Category Archives: featured entry

Wednesday Night...

Nothing special. Just a random Wednesday night in the hood... My sundappled kitchen, in all its messy glory. The hood... I have no idea who painted this building, but......

Painting with Light

Thank you all for your kind wishes in the last post. I really appreciate it! ...So I took the LSAT on Sunday. In short, I don't think I did as well as I did on the practice exams, but all is not lost. I was scoring quite high on the practice exams so even if the score I get on the actual test is a few points lower than what I'm used to, it should...

Sick Panda

So after making it through almost an entire year without getting sick, of course now - NOW - one week before the LSAT...! - I have to get struck down by a terrible cold and fever the likes of which I haven't experienced in quite some time. I was passed out, fevered and unable to even feed myself - let alone study - for the past few days. Nice. This is a picture of me...

Tokyo Blue Skies II (Sky Worship IV)

Damn, that title could have used some work, huh? *laughs* At first I was going to call it something like "tokyo upshots" but decided against it because that might bring in exactly the wrong kind of intarnets traffic... (see, 'upshots' can apparently also be used to describe (especially in Japan) the phenomenon of taking a picture up a woman's skirt... which, needless to say, is not what today's post is about.) (sorry to disappoint...) Lacking...

Akihabara Wideangle

First shots from the wide angle Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. Sorry for the lack of interesting subject matter, this was kind of an off-the-cuff series of snaps as I walked around Akihabara. Pedestrians headed home after a long days work... The weather has been getting warm and damp recently, reminding me that the incredibly humid and uncomfortable rainy season is just around the corner. Which, when added to the daily grind of a life...

More Zoo Pictures

I should probably start a category just for closeup pictures of animals making funny faces, because there are few things as amusing to me as animals staring into cameras. I don't know why. Is that weird? There is not much to this post besides just more pictures from the zoo (hence the title - I am nothing if not creative). I have been too busy lately with work and study to have much of any...

Mistar Parrot

I spent all weekend studying for the LSAT, translating documents for work, mirroring my blog and production server onto my local machine (with varying degrees of success) and taking pictures of animals. Since only the last one is of any visual interest (unless you have an unhealthy obsession with the OS X terminal window), here are a few pictures of parrots for your enjoyment. Something that was kind of odd about these parrots was that...

My life at present

This is my life everyday. Sigh. I work 8 to 10 hours, then I come home, try to cook some dinner, and then sit down to face this: Trying to study for two major standardised tests while working full time sucks. I wish I was a college student again so I could just concentrate on studying. But alas, this is the way things are, so nothing to do but just suck it up and try...

Vietnamese Chicken Panda

So I wasn't going to post any more food pictures, but this was just too delicious to pass up. Last Sunday I woke up with the strange urge to buy the (Product)RED version of the iPod shuffle for some reason. (I wake up with the strangest urges at time...) Anyway, the only place they are sold in Japan is at the Apple store in Ginza (or over the internets, but I demand instant gratification and...

What a panda eats

Did you ever wonder what pandas eat in a day? Okay, probably not. But I haven't updated in about 10 days, and the only pictures I've taken recently are of food, so I guess that's today's post topic. Breakfast Kiwi and Blue Cheese Bruschetta on Vanilla Sponge I wish I could take credit for this recipe, but this incredibly tasty and delicious meal comes courteously of Bron Marshall and her gorgeously photographed blog. This was...

Nighttime Sakura

Nighttime sakura on a rainy, drenched sunday evening in Tokyo. Can you believe this is the only shot of the cherry blossoms I got all weekend? The irony of it is, last weekend was the last opportunity to see the cherry blossoms in prime bloom here in Tokyo (northern parts of Japan bloom later). Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I thought about going to see them then, but decided in the end to...

Top of the Morning

It seems like such a shame to spend 30 minutes dressing up nice and getting ready for work in the morning just to head out the door and have it all ruined by the combination of wind, rain and heat which conspires to turn one into a wet, tussled, sweaty mess in a matter of moments. Even if one does miraculously manage to avoid all three of the above and make it to work unscathed,...

Mashiko

A bit out of chronological order, but a few weeks ago a friend and I went up to Mashiko in Tochigi prefecture on a day trip package offered through JR. Tochigi itself is famous for several things, not least of which Nikko, an important tourist attraction and a generally interesting and beautiful place to visit (especially in the autumn, save the almost unimaginable throngs of tourists - a friend told me he was stuck in...

Snow Panda

Haha, in all the years I've kept this blog, I don't think I've posted as many photos of myself as I have in this entry (and the previous one). Is the panda blog turning into a venue for indulging my inner narcissisist panda? Oh my goodness, look, I can never spell that word. Narcissist. Ha. That's it. Thank goodness for spell check. Clearly the thing to do when surrounded by snow is to make a...

Vainpanda

So the lovely Miss YJ sent me this equally lovely cashmere scarf out of the blue last month and I promised I would send her a picture of myself vamping deliciously for the camera with it. And now, since I haven't finished processing the pictures from last few weeks' worth of adventures, I am going to post it and pretend it counts as a blog update. Oh deliciously vain sun-dappled panda. What a silly way...

