Yesterday was Electricity Day (電気記念日) in Japan, commemorating the switch-on of the nation's first electric lights on this day in 1878 (50 arc lights at an engineering university which later became the University of Tokyo's School of Engineering).

I celebrated by buying a new electronic dictionary. I debated throwing down an extra 10,000 yen or so to get one that also had an encyclopedia, a medical dictionary, etc., but then I realised that I... didn't really want them anyway. All I really needed was a decent set of dictionaries that work within Japanese, and the SL-LT3W has Koujien (my J->J dictionary of choice), the Sanseido Old Japanese dictionary, and the Iwanami dictionaries of proverbs and four-letter compounds -- both of which I've been feeling the need for anyway. So, in a way, I saved myself over 5,000 yen with this purchase! ... Right?

The SL-LT3W seems OK so far. Key response is noticeably slower than my old dictionary, and it's also bigger and more awkward to use while reading -- I don't see myself ever getting to the point where I can use it one-handed, unlike the old one. But, to be fair, the new one does have a lot more data to store and search through than the old one did.

So much more, in fact, that I find myself getting distracted from my reading by the chains of association I can now follow electronically, the endless maze of ever more obscure lexical and orthographic oddities. It's bad for my immediate reading goals, but... it's so gooood.