Have you tried opening your eyes?

Well, there's much lost ground to cover after many months of idling, but I'll never overcome inertia with the perceived need for a full and immediate recovery hanging over my head. So here I go with a quick first step. (ATP, Tokyo, the plane sittting in the river outside my apartment and other fun tales will have to wait.)

I chatted a bit with a couple of people at work today about my trip to Tokyo. One of them is a frequent visitor on business. He was eager to share his observations, most of which were about the women. (To give some context, I should note that he's not Asian.) He's of the view that the women of Tokyo are rather unattractive. As a basis for comparison, he offered up the women of Thailand as an archetype of beauty. And he went on to explain ever-so-scientifically that the women of Thailand are beautiful because the population of Thailand is a blend of many ethnicities. In contrast, there's no "mixing," as he put it, in Japan.

I probably should've left that alone. But for the hell of it, I asked whether he'd ever been to Korea. He answered in the affirmative and declared that the women of Korea are also beautiful. I then pointed out that the population of Korea is rather homogeneous. Seeing the incongruity in his theory, he quickly asserted that the population of Korea isn't homogeneous, what with the Malaysian and ... well, I didn't pay much attention after that. Malaysian influences in Korea?

It's safe to say that his knowledge of anthropology is about as deficient as his sense of aesthetics.