MINUTES FILLED WITH DAYS

Kids can fill minutes with anything, like when Kaya came for the holidays and one of her big wants was to play in some leaves, as she always does in autumns at our house - which was still possible since there's been no snow - so I took her out into the garden to where all the late-fallen oak and cherry leaves had been gathered by the rake-assisted wind.

She gathered bunches of leaves in her arms, threw them high in the air and ran through them squealing, storing up days worth of wish-fulfillment in no time at all, then I suggested that since it was growing dark we should get busy on another big want of hers and use a bunch of these leaves to roast some potatoes, so we got lots of leaves together in a pile and Kaya lit them like a little priestess at an altar; then we got some oak twigs and threw them on, then more leaves and in very short order the heat was ready for potatoes, which in 20 minutes of additional leaf-cavorting were perfect for eating with some salt while sitting on warm rocks by the embers in the falling dark.

Then yesterday we went out to trim the plum tree (Kaya always has some house and garden tasks when she comes to stay) and I got the ladder and saws and pruning shears and of course the wheelbarrow-- Kaya loves the wheelbarrow, so she was in charge of that. The plan as we initially set it up was, as I trimmed the branches from the plum tree, Kaya would take them, clip them down to size and put them in the wheelbarrow; then when it was full, she would wheel the twigs over to the garden, where she would dump them onto the compost pile.

So there we were, I up on the ladder among the bare plum branches and Kaya standing next to the wheelbarrow with everything -- ready to go, but something wasn't quite right, some essential was missing... after a moment's thought, Kaya realized what it was, ran into the house and came back out a few seconds later carrying her toy mouse, which she placed just where it belonged in the wheelbarrow. Now everything was ready.

But with all plans, we must be prepared for change. As Kaya was doing her part, she suddenly had an even better idea than our original one: she began to use the ideally sized twigs to build a fine house in the wheelbarrow for her mouse to live in, using the larger twigs for the frame and the smaller ones for the roof, with some nice roundish green leaves for shingles against the rain and snow, and who was I to object from way up in a plum tree with such a godly perspective? Indeed, from my point of view the new architecture looked attractive and functional. By the time the structure was completed the plum tree had been trimmed, the mouse was snug in the newly named Wheelbarrow Mousehouse and it was time for tea.

Though the new plan took quite a bit more time to carry out than the old plan, we're always asking heaven for more time, aren't we-- and there it is right in front of us, all along.

KYOTO JOURNAL #68 IS NOW OUT...

"KJ #68 starts out literally in the backyard of one of our editors — amidst frogs, bees, butterflies and mantises — leading into a passionate exploration of environmental aesthetics by Brian Williams, a leading Shiga landscape painter, and an investigation of Natural Agriculture by writer/photographer Lisa Hamilton. Other rambles, poems and profiles take us as far afield as back-country India and rural Cambodia; we meet multi-ethnic students in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a comedian family in Mandalay, Burma, and two women doctors from Iraq as they visit Japan.

This issue's In Translation feature looks at how publishers present Japanese children's books in English, with the bonus of a delightful modern fable by Awa Naoko, translated by Toshiya Kamei. Fiction is set in the mountains of Vietnam, as well as a mikan-growing village in on Japan's Pacific coast. Blogology introduces vital links for anyone interested in homesteading in Japan.

Finally, we return to Kyoto, strolling the contemplative Philosopher's Walk."

Details of Full Contents

See also Home Page

THE RAIN GUTTER DIALECTIC

From as far back as I can remember, I have always been hungry for knowledge about the infinite aspects of this universe, starting with the earliest queries of my infancy: Where the hell am I? and Why are women so fascinating? and growing on from there, ever hungry.

