Belgian Waffles and Cougars

I actually got dragged off a to a football game today (or at least a broadcast of one). A friend of mine in the ward wanted to go at a local movie theater, and I turned him down last time he invited me to something, so I felt I probably ought to go. Anyway, it ended up fun (we won, and I ate popcorn), so hurray for football. In a fit of sanity, I changed out of my red T-Shirt into a blue one to go watch the game.

My parents are having their anniversaries this week, so we took them out to breakfast at a local restaurant. The food was really good, so score one for Mimi's breakfasts. Unfortunately, the service was sloooooww, so score minus-one, for a grand total of meh.

I filled in for a friend's shift at the temple for most of the afternoon and evening, which was a lot of fun. I haven't done baptisms in quite a while, so it was a nice change of pace from always doing sessions.

Rivalry Week

It's rivalry week! The rivalry in question is BYU vs. the University of Utah, also known as Blue versus Red. The school colors are actually blue & white vs. red & white, but we prefer to emphasize the differences. It's a bad week to be wearing red in Provo.

Since one of the favorite (and particularly destructive) pranks this time of year involves painting things red, most of the BYU campus statuary is coated in shrink wrap. The theory is that overzealous students will chuck their bucket of paint on the shrink wrap, and the statue can then be restored simply by waiting for it to dry and then removing it. The Y on the mountain is 200-odd yards tall, though, and the shrink wrap trick is a little impractical at that size. Instead, they just stick day-and-night patrols on the Y and check anyone going up for paint.

The football game is today, so the madness will hopefully die out by tomorrow.

Giving Thanks

It was Thanksgiving today. This has brought several pertinent things to attention:

1. My niece is very cute.
2. My nephew is pretty cute too.
3. Many of the members of my extended family can cook extremely well. Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful.
4. Folks in my family get along with each other pretty well, and everyone hates leaving when we get together. This is a good thing.

Susan tells me that I should inform Cavan that his trip to Russia was clearly ill-advised, as it has caused him to miss out on a very large chocolate trifle. It was, indeed, a particularly pleasant chocolate trifle, complete with cream, nuts, cherries, chocolate cake, grated chocolate, and loads of chocolate pudding. Cavan, if you're reading this, consider yourself informed.

Incidentally, Thanksgiving at my house is a bit of an amalgam of traditions. It's not a holiday in South Africa, so our family customs had to be pretty much invented on the fly. Turkey with cranberry sauce is good stuff, but for variety's sake, this year we threw in a ham as well. Why not? Mashed potatoes are pleasant enough, but roast potatoes are much nicer, so we do roast potatoes and yams and skip the mashed variety. Stuffing seems like a good idea, but it cooks so much better when you cook it outside of the turkey--and when you do it that way, you can make enough for everyone to eat a lot of it. My mother's stuffing-like invention involves adding a lot of sausage, and is actually one of the main dishes. And of course, there was dessert.

Now, I have nothing against pumpkin pie. They fed it to me in school, and I learned to really enjoy the stuff. But, and this is important, my parents don't really like it. Blasphemy, I know, but they're not going to serve something they don't like. So instead of pumpkin pie, we had to settle for, well, chocolate trifle and lemon meringue pie and custard and some kind of chocolate-and-coconut covered marshmallow things that Elaine assures me are very similar to some favorite South African candy that I don't remember too well. I say "settle," but I think we win on that count.

I think an easy way of describing the meal is sort of a cross between a traditional American Thanksgiving and a British-style Christmas dinner. We just took all the bits we liked from both and mixed them together until you're so stuffed that you have to sort of waddle out the door as you're leaving.

Thanks to all who prepared, those who came, and those who hung around afterward and kept things interesting. It was a great day.

Coding Blog

I've got a fairly long list of programming snippets (usually in C++), and have started a different blog so that I have somewhere to stick them. Most of my readers here are friends and family with little interest in computers, so I've been hesitant to stick heavily technical posts here. Having a separate blog for it makes sense.

Hitting the Gym, and Updates

I spent the evening with some friends who are going back to France tomorrow. We had a mock Thanksgiving dinner (France has no Thanksgiving, and they found the whole concept of deep-fried turkey fascinating). They have a cute four-year-old boy who is sweet and ignores pretty much everything he's told. It was nice to actually use my French a bit, since it gets rusty if left unused.

Shan, if you are going to get a membership then of course I would love to go. Actually, that goes for anyone who doesn't mind putting up with the gym's oozing, oily salesmen in order to get a membership (just be aware that the price you pay and the price they say have pretty much nothing to do with each other--don't give them anything until after you've read the small print on the contract and added up all the unmentioned fees). My hope is to go about 8 o'clock on weekday mornings, so if anyone wants to try it, let me know!

Oh, and Cav asked about a couple more passages. Here they go:

John 10:30, KJV: "I and my father are one." NIV: "I and the Father are one."
John 14:9
KJV: Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?
NIV: Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?

There are, to my knowledge, no passages claiming that a vocal confession of Christ saves us. The strongest passage that I'm aware of in support of this doctrine is this:

Ephesians 2:8-10
KJV: For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.
NIV: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.

Nothing particularly notable on either of these. The word "vocal" never occurs in the NIV NT. The word confession occurs a couple times, but it doesn't seem to be strongly tied to the "grace only" doctrines.

Quick Life Update

It was an interesting weekend. I was reminded that I needed to teach a lesson on Sunday sometime late on Friday night; Saturday was occupied in rapid serial fashion by a quick trip to the gym, several hours of catching up with friends at Van's, and then a session of D&D (with a small gap in there where I actually planned out said session). The talking squirrel is turning out nicely so far, and the druid's back.

That was a lot of fun, but the lesson ended up getting prepared at sometime past midnight, and while it went all right, it was delivered on insufficient sleep. It didn't help that the topic was "women in the church," which I'm sure the Relief Society enjoyed, but it's difficult to figure out where to go with that for an all-singles Elder's Quorum.

Anyway, it's coming up on bed time. Good night, gentle reader(s).

Further Bible Thoughts

I got such good comments to my last post that I thought I'd do a little follow-up research.

First off, I don't think the NIV really has a good shot at being a replacement for the KJV. The Book of Mormon language generally parallels the KJV and makes recognition of matching passages easier. Our doctrine and lesson books and libraries of sermons are all centered around the KJV. The terms we use come out of the KJV. And there are probably cases where, in doctrinal matters, the KJV is closer, although I haven't really got a good one yet. I think that for reference, the KJV is probably the best way to go. However, for reading, there are definitely times when a modern-language translation can shine.

A quick example: Try reading 2 Corinthians 11-13. Now, I'd read that in the KJV, and while it's a bit of a grammatical maze, you can puzzle out the meaning. What doesn't come through in the KJV is that Paul is ranting. Sure, he's talking about a serious topic (namely, the apostasy of the Corinthians), but he's doing so in such an aggressive, fiery way that you can almost picture the audience wincing at his forcefulness. The KJV tends to come across as soft-spoken and formal, no matter what's being said.

It was mentioned in a comment from Eve that the NIV might have an anti-LDS doctrinal slant in the way things were worded. I would really like references for this. I've taken a few shots at passages with fairly strong references to decidedly LDS doctrines, and thought I'd share the results.

1 Cor 15:29 -- Baptism for the dead as an authentic practice.

KJV: Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?
NIV: Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?

Rom 8:16-17 -- Man's potential to become heirs of God with Christ.

KJV: The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children then heirs; heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorifed together.
NIV: The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Amos 3:7 -- God reveals his will to prophets

KJV: Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.
NIV: Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.

Genesis 3:4-5 -- A moderately meaningful difference in this one: The word "gods" was changed to "God." This one doesn't bother me all that much, admittedly, since it's a pretty fine distinction, and we're usually fine with Elohim being translated as "God."

KJV: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
NIV: "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Genesis 3:22 -- Plus, the plural is still here. Some branches of Christianity explain this one as God addressing "the heavenly court," by the way.

KJV: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
NIV: And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

Job 38:7 -- So this one looks like a difference...

