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By Michelle Rafferty

Last week we received a message from Miki Matoba, Director of Global Academic Business at OUP Tokyo, confirming that her staff is safe and well. This was a relief to hear, and also a reminder that although many of us are tied to the people of Japan in some way, our perspective of the human impact is relatively small.  So I asked Miki if she wouldn’t mind sharing some of her experiences, and she kindly agreed. When she responded to my questions she wrote: “Hope my answers reflect a part of how we view the incidents as Japanese.”

1.) Where were you, and what were your thoughts as the earthquake hit?

I was in a meeting room with a visitor from OUP Oxford and my staff having a meeting when the earthquake started. You may find this weird but we all are very much living with earthquakes from a young age. So little shakes here and there are just a part of our lives. But not the one we had last Friday as that was the biggest one in some hundreds of years. What I normally think when earthquakes start is when shall I get up to secure the exit and go under the desk. Most of the time, you do not have to do either as it does not last long. But not this time. As the building started to shake for a while I opened the door of the meeting room thinking that this is a big one but should stop soon. But it did not. So we put ourselves under the table hoping for the shaking to cease. When it did not, I thought then that this is a serious one and something really severe will happen as a result.

Then we saw some white stuff coming down in the office (it was not fire – just some dust coming down from the ceiling) and someone shouted that we should leave NOW. So we did. I did not take anything. Just myself and those who were meeting with me, running down from 8th floor to the ground. Even when we were running down the stairs, it was still shaking. After a while, we went back to the office to get things as the decision was made very quickly to close the office for that day. Almost everything on my desk had either fallen over or was on the floor, and it was still shaking.

2.) Was anyone prepared?

Yes and no. As Japanese, we all are prepared for earthquakes but not for something of this size and the aftermath of it.

3.) How do you continue to manage your group at such a difficult time? Is it possible to work?

Try to communicate well. We email and also have set up an internal Twitter account that we tweet to, including who will go into the office and what they are doing as we are still mainly working from home. The situation is still very unsettling making it difficult to concentrate on work (power rationing, aftershocks and the nuclear power plant situation) but we try to process day-to-day things as usual.

4.) How would you describe the city right now (the business activity, the state of mind)?

Interesting question. I think Tokyo is normally one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Now the city is very quiet compared to normal. The weather has been clear and nice after Friday so it feels odd to be in this peaceful, quiet Tokyo under the sun after all that.

5.) I’ve heard radiation levels are higher than normal – is everyone staying inside?

We have lots of information going around including rumors. We live almost as normal – just listening to TV and radio all the time, watching the progress of the nuclear plant situation. I do not go out if that can be avoided.

6.) What do people outside of Japan need to know?

Illustration for a roll banner of an Android event.

The image was rendered in 9600 x 24000 pixels (about 80 x 200 cm in 300 DPI).

For an inside glimpse of the Novel Revision Retreat, here’s a short video podcast or trailer from the recent San Rafael, California retreat.

Read more from Lisa Gottfried of DigitalWeavers.com, who edited this video for me.

Related posts:

1. book trailer criteria
2. Random Social
3. CA Retreat

The sketch was done as a doodle in a meeting. The painting was done several months later after a bit of a debate in my head whether the painting would do the doodle justice. It never hurts to give it a try.

Megan Branch, Intern

For many people, country music has always been a crossover genre. Artists like Taylor Swift, Reba McEntire and the late Johnny Cash are able to tread the line between popular and country music, with hits that please the ears of the thirteen-year-old next door and your grandmother. What most people may not know is that Swift, McEntire, Cash and a whole slew of other performers, including Louis Armstrong, owe much of their success to Jimmie Rodgers. In his new book, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century, Barry Mazor chronicles Rodgers’ life and career up until his unfortunate death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. Then Mazor goes on to detail Rodgers’ far-reaching influence that continues even now, almost 80 years since his death. Below, from Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, are 10 of the most interesting things about the father of country music you may not have known.

1. He ran away from home to join a traveling show:
“By the age of twelve, Jimmie had attempted to stage a tent carnival of his own, and even took it on the road locally […] Soon after, he ran away from home with a medicine show, having convinced the management, based on his amateur ‘experience,’ that he was a professional performer.”
2. He had a voice like no one else:
“…[Y]ou always knew—literally—where he was coming from. The speech from which his singing extended was Mississippi speech, not just in references, but also in sound. On record, his accent is particularly light, sweet, and most of all present—not diluted or eradicated […] he rather charmingly loses a few middle-of-the-word r’s to rhyme a very liquid barrel with gal…”

3. He raised a huge amount of money for the Red Cross during the Depression:
“[Will] Rogers, Rodgers, and crew flew from town to town across Texas and up into Oklahoma, pulling in unprecedented amounts of cash for relief…every dime going to the Red Cross for food and basics like vegetable seeds, so families could stay fed.”

4. BB King is a fan:
“‘My aunt was a kind of collector of music of her time,’ King recalls […] ‘But of the many [records] she had, Jimmie Rodgers was one of my own favorites […] I never tried to yodel—though he was good at that.’”

5. He didn’t stick to only one style of music:
“There would be Peer-produced Jimmie Rodgers recordings featuring Hawaiian bands, jazz bands, country stringbands, pop orchestras, protocowboy and Texas string contingents, and also those groundbreaking sessions with African-American musicians from Louis Armstrong to the Louisville Jug Band.”

