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.

What to Put in a Blog?

So, I've had a couple ideas for posts float through my head but I haven't really gotten around to any of them. I'm still trying to figure out what to blog about--most of the things I have on my mind seem a little too big for individual posts. I guess much of this is just laziness. I liked the idea of sticking up a picture with each post, but that's a fair amount of work.

Some things I have in mind:

• Just news about what I'm doing. Frankly, the stuff I write for the family newsletter is about as much as there is.
• Lengthy philosophical rants about one thing or another. Politics, religion, philosophy, whatever.
• Technical stuff. Maybe talking about what I do, or interesting recent problems.

Friends of mine just run multiple blogs, one for each topic they want to talk about, and then post to whichever one seems relevant at the time. This would be a good idea, but I don't output enough writing to keep even this one going. Perhaps I'll get better at it again.

Wii Campout

Today's image is of the Wii campout just outside of Wal-Mart. You're looking at a line of tents filled with people hoping to pick up their own Wii console the next morning. Wal-Mart had twenty or so consoles to give out, so quite a few people hung around. The successful folks waited for about 2-3 days. A friend of mine was in the line so I paid them a visit a couple of times, but I didn't try camping out myself.

Getting a Wii is approximately half the fun of these campouts. The other half of the fun is running into people you know, converting people you don't know into people you know, and switching from "always-on" mode to "sitting around doing nothing" mode, if only for a few days. I think we ought to do that more often.

I caught a cold (or something sort of like a cold) and stayed home from work yesterday. I'm still sort of tired today (I plan on sleeping for a good 9-10 hours, again) but I'm feeling much better. At no point did I wish I was dead, so I think I'm all right.

Foodie-wise, I haven't made any progress on the pizza quest, though I did attempt to make apple crisp yesterday. It didn't go very well, but I think I know what I did wrong, so I will try again some other day. I shall be eating turkey with a massive number of side dishes in a few hours, though, so the various other foodie quests shall have to go on hold for a while. I am not bothered by this.

Geekin' Out

The pictured object is made of Legos. If you don't know what that is, then please turn in your geek license. For those of you who never earned your geek license in the first place, it's a character from the original Legend of Zelda game, soon to be up for sale again, thanks to the evil machinations of the Nintendo machine.

Next-gen console fervor is building to a fever pitch, with both the Wii and the PlayStation 3 coming out in the next couple of weeks. I'm unlikely to buy a PS3 because it's stupidly expensive, and unless it pulls off some miraculous coups in the marketing and distribution department, it's not going to have many good games either (that's a function of market share). There was recently a survey in GameDeveloper magazine where Sony was trolling for suggestions on how to deal with the (very) negative PS3 buzz, and my first thought was "How about going back in time and refusing to allow your Blu-ray team to saddle your console team with an unproven and excessively expensive technology?" Is a dual-sided 8-gig DVD just not enough space for you?

The Wii, on the other hand, has been doing a brilliant job of building buzz and interest. It's a great example of massive R&D investment paying off. I might buy one of those, mostly cause I want to show it off to people.

A recent project of mine is trying to find a decent pizza somewhere in Utah Valley. Since most people don't have quite the single-minded dedication or budget that I have, I figure that I can save you all a little time. Please note that for judgement purposes, I nearly always get the cheese pizza--if they can't make a cheese pizza delicious, I'm not particularly interested in slathering it in toppings to try and save it. How hard can it be to make really good crust, really good sauce, and use really good cheese? Very difficult, apparently. So here are some initial results:

The absolute best pizza, with a commanding lead, is Papa Murphy's Take-n-Bake. It's not even funny how big the difference is. It's not as good as, say, that really great stuff I had in Brooklyn, but it's close. The main downside is that you have to take it home and bake it.

Another really good place is "The Pie" in Salt Lake City. It's just next to the University of Utah, and they will cook it for you. Unfortunately, it's not in Utah Valley, and I still like Papa Murphy's better. Papa Murphy's isn't quite as greasy.

There are quite a few places that have respectably good pizza. Olive Garden is very tasty, and Sbarro's at University Mall does a very decent cheese pizza (nearly as good as the Pie's, I think) -- although you have to get it fresh. I neither hate nor love Brick Oven, though to be fair to them I need to try a cheese pizza there.

There are also a great many places that make merely decent pizza. Smoke House brags about their pizza, but they use a precooked crust for selling by the slice, and that kind of kills them. They also can't seem to make up their mind whether they want to make Chicago-style pizza or New York-style pizza, and they end up at kind of an odd compromise. California Pizza Kitchen has okay sauce and cheese, but the crust tasted like a prebaked pastry.

There are also a few places that just disappointed. There's a place called "The Wooden House" (I think) on State Street that does charcoal grilled pizza. They use good cheese, and the charcoal grilling really does make an amazing crust, but their sauce is terrible. It's actually sour, and reminded me of those heinous squares of pizzafood you'd get in elementary school. If they would switch to a decent sauce then they could be good (though cleaning the place up would help too). Papa John's talks big, but all three times I've had them recently the cheese was manky. It might be a different story if you eat in. The Napoli place (near Albertson's on the parkway) does well on thin-crust pizzas, but when I got a thick-crust pizza it actually came out raw in the middle. A raw crust is an instant failing mark. I did like the thin crust stuff, but I don't think I can bring myself to eat there again.