Castles and Sunsets

I happened to have my camera with me as I was walking home yesterday, so I decided to snap a few pictures of that perfect time in day when the sky rapidly changes from the brightness of afternoon to the duskiness of evening in the span of like a half-hour. There's only photographs in this entry (and they're all HDR images, in case you're wondering why some might seem a little "surreal"), but I just...

Unnecessary Automation

Sorry, there are not many interesting pictures in this entry, namely because people tend to freak out when you start taking snapping photographs in public bathrooms (you'll see what I mean if you read this entry) But don't fear! If you want pictures, check the entry right above this one, which I posted like 5 seconds after this despite the dates being different. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Well, not really a good morning....

Blue Skies over Tokyo (Sky Worship III)

Blue skies over Tokyo Yesterday was a brilliant blue day in Tokyo so I went for a walk with a friend to Harajuku to attend to some Hatsumode-ing, about 2 weeks too late. After we were done praying for happiness, wealth, or in my case, a real live baby panda, a box of new Legos and admittance into Columbia Law school (roughly in that order), we decided to go for a walk around town to...

Happy New Year 2008

Happy New Year 2008 everyone! It's the year of the Mouse, for whatever that's worth, so umm, I hope you all have a great mouse-themed year and don't get too sloshed with the bubbly tonight ;) I'm in a good mood at the moment - it's the goyo osame end of the work year period so I'm off until next week. I'm trying to use the time to study, redesign the website and just generally...

Farmlife

I actually have been slacking a little bit when it comes to posting, not because I have a dearth of things to write about (quite the opposite, actually) but because a) I had a big test to study for earlier this month and b) after I finished that I became incredibly lazy and sloth-like because 1) it is the holidays and 2) it is cold as heck at the moment and this being Japan, my...

Fingerprinting

Note: I'm sorry, but there are no pictures in this post. It is also very very long, though broken down into sections for easier reading. Unlike most of the fare on the pandablog, this deals with a subject that is rather important and of great personal concern to me. If you choose to read, thank you for your time. If not, do not fear, we will soon return to lighter fare. Thank you for...

Nekobukuro Kitty Kats

There have actually been some very disturbing things happening here in Japan land (not to me personally, but at the political/civil liberties level) that have put me in a severely depressed mood recently and are making me seriously - like, seriously - think about leaving next year, or possibly sooner. Shit, to put it nicely, is about to get a lot more oppressive is you're unfortunate enough to have the wrong skin colour and you...

Tatami Nap Panda

Mmmmm.... I could nap in this spot of sun forever. I'm going to Nekobukuro later on today for the hell of it, so I figured I might as well get my practice in cat-napping before I depart. What a beautiful Autumn day! And here's what's currently playing, if you want to recreate this incredibly lazy and relaxing Sunday in your own home: Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945 (03'14" :: 160kbp vbr .mp3)...

To all the Rooms Ive loved before

So the other day I was flipping through one of my old boxes of letters and and pictures from years past (which reminds me that there are still some of you who owe me letters from the Great Michaelpanda Spring Letter Exchange 2007 *wink*) and I ran across some pictures of an old apartment I used to live in. This is my current apartment... read on for old ones This got me to thinking -...

Birthday Scarf Panda

There's still a part three to the Great Tohoku Road Trip 2007 (parts I and II can be found here and here, respectively). But it's taking me a while to get to it since I've been kinda down recently, and busy at work to boot. It was my birthday last week, the big 28, which means I've spent nearly a fifth of my life here in Japan. Kind of scary when you think about it...

The Great Tohoku Road Trip - Part II

After our unsettling experience putzing around the smelly Gates of Hell, we cracked open the guide book and tried to figure out where to go next. "Hey panda, I've got an idea." piped up KC as we headed away from the noxious odors of the sulfur fields. "How about visiting these temples in Yamagata?" "Sounds good!" I mumbled absent mindedly, trying not to drive the Purple Elderberry of Doom off the side of a cliff...

The Great Tohoku Road Trip - Interlude

Yes, yes I know, you all want to know (omg hi2u mistar presumptious panda!) what happened next after we left the stinky sulfurous gates of hell. I'm working on part II but at the moment have writers block and a busy week at work that has left me too exhausted to write anything. But here's some foreshadowing for you: it involves mummies. In the interim, a picture from us tearing up the road, purple eldar-berry...

That's why I jump...

We'll get back to the Great Tohoku Road Trip 2007 in just a second, but first a brief interlude of some jumping pictures from Bart-in-Japan's final hurrah in, errr, Japan. Click to embiggen. Hey, what about trying it front-lit? Click to embiggen....

The Great Tohoku Road Trip - Part I

If there is one thing that KC and I have learned from our past adventures, it's that neither of us are much of "planners" when it comes to travel. Our general philosophy is to tack down the intended time of departure and a meeting spot, then show up and hope that someone remembered to bring a car (and if it has sufficient fuel for the journey, then so much the better). Since this approach has...

How Expedia.com made me hate Yoghurt

So as I had posted about a month and a half ago, I was supposed - supposed being the operative phrase here - to be leaving for Mongolia with my erstwhile travel companion this Friday. In a clear example of what my writing professors used to refer to as "foreshadowing" (or perhaps just "spoiling the ending"), let me just state here and now that we are no longer going to Mongolia. The closest I'm going...

Are you getting fatter...?

