Amazing!! Amazing!! This page is dedicated to interesting things that catch our attention. There is no unifying theme beyond our impression that this stuff is odd, funny, amazing or just totally cool. Cool Stuff 16 December 08 Life In Singapore Smoking in the subway: $1000. Flammable goods: $5000. Eating and Drinking: $500. Durians: Priceless. 11 December 08 Rats! The container ports we visited were very clean, but you know there have to be rats on the waterfront. This is a rubber rope bib, to place over the rope where it leaves the ship to keep rats from boarding ... they haven't paid! Through Thick & Thin In Japan bread is sold in loaves of equal weight, but different number of slices. It usually comes in 4, 6 and 8 slice packages; our favorite is five slice, which, as you see, is hard to find. Glow In The Dark Snack At our favorite Tokyo bar, the featured happy hour snack one night was pickled firefly squid. It was wonderful! And, when we Googled it later, we found out it is wonderful when it's not pickled. Check it out here! 20 November 08 Most Valuable Player After the Seibu Rabbits beat the Shanghai Sharks in ice hockey tonight, there was a ceremony for the MVP, a "wascally wabbit" named Prpic. Really. After a few remarks, he was handed two cases of vegetables for his scoring efforts. He reached inside and grabbed a bunch of spinach and thrust it triumphantly into the air! Yes! Greens! Actually, it looks like maybe he's wondering what to do with a year's supply of carrots. 11 November 08 Transition Dan asked us why we didn't consider the US election to be "Cool Stuff". And he's right! The smooth transition of power of any democracy is a wonder. But this election has been even more historic. Many believe that during the Bush years the US tipped too far away from American ideals, and in one day "righted itself". So, join us in celebrating our new president. Vote one more time! 4 November 08 Reflections On Art We are looking at a sculpture made from Chinese roof tiles at an art gallery in Kobe Japan. It is in a glass enclosed courtyard one wall of which is blackened steel panels. This is our reflection through the glass, off the steel and back through the glass. Chinese Traffic Drill On the street going by Peking University we saw ... Think about it. 9 October 08 Wounded Pride We met this gentleman by his van, complaining of the orange and gold "leaf" on his windshield. This sign must be dislayed by all drivers in Japan over the age of 75 to alert others drivers. He was complaining that it was age discrimination, because the sign implied that his driving was poor, even if it is not. We have since found out that older drivers are furious about the regulation for another reason.Teenage beginning drivers must display a bright green leaf. The gold and orange colors emphasize too strongly the end of life! So, he was happy to give away one of his colored leaves! 5 October 08 Earth At Night APOD -- Astronmy Picture of the Day -- did it again! Here is a composite satellite photo of the earth at night. Click on it. Can you find your light? Check out North Korea ... the darkness thunders the "hardship" endured by these oppressed people. 2 October 08 Disk Space The picture below is of an IBM 1301 Disk (hard drive, but that's not what they called them then). It was the size of two refrigerators and was delivered to the computer center L worked at in July 1964. It cost $150,000. It stored 58 megabytes. We bought a disk the size of a hardback novel just before coming to Japan, it cost $200 and stored 1 terabyte (trillion bytes) of information. Comparing these two disks: 1964 Disk: $27,800,000 per gigabyte 2008 Disk: $0.20 per gigabyte Thanks for the memories! Wart Hog Down the street is a drooling warthog! We bet your neighborhood doesn't have one! With help from Tomoko, we know that this is a copy of a statue in Florence by Pietro Tacca, and it is the symbol of the company, Pigeon, that displays it. If you rub its nose, supposedly, you will be blessed with luck, finance and babies! 19 September 08 Convenience Food The convenience store near our house (7-11) sells individually wrapped marshmallows with chocolate in the centers. Now if we could only find Graham crackers! 31 August 08 Dating Scene A long forgotten photo turned up as we digitized our slides. It was taken during the University of Iowa Homecoming weekend in 1966. J is wearing one of her all-time favorite dresses and L has on a tie! We must have been going to a party, but neither of us remembers the date. Meteors Over Vancouver A spectacular photo of the Perseid Meteor shower over Vancouver made the Astronmy Picture of the Day. Check it out! 24 . July . 08 Sign Language The signage on the University of British Columbia campus is generally informative. This sign, located on a short street leading to the lovely campus rose garden, is an art installation! The text at bottom reads, "Hock E Ave VI Edgar Heap of Birds 2007". Camping Gear Miracle Dave recently got some new camping gear, and tried it out for the first time. "So, how did your new gear work out? Are your pots black yet?" "The stove works like a dream. The pots worked well. Unfortunately they stayed fairly clean, which I think distracts from their authenticity. The frypan, however, does have two ghost-like sausage halos on it. One might see the virgin mary in them, had the virgin mary been a dachshund." Iowa Moutaineer We are digitizing our 35mm slides and it's revealing long-forgotten photos. This photo, taken when L was 18, followed an aborted attempt to climb Symmetry Spire in the Grand Teton National Park of Wyoming. As the "technical rock" part began, a blizzard came up, complete with lightening, so the mountaineers returned to camp. 07 . July . 08 The Writer's Life To send best wishes and encouragement for L's next book-writing project, his assistant, Judy Watson, sent a card with the following quote from the famed Southern author Flannery O'Conner (1925 - 1964): Everywhere I go I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. Rebar Extension Cord When Jeff Paradee returned on leave from Afghanistan, he told several amazing stories. "I was at a job site where the [Afghanistani] contractor was using an electric saw to cut a pie. But he didn't have enough extension cord, or power for that matter. So he used what cord he had, hooked it up to a welder, and when he needed additional length, he used a 40ft piece of rebar [12 m steel rod] to get power to his saw. One of our favorite sayings is 'You can't make this stuff up'." Jeff also pointed out that the secret to land ownership in Afghanistan is to find some open space and build a wall around it. The result is predicable. (This is a color picture.)