the last 5 pictures on my phone

Well, I am a little embarrassed to say that I am a (in-the-closet) ZIMA lover. When it came out in Canada, I never had a chance to try it, because it was rejected by the beer-drinking Canadian men so quickly. (What 3 months? Barely...) Here it is not so common, but when you drink it with a slice of lemon, it's fantastically refreshing! Go ZIMA!

The canals during a light snow. The picture has a washed out look to it, as if it were taken in a different age.

2am hanging measurements

an abandonned marketplace, covered with tarps because of nearby construction. The whole place looks like a bio-hazard containment site.

A happy accident...

Winter can be so beautiful sometimes...

So cold even Jesus was wearing a hat.

This an icicle on Oyama Shrine. The thing it is frozen around is a traditional drain to remove water from the roof...damn...er, what`s that thing called in English again?

Walking through Kenroku'en...

...There was still greenery underneath everything.

The sun came out suddenly...

...Then disappeared...

...behind an enormous pagoda.

(a giant mushroom?)

Happy Valentines!

As I mentioned before, Valentine's Day is a guys' holiday in Japan. Girls give guys chocolate. So in celebration, here are some funny Engrish pics.

Translation: Creamy collon! mmmmmm...delicious tube of cream.

Remi licking the cream out of the collon. Wowza!

alphabetic poetics

something cool I found: The old Japanese syllabary was arranged to form a kinda of poem.

now it goes か　き　く　け　こ、　さ　し　す　せ　そ　(ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, shi, su, se, so); arranged by the sound.

The old one goes:

いろはにほへと　(i, ro, ha, ni, ho, he, to) Even the blooming flowers
ちりぬるを　　　(chi, ri, nu, ru, wo) Will eventually fade
わかよたれそ　　(wa, ka, yo, ta, re, so) Even our world
つねならむ　　　(tsu, ne, na, ra, mu) Is not eternal
うゐのおくやま　(u, wi, no, o, ku, ya, ma) Deep in the mountains
けふこえて　　　(ke, fu, ko, e, te) Cross them today
あさきゆめみし　(a, sa, ki, yu, me, mi, shi) And superficial dreams
ゑひもせす　　　(e, hi, mo, se, su) Shall no longer delude you.

the eternal return of the internet

Ok. The strangest thing just happened to me. While surfing the net, I found a small piece I wrote in high school (?) about buying a pet monkey, who had a penchant for punching people in the balls, and teaching him how to drive. I remember sending it to my friend, Byron, who laughed his ass off and proceeded to forward it to some other people. Little did I realise that once something hits cyberspace it becomes an ephemeral bird, free of all bonds. This silly story I wrote has been copied and pasted so many times that I hardly recognised it when I saw it. It was like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. The entire essence was so different, altered by countless thousands of teenagers (no doubt!), but I still recognised some of the lines...and the first sentence was almost the same.

This experience made me realise anyone who tries to control information on the internet is either a cyber-stalin, or a half-brained twit. And that goes especially for the recording industry. I honestly believe that this info becomes its own self-replicating organism. It no longer has an owner, and barely has a creator since often the ideas pop out of the collective cyber-conscience. Rather it has co-authors, or co-engineers and contributors. What we adoringly refer to as "our series of tubes" amounts to the majority of collected human information and experience. It is therefore meant to be shared, copied-and-pasted millions of times until it becomes the uncountable electric flow that pulse-pulses through every computer in every household and business. Anything on the internet can never be destroyed once it is there. Unless there is some complete collapse of human civilization and all it's infrastructure, internet information will be humanity's eternal monument — copied, linked, file-shared, saved, and downloaded in perpetuum.