quantum electrodynamics

Rice cakes are a staple winter food for Japanese. They can come in various shapes. The shape you see here, a dome-shape, is the commonest.

You heat rice cakes in an oven for several minutes before you eat them. Hot rice cakes are very sticky. Many elder people choke on them and die every winter. According to the Japanese version of Wikipedia, domestic vaccum cleaners can be used to suck the cakes out of the choked throats.

I've changed my mind. You don't have to p@y.

A night view from a driver's seat. This pic is very significant because I took this on the last day of 2006, i.e. Dec/31/2006. You don't know why the date alone makes the photo so important. You can't tell where my car was heading to, either. I won't tell.

What!? You mean you don't know? No, you're absolutely lying. You're just pretending not to know it. You have to pay me back right away!

I went skiing yesterday. The snow condition was terrible.

you have to pay me back $10. You must remember it.

They are on the set for a drama. I usually don't enjoy movies and dramas. When watching them, I always picture scenes where the actors are practicing the clips. I mean I imagine scenes like the one in the pic. This distracting obsession never allows me to share the emotions that other beholders would feel from the clips.

shanty town

This outstanding plant, Tecophilaea cyanocrocus, is from the Andes highlands in Chile. Some gardeners believe that this is one of the bluest flowers. T. cyanocrocus would be surely the bluest in the southern hemisphere. I'd say that some gentians in the Alps could exceed this Chilean blue.

Tecophilaes cyanocrocus seem to be extinct in the wild due to over-collecting and environmental deterioration in the habitats. Commercially available ones are all from gardens, not from the nature. On a slightly positive note, wild T. cyanocrocus, reportedly, was rediscovered somewhere in Chilean Andes.

fedex express

It's around 3:20 pm, Feb 17th (local time in Japan). So here is my plunge-ritual venue. The water temperature is slightly below 3 degrees Celsius.



















The little kid is taking clothing off.















Well, I think I gained some weight.






It's me in the fall. Rather than plunging into the water, the water is plunging onto me. My brain got paralyzed with this ridiculous shower. The best numbing experience ever, literally.

I'm praying that plunge events in your venues will be successful. Cheers!

scandinavia

My college professor, who studied fungi, said that some species of mushrooms feed on chemicals in urine. The teacher in fact observed mushrooms growing on the ground where he had pissed.

Here's my follow-up on his observation. Since last October, I've pissed on a particular spot in my backyard. The ground now must contain a good amount of my pee chemicals. Surprisingly, the follow-up didn't support the theory; nothing showed up. Instead, weeds around the spot have gone! My piss seems to have worked as a herbicide rather than a fungi-growth-factor (FGF).

FGF..., it's an acronym of the supposed factor. Ah, making trivial acronyms really brings me self-satisfaction. I feel like as if I were doing something extremely advanced in a scientific sense. It's embarrassing to tell that I went out of my way to do the experiment not to examine the theory but to coin the acronym FGF. Overlook this silly person, please.

antibiotic

Now you see from where the wind is blowing as the ice is growing down the wind. In Japan, this form of ice is called "shrimp tails". The one in the photo is not a typical one. So it would be hard to reason the name. Well-developed "shrimp tails" indeed look like a line of tails directing down the wind.

abortion

So the ridge looks like this. You see ice growing on the branches of the shrubs. Seeing them up close, they just look like branches decorated with sugar. Quite a bit windy and freezing.

You may think the snow thickly lies there. However, it is only half as deep as the snow-level in an average year. We have an unusually snow-less winter this season. Most ski resorts in western Japan are now weeping because they have a really tough time.

I blame El Nino for hampering Japanese ski industry. So I asked a girl who is now traveling South America to slap the waters off Peru, where El Nino is going on. We'll see how it works.

Alzheimer's

Not long ago, I went hiking in the mountain range. I photographed the mountains from afar. Next a couple of posts will be about this trip. See you tomorrow.

maria yuryevna sharapova

Some English words are difficult to spell. Basically, I'm not a good speller. I can never spell ''entrepreneur'' without a dictionary. Kids in spelling bees are often...

Well, I drew the Nike mark. I think I did a fine job on it. I have a nike backpack, a pair of nike shoes and a piece of nike t-shirt.

dementia

It is called Roh-bai. A literal translation of the name is ''plum blossoms made of wax''. This is because Roh-bai's semi-transparent petals look like a wax product. People enjoy its sweet fragrance as well as the unique appearance. This species is from China, not Japanese native.

eyesore

At last, I've photographed an unidentified flying object (UFO). It has the typical hat-shape. Some critics say that it is a blurry image of an airplane.