Yet again an ambulance just used their siren/voice alarm at 12:45am. I’ve mentioned this annoyance in Japan before. In the UK it’s illegal to use your car horn after 11pm and before 7am. I’m fairly sure it’s either illegal, or at least severely frowned upon, to use sirens after 11pm, and certainly after midnight they’re rare. In Japan, the ambulance drivers in particular seem to be all like Bill Cosby in Mother, Jugs and Speed. This one used their sirens and the recorded voice that (I assume – I can’t hear well enough even to try and translate) tells people to get out of the way, then it stopped. About thirty second later it started up again. Since I’m sitting at the computer I pulled up the blind and watched them drive off quite slowly and with absolutely no other vehicular traffic in sight. They then proceeded down the “road” along next to the canalised river bed. It’s fairly narrow but it’s got good visibility and very few vehicles, mostly pedestrians. I’m sure that the ordinary lights would be enough to get people out of the way, and if people were in the way THEN they could have switched the siren/voice on. But, no, if they’re moving and on a call they have the noise going.
At least now the elections are over the loudspeaker vans have gone. There’s still a delivery van that beeps everywhere it goes, though. Makes me long for the once a week (alternating garbage and recycling) collection vans at 7:30am at home.
Japan has a serious problem with noise spam (spaudium?) .
After a Nippon 2007 meeting today at the site in Yokohama, the staff attending split up into smaller groups and went to check out various restaurants. There are a lot of different restaurants in the Queens Square and Landmark Tower Malls near the Pacifico Yokohama conference centre. They’re not badly priced, either. Certainly I recommend the short walk across to the Queens Square (you go through that to get to the Landmark Tower Mall, about ten to fifteen minutes walk – longer for slowcoaches) rather than eating in the Intercontinental (small portions and extortionate prices).
So, along with Inoue Hiroaki-san, Inoue Tamie-san, Trevor Knudsen (what name for a Westerner living in Japan, try getting Japanese people to pronounce it from the written form), Rodrigo Juri and a couple of the other Japanese, we went in search of something that would fit me (picky beggar, mostly vegetarian) and Rodrigo (on a tight budget). Tamie-san suggested we try an okonomiyaki place (she remembered there was at least one in the Landmark Tower Mall).We went to the Yokohama Landmark Plaza Botejyu (okonomiyaki is food from the Osaka region and this is a chain that started in Osaka).
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The UK ID Card and Database
There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:
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