I do not know exactly what the temperature is in my house at the moment – like most of the buildings here, it has no central heat or air and thus no thermostat. But basic biology and my own factory-installed thermometer tell me it is freaking freezing. This concerns me. It’s only November 19, high noon, and it’s 42 degrees Fahrenheit (or 5.55 C, whatever that means) out there in the sunshine. Is this normal? I have no idea. What I do know is that tomorrow night they’re calling for snow, and the two kerosene-filled space heaters in the house are wholly insufficient to warming anything but a small, enclosed room – and even then only for as long as they’re burning a highly combustible and stinky liquid explosive just feet away from me. The rest of the house is like a meat locker. I spent last night in fetal position under two blankets, curled around my pillow, occasionally waking to find a portion of my hand had strayed out into the open and turned into a fleshy block of hand-shaped ice.

How can this be? I’m living in one of the most technologically advanced societies on earth. People watch television on their cellphones here. Japan’s public transportation system shames the rest of the industrialized world, and just last month they put a probe into orbit around the moon. I strongly suspect Fukui might be the mechanical pencil capital of the world. But they can’t figure out central heating? If you follow the line of latitude that Fukui lies upon all the way around the globe to the east coast of North America, you find yourself at Cape Hatteras. Is it snowing in Cape Hatteras tomorrow night? I seriously doubt it. Do they have central heat and air? You better believe it. They’re not Ice Age cave dwellers in Cape Hatteras.

If I needed any reminding that I’m not living in Tokyo – and trust me, I didn’t – this would be it. Send blankets and frostbite kits.

Well, it was probably the least traditional birthday weekend I’ve ever had. And I mean that in the best sense. A full treatment will follow shortly. For the moment let me simply say that it will include such toothsome plot elements as Third-Reich Immigration officials; pierced, hair-metal-listening German passport thieves; mystery meat that may or may not have been canine in origin; a quartet of nubile Korean college girls; two consecutive pre-dawn awakenings, two international flights, and ten and a half total hours of bus travel. The big day itself – last Thursday, for the benighted among you – was occupied mostly with getting myself out of Seoul, South Korea, and back to my suburban digs in Japan. I treated myself to a carryout cup of sake and some thumpy techno on the iPod during the three-hour bus ride back from Nagoya to Fukui, but by the time I dragged myself through the door it was 11:30 p.m. and by that point I was all but comatose.

On Friday, however, I joined my housemates Joel and Elaine and a Cambodian friend named Srekeal for a surreal bowling experience at one of Japan’s giant, day-glo, all-purpose entertainment arcades followed by a genuine-article, real-deal couple of hours in a karaoke club, which is just about the furthest thing from the Americanized version of karaoke (or as we say there, karyokie) that you can imagine, the one common element between the two being beer, and lots of it. Finally, on Saturday, feeling inexplicably restless, I took a train 45 minutes north to Kanazawa, a city I’d visited once before, on my first weekend in Japan. As with my first trip, within moments of me stepping off the city bus next to Kenrokuen Garden, a perfectly beautiful cloudless blue sky transformed into freezing gray wall of drizzle and occasional downpours. No matter. Paths were followed. Photos were taken. Touristy actions were undertaken. Bad, broken Japanese was spoken. Weather does not deter a real man, or a real birthday boy. (On a related note, they’re calling for rain and snow here Tuesday night. It begins.)

Forthwith, a trio of photos, one from each of the weekend’s three adventures. A full accounting is on the way, rest assured. In the meantime, send pumpkin pie. I don’t think they have turkeys in Japan.

Street vendor in Seoul

Tea house in Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa

This is what a real karaoke club looks like: behind every door, your own private, closet-sized slice of musical paradise.

“We need to talk,” she said.

My nerves leaped like I’d French kissed a wall socket. Talk? Talk about what? What had I done? In my experience, the only people who’ve ever said those words to me have been soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends and my mother. In this case, the woman speaking to me was Kaori Umeda, one of the young admins at the Ninomiya American Club, where I teach English during the week and the local sponsor of my Japanese work visa application. I’d been lounging, as one is wont to do, in the tiny teachers’ lounge yesterday at the Club (which, for the record, is rather more schoolish than clubby), when Kaori had burst in on me, face like a funeral, and made her announcement.

“We do?” I replied, suddenly 12 years old again.

“There’s a problem,” she said. “We made a mistake with your work visa. You have to leave and come back.”

“Leave the Club?”

“Leave Japan.”

“Not really,” I said after a moment.

“Korea. Just for a day. Then come back.” She looked at me. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, then, I will be in Seoul, South Korea, presumably in a hotel near the airport, since I’m returning the next morning – my birthday, as chance and circumstance would have it – to Nagoya, Japan, where I’m hoping with all my heart and every other applicable organ that Japanese Customs will willfully disregard the obvious fact that I was in Japan for exactly 90 days, left the country for less than 24 hours to hang out in a city just feet away from a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship, and am now asking to be let in again on another 90-day tourist visa. In the United States, this would be more than sufficient cause to perform a full-body-cavity search on me, hold me indefinitely, deprive me of sleep and water, suspend Habeas Corpus on me and all of my relatives, place me in painful positions, and subject me to non-stop Eminem at top volume. (It’s not considered torture until they put on the American Idol Finalists CD.)

