In about 1993 or 1994 I decided that I was tired of being a consumer of music and wanted to be able to make my own. After a period of strategizing I settled on learning the viola, thinking, every string quartet needs one and the other instruments are more popular, therefore, a market opportunity ( Read more... )

My only experience with hitting other people outside the family home has been the Tae Kwon Do I took years ago. The angry digitized refugees from Playmobil against whom the Wii pits you don't take that into account, and both they and murphy_slaw were pounding me into insensibility until I figured out how to hold the controllers in what I take to be Nintendo ( Read more... )

I am a city boy and when meeting a horse I attempt in my mind to put it into a pre-existing box. The horse is very large and upholstered, so it must be furniture. But no, it's moving around and looking at me. Susie is telling me that the horse is bickering with its neighbor, that it's happy, that it's misbehaving just a little. I can't really ( Read more... )

I got sent this because I suggested to Pat that brisket wasn't worth getting all that excited about, and that I had liked the tri-tip we had had at zoevaughn's Fourth of July party better. In addition to this, I was informed that I am dead to him.Brisket is like the fatty part of the bacon. Tri-tip is more like the meaty ( Read more... )

It was the day we arrived, or at least we felt like it, and we were in an eight-story electronics store in the Akihabara "Electric Town" district. The store had a 60-yard wall of different butt-spraying electronic toilets. There were hundreds of square feet of five- and six-door refrigerators, as you can never have enough compartments, apparently ( Read more... )

I spent the day being the not-so-interesting-spectacle trailing behind the one-dog parade that is my friend Cinders and her dog Snowy in motorcycle gear:


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I presented a scarf from the hot springs to Michiko, the hostel staffer who found our lodgings in Kyoto for us and who did all the hard translation work needed to get us to the hot springs themselves. After the usual "For me?" stuff, she said: "I will use it whenever I cry." She mimed daubing her eyes, then noticed that I looked slightly appalled ( Read more... )

I am not sure how to start this one. I've come back this morning from a hot spring in the hills somewhere in the mountains north of Tokyo, which has been an astonishing travel experience that is hard to explain. I wish I could illustrate it with pictures, but sadly the Flickr Uploadr got Constipatd and is not cooperating. So, I'll do what I can ( Read more... )

A much better Kyoto is in fact hidden behind the veil of crappiness. It turns out that the city is divided into very large blocks, each with a veneer of largely uninteresting postwar buildings. Inside the blocks is a warren of tiny alleyways quietly oozing charm ( Read more... )

gjunell and I were standing on a bridge looking out over a river bed in which a few rills ran through　broad clumps of weeds, past the occasional pile of refuse. The sky was a dull greenish amber. The air was hot and sodden ( Read more... )