KJV: When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
NIV: while the morning stars sang together and all the angels ^[a] shouted for joy?

But to be fair to the NIV, that footnote [a] reads "Hebrew the sons of God." This one also strikes me as pretty minor.

Anyway, there are piles and piles of these. This was just a random sampling. I hope someone was interested, since these are fun to put together. Feel free to throw out suggestions.

Reading Materials

So, I was going to add a picture of a fun FHE activity here, but I couldn't get the photo off my phone. Oh well. It was a bunch of [mostly] college students sitting around in the bishop's living room and playing pictionary with movie titles, followed by apple pie and ice cream. It was fun and sociable. That's about all for my life in this post, the rest is a lengthy discussion of Biblical language. Those easily bored should probably stop reading.

I've been reading the New Testament lately in the New International Version. The New International Version is a Bible translation that was done fairly recently, and renders the entire Bible in modern English. That's not to say casual English--it is still quite formal, just less archaic. There aren't too many LDS people that read the NIV translation (though I do know of a couple). As far as I can tell, the main argument against it is that the language is somehow less formal or less respectful. In particular, there exists a feeling that using "you" to address God is overly casual. I want to discuss that a bit.

The reference Bible translation for most Latter-Day Saints is the King James Version. It's familiar, it's comfortable, it's the version that our fairly expansive theological literature refers to, and it's difficult to read. The archaic style both gives it a ceremonial air of formality and slows down the reader. There have been some official statements on this: for example, using the pronouns "thee/thou/thy/thine" has been endorsed several times as being more respectful. This is a really interesting statement. It's true that in modern English, these words connote respect, but there is a chicken and egg problem here. The reason that we use thees and thous in the Bible is because William Tyndale used them in his translation in the 1500s to make clear the difference between "one of you" and "all of you," which are two different words in the original Greek. At the time, thee and thou were the singular, informal English forms, and it seems likely they acquired that air of formality because they were used in the Bible. (If you're interested, there's a wikipedia article that gives a much more thorough treatment than this post can). Now, when we read the scriptures, should we interpret them according to what the words mean now, or what was actually written in the first place?

By the way, most of the other Indo-European languages have kept their old plural-formal/singular-intimate distinction, and at least in the languages I'm familiar with (Spanish: ti/vosotros, French: tu/vous, Bulgarian: ti/vie), you always address God using the singular-intimate form. Here's a quick illustration from the Lord's prayer:

English: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Bulgarian (Latinized, dropping Biblical terminal vowels): Otče nash, Koyto si na nebesata, da se sveti Tvoeto ime! da doyde Tvoeto tsarstvo; da băde Tvoyata volya, kakto na nebeto taka i na zemyata.

French: Notre Père, toi qui es dans les cieux, que tu sois reconnu pour Dieu, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite, et tout cela, sur la terre comme au ciel.

Spanish: Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre, venga tu reino, hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo.

Although the tu/ti form definitely has intimate and informal connotations in these languages, it's still used for addressing God. This usage even carries over into Book of Mormon translations. Here's Lehi praising God in 1 Nephi 1:14:

English: Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy power, and goodness, and mercy are over all the inhabitants of the earth; and, because thou art merciful, thou wilt not suffer those who come unto thee that they shall perish!

Bulgarian (Latinized): Veliki i čudni sa tvoite dela, o Gospodi, Bože Vsemogâshtiy! Prestolât Ti e visoko v nebesata i Tvoyata sila, i dobrina, i milost sa nad vsički žiteli na zemyata; i poneže si milostiv, Ti ne shte pozvolish onezi, koito idvat pri Tebe, da poginat!

French: Grandes et merveilleuses sont tes œuvres, ô Seigneur Dieu tout-puissant! Ton trône est haut dans les cieux, et ta puissance, ta bonté et ta miséricorde s'étendent sur tous les habitants de la terre; et parce que tu es miséricordieux, tu ne souffriras pas que ceux qui viennent à toi périssent.

Spanish: ¡Cuán grandes y maravillosas son tus obras, oh Señor Dios Todopoderoso! ¡Tu trono se eleva en las alturas de los cielos, y tu poder, y tu bondad y misericordia se extienden sobre todos los habitantes de la tierra; y porque eres misericordioso, no dejarás perecer a los que acudan a ti!

I don't want to give the idea that these languages are being at all disrespectful (indeed, you might have noticed that the Bulgarians capitalize the pronouns). Rather, I want to show that using an intimate form of "you" need not be a sign of disrespect.

But why bring this up? Part of the problem is that the archaic forms simply aren't understood clearly anymore. They are turning into kind of ritual formula, repeated without truly understanding the words. In any given testimony meeting, at least a handful of the testimonies are going to end with "in the name of thy son..." The speaker is repeating a ritual phrase, without understanding its meaning. Can you imagine that same speaker ending a testimony "in the name of your son..."? I think not! Further, it's very rare for members to actually use the grammar properly--The "thee" form has a fairly complex set of rules, and it's often used incorrectly. If this is truly a question of respect, then is it really all that appropriate to address deity with halting, bad grammar?

A counter-proposal, of course, is that we should take the time to learn the Jacobean English properly. This, to me, seems similar to the Moslems requiring that you learn Arabic to read the Koran, or Catholics requiring that you learn Latin if you wish to understand the liturgy. In the Moslem case, the scriptures were felt to be the literal word of God, and translation would destroy their integrity. The Catholics settled on Latin because tradition acquires a momentum of its own, which I think is also why Jacobean English has stayed with us so long. The terrible irony in the Catholic case is that the Latin was originally translated from the Greek, so that the commoners might understand!

And that, in a nutshell, is the point. Modern English may not have the same religious gravitas, but it does add a certain electric quality to the scriptures. It bypasses that piece of your brain that has to work at decoding the language and goes straight to the meaning. While I would struggle to make it through a full chapter of Paul's letters in the KJV, I find myself reading entire books at a sitting in the NIV, and enjoying the flow of the text and the arguments. It's not that I don't understand the KJV, but it just doesn't feel the same. I've read maybe five-thousand pages worth of Jacobean English in my life, but my practice with modern English is perhaps a hundred times that. Is there really a good reason not to take advantage of that easier path to understanding?

Anyway, I have probably beaten the topic to death by now. I'll leave you with a few parting words:

"[M]y soul delighteth in plainness unto my people, that they may learn." (2 Ne 25:4)
"For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language" (D&C 90:11)
"You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thornbushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so every good tree bears good fruit; but the rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down, and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits." (Matt 7:16-20, NIV)

Paying Attention to the Small Things

My thought for tonight is that life is happier when we daydream more.

This is a tree from Zion's park. I loved the texture of the bark, and wanted to try and catch it in a picture. I found myself in forced idleness for several hours, with little more than a camera to play with, and some interesting pictures resulted. It was a great trip.

Goal setting and tracking

I imagine that most folks set goals for themselves sometimes. New Year's Day is especially popular. Thomas S. Monson has (famously) said "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates." My old set of goals was looking a bit stale, so I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks revamping my goals, getting them written down, and figuring out how to keep track of whether I'm meeting them or not.

Most of the goals are pretty simple things. Being more regular about giving to charity, for example, or having an exercise program. Some of them are really difficult to define, though, like trying to spend more time doing social things. It's a little difficult to have a check-box for "yes, I did something social today!" What counts as "something social"? I have a few ideas, but I don't think I've nailed it yet.

My current approach to tracking is to print out a bunch of small paper booklets carefully sized to slide into the billfold of my wallet easily. I tend to have my wallet with me all the time, so it's easy to pull it out and write on it (this is really useful for tracking eating and exercise). I haven't found a writing instrument that fits in my wallet yet, and I haven't gotten in the habit of carrying a pen everywhere, but other than that it's worked pretty well.

So, readers, what do you do to track your goals?

Literal virtuality

I'm back from SIGGraph in San Diego and I have Internet again. The hotel had Internet, but it cost ten bucks per night per computer, and it wasn't particularly fast. If I were paying three-hundred bucks a month for Internet at home, I'd expect my downloads to be leaving skid marks when they finished, so I put off posting till I got back.