So last Friday I found myself stuck in a meeting all day from 8 to 5. Now this would be bad enough, but combine it with the fact that it is the rainy season - and hence hot, sticky and miserable - and that a typhoon happened to make landfall that day, and you pretty much get a very unhappy panda. I think I have alluded to my dislike for my current job before on...

Public Drunkenness at 50mm f1.8

Whatever I thought it would be like, I'm pretty sure I didn't think it would turn out like it did - my mind going over the laundry list of things I had to do to get ready for work tomorrow, my heart heavy with the thought of having to walk to work in a wool suit in the hot sweaty mugginess of the Japanese rainy season, my eyes just moments prior flicking over train schedules to find the fastest route home after getting off at Tokyo so as to avoid time consuming transfers and giving myself a chance to catch a few precious hours of sleep before having to get up the next day. Here it was, my little moment which I had dreamed of long ago, and rather than feeling euphoric, or overjoyed with hope or optimism as I had expected, it instead felt oh so very... real...! But not real in that way that excitement tinges your tongue with feathery touches of alkali, or real in the way that hope swells your heart such that you think it will burst from your chest, but rather real as in the damp, sweaty, somewhat downtrodden leaden-ness of the everyday grind. Maybe not as real as waking up one day to find yourself a lonely bald fat low-level manager of a box plant and suddenly realising your youth is gone, but definitely real in the way that you realise you are now, at this very second and this very age of 27, engaged in a day to day struggle not to end up that way. It wasn't a sad feeling, the lack of euphoria, but just surprising that achieving one's dream - no matter how small - would feel so completely run of the mill. After all, what I was doing at that moment wasn't particularly unusual, and now that I thought of it, I had done this very same thing - eat an eki bento on a bullet train late at night - quite often in the past few years. I began to wonder: was this all there was to life? (silly I know, but I thought that). Were we lied to when told that achieving our goals was to rewarded with feelings of accomplishment, when in fact all it felt like was more of the same? Or perhaps, more disturbingly, had I set my dreams and sights too low?

Mos Burger Update

So I promised an update this week and here, so as technically not to break my promise, is a poast that I guess qualifies as an update. I'm currently sitting in my friend's apartment up in Ishikawa prefecture, a little peninusula sticking up into the Sea of Japan in the middle part of Honshu. She's off at work trying to earn a living and I'm currently eating up all the food in her refrigerator, including...

Still alive... and at the beach

Yeah, I know it's been 15 days without an update. I am still alive. I just had an intensely fun but seriously sleep deprived weekend (3 hours in 3 days or so). I need to sleep now. More pictures and stuffs later on this week ("yeah right, we've heard that before!!"). But for now, enjoy panda surveying all the territory over which he rules supreme. Update soon, I promise folks....

Morning Tea

A bit too busy to write a full length post today, but one will be forthcoming soon. In the interim, a picture of some creepy half-naked Kewpie Mayo Babies that suddenly appeared on my breakfast table the other day. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't post a random picture of my less-than-healthy breakfast of champions earlier this week. Speaking of which, it's like 7:40 am on Saturday morning and I have...

Mongolia Panda

So one of my lovely Kiwi readers (have I told yow how sexy I think the New Zealand accent is?) from the Land of the Long White Cloud left the following comment on my previous blog poast: this isn't really related, but can you post some more pics of your panda collection? the ones in the first photo of the post are soo cute :) Well, I've always been one to please the people, so...

Lindsay, the Telemarket-stalker

What is this book, you might be asking yourself? Well, let's look at the cover: The Complete Fake History of a Bunch of People Who Don't Actually Exist I'd like to think of it as the first entry in a series of books entitled "Hey, so I heard you've got a stalker - the Michaelpanda Stalker Prevention Series". What am I going on about? Allow me to explain. You see, while it may be hard...

More Monorail Love

New post coming soon, as in tomorrow, hopefully. But for now, here's another picture of a monorail to tide you over. I really should make a category called "monorail worship" over on the side ;)

Picture Poast

Thus dear readers, I am afraid I shall have to tempt you with the tease shot of the mystery book above: The Complete Fake History of a Bunch of People Who Don't Actually Exist, and then segue into the rest of this post, which I am afraid will consist solely of pictures that have nothing to do with the one directly above or below. But as soon as I get back from this meeting - provided I survive - I promise I will tell you all about my telemarketer stalker, touch on my real-estate stalker (sigh) and expound in great detail about my almost pathological inability to say no to people to their faces that lands me in these convoluted situations in the first place.

Panda and the Eau de Gooch

...this person - and I've had a lot of time to think about this and what metaphors to use here - is surrounded by an odoriferous vapour cloud of doom so horrible, so vomit gag inducing, it's like the stank of a sweaty salt ham stuck inside a pile of old wet moldy hard cover books....! I mean... it gets you.... gets you right in the back of the throat - it's like... as if... I dunno - like.... a thousand stanky gooches simultaneously rubbed themselves all up and down your tonsils...!

Dining Table, what what!

Table cloths, placemats and varnish - these things are artificial filters that barricade the connection between us and the immediacy of the moment. Naught but the trappings of pretension, they defy the purpose of buying furniture in the first place - to use it and to let it serve its purpose. I don't want to stop to think to put down a coaster, or spend hours trying to lay down the perfect streak-free coat of varnish and stain - I just want to kick off my shoes, set down a plain white ceramic bowl filled with a simple food on the table, open my computer, or tear off a sheet of paper and just be. When the future is uncertain - when my future is uncertain - it is comforting to have this reminder of the my connection to the solace of an immediacy of moments spent in comfortable surroundings, in my little house right here in my little corner of my little city in this little chunk of this little island floating all along and bobbling in the wide vast swath green blue oceans of the uncertain scary world...

