7.September.08 We are living in Tokyo now. We have an 11th floor apartment overlooking central Tokyo, two subway stops east of the Ginza. We have two rooms (42.6 m^2 total), a balcony, a rice cooker with a kitchen attached, the usual electronics, and a cleaning lady. It's very comfortable. (L takes the subway three stops to the National Institute of Informatics.) Tokyo is an exciting place to live! On weekends the Ginza (Tokyo's 5th Avenue) is closed for pedestrians. As we sat people-watching in front of Tiffany & Co., which is being renovated, this Buddhist supplicant walked by in his one-step-and-stop shuffle, tinkling his tiny bell, begging. No one on this fashionable street gave him alms ... could it be his hat? News & Notes Dan reports on the rigors of college teaching: "One of my students spells 'shark' with a T." He didn't say where in the word the T appeared. One of our favorite companies in the world is Yamato delivery service. On arrival at Narita Airport we left our heavy bags with them and scheduled delivery 3 days later at our apartment. The white gloved delivery man phoned from the neighborhood office to be sure we were in, rolled our possessions to our door, put them on the elevator, and hand deliered them inside the apartment. What a guy! "Black Cat" Man On leaving a restaurant we were handed an advertising flyer for Summerland Water Adventure Park. It included the following notice in Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese. As a general rule people affiliated with mobsters or ciminal organizations are not allowed to enter the premises. The same applies to people wearing tattoos. This rule will become effective on 1 July 2008 and applies to the entire premises of Tokyo Summerland. People found to be ignoring the above rule will be asked to leave.
Did you know that there are a dozen popular browser programs? Most of these are "open source" browsers, which means they are free and usually much SAFER, FASTER and more up-to-date than Internet Explorer. The best of the "open source" browsers is FireFox. Our Coordinates Page works best with Firefox. Get a free copy of Firefox in your favorite language ... we are sure you will like it. Permission: We have been eager to use pictures of our friends or taken by our friends, because we like them. Perhaps we have not always asked permission to use them. If you do not want your picture displayed on our Web page, please tell us. We'll take it down.