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The Great Outdoors
I love being outside and the longer I am in nature, the better I feel. Camping on Niijima is one of the highlights of my year. Over the Golden Week holidays we hosted Guru-guru Camp and stayed at Habushiura campsite for 13 days. It was blissful. The weather was as predictably unpredictable as always. There…
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Unrelated thoughts
I keep having ideas for blog posts – topics meaty enough to be more than a tweet or status update on Facebook – but for whatever reason I talk myself out of writing up my thoughts. I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging, and that’s a shame for me (maybe not such a big…
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Modernist Dining in Bunkyo
Dessert last night blew me away. Pictured above you see a “deconstructed apple crumble” that involved nitrogen-frozen whipped cream with a hot caramel soup poured over cubes of apple, cinnamon cookie crumbs, caramel ice cream and a slice of dried apple. It was such an impressive presentation and my first experience with “molecular gastronomy.” The rest of…
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Equinoctial Thoughts
Today our planet has made another full circle around the sun and our day and night are equal length. It’s a public holiday in Japan. Following the Buddhist tradition, we clean graves and remember the dead today. I have no grave to clean but I honor my father every year on the equinox, the anniversary…
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Making Music, part 1
A couple of weeks ago I started casting around for someone to write me some music. I want an original tune for this year’s World Hoop Day Dance project and so I was telling to my musician friends about it. I never thought this would happen but my ukulele teacher, Huw, suggested that we work together to…
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Up and Down in Tohoku
Sunrise view from the cliffside cabin in Ofunato where we stayed. I spent the past week in Iwate-ken touring schools and doing performances with Guy Totaro, the Smile Ambassador for the Tyler Foundation. We visited 11 schools in 5 days, seeing about 700 kids for play, hoop workshops, and more. It was a very satisfying…
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Skilling Up and Making Connections
Twenty twelve so far has been about engaging new connections and skills. There have been two main threads in the past six weeks. Connection Thread #1: Skating & Hooping Just before the new year, Tod and I went skating at a newly opened skate arena at Tokyo Dome. It was such fun that we made…
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Potential Catastrophes
Frequency of quakes around Tokyo, before and after the Tohoku quake. Data from Todai report. Last week, the University of Tokyo Earthquake Research Institute published a new report on “The Big One” that is overdue to hit Tokyo. After studying the frequency of quakes in the Kanto region since 3/11, they say there is a 70%…
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Comic Hooping
Wednesday night at Hoop Lounge I did a first run of a new act that I plan to take up to Tohoku next month to entertain kids who were affected by last year’s earthquake and tsunami. I’ll be going up with Guy Totaro and the Smile Ambassador program, a part of the Tyler Foundation’s children’s…
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Mystery Weasel = Masked Civet
My neighborhood wildlife spottings started in December 2002 and it has always been a mystery to me what this long tailed grey critter was. Tanuki? Badger? I called it the Mystery Weasel in my first post and wrote about another sighting of the same animal on July 2006. After seeing four of them together two…
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