One bit of knowledge I've recently felt the need to acquire is how to clean rain gutters only when the sun is shining. This desire only arises whenever I'm cleaning the rain gutters with rain cascading in my face, running up my sleeves, down my neck and into my boots as I stretch out to full length and height there on the wobbly ladder in the multidirectional wind-driven downpour, my wife affirming my knowledge-hunger by stepping gingerly out into the skytorrent -- while I have one leg on the top rung, the other leg on the slick deck railing, one hand on a slippery roof tile and the only remaining hand scooping leaves and cedar needles out of the icewater-filled rain gutter -- and asking from beneath her umbrella: Why do you always clean the rain gutters when it's raining?

Somebody must have asked Socrates that question. They didn't teach rain gutter in college, and I never had a house to learn from until this one; we always rented and moved a lot when I was a kid, so all you guys whose fathers made you clean the rain gutters all those autumns while I was gloating at football or baseball, go ahead, you can gloat now.

The thing is, every time I'm out in the sun I'm not looking at any rain gutters, I'm looking at the light from the blue sky or the dark nourishing earth or the vital seeds I'm planting or the shiitake logs I'm drilling or the firewood I'm splitting or the monkeys I'm chasing or the delicate sprouts that need weeding, mulching or support, I'm not gonna drop everything that needs doing right now, as the sun slides nonstop down the sky and time is wasting, to go and get the ladder and lug it around the house and set it up here and there and climb up and check to see IF the rain gutters need cleaning, are you nuts? As soon as it rains I'll know whether or not the rain gutters need cleaning.

So that's the answer, it comes to me like a face full of rain, just as it must have for Socrates: as there is a time for all things, so there is a time for knowledge, and some things are just not worth knowing until it's time to know them. And so it is with rain gutters. But how can I possibly explain that to my knowledge-hungry wife under her umbrella as I hang there in the rain grasping a handful of wet leaves?

Socrates is silent; he seems to have something under one of his fingernails...

Merry Geol!

POWER

via Celsias

But don't despair, home nuking is just around the corner... [link fixed]

PROTECTING LUNCH

How much of your lifetime have you spent closely examining oak bark? Not too many minutes, I'll wager. Scanning even small areas of oak bark is not a general habit among humans of my acquaintance. Until a few years after I moved here it wasn't a habit of mine either; out of the first 60 years of my life, I don't think I spent more than 30 seconds carefully examining oak bark. I can't imagine why I might even have done it for 30 seconds, but you never know, we were all kids once, with hungry minds, nothing to do and an oak nearby.

But then one day you're grown up and having lunch, say, in your house on a mountain in a completely other country like Japan at just about winter solstice, when all self-respecting insects are dead or asleep - you still with me on this? - and a kamemushi (lit: turtle insect, i.e., stinkbug) suddenly comes bungling headlong through the air the way they do and decides on a spontaneous crash landing, also the way they do, but this time right into your fried noodles, soup or salad. At that point, you are likely to ask the air-at-large that timeless question that so often issues from the depths of the human heart: Where in the hell did that come from? And as timelessly usual, there is no answer from the air-at-large.

But as the evolutionary process chugs along, after this has happened a few times and you've tossed out a few soups or salads or cups of tea or glasses of wine you'd been just about to enjoy, and that question is still cooking on your brain's back burner, one day you're out in a cold afternoon loading firewood into the firewood bag and you notice what looks like several bits of oak bark moving around on the oak bark. Thanks to evolutionary experience, you know that this is strange. So you look more closely, this time with your glasses on. Those moving bits of oak bark are in fact kamemushi, staggering groggily in disturbed hibernation.

If they weren't staggering you never would have noticed them until you unwittingly brought them indoors and into your nice fresh cup of tea, for they have developed over the - what is it, 500 million years? - of their evolution the ability to mimic oak bark, ultimately ruining salad and other enjoyables by crawling together in the bark crevices as the weather cools, when they go into hibernation, their combined oaky carapaces then looking precisely like part of the bark-- as if any creature living is going to bother with stink bugs anyway, this is defensive overkill if you ask me.

