‘No Refusal’ Fat Tuesday ends with 14 arrests
AUSTIN — Mardi Gras celebrations in downtown Austin are over, and the Austin Police Department is releasing arrest numbers from the festivities.
Article source: http://www.kvue.com/news/APD-reports-14-arrests-made-during-Fat-Tuesday-no-refusal-190993451.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Austin Police Department, Tokyo
‘No Refusal’ Fat Tuesday ends with 14 arrests
AUSTIN — Mardi Gras celebrations in downtown Austin are over, and the Austin Police Department is releasing arrest numbers from the festivities.
Article source: http://www.kvue.com/news/APD-reports-14-arrests-made-during-Fat-Tuesday-no-refusal-190993451.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Austin Police Department, Tokyo
‘No Refusal’ Fat Tuesday ends with 14 arrests
AUSTIN — Mardi Gras celebrations in downtown Austin are over, and the Austin Police Department is releasing arrest numbers from the festivities.
Article source: http://www.kvue.com/news/APD-reports-14-arrests-made-during-Fat-Tuesday-no-refusal-190993451.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Austin Police Department, Tokyo
So, fat cats and a blue caterpillar will save Japan from nuclear hell. OK
If you visit the Alice Pavilion at the Shika nuclear power plant in the town of Shika, Ishikawa Prefecture, you will be happily entertained by Prof. Aomushi (Blue Caterpillar), who, water pipe in mouth, sits in the sun and, together with Alice, “teaches you about radiation.”
What these friendly cartoon characters will not teach you, though, are facts about the geological fault that, in all likelihood, is active under the plant’s No. 1 reactor.
The government gave Hokuriku Electric Power Co. — the plant’s owner and operator — the go-ahead to start construction in 1988, “after (the company’s) underground surveys did not detect any active faults.” The No. 1 reactor was commissioned in 1993, and a second reactor went on line in 2006.
Now research has shown a “strong possibility” that the fault lying below the older reactor may be active. Another fault lies below No. 2 reactor as well. By law, nuclear power plants built over active faults are not permitted to operate — yet Hokuriku Electric is determined to restart these reactors despite local opposition due to real safety concerns.
It is not only the utility companies operating Japan’s nuclear power plants that are pushing for a return to the status quo ante as it was prior to the nuclear disaster that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. The most dominant industrial forces in this country are actively lobbying for the restart of reactors as well.
Nothing could have illustrated this more vividly than the Oct. 3 visit by Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Japan’s most powerful business organization, to the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture.
Yonekura, who has been president of Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd. since 2000, was accompanied on his first visit to a nuclear plant since 3/11 by Yorihiko Kojima, vice-chairman of Keidanren and chairman of the board of directors of Mitsubishi Corp. (The Articles of Sumitomo Chemical list, as an “Objective of Management,” “the nuclear power industry,” for which they provide a range of goods and services; while among Mitsubishi Corp.’s “Main Products and Services” is the “transport and import of nuclear fuel.”)
“I was extremely relieved to see,” said Yonekura, “that safety (at the plant) is steadily being strengthened.”
The safety he alluded to is in the hands of owner and operator Chubu Electric Power Co., which, in May 2011, was forced by Prime Minister Naoto Kan to shut down the Hamaoka plant because its safety could not be guaranteed. Yonekura was “relieved” when he saw the construction of an 18-meter-high sea wall, to be completed by December 2013 at a cost of ¥140 billion.
But the plant sits right over the subduction zone where two tectonic plates come together. It is a toss up of chance involving potential catastrophe as to whether the plant’s reactors could survive the expected massive Tokai earthquake, and whether this new sea wall could stand firm and repel an accompanying tsunami.
Yet, the industrial and financial interests that dictate public policy to politicians and bureaucrats in this country are determined to forge ahead.
Consider this: On Oct. 3, the day of the Keidanren visit, national broadcaster NHK displayed a map on its 7 o’clock evening news program. The map had a number of circles on it, each with a radius of 50 km — and each representing the area that would be contaminated by radioactivity from a crippled reactor. The circle with the Hamaoka plant at its center encompasses the largest population of any plant in Japan: 2.14 million people — though of course radiation from there could well track north to Greater Tokyo, with its population of more than 35 million. What then for Yonekura’s sense of “relief”?
