Blaine's latest...

are several cool feature stories. (I'm way behind in my Blaine publicity work.)

1. On the front page of today's paper (Fri 11/21), Blaine has a wonderfully written "Innovators" piece called "Kafka of the Cubicle,". It's a delightful story about a computer guy who has invented a best-selling comic-book character called "Otaryman." The best thing about the piece is the lede:

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 21, 2008; Page A01

TOKYO -- The American poet Theodore Roethke called it "the inexorable sadness of pencils." It's the desolation of time lost and dreams forsaken while sitting in an office.

Blaine says he read that poem in college! I'm impressed. Lucinda thinks "inexorable sadness of pencils" is very funny and, at dinner, offered "the inexorable sadness of" lots of other stuff, while Arno joked a dozen times about the "inexorable sadness of underpants."

2. Blaine wrote a neat story about incinerators in central Tokyo that burn trash at an extraordinarily high temperature (8500 degrees Centigrade) and use the heat to create electricity (via steam-driven turbines) for 20,000 households, to make sand for bricks and roads, and to heat water for a swimming pool at the "garbage factory," as it calls itself. And this incinerator is odor-free. Could that ever be built in NYC? (Here's the video.)

3. And he wrote a front-page story about this country's amazing "konbini" - convenience stores - that are ever more profitable even as grocery stores and dept stores have been losing money for decades.

He went to "Happy Lawson, a kid-friendly store that overlooks Yokohama Harbor, you can buy fresh sushi and carbon offsets, pay income tax and change diapers, book airplane tickets and sip vodka coolers. There's hot soup, cold beer, fresh bread, clean toilets, french fries, earwax remover, spotless floors, and a broadband-empowered machine that will order home appliances, book concert tickets and sign you up for driver's ed." And here's the video.