I'm back to the old cell phone for pictures. I do have good intentions about getting a new and better phone (not to mention a new and better camera), but these intentions were stalled when I discovered that the phone I actually want is hard to find outside Europe. It exists here, but it's not available online from the major stores. Meanwhile I'm still using my poor, half-broken old phone, which limps gamely along like a wounded elderly cat. Today's first picture is Harbor Boulevard, which runs past the convention center. The hotel was walking distance away, so I walked this route a few times a day.

Next up is the convention center itself. Here you're looking at gate A. You can just see the sign for gate B in the distance. Gates C through H are beyond that, so it's a pretty big building. Their biggest event of the year is Comic Con, which pulled in 125,000 people last week (and not everyone could get in). SIGGraph only pulls in about 30,000 people, so comparatively speaking the center was pretty empty. By the way, for those who are curious about this sort of thing, the largest convention center in the world is the Hannover Messe (Hannover Fair), which has half a square kilometer of exhibition space. By comparison, the San Diego monster is a cozy, friendly sort of place.

One of the fun sides of SIGGraph is that the motion picture industry shows up en masse (this is a great place to get hired for jobs in animation or special effects), and they like to show off all the neat stuff they've done this year. Even more fun is they tell you how it works--this is the place for special effects wizards to get together and trade war stories about how they pulled off the latest batch of movie visuals. There are usually a bunch of composite scenes playing at the electronic theater, showing you how everything works. They'll start with the actor hanging from a blue screen with a few real-life props, then gradually fade in the wire frames and other animated objects until he's climbing onto the side of an airship, or plunging on the back of a dragon into the ocean below, or what have you. The effects folks also wander around looking at all the latest research, scavenging for cool ideas for the next batch of movies.

This is also a neat place to check out new devices and ideas. There are usually at least 3 or 4 new ways that someone might implement a 3-D television. Some of them are serious commercial attempts, and others are set up purely for fun or for art exhibits. The one you see in this picture is more on the novelty side. It's a spinning globe with a pattern of lights on the outside. Right now it's got a sliding checkerboard pattern, though it had a rotating map of the world a few seconds before. Like every 3-D display ever invented so far, it gives you a splitting headache if you stare at it for too long--the real problem is not figuring out how to make a 3-D display, it's keeping that display from giving you horrible headaches after ten minutes of use.

A more practical demonstration was a high-resolution color display that works well in bright sunlight! It reflects lightly effectively, so it looks as good as a piece of paper. It didn't use or need a backlight, and the surface looked almost like color printed on paper. The entire display is based on bazillions of tiny mirrors, which is terribly cool, besides looking good. They tell me that a black and white version will be available in commercial products pretty soon, but the color version still only works in the lab -- and at SIGGraph, of course.

I also got to play with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a $100 computer that they're going to sell to developing countries for education. At that price, you have to be a sort of intermediate-level developing country to afford it, but it's still a really cool idea. The computer is pretty nice and definitely usable--as long as you have VERY tiny fingers. The keyboard is just a little too large for adult hands, which made typing awkward.

Of course, most of the time I was just working. This picture is of our booth on the convention floor. The guy on the left is the CEO, and the guy on the right is a coworker. The glowing rectangle in the back is playing a looped video showing pretty pictures of our stuff. I spent most of my time at the conference standing around that booth and answering questions. Mostly, it's just the one question--"so, what's a T-Spline?"--over and over and over and over. I got asked again at the Salt Lake airport while I was heading home (I was wearing a T-Splines shirt), and it was funny how it gave me flashbacks to the booth.

Probably the most exciting moment for today was packing up the booth. Imagine this schedule:

3:30 Exhibition floor closes
4:00 Shuttle departs hotel for airport
6:30 Flight boards at San Diego airport

You may notice a very small gap between the closing of the floor and the departure of the shuttle. To make matters worse, we couldn't find taxis that could fit our booth in the trunk, so we really needed to make that shuttle--and waiting an hour for the 5:00 shuttle could make it tricky to catch our flight. We tore down and packed the whole booth frame in ten minutes flat, and I ran from the conference center with a one-hundred pound wheeled booth box in tow, trying to make it to the hotel in time to get the booth taken by shuttle to the airport. We all made it in the end (with 90 seconds to spare!), though we spent the first part of the shuttle ride catching our breath.

Anyway, now I'm home, with full access to a proper kitchen and a multitude of liquids and pastes containing more than 3.4 ounces, and it's great. And since it's getting late and I still have work in the morning, I need to head to bed.

California AGAIN

I'm going to California. Despite my frequently avowed dislike for the state, I just can't seem to avoid it. On the bright side, this time I'm going to San Diego. Most of my dislike of California stems from having to spend too much time in Los Angeles. There is much good to be said of San Diego.

One of the good things to be said for San Diego is that Allaryin (Ammon) moved there just a week or two ago, which means I'll probably get a chance to go say hi. He started life in Texas and has been drifting gradually west ever since. Ammon recently acquired a new baby girl (with the esteemed assistance of his wife, of course). I have been informed that said baby girl is adorable, and if I visit I'll probably be observed making silly googly noises. That should be fun.

Another good thing to be said for San Diego is: the weather.

Now, my purpose in traveling to San Diego has nothing to do with either the weather, nor the fact that Ammon just moved there. These are merely happy coincidences. No, I'm going to go play salesman at some conference for the week. The conference is to be attended by, and I quote, "Digital innovators, creative researchers, award-winning producers, provocative artists, energetic executives, and adventurous engineers." They really seemed to be stretching on some of those adjectives--engineers are very nice chaps, after all, but "adventurous" is not usually a defining quality. The conference is a lot of fun because there are a lot of very smart people there, and very smart people are a lot of fun. Unless they get drunk of course, in which case they're pretty much like drunk people the world over, but that doesn't happen all the time.

It is possible that, by now, you are wondering why on earth there is a picture of a mutant cow for this post. Interestingly, it's not entirely unrelated. Said mutant cow was made using software that I wrote, and which we'll be hawking at the conference. So, in essence, I'm traveling to California to sell software that lets you make your own mutant cow. Admittedly, it can be used for things other than mutant cows. Some folks have even used it to make weird horned monsters.

Ultraman Redux

I mentioned Ultraman in an earlier post, but I still owe Eve some photos so I figured I'd do that for today's post. Here's the dubbed pilot episode of Ultraman if you're still curious/masochistic. Japanese doesn't dub well to English for some reason.

One of the "neat tricks" in movie and television production from the 1960's was to build a set in miniature (kind of like a model train), and then film the action on your miniature set. That way, you could add giant space ships, huge monsters, or epic battles without actually spending very much money. Nowadays you'd accomplish the effect with computer graphics, which looks a lot better but isn't nearly as funny. Anyway, it seems that somebody decided that it would be fun to make a television show about a giant spaceman fighting giant space monsters, and thus Ultraman was born. I don't think there's any particular significance to the name (the explanation of the name at the end of the pilot is ultra-cheesy). I guess superlatives make popular names for superheroes.

Ultraman became a pop-culture phenomenon in Japan, and is still very popular with boys (Boys have interesting taste in TV shows). I was introduced to it for the first time by the Ultraman aisle at Yodobashi Camera, a large shop in Tokyo that sells just about everything for males of all ages. Eve, the dazzlingly attractive young lady pictured in a previous post, had heard of Ultraman in the English classes she teaches and was immediately fascinated by the aisle. At this point, I received the impromptu commission to photograph every single model of Ultraman available, and was exhorted to make said photographs available online later. This was difficult for three reasons:

1. Japanese electronic shops are jumpy about people taking photographs inside. I didn't see a "no pictures" sign within eyeshot, but I still wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of attracting official attention, so we had to photograph on the sly. That meant no flash, so the pictures are a bit blurry.

2. Do you know how many versions of Ultraman there are? At least this many. This is only about half of them (and I left out "Ultraman Nice" because it was too badly blurred).

