~~~~~~~~~


US BUSY MAKING FRIENDS OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE, SPREADING GOODWILL THROUGHOUT THE REGION

"US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops."

--Who of course have every right to be there, and are justly shocked at being targets of an unfairly resistant local populace. The jazz is a morbid Apocalypse Now touch.

"Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: 'It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth.'"

At least they're not using agent orange. They aren't using napalm either; napalm is made with gasoline. They're using a not-napalm made with kerosene. Smells different; leaves good will behind.

[Story here, with thanks to Ron Andrews for the nudge.]

~~~~~~~~~


CAN A UNIVERSE LAUGH?

Throughout my life I have generally tried not to irritate the universe and its larger components, though there have been times, particularly in certain boneheaded regions of my youth, when I dared the big U to have at me one-on-one, but ever since my miraculous survival I have generally tried to stay on the good side of what can in effect squash me like a bug with any one of its infinite little fingers.

When you build your house high on a mountainside above a lake, though, with the nearest wind-breaking land formation some hundreds of kilometers away, you're in effect daring the universe to go ahead, see if you can blow me and my stuff off the mountain, just try it, which is not exactly what I had wished to say to anything so big at my age, or planned to seek to prevent when I decided to live here.

Which is what the universe was trying to do, using the much more it had at hand, this afternoon where I had earlier stacked my barrel staves out in the wind tunnel for easy chainsaw access, and foolishly desired to protect them from the elements with tarps held down by rocks and big barrels staves and logs, which items the big typhoon flicked off without even breathing hard.

This irked me. I rashly insisted that the staves remain covered no matter what the damn wind wanted, and for some reason the universe didn't like that. It didn't like that at all. Maybe it was my attitude, but as soon as those tarps blew off I was out there cussing and ready to go like at some bully bothering my kids. No I'm not backing down, no way; go ahead universe, hit me with your best shot. Not a good thing to say to a universe.

It is not commonly known that barrel staves take on new properties in a 120 mph gusting wind, as do rocks and logs, generally so morbidly passive in their addiction to gravity. But when propelled by tarps unfolded into flapping acreage by a sudden mini-typhoon that surprises even the weather man (it was only here for an hour, but what an hour), they take on a new and very ballistic grace, and become very target oriented.

As I held on to one or the other end, and then the one end again, of a tarp unfolding in all directions billowing and bucking like it was full of bulls trying to leap off the mountain while chucking rocks and logs and big oaken barrel staves at this foolish human trying to pin it all to the ground with those very items, I suddenly felt strangely mythological. Using my mythological wiles (not the smarmy ones I learned in school, the other ones), I finally managed to narrowly pull off a sort of quasi-victory.

Or so I thought. But the universe has always had a bigger perspective than even mythological egos can muster. And it does not forget. When I looked out the window later, I saw that the big wind had simply toppled the other woodpile out back and gone away, leaving rain pouring on it. I could swear I heard a distant whispery laughter in the leaves, but it must've been only the last of the wind. Universes can't laugh, can they?

~~~~~~~~~


NUMBING DOWN

"'Kill Bill' rife with fun, bloodshed" Is that an American entertainment headline or what? "Blood doesn't simply spurt. It erupts in geysers and rains down on dead bodies." Desensitivity training continues apace. Training to what end? The rest of the world wonders.

~~~~~~~~~

orange brush stroke
upon the lake
rising moon

~~~~~~~~~


I MUST TAKE THIS COURSE

"Clutter tolerance seems to run a fever cycle, much like the flu. Every so often, the cluttered household will become intolerable, sparking the home manager to brief, massive anti-clutter spasms. Piles will be shifted, boxes will be filled, stuff will be stashed--until the fever breaks. Then the clutter tide flows back in, confusion redoubled because of the flushed and furious attempts to get a grip in a hurry.

Just as clutter arises gradually, over time, so it must be fought gradually and over time. Beating clutter requires building new habits, applying new organizational methods, and creating new household routines. The clutter cure takes time, and can't be short-cut."

Excerpt from Declutter 101 at OrganizedHome

With clutterless thanks to Anita Rowland for the link.