I'm still trying places out--I intend on trying Pier 49 soon, and I intend to give Smoke House a better shot by ordering a full pizza (and hopefully getting it made from scratch) one of these days. If anyone wants to help me eat a pizza, I could use the assistance. I also haven't really put too much consideration into Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, or Domino's, but I hope I will be forgiven for ignoring them. I also can't pursue this too faithfully or I'm going to blow up like a big blubber-filled balloon.

The long and short of it is that I really wish somone would figure out how they make that pizza sauce in Brooklyn. I've found really good crusts here, and there's only so many ways to mess up on cheese, but nobody has figured out how to make the magic sauce yet. Until then, Papa Murphy's it is.

Behold, the results of the pumpkin carving contest! The pumpkin more or less in the center is my team's entry (the "team" being Corby and myself). I imagine that none of my blog's readers know Corby; suffice it to say that he's a fellow from my ward with a very dry sense of humor.

In the end, about half the pumpkins got labeled as "pretty dang good" and the rest wallowed in the mediocrity of "not quite as dang good." That was about as far as the judging went, as no one had bothered to actually organize any judging in the first place.

The pumpkin now occupies a seat of honor on my balcony, displaying its mischievious grin to passers-by. I have got a bunch of candles and I could probably make it glow, but have not yet bothered to do so. I might do that for Hallowe'en, just to get in the spirit of things.

Cavan finally managed to call me from Russia (woohoo!). He tried a few times but kept catching me away from the phone. He calls me from some kind of weird phone card number, which means I can't call him back if I miss the call, and he's disinclined to try twice. I gave the number its own magic ringtone, and that probably helps a little. Anyway, it was fun, and we talked about stuff. I mostly don't remember what, but it probably involved Russia, and it definitely involved Russian ravioli, which Cav was having for dinner that night.

Thinking of food (and back on my side of the pond), I have yet to find a garden vegetable soup that doesn't taste like sour tomatoes. It's possible that people just don't use ripe enough tomatoes, but overall I find this a great pity. I'm often on the lookout for healthier food, and garden vegetable soup ought to be a good candidate, but it's always sour. Maybe you can make a good soup without any tomato? Tomato is always what you use to give the broth flavor, though, so you'd have to find a different good vegetable. Beans work pretty well, but add a lot of calories. Maybe a variant on onion soup would work?

Just when you thought everything was dead

The three round spots you see in the middle are mushrooms, poking up through tree bark. The tree bark, in turn, is scattered all around the base of a tree found at approximately 200 west 150 north in Provo. I was walking home from a birthday lunch for one of our employees when I spotted this tree with attendant mushrooms.

The reason it's interesting is because the entire treebox is infested with these mushrooms. There were dozens of them, I think. We put bark down to keep weeds from growing around the base of the trees, but these mushrooms pushed right on through like they loved it.

My blog is like a mushroom, and my laziness like treebark. Despite my laziness, eventually you get ... mushrooms! I'm sure there's a moral here somewhere. Just don't look too hard, I don't want you to hurt yourself.

Back from Iraq

I actually have something related to current events to talk about today, so I may as well :-). The guys you see on the left are members of the National Guard, and got back from a 12-month tour of duty in Iraq recently. They're also identical twins. They signed on in the same unit and stayed together. One of them was a mechanic, the other guy was a machine-gunner on the back of a humvee.

Up till I met these guys, I hadn't personally run into anyone who'd actually been to Iraq. Oh, I've run into a dozen dozen people who have strong opinions on Iraq, and I even had a religion professor who was excited for Saddam's ousting because he wants to go to Iraq "once it's stabilized a bit" so that he can see some history. But these guys were the first I've met who'd been there.

So what was their opinion on Iraq? In short: far more positive than any I've heard elsewhere. They stuck a slideshow on their laptop, showed off their gear, and answered lots and lots of questions. They believe the media really isn't giving the big picture--it's focusing on every bad thing that happens, and ignoring what is mostly a positive transformation. They never talk about any of the humanitarian projects, but anytime there's an accident or a death, you're guaranteed a mention. Lots of close-ups of the worst things, but complete silence regarding what's going right.

They also talked a little about the difficult things. They lost one guy in their squad to an IED--two artillery shells and some other stuff completely blew out the truck in front of them. Two of the guys were wounded and survived, one guy was killed. It was upsetting. However, mostly the service was large amounts of very hot, very sweaty boredom punctuated by rare moments of intense excitement. They didn't get shot at very often, but there were a LOT of roadside bombs. They saw those all the time. Mostly they succeeded in avoiding them.

They did give one credit to Saddam's army: They were the first army in the entire world to ever take down an Abrams tank. It was a pretty clever hit, too--very poor visibility, and they managed to get in close and get a shell in through an exhaust vent. So the total worldwide fatality count on Abrams tanks is now: One.

