Never Sleeps Dept.

I spent Saturday with my folks in Jersey, celebrating the birthday of a family friend, and then from there swung quickly through Manhattan to test out a theory I had about whether or not Google Street View was any good at helping me find curbside parking in a given neighborhood. The short answer: Yes, but bring change anyway, just in case. (Free parking on weekends is not totally dead in the city; it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to not count on at all.)

I swung through Book-Off — saw that one coming, didn’t you? — and nabbed a few goodies, among them the original novel of The Year of Living Dangerously.

Also snagged the first few untranslated Guin Saga books:

I’m planning on filing the originals next to the U.S. editions and using them as self-teaching tools, along with my copies of the Oldboy manga and a few other items that aren’t exactly classics (Sakura Taisen, cough cough) but are fine for the sake of readability and comprehension-building.

Another thing I stumbled across was — okay, nostalgia time — the soundtrack to the anime version of Peacock King. It's all hard-driving guitars, smoldering ballads and Emulator / CMI synth sounds, all guilty pleasures of mine. (They even made a live-action version of the story in Hong Kong, which I should cover one day if I can ever find a decent DVD of it.)

On the way back to the car ....

As the Beatles once said, "A fine time was had by all."