3. After about the first five photos (complete with imaginative announcements), I was laughing pretty hard. This probably made the later photos blurrier than the early ones.

Nevertheless, I have now officially posted the Ultraman photos (it was somewhere between numbers 2 and 3, in case you missed it). If the link quits working, send me a message and I'll probably fix it--I'm changing servers soon, and my old links might break. And now, while the rest of you stay up through the rest of tonight reading the seventh Harry Potter book, I will head to bed.

Localized Chinese Food

Most of you probably know that when you eat out at an ethnic restaurant, what you're getting is not usually very "genuine." Taco Bell is not really Mexican food, Panda Express is not really Chinese food, and so on. It's more like those films that claim to be "based on a true story." Of course, this same thing happens in other countries too, which brings me to one of a handful of photos I managed to get in Japan after the Camera Incident. This is--believe it or not--a Chinese restaurant. Indeed, several of the items on my tray kind of resemble things you might find in Chinese cuisine, but the style is so Japanese that the Chinese food almost feels out of place.

The wooden bowl on the left has steamed rice, and the bowls on the upper left and upper right are the "main entreés." The first one is shrimp in some kind of sauce, the second one is sweet and sour pork. In true Japanese style, they are both very small portions, but they make up for this by giving you a million kinds of everything. The center bowl is half an egg roll with several kinds of decorative garnish and some kind of sweet, deep-fried sesame dumpling thing. Yes, they only give you half an egg roll, diagonally cut in artistic fashion. The bottom two bowls have a half dozen varieties of pickled vegetables, and the lower-right one is egg-drop soup, positioned exactly where the miso soup usually goes.

The most intriguing thing was that cup in the middle that looks like an egg. No, it's not an egg. It's homemade sweet almond tofu, and it's a good dessert. Tofu doesn't taste like much, to be sure, but it has a good texture for pudding, and the homemade style tofu is softer and wetter than most.

This restaurant was really good, by the way. If for some reason you ever find yourself in the Granvia hotel next to Hiroshima-eki, feel free to drop by the Chinese place on the second floor. It's good stuff. This is the place that got me thinking "I wonder if you could serve American food in kaiseki style?" That is, a little bit of roast beef on one plate, a little bit of mashed potato, a little bit of corn ... just for the heck of it. Seems like a ton of work, though.

In more contemporary news, I helped my sister and her husband move to Logan today. The picture here is of their living room before any unpacking. You'll note that Yoda (back left) is still around and doing fine after multiple moves. Logan is a 5 hour round trip from Provo, which meant that the drive was more painful than the actual work. We packed five adults into a Prius (note to self: never do this), and a few neighbors from the new ward showed up to help, so the loading and unloading was done in short order.

In related news, my sister had her second child on Thursday, a cute baby girl. The two-year old big brother is taking the news well so far, although I imagine he hasn't yet realized that parental attention is a precious commodity, and the younger siblings are going to steal it away. The new baby has continued the fine family tradition of being born with a full head of hair, which we're fairly sure is unusual but makes for cute babies.

Questions for the Readers

Been a few days since I last posted, and it'll probably still be short.

Firstly, my neck has gotten better, but it still hasn't completely healed. Is this the kind of thing one goes to see a chiropractor for? I really have no idea. It is healing on its own, but it does seem a bit weird for a pinched nerve to last for a whole week. It's usually fine except when I'm driving and can't turn my head quickly.

Secondly, what's the best way to watch for web page updates? It seems like someone told me about a service somewhere that could alert me any time a certain web page changes. This would be good for watching blogs, forum posts, all sorts of things.

I went straight from vacation into crunch mode at work. Well, if there's a good way to go into crunch mode, that's probably it--at least you start out pretty relaxed. I have a conference in Los Angeles at the start of August, and we want to have a lot of things to show off by then. Y'know, I hate Los Angeles. It's big, it's dirty, it's crime-ridden, and the single-minded selfishness of the place creeps me out. At least for conferences I don't have to look at anything more than the hotel and the conference center--and it is a very nice conference center. Oh, and I'm aware there are probably tolerable regions of Los Angeles, but I'm always stuck downtown, and downtown is a nasty place by most measures.

Tenki no shita

Post title means "under the weather," which means nothing in Japanese. I somehow managed to pinch a nerve in my neck, which aches like crazy. It made the plane ride home very unpleasant. I can't straighten my neck out without shooting pain, and working on the computer is also difficult. I'm going to go lie down now.

I will try to keep the blogging momentum going, but please excuse me for this short post.

Turbo Shrine Dash!

So, I'm going to Tokyo to hang out with Eve tomorrow, which means that whatever else I want to see in Kyoto had to be seen *today*. Unfortunately, Kyoto is the city of a million shrines (this may be an exaggeration, but I dare you to prove me wrong: There's way too many to count). I mentioned that this was probably because the city had been the capital of Japan for 1,000 years, and Sister Sakai (our helpful taxi service for the day) corrected me: "Actually, 1,200 years." But what's two centuries between friends?

It was Sister Sakai's day off, and of all the 25 years she's lived in Kyoto, she had never been on the thousand gate hike at the Inari shrine. Therefore, naturally, we went to the thousand gate hike first. We got about halfway up the mountain before discovering two things:

1. The 'thousand gates' is more metaphorical. And not in the usual way. I there are *way more* than a thousand gates. If anyone has bothered to count them, congratulations. The entire walkway for long stretches is bridged by gates as far as you can see, and it's an exhaustingly long hike. The hike even branches off along multiple alternative paths, all of them covered with gates.

2. This is a fairly difficult hike. Even though it's paved with steps the whole way, it's still really steep, and the weather's quite hot. Clarissa and Sister Sakai made it to the halfway point (complete with bathrooms, vending machines, and souvenir shop) before asking that we go back. I figured I'd seen enough torii gates to last a lifetime, so back down we went.

3. The gates are all painted bright orange!? They also have black kanji carved on them. The kanji give the donor of each gate -- large gates from bigger companies, smaller gates from individuals or small businesses. Inari is a fox god (so there are many fox statues) and also the god of commercialism and making money (I am not making this up). Thus, Inari is a very popular god in Japan, and the businessmen like to show up at his shrine and pray for business success. Apparently, for a goodly fee, you can even go into the inner part of the shrine to pray closer to the enshrined object. Crass commercialism seems somehow appropriate for a god of commerce. Oh, we also spotted a miko (something like a priestess) doing a rather interesting bell dance for some client, whom we were informed had probably paid a goodly chunk of change for the privilege. There was a koto and a shamisen playing for the dance, and it was pretty.

The next shrine was the 'bursting waters' shrine (I think; I can't remember the Japanese name). There's a spring and you can drink from it. They provide long-handled metal cups for catching the flow of water, and UV lights to sterilize the cups after you drink. Having ancient looking mossy stone coves glowing purple from the UV lights seemed like a funny anachronism. There was also a stage , and Sister Sakai said that there exists a Japanese proverb: "If you jump from the stage at the bursting waters, you can fly." I was skeptical. Had anyone tried this? "Yeah, quite a few people. They all died."

After that we went to make reservations at the Imperial Palace (the emperor still uses it on occasion, so the security is tight), then went to the garden castle until our reservation came up. Unfortunately, this meant that we ended up with only 10 minutes to look at the garden castle, so we kind of did it at a run. The garden castle has tons of cool painting and nightingale floors, which squeak like a room full of birds being tortured. This is to prevent assassination. That's about all I saw.

The Imperial Palace doesn't let you into most of the buildings, but they do keep most of the outer doors open so you can look inside. The whole tour is shepherded by swarms of policemen, and was impressive.

Come evening, we went to the Sakai family's house (eh, it's small, but it's not so small that they can't have guests) and we ate sukiyaki. *Really good* sukiyaki. If we can get decent sauce, we need to give it a try. Mom's cast iron skillet would probably work (you cook it at the table ... hmm, we'll have to work something out).