What gets me (note considerately avoided bug pun) is that the innocent two-legged, fire-using newcomer, having evolved into a woodstove user less than 300 years ago, in all innocence totes the noxious insects into his warm home, where the stinkers wake up thinking it is Spring at last and bungle through the air as is their giddy Springtime wont, spontaneously crash landing here and there on your computer screen, your tv screen, in your hair, ear, soup, salad etc.; it would all be very entertaining as a video I'll never make.

So having evolved to this advanced point through my relentless pursuit of knowledge and non-malodorous lunch, and a preference for nothing crawling over my WORD text, I have learned to scan oak bark in great detail when filling my firewood bag, so I won't have to throw away another glass of pineapple juice.

Evolutionarily speaking, I have thus far managed to slash my kamemushi experience by up to 95%. I'm aiming for 100% and I'm getting there, but as most humans must be aware by now, you can't evolve overnight. Want the rest of my salad?

HOT CHICKS, COOL GUYS

I received a link in my email the other day, via my account at Classmates, to some fotos of my high school class reunion that had been posted by a classmate whom I remember as a very cool guy. I went to see, and was gutrocked to realize that it's been nearly 50 years since we all graduated.

The fotos were ones he'd taken at the Cardinal McCloskey Memorial High School Class of 1958 reunion, held somewhere back in the old home town that I haven't visited in over 15 years, and only a couple of times in the last 40 years. I left and never went back, essentially, though I took a mindful of fond memories with me.

The Class of '58 had had 132 grads in it as I recall-- a few straight arrows, but mostly troublemakers in one way or another - that was the '50s after all - and we were all rebels with or without causes, the oh-so-hot chicks with the tight skirts, come-hither makeup and wannatouch hairdos, and the cool guys with the greased-up rat tail hair, pegged pants and cordovan ducks, movin' and shakin' to Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Coasters, among dozens of others there in the background on the way to our own places in the big world out there, where the bond of all we'd we shared would link us always, no matter what...

But at the near 50th reunion, according to the fotos only a few of those rebels showed up, about a dozen of each sex, and the hot chicks are grandmas now, with comfortable slacks, little makeup and practical hairdos, a new kind of 'hot' we teens hadn't foreseen at all, and the rat-tailed guys are grandpas now, bald or wearing hats and soft shoes in a new kind of cool...

Amazing though, how the mind remembers faces and the memories associated with them, even after 50 years and countless worlds, the pranks we played, the trouble we got into, the juvenilities we talked about with such earnestness, we bubbling cauldrons of adolescence-- and then to realize that all the things that were so heartfully important back then turned out to be mere wisps of dreams of ephemera relative to what the future was actually made of and actually spelled out for us after all, that got us here to what it all became, as it always does in its ceaseless ways, and if we had known back then what our futures would be, would we have been willing to go there?

In my case, the answer is a resounding YES! And judging by the smiling faces in those fotos, the answer was the same for my classmates... It turned out to be true: that bond we shared was still there and holding, even after nearly 50 years of future, traveled in our separate ways.

The Class of '58 for life. Cool.

PANEM ET CIRCENSES

Depressing news from America today: Britney Spears has a younger sister.

Who's pregnant.

Those facts in themselves aren't depressing, lots of folks have younger sisters, even pregnant ones, pregnancy being a perfectly natural state for a 16-year-old, just as nature designed it.

What's depressing is that the many unintriguing facets of Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister's pregnancy topped the news all over America, e.g., "Jamie Lynn Spears' Pregnancy: Is It Legal? MTV.com - all 1,917 news articles »," drowning out such tiny whispers as House Approves 70 Billion for Wars (Reality TV anyone?) while taxpayers were helpfully distracted by the mesmerizing epiphany of Britney's pregnant sibling, all in keeping with the ongoing general trend toward the Bread and Circuses that historically attend imperial declines.

I wonder who the barbarians will be this time…

CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS SPEAK OUT...

Not sure honking will help.

I'd say let the new immigrants in,
but make the schools better than they were for the earlier immigrants.