However, Tokyo is by no means only endangered from the south. Around 100 km north of the capital stands the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant in Tokai Village, Ibaraki Prefecture. It was months after the Fukushima disaster before events that occurred at the plant’s No. 2 reactor on March 11, 2011 — the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake — came to light.
In fact it turns out that one of three pumps installed for cooling the reactor was inundated by a tsunami that reached 5.4 meters. If it had risen another 70 cm, it would have knocked out the other two pumps as well. It was simply good luck that work to raise the height of the sea wall to 6.1 meters was completed on March 9.
If a similar accident to that at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant had struck the Tokai reactor, airborne plumes of radioactive substances may very well have shrouded Tokyo.
Yet as Norio Otani, the mayor of Nasukarasuyama City in neighboring Tochigi Prefecture, said recently, “It was only in February of this year that I learned of just how dangerous the situation at Tokai No. 2 was in March 2011. Nasukarasuyama is a mere 37 km from it. … It sent shivers down my spine.”
But Shika, Hamaoka and Tokai are just three examples of nuclear plants highly vulnerable to catastrophic accidents.
Leaders of the governing Democratic Party of Japan have been issuing conspicuously ambiguous statements as to who will take the decisions on whether to restart nuclear plants or not — and when, if ever, nuclear power will be phased out. For its part, earlier this month the Nuclear Regulation Authority, which is an administrative body of the Cabinet, outlined a number of “nuclear disaster prevention measures,” such as expanding “priority areas for emergencies” to 30 km, distributing iodine pills to stave off the effects of radiation exposure in thyroid glands, evacuating hospitals, etc.
While these measures may be necessary in case of an accident when reactors are being decommissioned, they give a false sense of security to people regarding the operation of nuclear power plants.
This, though, is the strategy of Japan’s political leaders, bureaucratic controllers and industrial forces: Confuse the public with ambiguous signals, feigning an interest in opposition arguments; issue guidelines that assuage public anxieties; and send the captains of industry out to assure the people that their welfare — not instinctive greed — is their primary concern.
If a major earthquake or tsunami, or both, strike a reactor at the Shika, Hamaoka or Tokai nuclear power plants — or ones at any of the many other nuclear plants built on precarious sites — and radioactive contamination spreads through the population, what will the politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders say then?
They are trying once again, as they did in the 1950s and ’60s, to railroad policy in favor of nuclear energy while maintaining the pretense of openmindedness, debate and concern. But renewal of nuclear power in Japan is not the fait accompli it was decades ago.
If we do go back to pre-Fukushima norms, we will only be flirting with disaster and possibly poisoning not only ourselves but also our children, their children and goodness knows how many others beyond these shores. The only legacy of such a policy is the legacy of death.
Those who believe the assurances of a blue caterpillar and Alice concerning “the facts” about radiation are living not in Japan, a country plagued by natural disasters, but truly in a Wonderland. In such a Wonderland, myths reign supreme and bias is dictated as simple truth from above.
Now is the time for all of us to wake up, come back to Earth and refuse to allow the powers-that-be to force us to live in a world that does not resemble our own.
Article source: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20121021rp.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Japan, Mitsubishi Corp, OK, Tokyo
Book Review: Spilling the Beans:The Autobiography of One of Television’s Two …
Reading reviews of Clarissa Dickson Wright’s Spilling the Beans: The Autobiography of One of Television’s Two Fat Ladies, I notice one writer describes Dickson Wright as “a larger than life character.” My take on that remark is that if Ms. Dickson Wright was one jot “larger than life,” producers of Two Fat Ladies would have had to ditch that motorcycle-sidecar rig and haul the ol’ broad around in a ten-wheel dump truck.
Speaking strictly of autobiographers, Dickson Wright is more fun than most and better reading than many. Clarissa is a competent writer, a side-splitting raconteur (think Clarissa Dangerfield), and a maniacal name-dropper. If she actually knows half the people she claims to know or have known, she’s done enough living for a couple of dozen ordinary folks.
Through it all I was most impressed by Dickson Wright’s forthright confession of her alcoholism, to sleeping on the streets occasionally, to squandering every dime she had, to the swamp of shame and degradation into which John Barleycorn leads those who (like this writer) are fool enough to follow. Many members of polite society, never having been there, have no idea how low one can actually go on a liquor binge. My own experience leads me to believe that Dickson Wright doesn’t tell the half of it.