~~~~~~~~~


NECTAR OF THE BOB

Today I finally got a morning to harvest the several square meters of basil I was beginning to feel nervous about because I've been tenterhooked in the city the past two mornings as we near the time of the first frost, when the dawn air can suddenly take on a sharpness too sharp for what is basically a Mediterranean plant and one morning you go out to your green banners of basil and find a black brown shrivel. But I was on time this morning, maybe even a little early, so I just cut the large tops off (I love the way basil leaves curl so voluptuously in their green sheen, like they just can't contain the delicious beauty they embody), leaving thirds to perhaps grow out in the next few days if I'm frost lucky.

In previous years I've used much of my Genovese basil (I grow mainly Genovese and Spicy Globe) to make pesto (with pine nuts, garlic, walnuts, olive oil, parmeggiano and salt), and it is really prize-winningly deliciously soulfillingly fantastic when made with fresh Genovese basil, but it's so good it's gone in a week.

Last year I decided to try something new: I separately packed the Genovese leaves and Spicy Globe stems/leaves in olive oil. I pack the basil in and then fill the jar with oil. I can then use the basil for some months until it reduces to a kind of sludge that settles to the bottom, when the oil itself becomes darker and exquisitely fragrant with the essence of basil (just imagine that!); I use a small amount of that very flavored oil in salads or to flavor larger volumes of olive oil for cooking.

When I opened one small jar in the back of the cupboard that I'd forgotten about for 8 months or so, the top of the oil was covered with a fine pure-white mold like that on camembert or brie; when I lifted the mold off like a cm-thick white hockey puck, what shimmered beneath was the legendary Nectar of the Bob. The oil is very dark green, yet still clear. Needless to say I don't have much left, so this new batch will cure just in time to fulfill the deep nectarian needs of said Bob.

THE CUTE THAT HAS NO NAME

None of the great philosophers has ever directly addressed the cute; cuteness has never been the subject of virulent debate. Historically, discussions of cuteness have largely been confined to bubble-gum chewers and teen magazines, which fact has by default exposed modern Japanese society to infection by a pathogenic cuteness of such malignance as to put at risk all that is truly beautiful.

This terminal cuteness, even now eating at the vitals of the country, sapping its very lifeblood, is nothing like the vacant western cuteness of anguished clowns painted on velvet, or weeping ragamuffins with stylized cowlicks and eyes as big as dinner plates; it is even more relentless than the corrosively kitschy cuteness that is burying mad collectors in matching salt and pepper shakers; it supersedes the Disney cuteness of sexless animals yearning for their mothers, it is cute with a big C, a big U, a big T, a big E, in bold and throbbing hi-glo pink neon-ribboned letters underlined in red and gold, with heart-shaped fireworks going off behind it and a background medley of the cutest melodies of the decade...

It is The Cute that Has No Name; it is the neocute, the hypercute, the manic cute, the pathocute, the cute beyond belief and without cessation, the cute that knows no limits, it is everywhere and spreading; soon it will be coming for you, it is in this region now; in this very neighborhood, is there no defense, is there no escape as it comes bouncing smarmily up the stairs, oozing through the keyhole, treacling across the floor toward me; it is occupying my body, changing my shoes, my clothes, my hairstyle, my taste, my mind! And I believe: yes! It's happened! Now I'm cute too!

~~~~~~~~~


YESSS!!!

~~~~~~~~~


URBAN HOMESTEADING DIARY

"We have attempted to grow as much of our own food as possible in the city... In our society growing food yourself has become the most radical of acts. It is truly the only effective protest, one that can--and will--overturn the corporate powers that be. By the process of directly working in harmony with nature, we do the one thing most essential to change the world--we change ourselves."

Path to Freedom.

~~~~~~~~~


PANDORA'S DNA

Hope you don't live and garden near this farm, or plan to eat anything that has corn in it.