Night Photos and Naughty E-mails

Which brings us back to the present, and this gigantic very explicit pornographic image plastered on my screen, right smack dab in the middle of a crowded Japanese office...!

"EERGLPPPFFFHHH!!!!!" I squeak out an incomprehensible sound as my mind begins to register what the frick is happening. "OH MY CHRIST!!!"

"OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD!!!" I stammer-yell to myself as I realise I'm on a Mac and that shortcut doesn't work. Instinctively I move to hit "window" plus "l" which on a PC will blank your screen and bring you back to the security log on. Guess what it does on a Mac in Entourage. It "refreshes the message list", which means it has just refreshed this gigantic set of pornographic boobies displayed in my e-mail screen.

Applepanda - The Switch

Okay lots to talk about so let's get right into it. Last Wednesday I was at work tip-typing away hard core trying to plow through all the stuff I had to finish before the end of the day when my computer - loyal companion for the past 3.5 years - suddenly fritzed once, heave a terrible, terrible sad sigh that is still ingrained in my mind, then turned black and straight up died. Oh and...

Boots and Letter Campaign

Hey happy April Fools day! Actually I completely forgot it was April fools day until my Japanese friend reminded me the other day. Being in Japan for an extended period of time makes everything seem like a dream - you tend to forget about things like holidays, anniversaries, even your own birthday - anything that marks and measures the progress of time fades away into the background until the days and weeks and months blur...

Hakone

So the weather here in Kanto has been slowly sputtering and lurching towards balmier conditions week by week. The fact that it has been an unusually warm winter - it didn't snow even once! - means that we can enjoy spring traveling a little earlier than usual. With that in mind, the lovely Kazumi - making her first appearance here on the pandablog - and I headed over to nearby Hakone for a day long...

Panda vs. The Bathtub

Okay so here's the deal. I am not a very smart person. This is a humbling admission to make, but my track record: driving on the wrong side of the road, going into creepy buildings with strangers, blindly wandering into dark cavernous pits without pause, etc. sadly proves it to be true. And really, it's not such a bad thing. Yes, on the one hand, I'm openly admitting I'm dumb. But on the other hand,...

Inappropriate...!

I wince at the t-word. People, I am not a "manly man". I have a hard time talking about things like this with other men. If you've ever watched the TV show Scrubs, then you'll know what I mean when I say I'm like Elliot Reed when it comes to sex: shirt on, lights off and my idea of talking dirty is substituting "bajingo" for what would normally be an awkward throat clearing and a vague gesturing of eyes towards the ground (well, I exaggerate, but with strangers I'm a prude) So you can imagine how incredibly uncomfortable I was at this particular moment, with this young, obviously undersexed young Japanese man trying painfully hard to engage in what I can only imagine he thought was "male bonding" brazenly discussing his preference for gigantic boobies. I mean, just because Sir Mix-a-lot can openly declare his love for big butts to the entire world in a rap song does not mean that you have a free reign to describe in graphic detail your love for gigantic mammaries at the dinner table, young man. Do you know why? Because he is Sir Mix-a-lot. And he is awesome. And you are not. I mean, he has a music album entitled "The Return of the Bump-a-saurus". Do you? No. And this is the first time we've really spoken to each other for any extended period of time.

Setsubun - the face smashing festival

Are you imagining that phrase? Now while keeping that image in your head, slowly replace those words until it becomes "like hurling heavy beanbags at immobile foreigners trapped in a crowd about 25 feet away from you from an elevated wooden platform." And then add "oh and you're a gigantic muscular sumo wrestler." It was, as they say, all fun and games until someone got hurt, and that someone would have been the random old lady who took one to the dome with a rather sharp and alarming plastick-y "srrrMMMMGAAAACCCKKK!" as the beanbag caught her with a glancing blow to the temple. She stumbled back for a second, dazed and shell shocked, then bumped up against the chest of a larger guy behind her trapped by the surging crowd and could retreat no further. I watched as she valiantly tried to struggle to her feet only to catch another round straight in the forehead, chin snapped straight back from the force of the impact as she slowly sank into the murky darkness of the trampled ground below the crowd line, one hand upstretched piteously, palm splayed, grasping uselessly at the heavens, mouth echoing out its last plaintive gasp: "Damn you ..... beeeeaaaannnnnsss........."

A Panda in London (France Pt. II)

As you may recall from my last entry, the French have somewhat of a laissez-faire attitude towards things like immigration or knowing who's in their country at any given time. In their opinion, procedures such as "passport control" or "customs" are really nothing more than minor irritants impinging upon their cigar-smoking, cheese-consuming time, not to be taken seriously, or perhaps even done away with all together if the fancy strikes. The British, on the other hand, regard the question of knowing who's entering their country as a matter of utmost import and accordingly, the immigrations queue for the train heading to London from France wound halfway down the terminal as at the head, friendly, but quite severe looking English inspectors dutifully examined, stamped and returned passports and papers all the while chatting to themselves in that delightfully undulating British accent that made the gate area sound very much like the opening scene from any Guy Ritchie film

France Adventure Pt. I

Okay. So I should probably just change the name of this blog to "Watch Panda take pictures of shit at night", because once again this poast is sporting a bunch of night pictures - and it won't be the last one, je promise' (ooh, look at my two words of French!) So yeah, speaking of French, I got back from my Great France Adventure 2007 last Monday. Now rather than jamming everything into one massive...