This is all a big misunderstanding, I’ll say. You’ve got the wrong guy. What happened was, see, they told me at the school in Fukui where I was working without a work visa – waitaminnit, I mean was hoping to work as soon as I got a work visa, yeah, that’s it – they told me months ago that if my 90-day tourist visa expired before my work visa arrived, no worries, because as long as my work visa was being processed, I could remain in the country. Then just this week they learned that – whoops! – that would actually make me an illegal foreign national in Japan, which of course I deeply, deeply do not want to be, since illegal aliens here have slightly less legal protection than cockroaches. But, see, here’s the thing, my employers – that is, my guaranteed near-future employers – really want me to teach English to cute Japanese kids (have I mentioned how cute the kids are in your country?), and so only a day after I’d permanently relocated from Japan to an airport hotel in Seoul, they called me up and asked me to come back to Fukui so that they can definitely, positively offer me this job as a reputable, tax-paying, pillar-of-the-community-style English teacher.

So can I come back in? Okay, well while you think about it, can you turn off the Eminem? Uh huh. I see.

Is waterboarding an option?

It’s been raining here for three straight days, but a break on Saturday lasted just long enough for me to get out to Eiheiji Temple in the mountains east of here and spend the afternoon. Seven hundred and fifty years old and the size of a small city, Eiheiji is still home to an community of Zen Buddhist monks. The leaves were in full autumn pageantry, and I took so many photos that my camera battery died of exhaustion. Afterward, I hiked up a lonely road through the woods about two kilometers from the temple and found a massive dam, choked with shrubbery and what I suspect were “Keep Off” signs. I climbed it on principle, of course. (Note to self: next time, pack reserve battery.) See all the photos here.

So have you heard about the new Nigerian e-mail phishing scam? (And how about those resourceful Nigerians? They could make a fortune in the U.S. with an MBA and a small business loan if they ever decided to go legit.) The latest variation dispenses with the ol’ desperate-widow-of-a-fabulously-wealthy-deposed-Nigerian-dictator-ploy and goes straight for the jugular: your e-mail address book. Take a look at the following letter – which hijacked rubes send to all their soon-to-be-former friends – and tell me I couldn’t make a bundle as an editorial consultant to these guys.

Subject: EMERGENCY!!!

HELLO
HOW ARE YOU DOING? I WANT YOU TO KEEP THIS CONFIDENTIAL BETWEEN BOTH OF US, I KNOW THAT I CAN PUT MY TRUST IN YOU ON THIS. PLEASE DO NOT LET ME DOWN. RIGHT NOW I AM IN AFRICA, NIGERIA. I CAME HERE ON A TRIP TO SEE A FRIEND AND WHEN I GOT HERE I LOST MY WALLET CONTAINING THE ADRESS OF MY FRIEND AND HIS CONTACT PHONE NUMBER, ALONG WITH MY ATM CARD AND OTHER VALUABLES.
SO RIGHT NOW I DO NOT EVEN HAVE ANY MONEY ON ME . I AM STAYING IN A HOTEL NOW , AND THE MANAGER IS ALREADY RANTING OVER HIS MONEY AND AS TIME GOES BY THE BILLS ARE INCREASING.
I WOULD WANT YOU TO LOAN ME $2000. I PROMISE TO PAY YOU BACK AS SOON AS I GET BACK… I WOULD WANT YOU TO HELP SEND THE MONEY VIA WESTERN UNION . GET BACK AT ME ASAP.
HOPE TO READ FROM YOU…
YOUR NAME HERE

As soon as the Nigerians learn how to turn Caps Lock off, we’re all in trouble.

Anyone who knows me reasonably well – and by reasonably well I mean in an eyeball-to-eyeball, meatspace-not-MySpace kind of way, naturally – know that I have a bilateral, Oreo-cookie kind of personality. Not the sort where I’m calm as a Hindu cow one moment and raving hysterically with my eyes rolled back in my head the next. Fortunately for all of us. I mean more in the avocational sense. I mean, I’m a writer by profession, but– for some reason I feel like I need to whisper it – I really, really like science. There, it’s out. Ah, sweet catharsis. To most people, this is something of a paradox, albeit an extremely anticlimactic one. I’ll admit that it often makes me feel a rather like a vinaigrette salad dressing: all oil and water, constantly in need of a good shaking. There are not many benefits to this strange condition, as you might imagine. One of the very few – though I probably won’t be written into Heroes anytime soon – is that I’ve got double the normal capacity for finding extraordinarily boring stuff interesting. A few cases in point:

1. The Crittercam turned 20 last week.

2. Mathematically speaking, chances are better than even that we are all virtual computer simulations being run for kicks by our superintelligent distant ancestors. Personally, I’m okay with it.

3. Next weekend, the Leonid Meteor Shower will either rain interstellar destruction down on us from above (odds: marginal to low) or pass completely unnoticed by 99.99 percent of the earth’s population (odds: bank on it). I will be among the other 0.001 percent freezing their asses off somewhere outdoors in the middle of the night, battling hypothermia and grass stains.

4. The earth’s climate is warming, and we’re the reason. (Have you heard about this?)

5. Carl Sagan is one of my all-time biggest heroes.

6. Fuck being a fireman. I want to be a molecular nanotechnologist when I grow up.

7. Failing that, I want to be a Bishop in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Blessed be His noodly appendage.)

8. If I had a TiVo, the Science Channel would be all over it. So would Battlestar Galactica.

9. When I was a kid, I played Dungeons & Dragons. A lot. (Okay, not so much evidence of a paradoxically bifurcated personality as of being a friendless loser as a child. But still.)

10. What, you want exactly ten cases in point? Why? Because our mathematical system is predicated on the arbitrary fact that evolution has supplied us with 10 fingers instead of a different number? Would you be expecting 12 bullet points here if things had turned out differently and we had six fingers per hand and our maths were all based on a duodecimal system? Probably. There’s no satisfying you people, is there? (One cool upside of that, of course, is that all the volume knobs would go up to 11.)