No sign of the camera still, so I'm assuming that it's really and truly gone. After a brief period of mourning (and a chance for my bank account to recover) I'll have to get a new one. Clarissa has yet to come through on her promise to lend me some photos, but she swears blind that she has them, so hopefully they'll show up ... one of these days.

Parents normal, kid is a southerner

My youngest sister arrived in Kyoto today, and we did some more of that hanging out thing. She only got about 2 hours of sleep on the train over, so she spent much of the day snoozing (falling asleep on the longer bus trips, falling asleep on the sofa in my hotel room, etc. etc.). Nathan had a work emergency, so he ended up stuck in the hotel room while we went to explore the silver shrine (he assures us that he's feeling a bit shrined out anyway, so this was no big loss). The silver shrine is not, as you might suspect, made of silver. No, it's made of wood. I think the only reason it's called the silver shrine is because there's a golden shrine on the other side of the city, and they wanted the names to match (the golden shrine IS gold-plated, so that's cool and all).

The silver shrine has awesome gardens. There's a cute display informing you that there are several types of moss. There's 'intruder moss,' 'normal moss,' and 'VIP moss' (with the latter being the most desirable). And sure enough, you may spot a gardener crouched down on the moss somewhere, hacking away at intruder moss to try and help the good moss flourish. It seems that all moss is not created equal! Japanese gardens are kind of interesting--they're deliberately kind of rough edged, with no obvious organization, to make it seem more like a natural forest. But they're also not natural at all--everything is just a little too perfect, the waterfalls arranged a little too conveniently, the bushes a little too round and the lilies a little too numerous for it to be completely natural. And of course, there's no bad moss.

After the silver shrine, we ate out with my sister's home-stay family from Kyoto. We had a very pleasant Korean barbecue. I think that the Korean barbecue in Los Angeles might be a bit more authentic, ironically, but it was very good Japanese/Korean food :-). The meat is Korean style, but they have to bring it neatly arranged in geometric patterns on decorative plates. If you order scrambled eggs and toast in this country then it's going to arrive in a geometrically arranged pattern on a decorative plate. Soup? It'll be in a decorative bowl, with approximately three separate garnishes, selected for their harmonious colors. Even at really cheap restaurants there's going to be some kind of effort to make the food decorative. It's kind of funny, but the Japanese expect it and like it, and it's also kind of fun. Oh, I tried both tripe and cow tongue, and they were fine.

One of the most entertaining things about the silver shrine was the sand gardens. The sand is carefully arranged with a rake into various geometric patterns. The sand is wet (naturally; dry sand happens to Other People in Other Countries), so it tends to stick together and keep its shape. Some of the shapes leave you wondering how they pulled it off -- large, perfectly flat plateaus with patterns raked into the top, much too large to reach across by hand. We were wondering if they have rakes with very long handles -- or perhaps they build the plateaus piece-by-piece, smoothing out the joins as they enlarge them? It is a great mystery.

My sister says she has photos of a lot of this stuff, so even though my own ability to produce photos has been cruelly removed, she should be able to supply handy supplementary materials later. Just as soon as I can get my hands on her laptop. Possibly after I get home.

The post title is in reference to the 12-year-old son of the homestay family. His parents have quite a normal, standard-Japanese accent, but the kid has a strong, slangy southern edge in the way he speaks. The accent in the Kyoto area is called "kansai-ben," and it tends to be a lot rougher and more informal than standard Japanese. The usual "wakarimasen" (I don't understand) becomes "wakarimahen." There are also a lot of different hesitation noises, and he has a bit of a schoolyard "tough kid" speech style. At least it's very entertaining to listen to.

Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto

I'm having a bit of hard time with the Internet here. It's working fine for Nathan, and it SORT of works for me, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been riding quite a few bullet trains lately. The first hour or so I spent gawking out the window at the ridiculously spiffy landscape flyby, but lately I've taken to reading books. I got through some enjoyably brain-dead space opera, and now I'm now reading some enjoyably brain-dead Anne McCaffrey. Will they crack the conspiracy? Will our hero survive and get the girl? Will the girl forgive our hero for being a doofus? I'm mildly in suspense on the final point.

In a moment, I'm going to wander downstairs and find out if the hotel's sushi is any good, but before that I'll update you on our touring:

We went to the "peace memorial" in Hiroshima. It is very close to where ground zero was for the atomic bomb back in 1945 (August 6th, I believe? The date gets repeated over and over and over in the exhibits). About 140,000 people died, and there are a lot of people left in the area who are "genbakusha" -- that is, survivors of the atomic bomb. They tend to have unique medical issues.

There was one building that was almost directly beneath the blast, which meant that all the horizontal surfaces were blown out but vertical walls mostly survived. It's called the A-bomb dome, because the original building had a large central dome, of which only a metal skeleton survives. There's a large park with a cenotaph, fountains, trees, etc. near that, and at the south end of the park is the museum. The museum and park cover the tragedy from nearly every possible angle--there are newspaper articles about the bombing, both contemporary and recent. There are models of the city before and after. There were huge numbers of schoolchildren (mostly junior-high aged it seems) who were working on demolishing houses for firebreaks against bombings, so about 8,000 of these students died; there was various memorabilia of all the different students, some of whom lived for several days before dying.

As a whole, the exhibit is quite gloomy (but of course, given the topic, it's hard for it to be anything otherwise). There is a desperate, urgent feel to the place, that "this must never be repeated, anywhere." The people who went through it seemed very intent that some kind of meaning be made out of the tragedy, and the meaning they pull from it is to make Hiroshima a "world peace city." The mayor of Hiroshima sends a strongly worded protest to any government that performs a nuclear test, and the full text of all those telegrams is engraved in stone. It did occur to me that the present emphasis in Japan on world peace is probably drawn especially from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I've been told that a commitment to nonviolent resolution of problems is actually in their pledge of allegiance).

After Hiroshima, we went to Osaka. Osaka is (I believe) the second-largest city in Japan, and famous for its food. Unfortunately, we only spent a little less than a day there, so didn't have a chance to sample much of it. Osaka looks like it has enough things to do to occupy an entire vacation, so perhaps some other year. Osaka has an amazing aquarium--there were dozens of tanks with some mighty big fish in them. The walkway spirals downward weaving through the tanks, so you start by seeing penguins, otters, iguanas and monkeys on the surface, and then gradually descends into the brightly colored swarms of fish swimming below them. The aquarium is themed around the "ring of fire," with species from various places around the world according to the position on the outside, with the "Pacific ocean" tank in the center. The Pacific tank is the spectacular centerpiece of the whole thing. There's a whale shark of some kind swimming among the manta rays and schools of fish--perhaps twenty or thirty different kinds. The walls of the Pacific tank are made of nine-inch-thick acrylic glass (the whole aquarium uses some 350 odd tons of acrylic glass, which they mention is more acrylic glass than is usually produced worldwide in an entire year). As you exit, you're walked past tanks and tubes of creatively lit jellyfish, in all their tentacled glory.

The one place we did get to eat was an okonomiyakiya. That's a kind of cook-at-your-table omelet, with lots of cabbage, meat, and noodles, and the slightest hint of egg. You eat it with a bunch of sauces, and you're not allowed to cook it yourself (the staff does it for you, and exhorts you not to touch it!). It was definitely one of my favorite meals of the trip, and there have been quite a few great ones.

And now, we find out whether the connection will work well enough to let me post this.

How to Lose Your Camera

It looks like there has been a serious wrench in the gears as far as getting further pictures posted: My camera went missing yesterday. I'm not sure where or how exactly; it just noticed it wasn't around my neck anymore when I arrived on the ferry near Hiroshima. I immediately went back across on the ferry and walked backward along the path we took to the last place I remembered taking a picture. The ferry staff also checked the exact boat I'd been on and said it wasn't there. I thought I might have taken it off in a restaurant (eel on rice, was pretty good otherwise...) but the staff couldn't find it at the table. None of the shops I'd been in seemed to have it either.

I tried to leave a message at the police box, but the officer was on patrol, so I left a message at the information desk for the ferry instead. The lady there said she would call the hotel if they found anything. I don't have very high hopes for this, however, so it looks like I won't be photographing anything else.