Narita-san Temple

Wow, so the first post of 2007, huh? I suppose it's a bit cheap that it's gonna be primarily a photo entry, but as previously mentioned I'm heading off to Paris this Thursday - Thursday people - and I've not done any packing yet. In fact, I should probably try and figure out where all my underwear seem to have disappeared off to over the past two weeks. I'll need them for my trip and...

Emperors Birthday

I look at her.

Panda: "Umm, do you need to check my camera or the camera case?"
Officer: (looking back at me) "Oh, your camera? No, it’s okay, you can take photos inside!"
Panda: "...."
Officer: "Just walk that way for the body check and then you can get in."

Shrugging, I take my messenger bag and sling it around my shoulder, safe (and entirely perturbed) at the though that had I wanted to sneak a couple of tools of assassination into the palace, I would pretty much have just completed my mission successfully.

Christmas Eve, 2006

Ahhh, is it really Christmas Eve? I'll tell you what, Christmas in Tokyo just isn't the quite same as I remember it back in Wisconsin... the glass skyscrapers, endless stretches of twinkling concrete draped urban jungle... the amazing lack of any type of snow... Then again, I could sit and drink in the beautiful purples of this sunset all night long. You don't get them quite like that back in the cow pastures! Below you...

No Chicken, No Life

Sign spotted outside a downtown Izakaya (Japanese-style bar). Hard to argue with this sentiment I suppose! Speaking of chickens everlasting - (actually, this has nothing to do with eterna chickans, that was a horrible transition) - I am planning on taking my new pretty baby out and about this weekend to take some pictures. Originally, I had planned to head over to Narita-san temple in Narita (town next to the international airport) to get some...

The Roundup

So as promised, here I am with a Roundup post to try and collect all the little tidbits of randomness that happened over the last three weeks I wasn't posting. Thus, without further ado... Banana Republic Whore There's like $50 USD worth of gift reward cards here... I've said it before, but I am a total Banana Republic Whore. In the course of about 2 years, I went from never ever setting foot in a...

Early Morning Photography

Off to Tokyo for some random adventures today. But first, some equally random early morning photos. Cufflinks and collar stays... God damn I love tiny furniture... This picture looked better uncropped. (Click here for uncropped version at different angle) Sigh... I need to get a Tilt-Shift Lens......

I'm not dead...

I am not dead. Now that that's out of the way, let me apologize for having not updated for nearly a month. I have just been super busy and super sick for the past three weeks, which, when coupled with the boringness of the daily grind, makes for a distinct lack of new entries on the panda blog. New entries to come soon, I promise, starting with a general roundup. In the meantime, I...

Thundar Dolphan!

The first thing it did out of the gate was skyrocket right into the eye of the furious storm far up above us at a sharp degree angle towards what we later learned was a height of 262 feet, the 5th tallest in the world. It was a dark and stormy night, much like Snoopy used to write, but unlike a Peanuts cartoon, the sky took on increasingly darker and more menacing shades as we were ratcheted into the heavens. The flimsy orange low sidewalls of the car suddenly felt incredibly inadequate and I began to seriously consider the possibility that maybe I might slip out of lap belt. The wind began to howl as if heralding the coming of something wicked borne on massive leathery wings about to burst from the heavens, and the thin twisting rails of the track shook and shuddered, swaying under each groaning gusty assault. To the sides and all around far off below in the distance the tiny gray skyscrapers of Tokyo faded into pinpricks of diffused shapes and melty light, while I turned to my left to see b.a. silently mouthing the words "oh... my... god." with a look on her face that expressed the "what on earth does this dolphin have in store for us..!?" feeling pounding through my chest at that very moment. Just then, we reach the crest of the hill and hung, momentarily for one second on the apex, a bright orange 5 car dolphin of thunder precariously perched hundreds of feet in the sky as if in mid-leap out of an urban ocean, silhouetted against a swirling maelstrom of thunder and bubbling cauldron of roiling liquid gray clouds and bursts of lightening burning fire within the stomachs hungry pitch black clouds and strata far above in the distant skyward darkness.

The Great Bike Theft of 2006

[In My Head]:: "Somehow, Scotland Yard, I'm not holding out much hope you're gonna find my bike next week, let alone in 4 or 5 years given that your investigative technique to date seems to consist of drawing a map in crayon on a crumpled piece of paper and measuring the distance to random buildings. Not exactly C.S.I. up in this motherfucker, is it?" [Out Loud]::"...ummm, if you find my bike in 6 years, you can just keep it as I'll probably have bought a new one by then." "No, no, someone must take responsibility for the bike, even if just to pay for the disposal fee. More importantly, what about when we arrest the criminal? A case like this will remain active in Japan for seven years. If we arrest the criminal and send them to court, someone needs to press charges. If you're gone, who will do this?" "...umm, that's okay, I don't want to press charges. I just want my bike back."

