Flashes of Panic

More Osaka bits:

• Having had my say about Pat Butcher’s book a few years ago, now he’s sitting in the row in front of me.

• Simon Turnbull of the Independent, sitting next to me, claims the British press named me “The Inspector” after my 100m pool win. I haven’t had independent (ouch) confirmation, and Simon seems to like pulling my leg, but I thought it was a pretty good joke.

• Japan’s famously crowded subways had an infamous problem with gropers—men who would take indecent advantage of being wedged in to subway cars close to women. I’ve not noticed such a level of crowding, but in the Osaka subways (and probably others) almost every train has a car near the middle of the train which is clearly marked, “Women only,” in Japanese and English. The entries for the car are marked in the stations. On some trains, I’ve seen men in the women-only car, but at other times I’ve seen men who boarded it (presumably by accident, or in a hurry) moving to the neighboring cars as the train pulls out of the station. Of course, this works best when trains are frequent and run on time, so I doubt the T will be picking it up soon.

• The Japanese even have better dried cup noodles than we do. Grad school here would be better fed.

• In Den Den Town, I spotted USB drives that look like sushi. Another one looked like a finger: a thumb drive. Den Den Town is awesome.

As previously noted, I’ve been working a lot. I get some sleep every night, but the cumulative effect of two to four missed hours every night is significant. The feedback I’ve had on my work has been generally positive, though I’m not really sure what the scale of readership is: dozens? Hundreds? Supposedly visitors to the IAAF website number in the hundreds of thousands, but how many are reading what my colleagues and I are writing? Not that it matters that much, I suppose.

I’ve had tentative signals that this may be considered a sort of audition for future work, much as Fukuoka turned out to be an audition for this. If I say more than that, I think I’d be counting chickens, because nothing is at all concrete, this far in advance.

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