This is now Sunday morning. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure out how to get to any of the Hiroshima branches, so it looks like we can't make church today. There do seem to be some branches in this area, but they're in rather distant prefectures, and I couldn't see any sane way of getting there by public transport. We're going to head to the site of the peace park (where the atom bomb was dropped some 62-odd years ago) and look around. Yesterday we went to Miyajima, which has been a shrine for about 1,200 years. There's a very nice torii gate built far out on the beach, and at high tide the gate and the shrine look like they are floating. We also took a cable car up to a station on the mountains, and I hiked to the peak. It was a bit hazy, but there was still a good view of the ocean on all sides. I believe that if you can make it on a clear day (which would probably mean that it would be a cold day), you can see a goodly dozen other islands poking out of the surrounding seas.

I bought some traditional maple-leaf sweet buns for a souvenir, and was having good fun until I discovered the lost camera. That pretty much ruined the day, but I'll get over it.

Shinkansen does not mean "Bullet Train"

Bullet trains are a nickname given to the shinkansen by the English-speaking world. In fact, shinkansen means "new trunk line," since it is the new "backbone" line for getting across Japan. They do look kind of bullet shaped, though, and they go fast. I took a few videos from my camera looking through the train window; things close to the track whiz by in a blur and are impossible to make out, while the background rushes along at a frenetic pace. Unfortunately, the video clips are very large (50 MB for 30 seconds), and I don't have the programs with me for re-encoding them, and I don't want the hotel to get furious at me for uploading 50 megabytes, so you'll have to remind me to show these to you when I get home. Actually, the picture uploading isn't working from here either, so I'll have to show you my pictures from a different connection too.

We did finally manage to do some laundry before leaving. There was a laundromat (called a "coin laundry" in Japan) near Tokyo station, and we went there. It was sweltering hot out, and even sweltering hotter inside the laundry, but our luggage is now loaded with enough clothing to last out the rest of the trip. While we were there, a fellow from upstairs was wondering around looking for four foreigners who had a reservation at his restaurant. They never showed up, but we went up to take a look. It was on the third floor of an apartment building, and it was something like a tempura bar. We got a lot of tempura seafood with rice, miso soup, and a couple of other sides. It was really good. He had a box of tomatoes there and told us they were going to try doing them tempura style to see what would happen. Although, as he said, "pretty much anything you tempura is going to taste good." He then walked us for a few blocks until he was sure we knew where the train station was, and practiced his English on us, which was good fun.

We're out of Tokyo now, and in a much nicer hotel. The old hotel was in a good location, but it was small and the bathroom was a bit unpleasant. This hotel feels positively decadent, and although it cost a bit more I think it's definitely worth it. The bathroom sparkles, the room is reasonably spacious (with room to put the luggage somewhere AND sit down), and the restaurants look very good. We had Chinese food for dinner, of all things, and it was kind of like Chinese food done Japanese style, which is really interesting.

Oh, in all the restaurants in Japan, they hand you a hot, wet face cloth before you eat. It shows up steaming in a wooden dish, and it's for cleaning your hands. If it's a really cheap road-side type place, they'll give you a wet cloth in a little plastic bag and it won't be hot, but it's nearly always there. Since the weather is hot and humid right now, and you tend to get "train hands" from riding on the public transport, this is an awesome tradition. I think we should steal it.

Tokyo Disney Resort

We have to get up kind of early, so unfortunately this post will be very short.

1. We're going to ride a shinkansen [train] tomorrow. Hooray! They go about 200 miles an hour, which is fricken awesome.

2. It's a little hard to find a laundromat in Tokyo. We need one.

3. Tokyo Disney Resort was fun. For some reason, Stitch has completely supplanted Mickey as the mascot here -- yeah, the little blue alien from Lilo & Stitch. He is stupid popular. There's piles and piles of Stitch merchandise, and the sign at the entrance reads "Tokyo Disney Resort/
Find Stitch!" There's a Stitch on every ride, I think, and a bunch of other places as well. Sure he's cute, but ... really? He even has his own dedicated parade, complete with some kind of 'Aloha' song.

4. Tapioca in a mango juice drink? Weird but ... kinda gooey. Fun.

5. I ate a Disney churro. It was pretty good.

6. "It's a Small World" as a song still sticks in your head, even if it's in Japanese.

Tomorrow will probably be comparatively boring, so maybe I'll have time to upload photos tomorrow. Maybe.

Yokohama ni Yokoso

We're going to Disneyland Tokyo tomorrow, which means I need to try and get enough sleep tonight, which means the post will probably be short. I'm sure you'll all manage.

We spent the morning in our hotel room, largely because I had a bad sore throat and needed to vegetate for a while. The sore throat hasn't gone away, but it has faded over the course of the day, so I do hope it doesn't erupt into anything worse. I've discovered that hot, humid weather is actually fairly pleasant when you're not feeling well!

We went to Yokohama (the post title means 'welcome to Yokohama'). This is the second time we've taken a field trip there. This time we went to Chinatown with my sister. It is possible to tell the difference between Japantown (i.e. everything) and Chinatown, but it admittedly takes a trained eye. I'm told the main trick is that in Chinatown, everything is red, that being a lucky color in China, and of course Chinese text looks a little bit different (but you sort of have to know Japanese to notice this). Yokohama's Chinatown is the largest in Japan, and for this reason Yokohama has great Chinese food. We didn't avail ourselves of this, however--no, we had something else in mind.

The idea was to take my sister's host family out to dinner at a shabu shabu restaurant, but apparently Nathan didn't hang onto the check tightly enough and the dad stole it from us when he wasn't looking. So, in fact, we were treated to dinner by said host family (on the understanding that we'd return the favor if they were ever in the U.S. ... which we would). Shabu shabu is a 'boil it yourself' buffet. You have a divided pot with water on one side and something like soy milk on the other, both of them boiling. You have very thinly sliced bits of pork and beef, which you pick up with your chopsticks and dump in the boiling water. I think "shabu shabu" is the sloshing sound from rolling meat around in the water. The meat only takes a few seconds to cook, so you can stuff yourself pretty effectively. There's also a wide selection of vegetables and noodles available for boiling, and it was really delicious. The hardest bit is trying to figure out how to get the grated carrot back out using nothing but chopsticks!

Although we were defeated on the bill-paying front, we managed to sneak in a box of See's candy which I brought along. I also had some packets of American money for Rin & Ren, the two kids. I have some photos with the family now, which I'll show off to anyone who asks--but probably not on the blog. Unfortunately, I think the family still wins on the hospitality front, because they then decided to drive us all the way back to Akihabara, which was terribly convenient for us and a longish drive for them. Thus defeated in the hospitality game, we plot revenge if they ever visit the states--maybe we can rent a limmo? ;-)

Tomorrow: Disneyland!

The ABC Song

Today was "hang out with Eve and Rissy" day. We slept in pretty late, so didn't get all that much done this morning. Probably the biggest thing we're trying to solve is the problem of doing laundry in Japan. It turns out this is really difficult -- laundromats do exist, but there aren't any nearby. Taking a taxi would probably work, but of course we'd rather not (taxis are about $20 each way I'm guessing). For those of you who think I have a lot of money, I'd like to point out that part of the reason for this is that I hate spending it stupidly, and taking a taxi to the laundromat is pretty high on my stupid list.

So, Hang Out Day started off with a boat ride. Tokyo is a waterfront city with a bay to the south, and there is a company that offers "Tokyo Bay Cruises." These are not quite as luxurious as the name makes it sound--there's no tour guide, and the boat clips along at power boat speeds, and you end up somewhere different than where you started--so it's really more of a ferry with a decorative passenger compartment. There weren't very many passengers, so we were able to sit out in the open on the back of the ship, which was fun. Tokyo is a massive city, kind of like an extended version of Manhattan. The cruise must have traveled a good 10-15 miles and it was high rise buildings the whole way. The photo I've included here was taken from the boat, and shows part of a forest of particularly tall high rise apartments on the shore.

