Stephen Phelan

TO arrive in Iga-Ueno on the first Saturday in April is to feel like a stranger in ninjatown. This small city in the mountains, about two hours by rail from Kyoto, is supposedly the ancestral home of those fearsome feudal super-sneaks and master-killers, whose name and reputation have long since spread across the world through martial arts movies, comic books, and video games. Here in Japan, ninjas are now something of a national myth, a slightly cartoonish composite of old folk tales and modern pop culture. This morning in Iga-Ueno, however, it would be discourteous to dispute their existence.

THE first time that Sudhir Venkatesh witnessed a drive-by shooting, he remained upright while everyone around him dropped to the pavement. “I just stood there,” he says. “Like a tree.” Venkatesh is a tall man – a big target. He would have been even harder to miss back then, almost 20 years ago, when he was a hippyish middle-class sociology student with a long ponytail and a tie-dyed t-shirt, conducting field research in Chicago’s biggest, poorest housing project, the Robert Taylor Homes.

IT is the night of the Led Zeppelin reunion, and the whole rocking world is divided between those with tickets and those without. Nowhere is this separation more awful than at the high-tech turnstiles of London’s O2 Arena, formerly the Millenium Dome.

I AM afraid. Merely admitting this does not make me feel any better about flying, and yet I often say it aloud to the person sitting next to me on a plane during take-off or turbulence, those two fixtures of aviation which always make my face and palms ice over with doom-sweat.

AT A shrine, in a forest, on a mountain in Japan, a flustered young woman tries to describe the mysterious appeal of Haruki Murakami. I have mentioned his name in bars, temples and beauty spots on my way across the country to interview him in Tokyo, and the reactions have been similar. Many young Japanese say that they know Murakami’s work well, especially his pop-romantic blockbuster Norwegian Wood, which they poetically refer to as “A Forest In Norway” even though it was expressly named after the Beatles song. They love his books, but there is something about them which they find difficult to articulate in English. Murakami makes people feel strange, and strange feelings must be the hardest to put into foreign words.

THERE is a portrait of Sir David Frost as a relatively young man hanging in the reception area outside his Kensington office. Frost would have been in his 30s when he sat for the artist John Bratby some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. By then he was already a veteran of television, after a decade of hosting one popular show after another – That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report, The Frost Programme – and his ubiquity probably appealed to Bratby, a so-called “kitchen sink” realist, best known for his pictures of everyday people and common household items (including kitchen sinks). In the painting, Frost seems more object than subject, his familiar face, suit, and cross-legged pose rendered mild, or even dull, by contrast to the bright surrounding colours. Which might say as much about the man and his life as the photographs on display elsewhere in the room, of Frost with Putin, Frost with Mandela, Frost walking and talking between Blair and Clinton on what looks like the White House lawn.

IT has been written that Mogwai make music to tear down the stars, rip holes in the sky, shred audiences like scarecrows in the teeth of a gale. And so on. But the band do not hyperbolise themselves, unless they are being satirical. This afternoon in a Japanese hotel bar, bass player Dominic Aitchison looks out of the window towards mighty Mount Fuji, and promises to make that volcano explode tonight.

LONG before Scotland was Scotland, when the population consisted only of green algae and the Highlands were as dry as Death Valley, a large natural object fell out of space and struck the Earth near where the village of Stoer now stands, in Wester Ross. This incident occured 1.2 billion years ago, but it has only been confirmed in the last few months. “If the same thing happened today,” says planetary geologist Scott Thackrey, “all the trees in Aberdeen would be felled. The trees in Inverness would actually ignite. Most man-made structures would collapse. Everything made of paper would burn. You wouldn’t be safe in Glasgow. But sitting here, we would be vapourised.”

THE short life of New York’s World Trade Center began with one spectacular crime and ended with another. Philippe Petit can only speak for the first. “My story is a fairytale, ” he says at the start of Man On Wire, a new documentary about Petit’s illegal tightrope walk between Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. This film goes on to confirm that the thinking behind the act was infinitely simpler than the staging, but its meaning has never been agreed upon.

ONE thing never questioned in a pub quiz is the pub quiz itself. Where did it come from? Who held the first one, and when? How has it become such a defining characteristic of British pub culture? Why do UK drinkers in particular seem to accept and enjoy challenges to their capacity for factual recall? What is the point?