Spiderman is hanging out on the Nagoya TV Tower for ten days this month.

Around a decade ago (my gosh, I can't believe it was that long ago),
my friend Grant and I filmed this video called Já, which maybe silly
at the time, now seems like a brilliant piece of work. The internet
is full of all kinds of worthless, silly videos like cats playing
with forks or whatever, but this, my friends, this is good stuff.
Please watch, and enjoy. And by the way, if the google video
player doesn't show up for you below, you can click here to see
the video directly.

On Saturday, a friend from San Francisco, Jeff, visited me in Nagoya. Even though he was here for only about 10 hours and the weather was rainy at times, we did a lot. We visited Midland Square, the new megabucks tower next to Nagoya Station,
ate three kinds of Nagoya specialties,

visited the Robot Museum, and went down to Nagoya Port and the Italian Village and some some turtles.

Thanks for stopping by, Jeff! Come again soon.

Well, last weekend I started to seek the blooming flowers, and they weren't too hard to find. In Meijo Koen （名城公園）I was already able to find maybe four different kinds of flowers. I honestly can't tell the difference between ume (plum) and sakura (cherry) blossoms, but my best guess is that all of these pictures are plum except for the last one.

This past weekend, my coworkers and many students came out for my birthday. Here are photos. Great food, drinks, and karaoke! Perfect. Thanks all for coming! BTW, this was my third party on or near my birthday, with one more coming. I am very lucky to have so many friends!

This is a great site, where these two guys Ben and Nate are taking a gastronomic tour of Asia. They've already done Japan and Korea, and they've already tried a few things I haven't yet, like whale and that raw chicken. It will be interesting to see how the food in the rest of Asia compares to what they've already had in Japan and Korea.

So the other night I went out to an izakaya not far from most regular izakayas, but I happened to see stuff like this:

There were six-year-olds and younger wrestling with adults. And here, at this place, you can have a beer, or some edamame, or some smoked salmon, or even smoke a cigarette if you wanted, and watch these children engage in this adult-style fighting tactics in a real live pro-wrestling size, shape, and equipment having ring. I even got to go in and make some faces myself.

And my friend got to wrestle, but she got pinned herself:

This, combined with the previous chickens in a tree, just makes me realize Japan is a place with much to be explored.

Trying out the streaming media functionality that my host provides. Here is a recording I made from my mp3 player of my subway train coming when I go to work (Meijo line, counterclockwise):

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

And here is the song it plays on the way home (Meijo line, clockwise). Now this song I nicked off of this video of some silly gaijin doing a video about Tokyo. The video was lame, but it was the best recording of the song I'd heard so far:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Now, I'd be interested in knowing if this didn't work for you. I've tested it out in a recent version of Firefox and IE. But if they don't work for you, let me know what errors you get. ありがとう！

On Sunday, as the second day in a three-day weekend, I went to Ise (pronounced /ee-say/) in Mie Prefecture, home of the most important shrine in Japan, and took a bunch of pictures starting here. Let me start right out by saying that every once in a while, you will see something you never expected you would ever see. Well, in Ise, I saw such an vision. That is, I saw chickens sitting in a tree. It might be the most incredible sight I have ever seen in my life. I still haven't gotten over the shock, the thrill, the elation of seeing this. Here it is:

OK, so anyway, there are many shrines in Ise, and millions of Japanese come every year (6 million a year or so) to visit them. Especially the big one, 内宮　(naiguu). When I went, it was a throng of humanity:

Sugoi hito desu ne! Anyways, besides the many shrines, Ise is famous for udon. There is this old-style town there where you go to a shokken (a manual one, with a real person, not a machine) and get a wooden tab with a number on it. It was difficult to hear the number because there was taiko drumming going on about 10 feet away at the same time.

The noodles were delicious. I also had some other festival foods, a cucumber on a stick, crab on a stick, and some amazake, which is a hot drink made from fermented rice. It's got an interesting, lumpy texture and is kind of sweet. No alcohol to speak of in it, so it's even used as baby food.
Here is a picture of me eating some kimuchi yakisoba okonomiyaki taken by a beautiful kind stranger:

I also found four Energy Gym machines.
And also, a cool VW dealership. Did I mention there were chickens up a tree? This man explained to his son that the kamisama (god of the shrine) put them up there. OK, but why? Why would a divine entity take the time out of protecting the people of Japan to put chickens in a tree? WHY?

I've talked previously about how obsessed I am with this drink. But I don't think I've expressed how I take a photo (with my keitai) of many of the vending machines ( 自動販売機 ) that carry this miracle beverage. Oh, and another wonderful thing about Fukuoka that I didn't mention is that the place is lousy with Energy Gym Dydo machines! I actually wasn't able to take a picture of every Energy Gym Dydo that I saw there. That city has a lot going for it - ramen and Energy Gym, and something else I'll mention soon. So far, the closest one to where I work is about a 12-minute walk, kind of far for this cold weather. But I have found one near Meijo Koen, not too far from my apartment. But oh, to live in Fukuoka, where there are Energy Gym machines like every 100 yards!!!