If I’m correct in that, what Clarissa left out is between her and her god, and that’s exactly as it should be. (I once sat in a 12-step meeting and listened to the most angelic young woman I’ve ever seen tell how she used to go to the restroom at the supper club where she worked and lock herself in a stall so she could squat over the toilet and fill her cocaine syringe from the bowl. There aren’t many who’d have the nerve to admit that in print under their own byline.)
Based upon what Clarissa gives away in this book, I’ll guess that the miracle of Dickson Wright’s recovery had much to do with the fact that she was born into and grew up in a home where social skills were appreciated by the parents and instilled in the children by whatever means. I say so because however unhappy Clarissa and her siblings may have been, they at least came up in the world knowing how to make friends and how to keep them. Boarding school also seems to have helped them a great deal. Many children are less fortunate, and the worth of what they miss is in many ways immeasurable.
The last of my surmise is that Clarissa Dickson Wright is one of those whom folks in recovery call “a high-bottom drunk.” She fell off of 20 stories but somehow hit hard on the eighth or tenth floor, so she didn’t get hurt as badly as those who hurtle headlong all the way to the bottom. Good things that happened after she sobered up didn’t simply fall into her lap nor did she create them from whole cloth. Always giving her credit for having the sense to seize opportunity when she stumbles upon it, some of those opportunities were dropped in her way by old friends from better days, friends who had always hoped for and (when the chance came) were quick to aid her recovery. Hats off to people like them and to Clarissa for giving credit where she knows it is due.
On a darker note, it seems to me as if Clarissa’s 12-Step commitment to “rigorous personal honesty” is less than rigorous where matters other than alcohol are at issue. In Los Angeles,
“. . . the three of us went to Nobu for dinner, where the Food Network had in error booked us seats at the sushi bar rather than at a table in the restaurant. … I went to bat with a splendid tantrum in my best English vowels. A rather ordinary-looking man with stubble on his chin and unkempt hair came up and said we could have his table. On being seated Pat asked how we had got the table and I pointed out the man; … her jaw dropped, since the man was none other than Robert de Niro, the owner of the restaurant. We thanked him profusely but . . . he wouldn’t join us. De Niro had discovered and backed chef Matsuhisa, the creator of his new wave Japanese cuisine. There are now Nobu restaurants in New York, Paris, London, Aspen and even very bravely in Tokyo. I find his food incredibly exciting and whenever Pat offers to take me out to dinner in London I ask to go to Nobu.”
There we see that TV star Clarissa can’t bother being civil to “an ordinary-looking man with stubble on his chin and unkempt hair.” But when that same man turns out to be Robert de Niro, Clarissa is ready, willing, and eager to kiss his butt from L.A. to Tokyo and back. Others will feel as they may but, personally, toadies make me hurl.
Same goes for Clarissa’s politics. In the last three chapters, her middle-class hypocrisy comes to the fore. She smears her opponents with allegations that they are paid terrorists. She tells horror stories about searching for bombs under her car. She implies that her television series, Clarissa and the Countryman, came to an end because there was some sort of collusion between BBC big-shots and her political opponents. All of those accusations are unsubstantiated.
So it is that in politics Dickson Wright exhibits the sort of behavior that, in her opponents, she would decry as lies or as wacko conspiracy theories. We see it is with Clarissa just as it is with most activists everywhere: Those who engage in confrontational politics typically cry “Foul!” when the blowback is not to their liking.
Well, I don’t like boohoos any better than toadies. The first three quarters of Spilling the Beans is some of the best tragicomic entertainment that human nature provides. In this reader those first chapters built an empathy for Clarissa that, unfortunately, the author went a way toward wrecking in the final few chapters.
Solomon sez: One of the Two Fat Ladies died. The other should have stayed in the kitchen. Five stars for good writing and an entertaining story, minus two stars for mucking up a perfectly good autobiography with a lot of snobbery and crank politics. Read Clarissa if you get the urge. Depending on what you have survived, her book may well repay your effort.
Spilling the Beans: The Autobiography of One of Television’s Two Fat Ladies (New York: The Overlook Press; 328 pp., 2009. $29.95)
View the original article on blogcritics.org
Article source: http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-Spilling-the-Beans-The-Autobiography-3618164.php
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Dickson Wright, John Barleycorn, Tokyo, Two Fat Ladies