Delphinium Days (Skyworship II)

I imagine he may have been thinking of days like this past weekend, when it seems like all you can see when you look up are endless expanses of blue - blue for which there are no boundaries - seas of soaring topaz, vast swaths of azure splashed with milk clouds, indigo pigments ground up and soaking into the parchment of the sky. Such blue skies are like a perfect backdrop for the sharp intercut of the earthy relief of jagged man made constructs daring to jab upwards into the heavens with their razor sharp borders. Blues so encompassing, I couldn't but help to put something concrete in each shot as if to remind myself I am still of this terrestrial life, as if pointing the camera straight up into the very middle of the blueness and pushing that shutter might be to lose yourself into the profundity of blues so deep they saturate the very silicon of the camera sensor and reach out with their siren calls to embrace you in their greedy swallow.

Sky Worship

People sometimes ask why I like tall buildings. This picture from the Mori Tower pretty much sums it all up. More sky worship after the jump...

Nice n Easy Sign Language

Part of the ease, I suppose, is that sign language isn't like "regular" language - you don't make sentences proper, you just sign the most "important" parts: subject, objects, main verb, etc. You don't need to worry about all those other bothersome parts of language that make you sound like a retarded 3 year old monkey when you speak (what natives refer to as "particles", "adverbs", "tenses", etc.), and given that my spoken Japanese basically goes something along the lines of "Me. Hungry. Eat." or "Toilet. Hole. Ground. I. Poop. No.", I find I'm already well on my way to the minimalist approach eschewed by sign language practioners.

Jumbo the giant panda

And while it's not the most inappropriate comment I've ever been subjected to in Japan (that dubious honor going to the intrepid junior high school boy who caught me off guard once with "hey panda-sensei, how big is your cock?" in perfect English (my snarky-yet-simultaneously-pathetic (insofar as I'm comparing penis size with a 12 year old) reply: "bigger than yours will ever be", greeted with tremendous "oohs" and what I can only assume is the Japanese middle school equivalent of "snap!!!" and "awwww shit!" from his boys - penis measuring humor is universal it appears)) – nonetheless it seems to me that one doesn't make a comment like "look at how huge you are" without having some sort of specific desired response in mind.

I walk away...

Moving to Tokyo(ish) was the right decision, I know. But it's hard to think of closing the door on a 3 year chapter of your life. I don't mind moving - I've done it regularly ever since I can first remember. After a while though, it can get tiring - the constant making and breaking of friendships, the tenous web of human interconnection... stretching, lingering, wavering, breaking. The sadness of going different ways. I made...

Bicycle Misadventures

So I'm back in Japan. Whoo-hoo. Actually a lot of things have been going on here recently which have contributed to me not posting much of anything. Let's start with my bike. The piece of crap I have to ride until my new bike arrives So I arrived in my new spiffy location down over Tokyo-ish (more ish than Tokyo, sadly) and find most of my stuff has arrived. Awesome. Now all I need is...

Leaving on a jet plane...

Hard to imagine, but in about 24 hours I'm going to be smelling the fertile farm fields of Wisconsin for the first time in three years. It's just for a short time, then back to Japan before it even has a chance to sink in. What a strange and wonderful past three years it's been! It's sad to think about closing the door on this chapter of my life....

Sky Monkah!

Monkah and I scope out the view from the top of the mountain. Look at all that beautiful sunlight pouring down! It might not seem like much at first, but three weeks into the rainy season with nothing but gray skies and thunderstorms night and day, it's quite possibly one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see.

Movable Type Livesearch

I Ever since the last major redesign, I've really wanted to add a "livesearch" function to the site. Up until now, all site searching was handled through Google via the "site search" box over on the right. It works okay, but the Google search page is not only pretty ugly, it also serves up ads and some not-so relevant results (for example, giving category pages instead of specific entries). What I wanted to do was something akin to what Dunstan did on his amazing 1976design blog - a live search that returns dynamic results that change according to what you type into the box. If you've ever used the iTunes search function, then you'll know right away what I'm talking about.

From the mouths of babes...

A while back, some local first year high school students were given an assignment that required them to write a short story that started with the phrase "once upon a time" or "a long long ago". Oh, and it had to involve a baby panda. These are three of my favorites: The charm of first one is due in large part to the author's rather... unique word phrasing - it's bizarre enough to make me...

Mornings...

The view outside of KC's window at 6:30 am. The deep countryside looks so quaint, so cute, huh? You can see the bright sun, the chirping birds (well, the deathsquawks of marauding crows, but whatever), the farmers trucks as they set up for the morning market... .... and then you pan over to the left and see what appears to be the impending apocalypse bearing down on you bringing the fury and rage of the oceans from just over the other side of the mountains. *gulp* It's times like these that I wish Japanese apartments weren't made of paper and wood...

Panda obsessed...

That having been said, when there's cute pandas at stake, sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. So after asking/guilting/forcing my friends and/or co-workers to assist me in my great undertaking, I started making the rounds at the stores and in the end, when all was said and done, I ended up buying some 40+ bottles of namacha. Yeah. 40 bottles.

Sunny Road Trip!