~~~~~~~~~


SEEING TO JAPAN'S FUTURE

Racial hatred being compounded of ignorance and self-loathing, this psychopathic Japanese grammar school teacher is apparently unaware of his anciently Korean-Polynesian ancestry and pathologically hateful of his own person, no doubt for solid reasons. Probably a rabid fan of Tokyo Governor Ishihara.

~~~~~~~~~


FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE TOUCHSTONE THING

Thoughtful comments on my previous post got me to recalling the oh-so-many years ago when I lived in Tokyo in a big old rambly western style house in a temple garden (nowadays fergeddit). One of the come-and-go residents (there were many), a French-Algerian named Andre, had picked up an old pachinko machine from one of the peripatetic sellers of used discarded pachinko machines you can still see now and again along the roadside, with the big truck open and the pachinko machines spilling out, a few thousand yen apiece or so.

Andre put the machine in the big sun room and in that house full of visitors there was always someone playing it, day or night. To play it was mesmerizing in what I felt to be a gnawingly unpleasant way, like taking time and just flushing it down the toilet. Which in my youth I did quite often in various ways, but happily never at such length.

Nowadays, every time I pass a newly electronified pachinko parlor I remark the packed parking lot (out in the country) or look in through the windows (in the city) at the shoulder-to shoulder crowds, just to purge that itching sense of profound disbelief that rises every time at the imminent sight of all those people sitting there looking at little steel balls rising and falling in smoky thickness for hours and hours on end (they also have automatic machines, that you can just set, then sit back and watch), even leaving their young children in the car or in the parking lot while they do so (incidents of infants dying in overheated cars or disappearing from pachinko parking lots are numerous enough to comprise a distinct news genre).

Mornings as I'm on my way to the office in Osaka I sometimes pass by a big city pachinko parlor where there's always a crowd of futureless and virtually yenless young men, old men and old women gathered early out back in the garage to get the extra-ball coupons the parlor passes out before opening. The players-to-be then sit on the floor in maze formation, coupons in hand, awaiting the opening of the doors to be first at their favorite machines, looking forward to moments that are, sad to say, hopeful enough for them to call happiness.

~~~~~~~~~


THE TOUCHSTONE OF MODERN JAPANESE CULTURE

Oh, how I hate to say this. The touchstone of modern Japanese culture is not the bold samurai spirit of bushido resurrecting in the nine iron; nor is it the exquisitely varied traditional architecture now being re-sided with imaginatively beige tile; nor yet the multiply subtle cooking now degenerating viscously into double cheeseburgers with max fries, pizzas and extra-large cokes. The true touchstone of modern Japanese culture is: (offtone cowbell, please) the pachinko parlor.

The reason I bring up this tasteless subject (apart from just having visited the Miho Museum) is that right up the road from the new, garish and madly popular pachinko parlor with the huge multilevel, always-mobbed parking lot in Katata, where Basho and Hiroshige used to hang out (not at the pachinko place; back then they had better things to do and better reasons to do them), which parlor is not far downroad from another equivalently garish parlor, and so on all the way north or south to Kyoto or the Japan Sea, or along any other well-traveled highway in Japan-- where was I?

Ah yes: right up the road from the old madly popular pachinko parlor, and right down the road from the new madly popular pachinko parlor: on a prime corner location some daring modern-day entrepreneurs have thrown business caution to the winds, boldly tossed conservatism onto the smoldering bonfire of change, and taken the radical step of opening, believe it or not, a pachinko parlor!!

Only this one is garishly multicolored, as opposed to plain old architectural-flash garish and bright-neon-light garish. Garishness is, as you may have concluded, is the primary characteristic of pachinko parlors, compounded by Niagara noise and unregulated-factory smoke levels.

You see them everywhere now, with more springing up overnight like day-glow mushrooms, these oases of low-grade Vegas (if you win more than, say, 10,000 steel balls you can trade them in for a dozen cigarette lighters or something; it is said that some make a living at it. I say it's sad to call that living.)

As I drove by the newly opening color-garish one, its employees stood outside beneath umbrellas in the pouring rain wearing their gambling establishment type uniforms, screaming at the top of their lungs perhaps the corporate philosophy, more likely invitations to the gambling-prone. When I went by an hour later, they were still screaming. Ah, the price of inventiveness and creative living!!

~~~~~~~~~


MIHO MUSEUM GETS MY VOTE

Well the Miho Museum gets my vote as the most beautiful museum in the world. We went there over the weekend, along the long mountain road and then on foot through the magical tunnel, across the stunning cabled bridge through the trees to the mystical opening in the hillside [architect I. M. Pei based his design for the Miho on the legend of Momotaro (Peach Boy)] to see the temporary exhibition of Autumnal Japanese traditional arts, of which there is a superb selection, chosen and arranged as only the folks at the Miho seem able to do it.

At the Miho there is a deep respect for the things displayed, not in the conventional bureaucratic, city/institution-funded, haven't-we-got-a-treasure-here glass cases against the wall, with bad lighting and crowded arrangements ("space is expensive"); rather, all is selected with taste and arranged with respect that can only spring from deep and genuine appreciation, never from merely following a schedule or fulfilling a contract.

The subtleties of coloring that characterized what pleased the eye before aniline dyes and industrial pigments was so splendidly shown that you could almost taste the beauty so artfully arrayed. Plain to see what has been lost in the maelstrom of progress.

Nor did the permanent Asia/Middle East exhibition suffer by comparison, or from repeated visits. Each time I visit the Miho I am awed anew by the early Buddhas, who look like forthright, worldly leading men, not the idly pudgy esoterics that came after.

And the displays aren't crowded, but arranged in historical plays of darkness and light that bring out every nuance. Then there's the architecture, and the environs; Kaya loved the fairytale tunnel, the varied hand postures of the Buddhas, the life-sized statues from Egypt, the smooth, cool marble floors and the big wooden benches, ideal for holding her sketchpad while she drew pictures of Ampanman.

Nothing for it but to visit the Miho and see for yourself before the annual closing from mid-December to mid-March.