ILLUSIONS OF DEMENTIA, VIRTUAL GRANDMOTHERS, CENTENARIAN RECIDIVISTS, ELDERPUNKS

In re my earlier rant about Japan driving and licenses, due to time, space and wannadoo restraints I never got around to saying that during the boring lecture the bored lecturer said one unboring thing that made me perk up in my seat: henceforth, all drivers 70 years or older must be tested on a simulated driving device.

Looking around, he added that, given this young audience, the requirement clearly wouldn't be a problem for us for a while, which was flattering, since I'm 67 and look weeks younger, but the law knows nothing of flattery, I've tried it on arresting officers any number of times.

The fact is, in three years I shall be required to stand in line at the police station with the other newly doubtful folk waiting to take an electronic drive like at the game arcade, though in this case to test our reaction skills they'll presumably toss virtual grandmothers, dogs and schoolchildren out in front of the virtual car and check how quickly we hit the brakes or, if worst comes to worst, the gas. I'll be virtually ready to wheelie my way out of trouble, lay some virtual rubber on the virtual road.

On the other hand, both hands on the wheel, I read yesterday about a 100-year-old recidivist cruiser in Japan who was arrested for the second time for driving without a license - after it had been revoked following a hit-and-run accident a few months previously - when the car he was driving struck the umbrella of a schoolkid standing on the side of the road. The elderpunk's excuse was that "Driving helps me from going senile because it keeps me alert." He was clearly suffering from illusions of dementia. Alarmingly, however, the article also stated that "Starting in 2009, drivers over age 75 in Japan will be required to get checkups for dementia when they renew their licenses."

For my part, all I can say is good thing they're not checking earlier...

THE GAME

The kid in the grade school uniform gets on the train in the mornings as part of the crowd and maneuvers expertly to be the first to stand beside the only guy in the car who will be getting off at the next stop, making the seat available. This is commuting 101, but somehow every day the kid beats all the experienced grownups.

At first I thought: that kid is on the ball for his age, he's figured out the Game already, he bests all the professional commuters who get on at the same station and who, despite the fact that they take the train every day, don't seem to be paying attention, never seem to become aware that this guy in the seat next to me always gets off at the next stop after they get on, so they could quickly have a seat all the way to BigCity.

The kid runs sometimes to beat others to the spot, or just gets to the station early so he can be at the head of the boarding line, but even then he runs to stand beside the seat to be certain to get it first as soon as it's vacated, and if for some reason he isn't first he slowly maneuvers until he is; he's small, and none of the big people notice him wedging his way in there. He's only eight or nine, but he's already an ace at the game, the big folks standing all the way while he gets the seat next to me and plays a video game, reads a comic book until it's time for him to get off and go to school.

At first I had to admire him for his skill at the game at his age, how that skill would stand him in good stead as he commuted through life, but the more I thought about it the darker it got. This is no way for a kid to live, these are not the things a kid should strive for and weave the fabric of his being from, no way for a kid to learn or to grow up, already getting good at the Game among all these dour faces.

But maybe it's me, maybe it's just because I never liked the Game. When I was a kid, I disliked just about every aspect of the Game, from uniforms and schedules, rules and rote manners, upward to suits and ties and getting ahead, rungs up the ladder to higher income before I outgo; making connections, getting in the right places, knowing the right people, making the right career moves and so on, keeping my true opinions to myself so that the "prizes" would be mine, but for some reason they never appealed to me, those prizes, any more than the whole endeavor did; so, beyond getting into and out of college for the sake of the knowledge - not the career path - I never played the Game, never got wrapped up in it at any stage. So I suppose that colors my thoughts.

This kid is trapped though. He is deep in the Game already, so deep in it and so good at it that as he grows into the Big Who of himself he'll be one of the best around, may never have an inkling that there is a profound and genuinely meaningful alternative, let alone find the ability to break away into a world where he can fully exist - he'll learn nothing of that from school or dogma, peers or society... He may well spend his life on such demeaning tasks as being first in one line or another, on weighing the worth of his life in mean scales...

