On the bus ride home, my AvantGo feed of Wired News presented me with this astonishing information.

Apparently,

TOKYO — Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.

In this technology-enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts — rather advanced mobile features by global standards — is routine.

Now, Japan’s cell-phone users are turning pages.

Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels — classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.

Once again, I find myself living in the future of the future. Really, it’s not at all what I had planned. I had a hovel in the country all picked out, replete with peeling lath walls and choked with charcoal dust, tracked with crushed pastels and aromatic with turpentine and linseed oil. Oh well; this only adds to my conviction that personal desire is a thing of absolute irrelevance.

Returning to the topic at hand from such – ah – pastoral reflections, I am becoming aware of the odd limitations that the Palm OS and associated apps enforce upon users. In this case, my immediate reaction to seeing the story, of course, was to blog it.

But how? AvantGo provides no direct URLs in the story feeds. I could copy it to the clipboard, paste it into mo:blog, thumb out a few words, and save it to sync when I got home – or even upload remotely as I did yesterday.

But how in the world could I get a screenshot of the eye-popper that prompted the entry? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have some longer-form thoughts on the general topic of this rather absurd mountain-climbing I’m engaged in. As I have remarked, I had literally no idea what I was getting in to. I thought this whole thing was a done deal and I was walking down some well-trod path, one that preferably passed though a bucolic countryside and ended in a garden cottage.