~~~~~~~~~


GEORGIE'S ROAD MAP LEADS RIGHT UP YOUR TAILPIPE.

GATHERINGS

Spent yesterday gathering a bucketful of chestnuts with Kaya, who stood and watched as I winkled the sleek brown throughbred beauties out of their porcupine husks with my boot toes, then she picked them up with the tongs and dropped them into the bucket with a very special quantity of satisfaction. When we were done she lugged the bucketful up to the house and gave it to Echo, filling the whole house with the pride of a task well accomplished. We then went to the park and tackled the long slide, after which Kaya napped while I sectioned the long whiskey barrel staves with the chainsaw, smelling fine whiskey all the while on the big snifter that is the air. At last when my right arm gave out (cutting stacked barrel staves with a chainsaw is basically a one-handed chainsaw operation) and I was wrapping it up, the wind was picking up to a good mountain howl when I spotted the mother lode of mukago revealed in the slant of evening sunlight. The lode was laced through the pulled-over tops of the bamboo just the other side of the cherry/pine firewood stack, upon which I climbed and stood teeter-hunched in the sunlit wind exploring the vast and deep fragrant tangle of green heart-leaved vines for the silvery air potatoes hidden here and there in the shadows like silver nuggets in the ground. When you harvest wild things that you suddenly find in abundance they just take you over, it's so much fun your self won't tell you when to stop; thank goodness pockets fill up and it gets dark, or I'd be out there yet.


Today we leave early for an overnight trip to Shigaraki and the Miho Museum.

~~~~~~~~~


A BIG AMERICAN EMBARRASSMENT PRAISES A SMALL AMERICAN EMBARRASSMENT
How do these types float to the top?

~~~~~~~~~


SHORTCOMINGS

Given the abrupt tumescence in my email, I can't help but be surprised at all the male shortcomings in the world these days, and how everything from the environment to international relations appears to be rooted, so to speak, in the dimensional aspects of what until recently was by nature a rather reclusive organ.

But not any more: they're waving it all over the place now, and not just the men. I learn much more of all this, in all its disappointing brevity, from the dozens of dozens of emails I receive every day from Mindy Maneater, among others. I've also gotten quite a few from Leland Compton, who until just a little while ago had serious dimensional problems with his personal parameters, but thanks to his miracle drug they are all growing apace; soon he will be in the minority vis-a-vis his physical person, and good luck to him getting on the bus.

I had been living quite happily in ignorance of the fact that these obsessions, formerly wrapped in strictly plain brown paper and delivered to other mailboxes, are held by people we see every day, people who give lousy service, ticket our vehicles, audit our taxes or hold high office: real people, with names like Maggie Friedman, Bruno Gagne, Lucinda Lugo, Dina Soto, Michael Myers, Ashlee Fernandez, Kenny Clifton, Nannie Kirby, Lauri Stephenson, Jerrod Sneed-- the list gets longer, though the width stays about the same.

This means that everybody you see on the street or anywhere else (except maybe the cemetery) could be experiencing, from one direction or another, serious dimensional concerns. People of all sexes, all walks of life and from every dimensionally obsessed country in the world (excepting relatives of recently deceased Nigerian officals; must be something in the water) are every day emailing everyone else on all aspects of this admittedly key organ and what they want from it.