As for the Iraqis? Well, they like Iraqis. "Most of the people we're fighting aren't Iraqis--they're foreigners." Their perception was the Arab Iraqis were largely in favor of them being there, even if they didn't like it much. The Kurds, on the other hand, treated the Americans like "rock stars." American soldiers in the Kurdish areas are far more relaxed, and can concentrate primarily on humanitarian work. There aren't really any combat ops in the Kurdish areas.

They'd been in just about all the areas of Iraq (at one point they were doing transportation work) and even served several months near Saddam's hometown. There were very wide differences in public opinion by region, although even in the worst areas it has been improving. They told a story about the election in Tikrit (Saddam's hometown) -- the voter turnout there was far below 1% in the initial election. At one station there was a conversation that went something like this:

"There's a guy coming to the polling station."
"Is he armed?"
"No, he looks clean."
"What's he doing?"
"I dunno ... just kind of walking toward the station."
"Huh."
"Yeah, now he's gone in."
"Anything happening?"
"No, pretty quiet ... yeah, just came back out."
"Nothing blown up?"
"Yeah, no one dead, looks like."
"Huh. Maybe he voted."
"Yeah? Weird."

That same region had a voter turnout well over 50% in the following election, which they felt was a huge marker of the way things were improving. Iraqis still have a higher voter turnout than Americans; whatever they dislike about the political system, they are willing to try voting.

Another story that impressed them: They met an Arabic man whose brother had been killed because he (apparently?) tried to run a roadblock, and the soldiers shot him. But this man said "it is still better now. Now, I can go wherever I want. Before, if I tried to leave my province, they would kill me because I would not have papers. It is better now." They felt this reflected the tenor of opinions--things may be bad, but perhaps they are better.

As for the WMD's? "If there was anything, it's been buried or destroyed by now." Yeah, so the WMD thing didn't pan out. Most of the people that we're actually fighting there, however, are not even Iraqis--they're terrorists from Iran, or even more from Syria. "So in the end, we really are fighting terrorists, because the terrorists are coming to us in Iraq."

That's a pretty tight summary from over an hour of chatting. The barbecue was also great.

What I actually do all day

A fairly common question I get is what I do for a living. This is a rather difficult question to answer, because what I actually do is create a specialized set of plugins for applications used by the computer-animation and computer-aided manufacturing industries. Got that? To be specific, I write software for calculating curved surfaces, which surfaces are second-derivative continuous, allow for mid-surface termination of their isoparms, and form a superset of both subdivision surfaces and NURBS surfaces.

Basically, unless you have a fairly decent background in engineering or 3D modeling, it's very difficult to explain what I do. I was digging through some old pictures wondering what might be a good idea to post on my blog, and I ran across a photograph I took of a whiteboard. The whiteboard is on the wall of the company I visited in Seattle a few months ago, and I wrote myself a lot of notes on how something worked. Since I was leaving Seattle in a day or so, I just took a bunch of photos of the whiteboard so that I could hang onto the notes. Clear? Anyway, the stuff I work with looks pretty much like what you see on the whiteboard. If it makes sense to you, perhaps you should contact me so that we can offer you a job.

Someone else has made a more coherent attempt at explaining what I do. Feel free to flip through that if you actually care. Most people don't, really.

My dad's in Chicago right now. Peter, who writes a far more interesting blog, also lives in Chicago, so I got him to call my dad and help him find the tourist traps. Dad's at a conference and hasn't got very much to do, so tourist traps are a welcome distraction.

It's late and I'm supposed to be asleep, but I'm not tired. I will make a half-hearted attempt in a few minutes anyway, so wish me luck.

I'm not sure how to spell the puppy's name

This week, we have a picture that was taken about a month ago. The extremely cute dog that you see presented here is probably named Payton. I say "probably" because I have never seen the name written down before, so I'm merely stabbing erratically at the spelling, like a blind serial language murderer with a blunt orthographic knife.

Anyway, this dog is my sister Shana's new pet, and he's very cute. He's still a puppy, though he won't get very much bigger -- he's about the size of a basketball, but not so fat, and you're not allowed to throw him or bounce him.

I have, at last, acquired a Bluetooth adapter for my computer. This means that I am writing this post from my desktop, rather than my old and dying laptop, and I was able to copy the photo straight from my phone to the computer. This ought to bode good things for the future of my blog posting updatefulness.

While I was out shopping, I also picked up Brain Age, which is sort of like a math test pretending to be a video game. The basic idea is that if you exercise your brain by doing memory, reading, and math problems for a few minutes every day, that you will keep your mind nimble and keep away degenerative brain diseases. Whether or not that's true, the game is mildly amusing, and I like to keep my mental arithmetic sharp because I use it a lot.

Actually, the main reason I'm fascinated by Brain Age is because it's a very interesting piece of Nintendo's strategy to expand the video game market beyond the fortress of males aged 9-35. Brain age is an attempt to go straight for the elderly -- the instruction manual's examples were all for a 55 year old woman. Nintendo's president recently spoke about the gradual fading of the mainstream video game market in Japan, and he feels that expanding the market is critical for the future growth of the industry. Brain Age is a piece of his answer, and the Wii is another one.

That's all I have to babble about today. Have a good one. Maybe I'll post again soon.