Tea break

Tea break, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

James taking a short break from digging.

The tsunami turned many people's lives upside down. That must be why, no matter which way I turn my iPod, this photo stays this way up.

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Personal Width

Actually I think this is wrong. Your seat should be = max(width of bottom, width of shoulders). A related issue is that, in trains people often fall asleep on the shoulder of their neighbour. In a way this is cute as it seems so trusting, but after a while it gets annoying. If the sleeper is elbowed hard enough they will sometimes start leaning the other way, and then it become a competition between the people on either side as to who is prepared to be the most violent. Only rarely does this cause the sleeper to actually wake up.  

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Big business

Big business, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

The digger companies must be doing very well. It feels a bit like some post apocalyptic movie in which the machines have taken over the ghost towns...

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Shrine polishers

Shrine polishers, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

The two at the front are quite cute, although they have fewer teeth than one might hope for.

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Deep Cleaning

Deep Cleaning, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

By the end of the day it looked very clean to my coarse foreign eyes, but apparently there are several more days of deep cleaning required before it is fit for the annual festival on Friday. Being up a huge flight of stairs the damage here is a bit of earthquake plus six months of vegetative neglect, rather than tsunami. The village below is obliterated, of course.

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Follow the Hat

Shinjuku Station, one of the busiest in the world. It is on the West side of Tokyo so is the gateway to everywhere.

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Kamakura Daibutsu on holiday

Kamakura Daibutsu on holiday, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Back in Tohoku, today we found the Kamakura Daibutsu doing zazen on the tsunami wall, which now sits only about a metre above sea level.

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Technorama Jubilee

 

 While many Japanese are undressed without a camera round their necks, it is rare to see a senior Japanese gentlemen this well dressed.  This is a Linhof Technorama Jubilee, and only about 100 were made... nicely coordinated hat, shirt and trews too...

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Big Beetle

A big green beetly thing in タマムシ  "jewel beetle" (Chrysochroa fulgidissima)

From Wikipedia:

"Tamamushi-iro

Since this bug has iridescent wings that glow lengthwise with different colors depending from the light angle, one cannot be sure about which color it exacly is. Therefore it gave rise to the expression tamamushi-iro (tamamushi color), in reference to a convoluted statement that can be interpreted in more ways than one. The term tamamushi-iro is used in the context of Japanese officialdom, when politicians or bureaucrats use language that is unclear."

[photographed on our neighbour's wall]

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Lions

So what do you make of Lion, Apple's new operating system? I find it needs a lot of taming.

It is just little things - like Safari automatically spell checking my beautiful English and turning it into some foreign crap. I thought it was Blogger - but no it was Safari itself! And then there's the way the applications automatically reopen with all the crap windows that you only closed the app to get rid of. Those issues are fixable, but the lack of a "save as..." in TextEdit and Preview seems permanent... I used to use that often to work out where files were located and then save new versions in the correct location - now I keep losing files. Need a "show in Finder" replacement. Getting the Library to reappear in Finder was easy enough, but the greyed out icons (and lack of personalised icons) on the sidebar seem unfixable and that slows navigation down.

[These very well behaved lions live at Kenchoji, Kamakura]

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