What they tacitly admit to in these plentiful but brief emissions seems to indicate a general dissatisfaction in regard to length, width, girth, endurance, and other qualities normally attributed to blue steel. Personally, I'm surprised that so many people suffer from such problems. I seem to be one of the rare exceptions, even though I've never been to Nigeria.

And all these people have what they obviously consider to be serious dimensional handicaps, some of which are small, so to speak, and some of which really loom right out there, as in the aforementioned pitiable case of Leland Compton, who will likely have to stay at home for the rest of his life or get a new doorway and special transport, if he can ever get a job with that miracle in the way.

Then on the other end of the very short spectrum there's the sad hunger of Nicole Yumyum, whose width and length requirements appear to rival the interstate highway system, so she keeps busy by sending millions of email organs into the world. Someone should introduce her to Leland.

Anyway, to unzip the fly, as it were, on all this formerly shadowy stuff, whose salespersons sprinkle their subject lines with such psychological come-ons, so to speak, as "manhood," "dysfunction," "enlarge," "dramatic," "self-esteem," "longer and stronger, "please her" and "enhancement" (the creativity, the creativity!!), maybe it's a form of projection they're engaging in, sadly assuming as they do that the rest of the world is just as deficient as they are, that we share their so to speak shortcomings, so maybe they can make some quick bucks off the suckers with the short attention spans.

But then again maybe it's only Bruno, Lucinda, Kenny and the rest of the metrically challenged crew who have to work so hard to forget the profound anguish integral to their lack of dimension, about which I'd know nothing, if they didn't keep telling me.

~~~~~~~~~


THE TWINS: THE ENIGMA GROWS

My newborn twin granddaughters, Mitsuki (Full Moon) and Miasa (Beautiful Hemp), have now grown into their own faces, and it has become pretty clear to me that they are not, in fact, identical.

I suspected as much earlier, based on the shapes of their ears and other factors, but since they had just been born and were as yet not really formed, I agreed with the identical school, since Mitsuki and Miasa were of the same sex and there had been only one placenta, with two umbilical cords.

Miki-san, the well-experienced midwife, who because of other slight differences in the twins had also initially suspected that they might be fraternal (from two original eggs, with two distinct placentas) had carefully examined the placenta and declared the twins to be identical (from one egg divided into two eggs, nourished from one placenta via two umbilical cords). I accepted her judgement, backed up by this quote from another professional source I found later:

"But fraternal twins are two babies from two ovulations and two fertilizations -- there must be two sacs and two placentas. So in summary, a set of identical twins may present with only one sac, or with doubling of everything; fraternal twins must have a doubling of everything."

This was further affirmed by a medical discovery I noted in the news some days later, in which it was announced that for the first time in medical history, fraternal twins had been born with a single placenta, which the researchers surmised must have originally been two placentas that had merged into one. They attributed this to its having been an in vitro fertilization, since this phenomenon had never been seen in natural fraternal twins.

But Mitsuki and Miasa had been born naturally. If they are fraternal, then theirs would be the first known natural single-placenta birth of fraternal twins in medical history. Not bad for a couple of cuties not yet two months old. My scientific inquiry continues...

~~~~~~~~~


STARTING EARLY

Kaya's snacks, like those of her mother when she was a child, have always been sweet potatos, rice crackers, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, popcorn, natto straight out of the package if you can believe it, fruit, nuts, her "soft" drinks various herb teas and home-made fruit drinks. As a result, Kaya's palate remains unmutated by artificial flavor enhancements, to the extent that she enjoys subtleties I can only dream of (I got a late start on all this).

So when last night she and I walked through the new supermarket to check it out, as we passed along the aisles that were arranged to ambush the little kids, draw them screaming out of their carriages or away from their mothers, saying "I want these cookies!!" "Buy me this candy!" "Can I have some soda?", Kaya just walked quietly by my side, looking casually around at the bright packaging everywhere.

She didn't run toward the boxes of chocolate or reach for potato chips or scream for cookies or yell for Coke, because she didn't know what they were! When we got home she had a snack of gemmae mochi (brown rice paste) sprinkled with slightly sweetened soybean flour, and was happy as a kid with a double scoop of chocolate ice cream in a big glass of Pepsi with Oreos on the side. Healthier too.

~~~~~~~~~


AMAZING THAT THIS IS NEWS.

Study says antibiotics raise kids' allergy risk
Finds prescription before six months doubles chance of asthma by age 7

Doesn't that mean that all those kids were guinea pigs?