JAPAN EARTHQUAKE: THIS DOESN'T COME FREE, YOU KNOW

Our Man can't discern a theme to today, so he'll leave it to the end and come back and amend this sentence so it will make some kind of karmic sense. Unless he can't be arsed, in which case if this sentence is still the same as this, you'll know he had one too many again. Whatever, blah blah blah (sub-editors fix later OKKK????), Duck! Bullets...

• So it continues. More aftershocks, fewer than in previous days, but stronger. In our best Walter Chronkite voice: This is not good. But is it getting worse? Our Man of course has no idea. To him he thinks of it as mother nature having contractions. If they get closer together that means she's gonna pop another big one out, right? Our Man quizzed Our Woman on this very point to which she replied: "How should I know? Do I look like an earthquake expert?" "Well, you are Japanese." She said: "All I know is aftershocks are bloody stupid."
• You don't need Google when you've got Our Woman.
• There is stuff in shops, just not every shop. It's instructive to see what is left, the truly undesirable crap: Fizzy drinks, iced coffee, very expensive beer, very cheap wine. Which is nice, because those are exactly the staples that made Our Man what he is today.
• The nuclear thing. If Our Man said he wasn't scared, he'd be lying. He is scared. But he reads posts like this and he is reassured. In a scared kind of way. We here at Our Man Towers are, like most of the nation, glued to the media. Which is not a good thing in the 24-hr news cycle. WHITE SMOKE CLOUD AT REACTOR 3!! said the NHK-Twitter-Mother-in-Law-industrial-media-gossip complex within seconds of the white cloud, er, clouding at the reactor and we were suitably, instantly informed. Hurrah! What does that mean, a white cloud at the reactor? Sounds bad, but we didn't know. My mother-in-law did though. She unilaterally instituted an exclusion zone from the entrance hall onwards to include the rest of the world, yanked the clothes off the pegs hanging in no-man's land and slammed the windows shut. All sensible if you live within 20km of the Fukushima plant, not 250km as we do.
• "You watch too much TV," Our Littlest One (5) told grandma.
• Ah, yes, whether to abandon Abiko and run to the hills to sit this one out. There are many moments when Our Man thinks this is sound advice, if not for him, then for his family. But he's still here. This is complicated and deserves a post all its own but the brief points are these: He has only half a tank of petrol in the Nissan Giant Panda; where exactly is safe in Japan, a land of earthquakes, nuclear reactors and strong winds?; if he hit the ejector seat button and went back to the UK, what exactly would he do? What message would he be sending to his kids, his neighbours, his customers, his friends who didn't or couldn't abandon Abiko? Maybe Our Man is meant to be here now.
• Oh, yeah, the Huffington Post popped round virtually to see if Our Man would like to write for them (for free obviously). And of course Our Man said yeah, cool, but then it turned out it they just wanted him to join their google group and give them story tips so they could post more disaster porn to scare the bejeeezus out of Americans. If they ever were to offer Our Man the chance to write a real blog post for them, he still would love to. He's sure they would donate the fee they should pay him to the Japanese Red Cross. Which got Our Man thinking: It's time he started a charity thing so you all could marvel at his magnaminousness and he could keep tabs on who his REAL friends are, CAPICE?

Well, here it is, and over there on the left. If you can donate even a little, it would make an enormous difference to Our Man, and might even save a few lives, maybe even those close to a former Daily Yomiuri copy editor whose wife is frantic with worry over not being able to contact her parents in Sendai. These are real people, in real need right now, and we need all the help we can get. Donate even a little. It helps. Please.