6. He inspired many imitators:
“After the unmistakable success of the first blue yodel, ‘T for Texas,’ brazen imitators immediately started to appear, matching the blue yodeling on their records as closely as possible to the original…Many were utterly inconsequential; many only good enough to be recalled in their context…”

7. He made songs his own:
“Slim Bryant recalls how Jimmie changed precisely one line of ‘Mother, the Queen of My Heart,’[…]Jimmie wrote the line ‘I knew I was wrong from the start’ near the end—the whole function of which is to make the storyteller’s own reaction to the story the emotional punch line of the tale.”

8. He had first-hand experience with tragedy:
Songwriter Steve Forbert “focuses on the traumatic winter of 1923 when Jimmie and Carrie’s baby daughter, June Rebecca, died. Jimmie took off for points West for months, then returned to Meridian and received the formal diagnosis of tuberculosis—which, by then, he had surely understood was coming.”

9. He is in our “musical DNA”:
“And while there is no credible evidence that any actual cattle workers had ever yodeled in the moonlight, after Jimmie Rodgers developed this cowboy theme, legions of screen and recording cowboys were going to be doing it until people across the world thought yodeling cowboys were history, not fantasy.”

10. He inspired women, too:
Tanya Tucker, a “famously, singularly, affectingly earthy country heroine—born, it seems in retrospect, to tackle Jimmie Rodgers songs head-on—took the unmitigated yet, as she proved, still timely sentiment of Jimmie’s ‘Daddy and Home’ to the upper reaches of the country charts in 1988, after having fought to make it a single. Tanya Tucker was born in the late ‘50s but had been raised on Rodgers music.”

It is my absolute favorite time of the year on the OUPBlog. Word of the Year time (or WOTY as we call it in the office). Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year. The 2008 Word of the Year is (drum-roll please) hypermiling.

Do you keep the tires on your car properly inflated to maximize your gas mileage? Have you removed the roof rack from your vehicle to streamline the car and reduce drag? Do you turn your engine off rather than idle at long stoplights? If you said yes to any of these questions you just might be a “hypermiler.”

Some history:
“Hypermiling” was coined in 2004 by Wayne Gerdes, who runs this web site. “Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.

Many of the methods followed by hypermilers are basic common sense—drive the speed limit, avoid hills and stop-and-go traffic, maintain proper tire pressure, don’t let your car idle, get rid of excess cargo—but others practiced by some devotees may seem slightly eccentric:
• driving without shoes (to increase the foot’s sensitivity on the pedals)
• parking so that you don’t have to back up to exit the space
• “ridge-riding” or driving with your tires lined up with the white line at the edge of the road to avoid driving through water-filled ruts in the road when it’s raining

The hypermiling movement has been criticized for its alleged promotion of driving tactics that are considered dangerous or illegal, such as overinflating tires, rolling through stop signs, and following closely behind large vehicles to cut down on wind resistance. The American Automobile Association (AAA) has issued statements condemning hypermiling as unsafe, while hypermilers have countered that AAA’s characterization of hypermiling is a misrepresentation (see links below for more info).

Hypermiling has also gotten some positive attention in 2008, gaining mainstream traction as gas prices soared and the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, especially those from foreign sources, has become more apparent. A new initiative launched by the Association of Automobile Manufacturers and supported by such notables as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger advocates the practice, referring to it as EcoDriving.

President-elect Barack Obama observed during his campaign that Americans could save as much oil as would be produced by proposed off-shore drilling if only they kept their tire pressures at recommended levels and took their cars in for regular tune-ups. Republicans’ subsequent criticisms of Obama’s statement put these measures advocated by hypermilers in the center of the debate between conservation and drilling as solutions to Americans’ foreign oil dependence problem.

A growing number of Americans favor hypermiling as a sensible set of practices for all drivers who are concerned about their wallets, the environment, and fuel independence, not just for those on the fringe who are obsessed with increasing their MPG numbers.

Related Links…

AAA on hypermiling

Wayne Gerdes response to AAA

Links relating to “EcoDriving”:
NBC Chicago
Eco Driving USA

Word of the Year Finalists:

frugalista – person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing own produce, etc.

moofer – a mobile out of office worker – ie. someone who works away from a fixed workplace, via Blackberry/laptop/wi-fi etc. (also verbal noun, moofing)

topless meeting – a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries, cellphones, etc.

toxic debt – mainly sub-prime debts that are now proving so disastrous to banks. They were parceled up and sent around the global financial system like toxic waste, hence the allusion.

Word of the Year Shortlist:

CarrotMob, carrot mob – a flashmob type of gathering, in which people are invited via the Net to all support and reward a local small ethical business such as a shop or café by all patronizing it at the same time. Also as noun, carrotmobbing.

ecohacking (also known as geoengineering) – the use of science in very large-scale projects to change the environment for the better/stop global warming (e.g. by using mirrors in space to deflect sunlight away from Earth).

hockey mom – like a soccer mom, but one who is supportive of her ice-hockey playing kids, as popularized by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

link bait – content on a website that encourages [baits] a user to place links to it from other websites

luchador – a wrestler, an exponent of lucha libre [Mexican Spanish, lit. = ‘free wrestling’, a form of professional wrestling originating in Mexico and popular in Latin America, with spectacular moves, showy costumes, etc.]

rewilding – the process of returning an area to its original wild state/flora/fauna etc.

staycation – vacation taken at or near one’s home, taking day trips, etc.

tweet – a short message sent via the Twitter service, using a cellphone or other mobile device.

wardrobe – has become a verb, as in: Ms. Mendes has a long-standing relationship with the house of Calvin Klein and has been wardrobed by Calvin Klein Collection.

A quick 4 minute sketch while at Starbucks. I like the heaviness and darkness of the line so I left the sketch as is. For a larger image click here.

Meilo So