plutonium

A night view of Kyoto City. The tower is Kyoto Tower, the tallest building in the city. I'd say that it is just an ugly eyesore. Hard to find what made them to build it.

I know of a guy who got ripped off by a bike shop.

Wandering downtown areas in Japan, you may stumble across flashy, boisterous places like the one in the photo. They are pachinko parlors. Pachinko is a gambling game, possibly the most popular one here. The game is found almost exclusively in Japan. As far as I know, Guam is the only place outside Japan.

Pachinko fans are all busy studying strategies to win. You can find various pachinko books on bookstore shelves. Some of them are technical enough to resort to probability theory.

Nobody knows why, but the spell checker has recovered.

a real nuisance.

I made a trip to the ski resort for the first time in nearly twenty years. Last time I visited there, I was an elementary school kid.

Not a soul in sight. The lift on the slope is not operational. The oldest ski place in my district, opened 80 years ago, seems to have little time left to live. The slope has less snow year by year. This winter brings exceptionally good amount of snow, local people told.

On a just slightly off-topic note, my blog has a spell checker. But it doesn't work for me. I can't find out what is wrong with it. Is any beholder to tell how to fix it?

you can't pass through tight junctions.

There is a university named Kinki University. The school seems to be catching on among English natives. The name is pronounced kinky university, although Kinki in Japanese simply refers to an area consisting of Osaka, Kyoto, and four other prefectures. Nothing to do with perverts.

The picture is an ad of Kyoto Sangyo University ("KyoSan" for short), one of the finest schools in the northern hemisphere. I'm not an alumnus of KyoSan, sadly.

NTT DoCoMo

Can you see falling snowflakes? Not the circles on the lower side of the pic. They are snow stuck onto the lens. Look closely for white spots like dandruff.

Weather news tells that the coldest air in this season is covering Japan. Now the snow is waning. It was so intense an hour ago. Such snowfalls don't occur very often in Osaka.

I've been sloppy with blogging.

I don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning these days. This winter in Japan seems colder than usual. Indeed, Osaka had snow covering for the first time in eleven years.

I start the day by warming my body in a bath. It's so soothing that I often fall back to sleep while soaking in the bathtub. If you try this, you'll know that it couldn't be helped that I was late for the public health exam.

Your NMDA receptors

The tense exam spell is now almost over. I only have a silly public health exam on Friday.

Humm, I have nothing to tell for now.