Whimsically enough, we ended up on the boat to the Asakusa shrine, which was a convenient way of checking two sites off the to-do list in one trip. Asakusa is very different from the Meiji shrine. Instead of a huge forest of trees, it's surrounded by avenues of tourist-vampire shops. The shrine itself is taller and more impressive than the Meiji shrine, and done in red, black, white, and gold. It lacks the quiet gravity of the Meiji shrine, but it's a lot more energetic. There is a nice garden off to one side, and the picture I've included is a pair of wooden miniature shrines from the garden. I actually have no idea what they are or what they're for, but they look cool. You can see part of the massive main shrine towering over the trees in the background. Honestly, the company was more fun than the actual shrine, but the shrine was good too.

After Asakusa, Eve set off on her self-selected mission to acquire ... um, I don't remember what. Possibly little rectangular brownie-like candies. We might also have been pursuing handkerchiefs. Whatever the case, our newly acquired mission led us to the nearest 100-yen shop. The shop is several stories of aisles packed with goods that all cost (you guessed it): 105 yen. I acquired some sugary snacks (Japan has better gummy candies) and some pottery. Then we went to dinner and ate food. I ate raw fish, Clarissa had a cook-at-your-table sukiyaki plate (that's meat and vegetables boiled in a nummy broth), Eve got a fried then boiled (yeah, weird) pork cutlet which she says was wonderful, and Nathan discovered that yes, they really do expect you to cut up your meatloaf with chopsticks.

At some point, Clarissa decided she needed to acquire some figurines. The stores near the hotel had closed, but Yodobashi Akiba (near the train station) was still open, so we headed that way. Yodobashi has an entire floor of action figures. Eve particularly enjoyed the entire aisle dedicated to Ultraman figures--a show so stupid that it's awesome. If you're curious about the show, you can give Youtube a browse, but be warned: Your eyes may never forgive you, if they can survive your brain oozing out of your ears. After that little nugget of entertainment, we headed back to our hotel.

The title of the post is because Eve sung us the alphabet song, which was really cute. If you've never heard Eve sing before, you should browbeat her into doing so, because it's awesome. Then the girls headed home (for some reason they have to get up in the morning) and that brings you up to now, at which point, dear reader, I have no idea what happens next. I'm probably going to go downstairs and buy a drink. Maybe I'll get one of the sodas with gummy candies in it.

Visit to the Meiji Shrine

We visited the Meiji shrine today. Before I get into that, I'll mention that I'm acquainted with one of the priests who works at the shrine, but we didn't see him today. It's a pity, because he's devilishly hard to get hold of. We've tried telephone (to the shrine; we don't have a home number) and email, and we don't have any other contact information. I don't have any ideas left for getting hold of him.

The shrine and grounds are impressive. The first picture is the Torii gate (rhymes with story) near the entrance to the shrine. There are two of these, both about the same size. The huge posts are each cut from a single Japanese cypress, which the sign tells us were 1,500 years old. The walk to the shrine stretches over about a kilometer of wide, graveled walkway (you can get a feel for how wide the path is from the picture). The walkway is surrounded by trees, and there was an old man with a wide broom walking his way along, sweeping up all the leaves that fell onto the path. This struck me as a sisyphean task, especially when autumn comes around, but the walkway is remarkably well groomed, so I have to hand it to the old guy with the broom.

The shrine itself is a huge stone courtyard with two spots for trees. On the right is a single tree surrounded by racks of votive tablets. Apparently, what you do is buy a wooden tablet for 500 yen (about 3 or 4 dollars) and then write a prayer on it. You then hang this around the divine tree, and the priests will offer up the prayers at some point. I'm not sure what that involves -- burning them or something, perhaps -- but the practice seems very popular. There were several thousand of the tablets hanging there in rows and columns and stacks, completely surrounding the tree. The tablets were written in a variety of languages, so this seems to be a popular practice. The handful I noticed mostly seemed to be things like "that my family may be happy and prosperous" or "I want my boyfriend to find his way back to me."

Further into the shrine is the area where you go to offer prayers. They have rows of tables with wooden slats instead of a surface. The idea is that you chuck a few coins into the slats and they fall through into a collection box of some kind underneath. You then clap your hands a few times (to make the gods of the shrine pay attention, I think) and then bow to the enshrined gods while offering up any prayers you have. I took a miss on this bit (something about the second commandment), but it still made me think.

One of the things that "you have to be there" to notice is that the prayer room of the Meiji shrine really does have a certain feel to it. It was very much a spiritual feeling--like a good home, or like a temple. It crossed my mind that while the gods of that temple may be a little hard of hearing, I think those prayers are still being heard. I suppose the visitors won't all get the things they're asking for, but I think that's all right. Getting what you want is not really the purpose of prayer anyway.

The outer part of the shrine has a large garden that has been cultivated for several centuries. The garden is spectacularly well groomed. Of course, there's something kind of funny about the way they do it. The garden is supposed to give you a kind of 'back to nature' feel, so everything is arranged in a flowing, organic way. By comparison, English style gardens are a lot more geometrically arranged.

The picture here is from the iris garden. You can't see it, but every single one of those irises has a little wooden tablet with several kanji characters on it posted next to the plant. I can't read very well still but I think they might have been family names. Perhaps you can donate to the shrine and get an iris planted?

You might also notice the fence along the side of the walkway. The fence is made entirely of woven bamboo strips poked into the ground, woven into an interlocking pattern. And in a wonderful "you're in Japan" moment, as soon as we walked past that wooden canopy, there was a rest area filled with vending machines. I got a milky white drink with little chewy cubes in it, and it tasted great.

We also went to Harajuku and looked at all the costumed teenagers wandering about. I ate some sukiyaki, and we found the Apple store in Shibuya (after much asking around--most of the people we asked had never even heard of the company, which made things dead difficult). Oh, and it's gotten late, so I think I'll have to wrap it up now.

Yokohama Church

So, for some reason, I didn't take a picture of the church building in Yokohama, so you'll have to settle for this highly attractive Catholic church instead.

So, we went to church in Yokohama, largely because Clarissa persuaded us to do so. It was a lot of fun -- there was a nice fellow who translated sacrament meeting for us, and then taught Sunday school in English (there was a special "English only" class for us foreign types). There are a lot of foreigners in the ward (many Chinese?) so it has a cosmopolitan feel to it.

After church, we got invited to some kind of "family home evening" activity, where a Chinese guy was making noodles for everyone who showed up. It seems to have been aimed at the single adults, in which category both Nathan and I are abundantly qualified. The food was a cold noodle dish with a salty broth, chewy noodles, cucumber, ham, tomato, and omelet strips. It was really good. This was preceded by an amusing brief message about reverence from one of the bishopric.

After that, Clarissa's homestay family invited us over. They really do have a very nice house. We ended up eating dinner there (we were told that the mom had just done yakisoba noodles for 600 kids at a school function, and that doing dinner for five people was hardly any work at all by comparison). We also got lots of advice on stuff to do in Tokyo, and the dad drew various maps of places we could go. The conversations were built out of an amusing English/Japanese pidgin, since everyone spoke just a little of the other's language. The kids, Rin and Ren, are absurdly cute, and I totally spaced taking any pictures. We got invited back for Wednesday, so I'll have to take care of that then. I have some gifts to give them anyway, so being invited back is fortunate, cause I didn't bring them this time around.

Anyway, I'm trying not to stay up too late, which means not writing too terribly much. It's 11:30 already. Bye bye faithful reader! (I find it hard to believe there's much more than one).

A post from Japan

Well, I appear to be in Japan. Two days ago, I was getting a haircut, and I mentioned I was going to Japan, and the hairdresser said "Cool. Where's that?" So in order to avoid further stupid comments, I'll explain: Japan is a country. If you cross the ocean from California, you'll get there. It's very green and hot and muggy, at least in summer.

The first picture is some kind of twisty statue in Yokohama. This city is where my favorite youngest sister is staying. It is close to Tokyo, which is to say it takes about an hour on the train for us to get from our hotel to Yokohama. They have a kind of amusement park there with a ferris wheel, which we rode. I have a lot of photos taken from the ferris wheel, but I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of the ferris wheel itself. Interesting.

