Good afternoon. It is I Gigi the parti poodle here to deliver my weekly blog. This week I have learned a new saying: “I don’t care what you think”. Although it is harder to say than one might realize, I find it to be liberating to not care what human beings think. Or dogs or cats or squirrels or bunnies for that matter. This means I say “I don’t care what you think” to other’s opinions about me. It also means I do not tell small lies or do things I do not wish to do to make others like me. I am fully aware that I am unlikeable and unlovable in the eyes of others. I am after all a 6.4-pound poodle typing a blog. How socially acceptable is that? In addition to this practice, I am trying to think differently about questioning my intuition. I am an intuitive thinking personality type. This is easier said than done because intuitive thinking poodles, from what I have learned recently, will negate their intuition before questioning someone else’s, even if most of the time said intuitive poodle’s intuition is more likely to be right. Thus, I have decided I must trust my intuition and all its glory. “I don’t care what you think” is not something I need to say out loud most of the time. It is something I say to myself when encountering various situations. However, there are times when it might come in handy to say the words aloud and let someone or some bunny know that the discussion is finished. And woof to that.  

MY BOOKS

You can check out my books Chicane and all five installments of the Musicology book series Musicology: Volume One, Baby!, Musicology: Volume Two, Kid!, Musicology: Volume Three, Twist!, Musicology: Volume Four, Sweetie! and Musicology: The Epiquad on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback editions. You can also check out Musicology’s web site at www.musicologyrocks.com and vote for who you think will win Musicology!

STREAM OF THE WEEK: BLACK BOX DIARIES (2024)-PARAMOUNT +

This week’s pick is a powerful documentary that was rightly nominated for an Oscar this past year for Best Feature Documentary. It is written and directed by its subject Shiori Itô who was brutally raped by a real sweetheart of a guy, a journalist named Noriyuki Yamaguchi who is 23 years her senior. I might add here journalists are #6 on the list of jobs psychopaths have or aspire to according to Dr. Kevin Dutton who penned the marvelous book The Wisdom of Psychopaths. The list also ran in Fortune Magazine. If you listen to Yamaguchi being interviewed in the film, you will start to detect a lot of disfluencies and doubled words in his speech which is one of the red flags in determining psychopaths. Yes, Shiori Itô is a journalist as well, but clearly not a psychopath. Also, bear in mind that the percentage of male psychopaths worldwide is 1 in 150. In females it is 1 in 1050. Clearly, testosterone plays a part in psychopathy. And since lying is common amongst psychopaths and plays a part in this film, be aware that according to studies men lie more than women. Here is an example.

Like many documentaries, this movie is not for the faint of heart. The attack happened on April 4, 2015, when Itô went to interview Yamaguchi over dinner. At some point during the interview, she began to feel severely intoxicated. That’s just a polite way of saying Yamaguchi slipped her a date rape drug and it had started to take effect. Surveillance footage at a hotel caught him pulling her out of a cab and dragging her into the establishment. The footage shows she was clearly drugged, falling over and staggering. What followed the rape was a labyrinth of horror.

Shiori Itô filed a police report in July 2016, that was dropped by prosecutors because they told her she didn’t have sufficient DNA evidence. The policeman who was assigned to her case believed her, but he was taken off. Not long after that, the case was dropped. The problem with Noriyuki Yamaguchi was he wielded power. At the time he was the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of TBS, a major broadcaster in Japan. He also had connections to the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Being a wise reporter, Shiori Itô continued pursuing her case and as she did, she chronicled her journey by filming it, even in desperate moments. When the criminal case fell through, she sought a civil case which put her in contention with the government of Japan, its attitudes and its handling of sexual assault cases. Even at the risk of being sued, Itô published a successful memoir called Black Box which chronicled her experience of being raped and dismissed. To publish it she was able to get the policeman who worked on her case to sign off on it as well as the doorman who was present when Noriyuki Yamaguchi dragged her out of the cab and into the hotel.