addresses little or nothing at all about my own post. While I have no doubt about this person’s good intentions (perhaps he wants to stimulate a response from a low output blogger like myself) I cannot help but feel that my writing is worth, to this person, only a two-finger combination of the control key and “V”. So too, then, his comment will be worth nothing more to me than a click of the spam or delete button. If he had wanted to encourage me to write more then he should have just said so. I cannot see how typing a few more keystrokes could have been that much more work for him. After all, this is a person who has his own blog with rich and valuable content. He is definitely not challenged for words.

But that is the advantage of having your own blog – it is that you can control what you post, and who and what comments can stay. This was not always the case. For blog’s forerunner – the mailing/discussion lists, BBS or usenet lists – posters had to rely on the often inconsistent discretion of the moderator(s) for whether their post was accepted or not. The quality of comments were also not as consistent as those on a blog. Today, we can publish safely from behind our blogs, have a voice. But that is not a licence for irresponsibility and recklessness. While the blog is a way to protect you from those who are irresponsible and reckless, it is also giving you a way to find and talk to others interested and place value in the things you say.

So please remember, the feelings of people – be it the feelings of an individual, group, culture or race – can still be hurt by your off-hand posts, comments or actions. This is true in the physical world as well as in the online world. Whether we are using Web2.0 or older technology, whether in the real world or not (what ever that means) good manners always apply.

Eating my words – your favourite music is good for your health

Not too long ago I wrote that there is no reason to listen to music except for cultural pressure.

But no sooner I wrote this and a comment from a reader/friend that I have to eat my words. Recent research has found that listening to your favourite music could be good for your health.

To be honest, I do love music. And to think that I can live without may be wrong. Or perhaps I can live without it, but I would live a shorter life.

It worries me that my partner’s dislike of (or lack of interest in) music may not be so good for her health. So tomorrow I think I will go out to get her a replacement of that lost cassette of her favourite music.

Adventures into photoblogging

I have been photoblogging lately.

To be honest I find it more satisfying than blogging. Firstly, blogging take a lot of time. To write a good post takes at least three hours. And as someone who is busy with the rest of life that is just too much. At the most I can only do a one-post-per-week schedule. Secondly, To write a long post means readers must read a long post. And that takes time, time that many people don’t have. So I can understand the Twitter mentality – short and sweet.

Photoblogging is also short and sweet. It takes only a few seconds to comprehend most of the content of an image. And comments are just as short. And for the same amount of time spent taking photos and processing instead of writing I can obtain three or four good quality images for use in the photoblog. So it is a medium suited for busy people like myself and the viewer.

There are things that cannot be said with a photo, of course. For example, I cannot “shoot a post” like this. It would be very hard to express the ruminations of the pros and cons of blogging and photoblogging. And to capture global warming and climate change “on film still” is easier said than done.

So there is a need for both mediums, as there is the eternal need for diversity, biologically or otherwise.