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Astronomy links
I’ve always been fascinated by things in the night sky; when I was a little girl I wanted to be an astronaut. I memorized sky charts and read all the classic science fiction epics. Living in a city, I don’t get to see the night sky, so I content myself with NASA’s Astronomy Picture of…
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Food news
Two articles in today’s news: Police raid firm in Mister Donut caseGov’t to abolish Food Agency The juxtaposition generates amusing ideas about what the Food Agency is doing. Covert food ops, no doubt.
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Slogging blogging
What’s happened to my schedule? It’s a quarter to 4 in the afternoon and I’m just now realising I didn’t blog this morning. Maybe all the computer troubles around me are throwing me off kilter. Yesterday’s chicken-waving session with MJ didn’t yield any useful results and today I’m in my office fighting with Premiere 6.…
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Denzuin
Ack! It’s 11:45 in the morning and haven’t blogged yet today. I’ve been caught up in writing an article and answering e-mail. Now I have to leave to go wave a dead chicken at MJ’s computer so forgive me if all I give you today is a photo series. This is Denzuin, an old and…
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Children’s procession
As we prepared to leave the house yesterday morning, we heard drumming echoing around the neighborhood. “Hey, let’s go find that!” I said. I’m always interested in local festivals. As it turns out, the drumming came to us. We left the building, we saw a parade of children and parents pulling a little shrine at…
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Caution, subtitles
In video stores in Japan, foreign movies make up the bulk of films for rent. And they come in two varieties: dubbed in Japanese and subtitled in Japanese. Which means the unwary English speaker sometimes ends up with a subtitled movie where the original language isn’t English. As an example, we rented Jackie Chan’s Accidental…
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Tax office efficiency
Yesterday I went to the tax office; I needed to pick up a copy of a form I’d failed to fill in at tax time. I pondered for a moment over which office to enter–the none of the complicated kanji combinations on the directory in the lobby exactly matched the one on my letter–and finally…
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Tod’s new toy
Tod’s new toy–a blowtorch. It’s the perfect partner for our grill. Although it looks like he might be about to scorch the swordfish he’s cooking for our dinner, really the blowtorch is just for lighting the charcoal. This is a cleverly designed device. It’s a torch head that fits onto a standard “gas bombe” canister.…
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Tropical tastes
I think we’re in for a tropical summer. First, Mango Colon. Now the candy shelves are crammed with tropical fruit flavored goodies: Pineapple KitKat is pretty tasty. The pineapple flavor is strong and a little plastic, but not bad. I like KitKat and this is a nice change. Mango Cream Pocky is excellent. Pocky is…
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My head hurts
Today I’m going to complain about the symptoms of migraine, since that’s pretty much all I can focus on this morning. I am nauseated, everything sounds too loud, and light is much brighter than it ought to be. On top of that, I feel stupid and slow. Don’t ask me to remember anything important, to…
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