BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Dress down to save Japan, PM says

Oh my god, we can only hope. I said it last year starting late March, and soon I'll begin to say so again, I'm gonna die this summer! Of course, if buildings were properly insulated and had central air/heating, the problem would be reduced as well.

"Summertime conditions in Japan's major cities, including Tokyo and Osaka, have had average daytime highs over 30 degrees Celsius for two and a half months in the past two years."

Weekend Update

Spent all day yesterday getting Toby to the airport - which is a deceptively long distance away! We left here around 10:30, and by the time we got there it was after 1:00, and by the time I got back to Shibuya it was well after 4. Did some shopping at Yamaya, a really good international food store, and came home. Today I'm gonna clean the place up a bit; I may even try to move our stolen desk but we'll see.

We may see updates from Toby over the next few days - he's in Chicago checking the place out, but he'll be back on Sunday.

Vera Drake

OK, a more detailed post. We really liked the movie - the acting, especially by the lead actress, Imelda Staunton, was really excellent, but all the actors were good. I thought the ending was quite understated but Toby liked it. Next on the "to watch" list is Million Dollar Baby - I want to see if Hillary Swank really deserved to win the Oscar; I think Staunton would've been tough to beat. Wait a sec...the Oscars? Fair?

Nevermind.

Yeah, same to you, too

Columbia has rejected my application. Well, fine! Like I'd attend a university with such a stupid online system!

UCLA checks in

All the responses seem to be coming in now. UC Santa Barbara has offered me admission, and UCLA has notified me that I'm on the waitlist. I'm not very interested in UCSB any more, but UCLA is a different story. I'm still interested in both UCLA and Chicago.

UCLA ranks higher than Chicago on the all-important Philosophical Gourmet Report. But my interests don't always match up with the ranking criteria of the Report.

Money speaks in favour of Chicago. Chicago has offered a 5 year fellowship at $18,000/year, requiring 3 quarters of TAing during the 3rd and 4th years, and 1 quarter of lecturing during the last year. That's a decidedly light teaching requirement, so I'd probably want to do some extra teaching along the way, and that would yield extra money. In comparison, UCLA is offering 2 years of fellowship (and those 2 years are good), but only normally paying TAships for the rest. That would probably mean constant TAing through the last 2 or 3 years just to get by, and while that doesn't sound terrible I would greatly prefer to have the financial option to slack off concentrate on my studies.

And, again, there's the issue of timing. All the universities seem to have the same deadline for confirming acceptance of admission offers: April 15. Most people will probably deliberate, and want to keep their options open, right down to the wire. (Even though I've basically ruled out some of the offers I've received, I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of rejecting them outright.) This means that waitlisted applicants probably won't find out whether they're off of the waitlist or out of the running until after the 15th. So if I want to hold out for UCLA, I'll probably have to snub Chicago on the 15th and hope for the best. That's not my idea of fun.

A bit of late night scavenging

After a late night of geekery, Kate and I caught the last train, and on the walk home from the station we ran across a wooden desk waiting for garbage pickup. It was dusty and scratched, but looked fairly nice, and a quick inspection showed it was still perfectly serviceable.

So we took it.

We weren't far from home--normally it would be about a 2 minute walk--but time works differently when you're carrying a rather heavy piece of furniture completely lacking in convenient hand-holds. We each took a side, and sort of half shuffled, half waddled our way along. We had to stop and start several times, and got some weird looks from a late night construction crew and the odd passer-by.

Thank goodness we only live on the second floor of our building, although the first floor would have been far preferable. We took out the drawers and took them up separately, but even then it was a struggle to get the thing up the stairs. The desk is almost as wide as the stairway, and it just barely squeezed through the door to our apartment. Consdering that it was well after midnight, we also had to avoid making any noise, but unfortunately, with all the drawers removed, the empty desk reverberated like a big ole drum every time we knocked it against something, so we had to be extra careful.

A difficult task, but it was a great find. I can't wait to sit at it! But first we'll have to buy some chairs.

(It's a Japanese apartment, OK? We only have floor-chairs.)

University update

Pittsburgh turned me down, Texas has me on a waiting list, and Johns Hopkins has offered me admission.

In terms of my preferences, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and UCLA are on the first tier. Texas is close, maybe. On the other hand, I don't think I'll be able to wait for Texas to tell me if I'm off the waiting list or not--they probably won't get back to me before Chicago's deadline for my response to their offer. As for JHU, they're offering me a much less attractive fellowship package than Chicago's. So unless UCLA comes through with something stunning, it looks like Chicago is it.

Plans to visit the Chicago campus are pretty much finalized. It'll be a direct flight, so chances of meeting up with anyone are nil. I had to go through my boss to get the days off, so I took the opportunity to inform him that I'd be leaving by the end of the year to go to grad school, to which he responded, well, maybe they wouldn't accept me after all. I took that as I sign that my presence in the company is appreciated, rather than a wish of ill will as such.

If nothing else, the Chicago has a great sales pitch. Besides inviting me to visit their campus, they arranged a time to talk to me over the phone (they called me), and sent me a package of papers by faculty that they thought I'd be interested in. And maybe they're psychic, or maybe I just fit some stereotype of grad students working in the humanities, but included in that package was a large poster for "DocFilms", which looks pretty awesome to me. (And since the theatre is right on campus I probably wouldn't miss anything out of laziness, which happened a lot when I made plans to see flicks at Pacific Cinematheque.)

Just in case someone from Columbia University admissions is reading: you guys sent me an ID code and a URL, saying that I could use these to check up on the status of my application, and when I went to the website I found that any attempt to navigate around my account sent me straight back to the login page, where I would have to reenter my lengthy PIN and sundry information (using annoying pull-downs), and after some exasperated clicking around I discovered that results of admissions decisions could not be found anywhere on the above website, a fact that was mentioned neither in the letter I received nor on the website itself. You guys suck!