On the way back we passed by this random 35 foot tall statue of a Tyrannosaurs Rex growling fearsomely at a curve in the road, apparently as an enticement to come visit the nearby dinosaur museum. What is mildly amusing about this picture is the sign beneath the T-Rex's feet. It reads: "Are you driving safely?" And all I could think was "No, man, a goddamn dinosaur that just scared the shit out of me when I rounded the blind curve here! What do you expect!!?"

Great Takayama Road Trip II

After our adventures frolicking in the "downtown" area of Takayama (population like 200) and running away in screaming terror from the stuffed knife wielding animatronic denzins of the "Eco TeddyBear Village", we looked at our cheesy tourist map and realized we still hadn't been to the "Hida Folk Village". The "Hida Folk Village" is basically a small enclave of old traditional Japanese houses which have been carefully preserved in their (more or less) original state. They are gathered together to form a village which is supposed to recreate how Japanese lived hundreds of years ago.

Yokohama Chinatown

....until I saw these. Oh my god!! This was the first of what would soon spin into an incredibly propitious string of Yokohama Chinatown panda spottings! These are steamed dumplings with are stamped in the shape of cute little panda faces! I squealed like a school girl when I saw them and ran over to purchase one. They were pretty steep (like $3USD each) but I was all set to plop down for them, when I saw to my disappointment that they were filled with chocolate and bean paste instead of delicious steamed meat. (Actually there were ones filled with meat - the one in the topmost poster for example - but they weren't so cute so I didn't buy them). My disappointment was soon alleviated, however, when just around the corner I spied... Oh my goodness, an entire store devoted JUST TO SELLING PANDA GOODS!! I was in heaven!! I rushed over to the store, brusquely pushing aside a small 12 year old girl and two old women who were in my way (pandas are endangered, old women and little girls are not so it's all good in my book). Had I found my mecca? I think I had!!

Great Takayama Road Trip Part I

It's spring break! With no big plans in the works, my ever faithful travel companion and I decided that a quickie road trip up to Takayama in nearby Gifu Prefecture would be the perfect way to spend a Saturday. What's there to do over in Takayama? Well... Historic Japan Much of Japan is rebuilt and artificial - concrete slab box buildings and shiny glass paneled convenience stores blending into a modern ugly mess. But this...

Sun and Rain...

It was simultaneously beautifully sunny and gloomily rainy one day earlier in the week. How crazy! Since I'm suffering from massive writers block lately, I'm afraid you're just going to have to settle for a picture post! The day started out wonderfully, with sun beating down gently through cool early spring breezes onto tiled rooftops outside my apartment. You can see the "downtown" in the distance. When I first got here, I really disliked the...

Killing Time...

sitting, back primly poised, hair impeccably parted to one side, cream colored leather Coach handbag tucked to one side, keitai strap dangling loosely out one of the side pockets, makeup perfectly done, as always, beautiful lips pursed ever so slightly as manicured nails flicked pages of a book from one to the next, eyes moving ever so slightly through expertly applied mascara lashes, each iris twitch scanning top to bottom, right to left, page to page, ponytail bobbing slightly as each echoing shift of the train's bulk rippled through the ground, through the wheels, through the floor, through the bench, through her body before manifesting itself in one tiny quiver, momentary separation of individual hair fibers, rippling shine reflecting the brilliance of the azure and topaz sky flitting by in the rows of houses cycling by in the background, melody line of children's Doppler laugher fleeting by for split seconds as suffused imagery of suburban bliss melted into a motion streaked blur of background behind us, parallaxing through windows and the smell of earth and coolness of autumn air cascading down inverted metallic slats of the old fashioned sun screens pulled down over half opened train windows, and I remember ginko leaves - beautiful, gorgeous stunning ginko leaves swirling through the air, striking yellow against austere brown branches silhouetted against topaz skies

Kyoto Road Trip

This picture was taken atop the mountain at Iwatayama Monkey Park (see below) by a man carrying a broom and a slingshot. We were actually just looking at the monkeys when he snatched the camera from our hands and shoved us over towards the couple of fanged screaming simians you see on the branch behind us. "You stand there. I take picture." "...b...but, those monkeys have fangs...!" we protest feebly. "You stand there. I take picture." he repeats, gesturing wildly with his slingshot. Our gaze flips back and forth between the fanged death monkeys and the almost too ethusiastic looking japanese man with a slingshot and a well worn looking broom. Monkey death? Or slingshot to the dome?

Random Photos

It was worth it though, to see everything bathed in amber sunlight on the way back down. I've gone up and down this road a hundred times before, and each time thought it was ugly and filled with concrete. But like so many things in Japan, sometimes the beauty is hidden deep down inside of it, and you just have to catch it at the right angle to see it, I suppose.

Don't Speak

But what about the next one? And the one after that? And after that? I can't catch them all, and the knowledge weighs heavily on my mind. When we're young we can afford the luxury of constant self analysis and the comforting confines of reality, but the older we get, the more we have to accept the fact that an increasing amount of our world paradigm will be predicated not on fact, but on fictions we have unwittingly invented throughout our lives. I feel that disconnect from reality is endemic to the modern middle age condition and we can only hope to ameliorate its more vulgar excesses - however, we can never truly hold it off. One day we will open our mouths to speak something we swear is true, and it will be our children standing across from us, rolling their eyes and heaving an exasperated sigh at our ignorance and irrelevance.

