People named Laura Bailey

My sister's name is Laura Bailey.

She wrote me an e-mail yesterday in which she said she also was doing an online journal of sorts on Xanga, so I tried googling her to see if I could find it. What came up, however, was information about two other Laura Baileys out there in the world. Have you ever tried googling your own name to see what other people share your name?

My sister is now an art major and Italian/history minor. She spent the summer in Italy studying art and Italian. She and her boyfriend Howard just got a kitten! I'm very jealous because our landlord won't allow us to have any pets. Lots more to say about her, but in a different post.

It seems there are at least two famous Laura Baileys out there, one a strict vegetarian British actress/model and the other an American voice actor.

Laura Bailey the strict vegetarian British model
Laura Bailey the voice actor
Laura Bailey the younger sister

I once did a similar search for my own name, and discovered that there was a professor of mathematics and a WWF-style wrestler named Jeremy Bailey. I would do a search now but I've spent an unhealthy time sitting in front of the keyboard, so I am going to opt to do some stretching and exercise instead.

PET Bottle Mystery Discovered!

I had quite a shock just now.

Earlier this morning I had been trying to set up a way to do mobile blogging from my cell phone (Vodafone), but failed using Mail-to-Blogger, so I decided to set up an account with Movable Type. When signing up, it asked me for my blog's URL, so I typed in the following address:

http://jerinjapan.blogspot.com/

It actually loaded, and had the same design as this blog, and is by somebody named Jeremy who was living in Osaka last year. At first I did a double take and didn't realize what had happened, before it hit me that my URL is jeremyinjapan, not jerinjapan. The various challenges I've encountered throughout my time spent here in Japan have left me with the sense that I am one of the few foreigners undertaking such an ordeal. This is absolutely untrue, but I kinda figured maybe I would be the only Jeremy in the Kansai region who goes by Jer. That I have the same Blogger design and the same nickname as this guy just freaked me out a bit.

I guess my ego wants me to differentiate myself a bit more. There are a lot of foreigners here, and many of them speak some Japanese, and some of them speak it quite well. Why do I feel this urge to make myself special among the pack?

In other news, I finally discovered the roots of a mystery in my neighborhood (and many others, it seems). I had spent the morning reading various blogs, especially blogs by foreigners living in Japan. Here are some of the ones that captured my attention:

Alive in Kyoto
Antipixel
Tokyo MetroBlog

The latter was not my favorite of the bunch, but it was the key to solving the aforementioned mystery, so I must give credit where credit is due. Surrounding many homes in the Ogura ward of Uji City where I live, there are many plastic PET bottles filled with water. Anna and I have sometimes wondered about why they are there and what they do. We thought maybe they were trying to utilize the sun's energy to heat the water, which they maybe used in some way to cut down on their gas bill.

Evidently, we were dead wrong.

A post on the Tokyo MetroBlog shed some light onto this strange occurence. Evidently it is to prevent animals from peeing on their property!

No joke. As the theory goes, someone discovered that by filling clear PET bottles with water and placing them along the perimeter of your property, a cat or dog, before lifting it's leg, would see his reflection and become frightened, electing to move on to pee in a more suitable spot.

If you have lived in Japan for a while, you'd probably recall how the ol' pee-proofing PET bottle trick used to be big news about 5 or 6 years ago. Some building owners still swear by it--the PET bottles are clear message aimed directly at the pee-petrators: "Don't urinate here."

As far as Japanese people go, "tachi-shoban" (or standing while pissing) also used to be more a visible Tokyo sight years ago than it is today, however, it still isn't all that uncommon to a witness a drunk middle-aged businessman unzip his fly and piss on the side of the street at night. During the day, you might happen to catch sight of a taxi driver pull over and urinate on some short bushes on the side of the road. Japan is not yet a country totally of laws, where one is arrested for inconspicuously alleviating his bladder on the side of a city street. However, I suspect the must be a law on the books somewhere against urinating in public.

Anyway, as the saying goes: Peeing is believing.

Credit goes to Mr. Jim O'Connell for solving the mystery.