We left Utah Thursday morning and arrived in Japan on Friday afternoon. That might sound like it takes over 24 hours to get here, but it's mostly the time zone changes -- it really takes about 14 hours. My sister met us at the airport and I barely recognized her. She styled her hair to match the current Japanese fashion, and she was wearing a currently fashionable hat, which conspired to make her look different. Since she hasn't been posting pictures in her own blog, I'll stick one up for you.

The train ride from the airport to our hotel (in Akihabara, which is in central Tokyo) was really long--about 90 minutes, and the train was crowded enough that we had to stand the whole way. What made it seem twice as long is that we were carrying all our luggage with us. The luggage has this "neat" feature that it can roll in any direction, not just straight backward. This seems like a great idea until you realize it doesn't have any brakes! This means that on a train ride, it kind of wanders all over the place, and when there's people all around you it takes a lot of strenuous effort to keep it off of everyone's toes. On top of that, it doesn't roll too well when there's a lot of weight in it--Nathan's big luggage weighed a bit over 50 pounds, and the wheels completely gave out somewhere in the flight over. This makes it *very difficult* to move around, and we're busy making other plans for luggage.


For my final picture, I took a picture of a Japanese street scene. This was taken while hiking to the Square-Enix store to buy geeky products. The "differentness" of Japan really hits you when you're out on the streets. Simply wandering around the city, taking in all the sights and watching the people is a lot of the fun of being here. A lot of the buildings are a little dingy and grubby. Rather than focus on scrubbing the buildings till they sparkle (we'll call that the "Provo way"), they are instead covered from top to bottom with bright, cheesy advertising and signs. The entire city is covered in advertising of one sort or another, lots of bright colors, super-cute cartoon characters, and stylishly smug foreigners modeling exotic products. The Japanese love European-style sophistication, and most of their advertising uses Caucasians as models. The cacophony of advertising gives everything a noisy, cluttered feel, which is kind of fun but also kind of exhausting.

That's about all I have time for (and I probably won't be able to pump out a big post like this every day :P). I have church with my sister tomorrow, and need to go to bed to make it to the station in time.

Going camping!

There's a "Fathers & Sons" camp-out being held by the stake down at Utah Lake today. They're starting it out with a bike ride from Provo Canyon. We'll start at the Riverwoods, ride up the canyon to Vivian park, and then drive the breadth of Provo down to the Utah Lake state park. All told, it's probably an 8-10 mile ride.

I've heard grand plans to cook "the breakfast to end all breakfasts" the next morning. Some 10-15 odd years ago at another fathers & sons we took along a cheap frying pan and loads of bacon, onion, steak, potato, and butter. The whole thing was cooked over a campfire, and the result was a rather fascinating concoction of grease-loaded starch and protein. We've been looking for excuses to duplicate the success ever since, but lately the camp-outs have gotten in the habit of providing dinner for you. Since we've been foiled on the dinner front, we came up with amazing plans for breakfast. I guess we'll see how it goes soon enough.

I haven't forgotten about my promise to post some Zion pictures. I've merely procrastinated it repeatedly.

Goin' to Southern Utah

I'm going to go visit southern Utah. I'll be leaving early tomorrow (Friday) morning, and will be back sometime on Monday. We're going to Zion's national park, and will do some slot canyon hiking. The canyon looks something like this. The hike we'll be doing is down inside that canyon, not the walkway up above -- apparently it's on the easier end of the Zion's "technical" hikes, and you have to check the weather report before going in. I'll try to take some photos (but since it's kind of wet down there, that will involve digging my camera out of the dry bag at the necessary spots).

Speaking of cameras: I have a new camera, which hopefully will not get dropped off a cliff or drowned or something while I'm down there. Hopefully it will also take lots of gorgeous pictures.

Dabbling in politics

I find myself following politics a great deal more these days, mostly thanks to Mitt Romney and his drawing enormous amounts of publicity to our common religion. Anyway, rather than rant about all the candidates (on the left-wing side, I know precious little about them), or about Romney in particular (what, precisely, is there to say that hasn't been said a thousand times?), I thought I'd open it up to comments and see if anyone wanted to say who their current favorite was. If no one comments, I'll probably hammer on friends and family until some of you do.

If anything really interesting or provoking is said, I might even follow up with an additional post. I don't know. Still trying to figure out this whole blog thing.

Evolution vs. Creationism vs. Sanity

While I was teaching a church class a couple Sundays ago, the topic briefly sidetracked into the evolution vs. creationism debate. There were two people in the class who were pretty clearly worried by evolution, since it seemed like a threat to the Genesis creation account. There seemed to be an unspoken fear that if evolution were ever proven right, it would prove religion wrong. It's pretty easy to answer this one from an LDS perspective, and I did so in the class. I'll chuck in the Biblical references too, just in case some very lost Bible belter wanders past and wants to use them.

First, evolution is openly taught and espoused by the biology teachers at BYU. Since this position is widely disliked by a lot of the students, they hand out a sheet of quotes from church leaders just before the relevant lectures. The gist of the quotes is that mankind was created by divine means, and that mankind enjoys a special relationship with God. It is wrong to use evolution to claim that mankind is an animal unbound by moral law. That said, the actual means God used for creation is a reasonable question, and biological evolution in and of itself is not a problem theologically.

Some time after BYU, I found that there's actually a reasonable scriptural defense of biological evolution, which I will share here. We begin in the book of Genesis, which starts something like this (KJV):

(1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (2) And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (3) And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

It goes on to describe six days of creation, with man and woman being created on the sixth day, and God resting on the seventh. Now we move on to chapter two, in which the Earth gets created. Yes, again:

(1) Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. (2) And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (3) And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

(4) For these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. (6) But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (7) And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

So was that all clear? Basically, God created all the life on Earth before anything had actually grown on the Earth. Now, without immediate proof, I claim that chapter 1 is describing a spiritual creation. After this spiritual creation (chapter 1), God created physical forms for all of these spirits (chapter 2). This second bit is the physical creation. This secondary physical creation starts with rainfall, and procedes with forming life (mankind in verse 7, other critters in verse 19) from the dust of the ground, a different term than was used in Genesis 1.

I've stated the spiritual/physical dichotomy without proof, and if you need a good Bible-only proof, I think you're stuck. I'll let you ponder over verses 4-5, which pretty clearly claim the two creations are a sequence, but I don't think you can get much further. The explanation here was in fact derived from LDS scriptures. The double-creation is explained much more clearly in Moses 3, which runs parallel to Genesis 2:

(4) And now, behold, I say unto you, that these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth. For I, the Lord God, had not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God, had created all the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; for in heaven created I them; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth, neither in the water, neither in the air; (6) But I, the Lord God, spake, and there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (7) And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul . . .

In short, if evolution is correct, then it refers to the period of creation described in Genesis 2. All of the wringing of wrists and yanking of hair that's gone into trying to make Genesis 1 fit with evolution is a waste of time, because Genesis 1 does not describe the physical creation of the earth. It describes the spiritual creation, where all the spirits of things were formed.

Genesis 2 even has some echoes of our classic understanding of evolution--rain and dust is an appropriate description of life emerging from the primordial ooze. And why not? The Bible makes no bones about the humble nature of our origins. We are referred to as being "from the dust" no fewer than seven times Biblically (Gen 2:7; 3:19; 18:37; Ps 103:14; 104:29; Eccl 3:20; 12:7), and a host more times in other scripture. It's also pretty clear that this dust reference isn't exactly complimentary; it seems odd that we should be so deeply offended to think of very-great-grandpa as being simian when very-very-great-grandpa is dust.

Of course, the scriptures also makes it clear that at a certain point, a change occurred. Mankind was given his spirit, the breath of life, and that spirit makes human beings God's children. As such, we need to follow a higher law than selfish desire if we are to be happy. Let's focus on that struggle, and give the evolution thing a rest.