In time, he will perhaps acquire a professional command of mediocrity, like so many of today's politicians. He may look back over his life and passively wonder what it is that's missing from that perfectly straight line he has traced with his being-- unless somehow he finds the power to take his own direction, follow his own lead, though that gets less likely every day he notches up a small, dark victory. Perhaps video games will be his doorway...

Later I came across this article in the Chicago Times that had this subtitle: "Defying the group is a noble, necessary American tradition." In it was this line: "Once upon a time, each American's objective was to become an individual."

JAPAN BANKS ODDLY UNWILLING TO FLING GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD

This is fascinating. If this were you or me asking for money on these terms we'd be laughed out of the bank.

Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorganChase, holders of major quantities of derivatives in which, one way or another, your bank account/pension fund may be invested, and who are losing big time as a result (right now we're only feeling the spray of the tsunami), are calling upon other banks around the world to put money into a fund to rescue whichever poor banks that in their mastery of financial acumen threw big money (i.e., yours) onto these mountains of derivatives and then sold them on, all the way to the last fool, just ahead.

Now they want everybody to chip in and rescue them. Though the proposed fund would comprise but one droplet in the tsunami of derivative-linked debt that is now looming over the world, you gotta admire the chutzpah, the sheer, imitation brass of it. The biggest holders of derivatives? Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorganChase. ("Today, more than ever before in the short history of derivatives, one leading United States institution effectively IS the derivatives market. This company, as we will explore in this essay, is the American giant superbank JPMorganChase (www.JPMorganChase.com)."

But for reasons to do with the economic vision and loss-avoidance generally associated with financial institutions, big Japanese banks are saying: do we really want to throw this much more money out the window?

A good explanation of derivatives

Krugman's take

The coming collapse of the modern banking system
"The banks don't have the reserves to cover their downgraded assets and the Federal Reserve cannot simply monetize their bad bets. There's no way out."

Dec 22 update: Banks Decide Not to Go Ahead With Super-SIV Fund, WSJ Reports...
They'll make the Scrooge announcement on Christmas eve, to take advantage of extended holiday amnesia... Mortgage holders, fund investors and pensioners should be this crafty...

THE FASHION SUTRA


"The fashion show opened with a Buddhist prayer set to a hip-hop beat at the centuries-old Tsukiji Honganji temple, where nearly 40 monks and nuns from eight major Buddhist sects showed off elaborate robes in an effort to win back believers.

'Many of us priests share the sense of crisis, and a need to do something to reach out to people,' said priest Kosuke Kikkawa, 37, one of the organizers of Saturday's event. 'We won't change Buddha's teachings, but perhaps we need a different presentation that can touch the feelings of the people today.'"

I've done a few fashion shows in my time, and I have to say, each one was definitely a religious experience.

THE 2008 J. E. E. ENVIRONMENTAL EXCHANGE ECO-CALENDAR

2008 J.E.E. Eco-Calendar

Slow Life Savoring Human Skills
NOW ON SALE!

VICTORY

I like a religion where anybody can walk right in to the establishment and in a good, open, non-infidel spirit buy one of the talismans-- in this case a "Victory" (in whatever may be your endeavor) omamori.

I could in this instance have bought instead a Hello Kitty general purpose talisman (photo a few posts below), butI don't really have any cartoonish aims, or objectives whose achievement could reasonably hinge on minimalist cat depictions.

I saw the Victory ones and I thought yeah, this red one on white is for me, this fits how I trust in the basic premise that religious hierarchy has coopted over the millennia, the original spiritual understanding that if you will it and keep it in mind it will come to pass, the automystery "magic," that is your own, that is born in you and that you should never surrender to another...

