Nothing But Words

• Maria's in DC all week, for a fellowship with CSIS http://csis.org/ – she was invited by Michael Green, who served on Bush's NSC #
• The "Toppa" candies are back for exam season in Japan http://bit.ly/cKkzUL (and my post from a couple years ago http://toppa.com/pd6z ) #
• @hakjoon We might come to DC the 1st weekend in March. I'll keep you posted. Maybe I'll bring the snow with me then too. #

• Tiled entryway yesterday – finally had a day over 40 deg., so I could use my wet saw to cut tile without turning myself into an ice cube #
• Watched "Tokyo!" last night, which is 3 short films: "Merde" was awful, but the other two were fun http://www.tokyothemovie.com #
• @zensmile I recommend taking a look at the counter-arguments to Thiessen http://bit.ly/7J3ZJ6 http://bit.ly/xmiYw #
• http://twitpic.com/yvjs4 Kai & I have been playing "Magic" a lot w/ my old cards ('93 -'96; I don't want to sell them) http://bit.ly/11cgU4 #
• Bush era torture cover-ups coming to light despite the Obama DOJs attempts to keep them hidden http://bit.ly/5wC9i8 http://bit.ly/36wGca #
• The whole work and life thing is really getting in the way of my tweeting and blogging these days. #

• @zensmile Congratulations! http://post.ly/Ht1w #
• Today's my first day as manager of the web team (same place, new job). The biggest change is I don't have time to eat or go to the bathroom #
• RT @scottspitzer I'm glad priorities are in order. http://bit.ly/881cmI #
• Odds of catching the flu go from 8:1 to 2:1 if you have kids http://bit.ly/7kzCSw #
• Good (but depressing) infographic on US unemployment rate: http://bit.ly/2tJgJV – scroll right to see recent years #

This past summer, I spent the many hours of my flights between Philly and Prague engrossed in Haruki Murakami’s 1997 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was such a pleasure to read, it’s come very close to supplanting Philip K. Dick’s VALIS as my favorite novel. Murakami’s writing style is nothing like Dick’s, but he shares Dick’s talent for spinning tales that are bizarre, dryly humorous, philosophical journeys of self-discovery.

If you are a fan of the TV show Lost, you will love Murakami. There are several elements of the show that are undoubtedly drawn from Murakami, such as the characters’ frequent trips down wells and other dark holes as catalysts for finding themselves. Lost has already acknowledged its debt to VALIS – we’ll see if Murakami gets his due in Lost’s upcoming final season.

To give you a sense of how many clever analogies Murakami can pack into a small space, here are a couple paragraphs from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This is the protagonist describing a strange man he unexpectedly finds waiting for him in his house:

He was a short man, dressed in a suit. It was hard to guess his height with him seated, but he couldn’t have been five feet tall. Somewhere between forty-five and fifty years old, he looked like a chubby little frog with a bald head – a definite A in May Kasahara’s classification system [his friend May made wigs for bald men]. He did have a few clumps of hair clinging to his scalp over his ears, but their oddly shaped black presence made the bare area stand out all the more. He had a large nose, which may have been somewhat blocked, judging from the way it expanded and contracted like a bellows with each noisy breath he took. Atop that nose sat a pair of thick-looking wire-rim glasses. He had a way of pronouncing certain words so that his upper lip would curl, revealing a mouth full of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He was, without question, one of the ugliest human beings I had ever encountered. And not just physically ugly: there was a certain clammy weirdness about him that I could not put into words – the sort of feeling you get when your hand brushes against some big, strange bug in the darkness. He looked less like an actual human being than like something from a long-forgotten nightmare.

…

The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill-formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing. He wore what he wore strictly because he had no choice but to put something on when dealing with other people, as if he were hostile to the idea of wearing clothes at all. He might have been planning to wear these things the same way every day until they fell apart – like a highland farmer driving his donkey from morning to night until he kills it.

Credit is also due to Jay Rubin for an impressive translation of Murakami’s Japanese. In preparing to write this post, I learned that he was forced to abridge his translation, due to a word limit imposed by the American publisher (I guess they think Americans are afraid of large books). An Amazon reviewer who read the unabridged Russian version says that 15%-20% of the book has been cut from the English translation, with entire chapters missing. I’m dying to know what I missed!

• "Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism" http://bit.ly/4FaPCN http://bit.ly/72kCn4 #
• Nice article on Fukagawa, one of my favorite Tokyo neighborhoods: http://bit.ly/6N6v6P – almost as good as mine http://toppa.com/2csq #

Check out the price tag – $408, 692 – that’s for one men’s room and one women’s room View at Picasa Check out the price tag – $408, 692 – that’s for one men’s room and one women’s room22-Dec-2009 20:19, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 200

The sign pictured here went up last month at 69th St Station. Check out the price tag: $408,692 to remodel the men’s room and the women’s room. My nice large house in a good neighborhood isn’t worth that kind of money. The station’s men’s room is a modest size – two toilets, two urinals, two sinks. Presumably the women’s room is similar, so we’re not talking about large facilities. And the sign says “refurbishing and renewal of existing public restrooms,” which doesn’t make it sound like major demolition or expansion is involved.

Usually when you see a sign like this for a public project, its for something like a bridge, and most of us don’t have the kind of experience needed to readily understand all the expenses involved. But most homeowners can relate to the cost of remodeling a bathroom. So I’ve been trying to imagine where all that money is going. Trying to be generous and fair, here’s my best guess at what the cost should be:

1. Let’s start with the price of remodeling a non-luxury residential bathroom. About.com puts the average remodel price at $16,000 to $17,500. Let’s round that up to $20,000.
2. Double that for 2 bathrooms: $40,000.
3. These are public restrooms that require heavy duty fixtures. In the old men’s room, the sinks, toilets, and urinals were stainless steel. The toilets were designed without seats (as the designers assumed – probably correctly – that some jerk would just tear them off) and the mirrors were reflective metal instead of glass. The sinks are probably designed to handle drunken idiots dancing on the counters. There’s also two of every fixture in each bathroom (two sinks, etc., but minus the showers and tubs in a typical residential bathroom). So given the need for heavy duty fixtures and two of each kind, let’s double the cost again: $80,000.
4. Now let’s add in the premium for union labor and the cost of compliance with regulations such as the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). That’s harder to guess at, but I think doubling the cost again is generous: $160,000.

So that doesn’t even get us halfway to the actual price being paid with public funds. What is the rest for?

UPDATE: The SEPTA Watch Blog has picked up this post, and has reached out to SEPTA for more information.

UPDATE 2: septawatch.com got an answer: it turns out the cost is for renovating 4 bathrooms, not just the 2 implied by the sign. So if you take my generous $160K ballpark estimate and double it again (for going from 2 to 4 bathrooms), that’s $320K. That’s still almost $100K shy of the actual $408K cost, but if you read the septawatch.com post, it sounds like they’re actually doing more than just “refurbishing.”

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