Seth's Blog

Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco has the best ice cream I’ve had. The ice cream at Japanese Ice Ouca in Tokyo is maybe 95% as good but the presentation is so much better than Bi-Rite I was stunned. The prices are about the same at the two places. At Ouca you get a choice of three flavors (versus two at Bi-Rite). The three flavors are mixed in an attractive pattern. You get a pretty round wafer to add crunch. And you get a little bit of salty chewy seaweed to eat after you’re finished. Ouca doesn’t stand out from other high-end Japanese food, which is full of these sorts of effective small touches. In Iceland I met a Japanese teacher of English who said, “I like everything about America except the food.” American food is like barbarian food — except worse.
When she was a teenager, Jane Jacobs visited a relative of hers in isolated rural Pennsylvania. Her aunt had moved there to oversee the building of a church. The inhabitants had forgotten that buildings could be made out of stone. American cooking reveals a similar vast forgetting.

1. Three-dimensional TV. Via polarized light. Not for sale yet
2. Pens with erasers. You can erase the ink.

A few minutes after I sent gamesinwelt.com credit-card payment for a Wii via PayPal, I phoned PayPal asking them to cancel the transaction. Your payment did not go through, I was told. “Did not”. So there was no need to cancel it. I was safe. To warn others, I wrote my earlier post about this.

Well, I was misinformed. My payment was not unauthorized, i.e., dead — it was, rather, not-yet-authorized. When I phoned PayPal, it could have been canceled but it wasn’t. A few days later it went through. Maybe I am easily amazed but this is amazing. At PayPal customer service, the account history screen seen by employees does not distinguish between two meanings of unauthorized: “authorization failed” and “not yet authorized”. What is this, 1960?

I was pissed. I called PayPal and was told in part that this was somehow my fault. I should have known [something]. To file a dispute I must call another number. I called that number. I filed the dispute. You’re safe, I was told. Will I have to call again? I asked. No, I was told.

Well, I wasn’t safe. Although I won the dispute, there was no money in the seller’s account. A possibility that hadn’t been mentioned. Too bad for me.

So I phoned my credit card company. I was told I should get my money back from either PayPal or the credit-card company. Fearing more untrustworthiness from PayPal, I emptied my PayPal account.

Bonus PayPal helping scammers, from the comments:

Same story! $300 for a Wii and a Nintendo DS! The day after my husband ordered I tried to go back to the website and order some games. I got a message saying the company “could not accept PayPal at this time” I then emailed PayPal’s customer service and asked them if this meant that they were not a reputable company that I should not do business with. PayPal said, and I quote, “It does not mean that they are not reputable, they could be experiencing problems with their internet connection to PayPal.”

I believe that books for tourists are filled with inside jokes. A booklet for tourists called Welcome to Tokyo published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government says the following about a place called Nakamise:

Both sides of the 250 m street from [A] to [B] are lined with about 90 stores dating from the Edo Period.

The Edo Period ran from 1603 to 1868, which few readers will know. The street is actually lined with stores selling the usual tourist stuff.

A few months ago a popular Japanese TV show ran a long (30 minutes?) piece about the Shangri-La Diet, some of which you can see here. It is very odd to see my work talked about and not know what’s being said. It’s like being a fly on the wall, taking into account that flies don’t understand English. The show is long enough that some of what they’re saying must be new to me. One of the panelists (there is a panel of one man and two women) appears to be Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, whose book Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window I love, have read dozens of times, and mention in The Shangri-La Diet — at least the English version. I first came across Totto-Chan at the Mill Valley Public Library. Even though I was living in Berkeley, I checked it out. Driving home I was so entranced I read the book at stoplights while waiting for the light to change.