If you have with you at all times something to constantly and subtly remind you, preferably in a beautiful way, of your wish to be, for example, victorious in your honorable endeavors (forget about taking the thing to Vegas or winning the lottery with it, these things work from the inside, not from the outside) then keep this on or about you at all times, let it interrupt you, let get in your way, let it redirect your wandering thoughts, let it re-mind you of the summit of yourself, until one day you arrive there...

I WAS ONLY GOING ONE WAY

The other day I went to the police station around the corner down the road, finally getting around to renewing my driver's license between my birthday and a month later as per the cryptic instructions on the postcard they sent me, one of those secret postcards, that said that between the aforementioned dates I had to go either to this large police station between 2 and 4 on these afternoons with these exceptions, that large police station between 9 and 11 on those mornings with these exceptions, or this other smaller police station on my side of the big toll bridge at one time a week only but since that possibility was so remote it didn't say when so I had to call the microprint number to find out the secret information, all because I drove south on a one-block street between 2 and 4 pm on a Wednesday (see Smiling Bob's Extra-Special Police Adventure). Go figure.

In a room filled with guys in uniform sitting at desks where they arm wrestle with sheets of paper, now and then going outside to hassle law-abiding citizens taking their usual Wednesday afternoon shortcuts, the polite lady clerk took my personal seal and a bunch of money, stamped the back of my old and now disgraced license about 42 times with various sizes of red-, blue- and black-inked rubber stamps so as to eradicate all semblance of validity while yet verifying to future generations of clerks and policepersons that I had indeed been here to a confirmable degree on this day and date long ago with fees in hand, bearing my personal seal, at this official desk in this official building, town, county, country, in person, with the correct face and what not - imagination is in short supply amid the nitgrit of bureaucracy - then she blinded me with an eye test and stopped me from putting my shades back on so she could take my picture without warning in a corner with a flash that made me look like Julius Caesar falling off his horse on my driver's license.

After that I had to watch beige walls for 45 minutes made up of those widely spaced ticks and monotonous tocks that drip like cold molasses out of bureaucratic clocks that hang above steel-legged benches upholstered in cold gray prison vinyl decorated with little triangular rips and old cigarette burns until as a hard-driving criminal locked into the police data base I could sit for a week-long lecture compressed into less than two hours by an about-to-retire police officer who also would rather have been just about anywhere else in the country than here now repeating this lecture to an audience of tired eyes for what looked and sounded like the thousandth time about the meaning of red lights and stop signs and the paragraph on page 66 and so many other priceless memories, e.g., about how going 60 is like your car falling off a building I forget how many stories high, like that will ever happen, all because last year I drove in one direction.

Wonder if I could erase my record if I drove backward...

WILL THE JAPANESE FISHERIES AGENCY KILL MISTER SPLASHY PANTS WITH AN EXPLODING HARPOON?

"With just a few clicks you can help save Mister Splashy Pants and his friends: sign our petition calling upon the Japanese Fisheries Agency to promise not to kill Mister Splashy Pants.

"For the people who voted for a name other than Mister Splashy Pants, take heart. The scientists involved in the Great Whale Trail tagged 20 humpback whales in the South Pacific. The top 7 names will be used to name whales with a further 5 whales being named by our Whale Defenders.

"In the coming days we will post photos of Splashy taken earlier this year in the Pacific. To keep up to date with all the latest news about Mister Splashy Pants and his friends, sign up for your free Whale Mail newsletter."

*****************

And be sure to get your Mister Splashy Pants t-shirt before the JFA agents traditionally winch his corpse up onto the deck for scientific mincing, then stand amid the bits of former whale and say "We now know Mister Splashy Pants better than when he was merely alive."

Maybe there should be a Japanese Imagination Agency.

R. I. P.

Otis Redding died 40 years ago today, age 26.

THE PERSIMMONS OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Yesterday morning out in the waning mist clearing some more oak limbs, then out along the road stripping vines from where they riff along the tops of the tall kinmokusei in a beautiful autumn arrangement of golden hearts while working to strangle the trunk and limbs below, I hailed an upmountain neighbor, Mr. U., doing much the same thing out on his section of the road, and we got talking abut the goings on of the trees and land, life up here in general.