Mochi made with sweat (and other stuff)

And wouldn't you know it? As soon as I remembered this one simple tidbit from my childhood, everything suddenly fell into place. I had the answer.

What would a ninja do indeed?

He would get revenge.

Let them eat cake (and die...)

I wish for a second that pandas could actually breath fire, or at the very least, spit acid like an Alien.

"What does he want me to do, DG?" I ask, voice emerging in ragged constricted packets.

"Well, he said he wants you to bring him an apology gift. Specifically he said he wants you to give him a cake or something. So I think perhaps you should go to his house and bring him a cake."

I absolutely lose it.

Paper chase...?

"Well you see honey, " I begin, eager to leap on the chance to explain "the lingo" and front like I'm from the ghetto (of, uh... Wisconsin) - "In tha' hood, we sometimes use slang for common objects. So for example, we say paper when we mean "money", right? So in this case, he's paper chasing, so he's chasing after money, trying to make some ends, that sort of thing. It's talking about what he's doing to try and make some money."

Square root of wha...?

Oh. my. goodness. And this is supposed to help you remember something!? I need a mnemonic just to um, remember my mnemonic! Now if this was as simple as the one above - just using the on/kun readings of the characters, then it might - might - be useful. But what a mess! You've got characters which are read using the Chinese readings. You've got characters which are read using the Japanese readings. You've got characters are read using the abbreviated Japanese readings (na(na) for "7"). You've got other characters which are read using the roman alphabetical reading and yet another character ("0") which has to be read both in English ("oh") and in truncated (old-style) Japanese ("re(i)")...!

Eiheiji and the Depressed Panda

Monk central command. As mentioned above, taking pictures of the monks was strictly off limits, but we just couldn't resist a single furtive shot as we headed out the door of the "front office", one of the most surreal scenes I have seen since coming to Japan. Behind the counter lay a fully equipped business office with one major exception - it was staffed entirely by Zen Buddhist monks dressed in flowing black robes from head to toe. As we walked by, Yasu started giggling uncontrollably as one of the monks appeared to be having trouble with his computer and turned to another monk who was making photocopies for help. Together, the two of them hunched over the computer screen trying to sort out whatever it was that was going wrong ("no, try clicking there"), while all around them other monks answered phones ("Eieheij Temple, how can I help you?"), filed papers and rolled around on wheeled office chairs.

Bumper Cars

So it's been continuing to snow on and on for the past two weeks and things are starting to get dramatic. And by "dramatic" I mean "I keep crashing into shit left and right". It's always been a point of pride on my part that I have always been the best driver in my family - my father has been in his fair share of accidents, my mother drove straight into the lamp post in...

Snow Tires

"AAAARRRGHHH!!!" I curse, frustrated by both my failure to stop my car's backward careening slide and inability to figure out what the hell "a vague deception of a dying day" means. I'm getting desperate - any second another car is going to come around the bend below me and I'm going to crash straight backwards into them. Or worse yet, I'm going to slide right into the living room of the house at the bottom of the hill. I struggle to remember the chapter in my driver's ed book entitled "What to do if you're sliding backwards down an icy hill in the middle of Japan and about to T-bone an old person's house"...

Himeji-jo and Acclimatization

What starts as a simple comparison of differences between cultures quickly spins out of control into a series of increasingly disconnected judgments, finally culminating in a bizarre tangent about the supposed submissive role of women in Japanese society! In the process a fully painted - yet completely falsified - picture of moral drama unfolds, complete with villains (Japanese teachers, "repressive Japanese system"), heroes ("I'm not going to sit down and do nothing"), treacherous deeds ("brainwashing"), and the archetypal damsel in distress ("this frail young girl"/ "timid and erased Japanese girl with no will to fight"/ "a good and submissive housewife").

The Cliffs of Death

WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE MOTHERF-ING BLACK JESUS WAS THAT!?" I bellow as my car starts to spin out of control, mud splashing up on my windshield, shocks creaking to absorb foot deep slime-filled potholes, the sound of ten thousand tiny gravel meteors flung up by spinning wheels at 70kph streaking through the air and denting the hell out of the car body. Tennis jolts straight upright in her seat desperately grasping for poor monkah (sent flying through the air from his vantage point on the dash as soon as we hit the gravel road) with one hand and the emergency stabilization handle above the door with the other. For one second, as the car starts to power slide (most unintentionally, let me assure you) through the gravel and mud towards a very painful looking ditch on the side, we catch glance of each others' panicked faces and I imagine this is what rally car drivers and their helpless navigators must feel the second before they lose control around a hairpin loop and crash head on into a tree or catapult off the side of a cliff.

Autumn Thursday

It was a beautiful autumn Thursday yesterday and due to a fortuitous coincidence in my schedule, I happened to be free for most of it. Somewhat on the road to recovering from the horrible cold that laid me out for a full week, I decided to make the most of the unexpectedly pleasant weather and go for a drive, camera in tote, and explore some of the lesser frequented areas of town stretching far...

The great orange hair disaster

Looking in the mirror the other day, I noticed my hair was getting pretty shaggy. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so, though, as I had heard (in the typical Japanese fashion) from a co-worker of a co-worker who was a friend of the section chief that the center chief wanted me to get a haircut as apparently it was "too long for a man". While the egalitarian in me wanted to...