As we talked I gazed uproad into the demistifying scenery and saw there the wild persimmon trees I know are there but had forgotten about (the mind has its rooms and cupboards), what with all the outdoor and indoor stuff that has been filling my head as I know it.

The persimmons, conducting their own business not far from the roadside, were leafless now and in full display, hung with bright orange globes lit by the slant of morning sun like this was somewhere in the mind of Hieronymus Bosch, or even better, Le Douanier... I resolved to enter that depiction beyond price and grab a bunch of those goldies before the other monkeys got there, the red-faced yet conscienceless ones...

When I finally got up there I took my hand scythe from a cargo pocket of the skateboarder pants I use for gardening (lots of gussets, grommets, big+little pockets, superseams, fabric backup in the right places, built to last), so I could reach higher than pedestrian passersby (mainly mountain hikers and wild fooders) had been reaching; crowded as the trees were, all the low-hanging fruit was already gone. I used the scythe to hook the higher branches down to arm's reach and soon had a bag full of the large and small varieties of bright orange worlds (I also always have a big plastic shopping bag folded up in one of my cargo pockets for wildfooding).

One thing you can say about wild persimmons is that as hieronymous as they may appear from a distance, up close they can be really ugly. But don't let that fool you, it doesn't affect the flavor, seems to enhance it in fact. Wildness is like that; it brings to everything edible that certain flavor edge that is lost in the strictures of domestication. When wild persimmons ripen to softness, especially the tiny ones, there's not much there once you get the peel off, but what there is is really wild.

Flavor you just can't get in a painting.

TO AND FROM TAROBO

Tarobo Shrine, from a distance

A distance, from Tarobo Shrine
(Taken from well beyond the small building
to the left in the upper photo)

FOUND POSTER, MIDDLE AGES SPORTS CLUB

YE OLDE COACHINGE TIPPES

Yea, and in ye game of hoope, seek not so much to honor ye rules of ye game as to perfect ye undetected personall fowles, wherein thy points count even while jamming ye defense; yet avoid like ye plague ye airballes thereof.

Forsooth, though ye three-pointe swishers be most worthy in ye eyes of ye benche, yet flashey slamme dunkes are not to be foresworne as expressing ye attitude whilst sticking it in goodly measure to thy opponent, which is, let us countenance it, ye point of ye game.

Also, leap not, except it be higher than thy opponent, who will otherwise swatte ye ball away quicker than ye committer of maternal inceste.

And be it said that in ye hardeballe, if ye pitcher seeketh to syke thee out, to set thee back on thy heeles, to cowe thy spiritt with ye duster, be thou not afeared, but rather raise up thy batte and gallope toward ye mound in righteous haste, ye while casting loude imprecations toward ye pitcher regarding ye species of his mother; that thou wilt as well rippe his armes off and aroint ye bat up his nether parts and suchlike threatenings, which if thou dost catch ye fiende, thou shalt in facte assay to do, thereby to maintain thy sporting integrity, that in future all pitchers shall think two times before assaying to duste thee back.

And if thou art at bowles, or yet at golfe, as thy opponent addresseth ye pinnes or ye tee shotte, give thou tongue at that moment to a lusty cry, such as "Watch out behind thee!" or "Hark ye goodies on yon damsel, wilt thou!" so as to keep thy score in ratio more suited to ye wager.

Lest the aforesaid be an insufficiency, see that it is thou that keepeth score, for at bottome lyne ye pen is mightier than ye balle, for damme shure.

Lo, regarding any game whatever, heed not the sayers that it is better to playe than to winne; for thou can verily bet thy fundamente that thou art giving eare to losers.

And forsooth, forget thee not that ye final tally is ye point of ye entyre emeffynge endeavore.

Ye Coache

R. Brady

COMMUTER MEDALISTS

Even though commuting involves the highest degrees of skill, grace, finesse, endurance and discipline, it is not officially recognized as an Olympic event, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

No doubt the Olympic Committee, in its top-secret meetings, has considered commuting as perhaps a decathlon-like event, given the multiplicity of skills involved, but they've continued to leave it out of the Olympics not only because of the transient and mobile nature of commuting, but primarily because the Japanese commuter squad would take the gold every time, so what would be the point? Olympic events must at least be competitive.

Having been a twig on the torrent of commuter Olympics here in Japan for some 30 years now, I thought I'd just share with you some of the amazing highlights from over the decades, limited only to my own experience, of course. You other commuters can start your own Commuter Olympic blogs.

This morning, for example, I saw the best Speedslip I have ever seen, the epitome of graceful headlong haste under pressure, while we were stopped briefly at a busy station along the line. From my expertly obtained window seat near the middle of the car, I could see a blurry young man broken-field-running his way through a tightly organized crowd up above, along the walkway leading to the crowded stairs down to the crowded platform we were stopped at: he was attempting to reach this train before the doors closed.

He was a good 30 or 40 yards away as the crow flies, with thousands of world-class defense players and a jammed stairway in between, with but a few seconds left before the doors would close, the train would leave the station without him and the next train would make him late for work (a small death in Japan), so he went for it full-out, running the field with briefcase through a rush hour crowd of defenders with their own briefcases, some of them even had those deadly pull suitcases on wheels that trail invisibly behind the apparently unencumbered player; he was moving fast, against the stream, the buzzer sounded, he was dodging, he was whirling, briefcase swinging, his body was turning, a couple of awesome feints, a record-breaking leap and then he was bounding down the upward disgruntled passenger-filled stairs, the doors were already closing would he make it, a fullbody bound across the platform, a mid-air turn sideways, he Speedslips between the foot-apart-and-closing doors that swish shut behind him - without messing his tie or moving a hair on his head - and takes his rightful place in the carjam. He's good for the gold , if you ask me; I haven't seen that much commuting skill, all in one person, in quite a while.

A couple of other Commuter Olympic highlights:

Most people fit into a 250 passenger car: Sept 14, 1973, Tokyo Station. The white-gloved pushers were working overtime, it was evening rush hour, I was on that train, a lovely young woman and I were pressed chest to chest, she looking over my right shoulder, I looking over hers, she smelled real good. Though the results were unofficial, being mine, I estimated that that 250 passenger capacity car held about 75,000 passengers for the requisite five or more stops; a standing record, I believe.

Other Olympic qualifiers and personal aspects in this unsung nationwide competition:

Complete makeup application dash

Eldest gold medalist

Righteous Inyerfacing

Becoming a Train Legend

IT'S OFFICIAL...

Hello Kitty is now a Shinto deity.

Spotted these Hello Kitty general-purpose omamori at Tarobo (one of Japan's top 10 most beautiful shrines, especially on a day like yesterday; will post of it anon) and they were selling like treacle-covered hotcakes for about twice the price of omamori bearing the conventional blessings of the standard old gods of no brand name, who never made it in show biz or hung around Cameron Diaz...

As I took some pictures in light of my disbelief, one of the shrine clerks said Look! The foreigner is taking pictures of the Hello Kitty omamori! (No one takes pictures of such everyday items as omamori.) Another clerk responded Of course! Because Hello Kitty is so cute! Little did they know my true reason or my opinion of Hello Kitty, the embodiment of cuteness as vapor in a desert. To say nothing of sacrosanctity.

Is nothing sacred? I mean is everything sacred? Sure, you could say, after a few hits of whatever, that everything is sacred, but... EVERYTHING? Then nothing is. The older gods, with millennia of experience under their obi, must be very upset. Look for problems ahead in Japan-- big problems, of oddly indefinite origin, emanating - sort of - from a sacred mountain... If anything is sacred...

NATURAL CEREMONIES

Salt offering
after removal of dying tree