Mike,

In about an hour, rakitty & son will have their sudden-death match continued from last week. Somewhat repaired after the Dom match two days ago, I’m ready & raring for this one, and the adrenaline is
already coursing through my veins.

To be continued…

rakkity

Mike,

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to the story. Dom and I got to the court about 10 minutes before time and started up after no warmup. This is usually a mistake for me, but this time it wasn’t. Dom failed to return any of my first 8 serves, and he went on to lose 15-3. The next game wasn’t so easy for me, but the Dom couldn’t score more then 6. By then I was relaxed–a bit too much relaxed–and Dom started off scoring 6 straight. I buckled down and chased after him, catching up at 10. He failed to score after that. By then I was so relaxed I was a standing puddle of jelly, and the Dom was scoring steadily. He was up 9-2 in the 4th game, when the adrenalin began to re-flood my veins. We reached 14-13, Dom’s favor, when he blasted an unhittable serve past me and won his first of the night.

The sweat pouring down my face, I looked at my watch. We’d been playing an hour. I said, ‘How many games have we played so far? Six?” Dom was a better counter than me, retaining 6 or 7 functioning brain cells to my 3, and said, “Let’s play a fifth.” By then we were both physically shot and refused to chase after any ball further than 3 feet away. By the time we got up to a 10-10 score, The Dom was just standing in one place, swinging pathetically, and I won that one just by spinning balls 4 feet away from him.

As we walked out, Dom panted, “I’m going to be sore tomorrow.” I smiled, but didn’t tell him I’d have to recover for my game Friday with Patrick. 

Now it’s Friday morning, and the Ibruprofin has kicked in. The court reservations are for 5 pm. Whatever happens, I have the weekend, with no snow-shoveling or tree sawing, to recover.

Now on to Friday’s challenge by rakkity-son–

Patrick returned to the challenge court on Friday at 5, and we played two long games, followed by an interupted no-decision. The first game was a wipeout for Patrick (15-3), but he wore his old man down in the 2nd game and managed to get 10 points before losing. It’s a good thing for me that our games are so long, because time ran out in the middle of the 3rd game. We were tied 8-8 when a knock on the door from two other players interrupted us on the dot of 6. Patrick asked them if we could play until one of us scored and then we’d quit.

So it was sudden death between Rakkity & Son.

It was my turn to serve, and P. fielded it well. I lost the serve, so P. served, and blasted a good one. I
returned it to a low corner. He dove for it, and missed it, losing his serve. My subsequent serve made a ridiculous bounce–impossible to return. Nevertheless, P. returned it, and I was so surprised I missed my return. Three serves now, and neither one of us had scored. This went on for 5 more serves without a point.

We figured we had exceeded the good will of the anxiously waiting players,so we quit. At least we gave them a good show. And now we await next Friday’s match for a final decision.

rakkity & son

From the unposted rakkity Japan Chronicles
Mike,

Don’t post this around mealtime.

Today I dispersed my food items from the warming cabinet onto a tray without looking carefully at the contents of the dishes. After I had started chowing down, I looked more carefully at the strange things on one of the plate (see attached photo). Had I actually eaten one of those? They look like bugs! Nahh..couldn’t be. 

Mukul sat down, and I asked him what they were. Insects, maybe? He said, “No, if this were India, I would say yes, but in Japan, I don’t think so. We can ask Shibasaki san tomorrow what they were.” Mukul ate them with gusto.

Even with his example, I couldn’t eat any more. I was sure those little tendils are legs or antennas. And are those little beady eyes? Maybe if they were fried and battered, or saute’d in dark chocolate,
I would go for them. But not as they are. Maybe Peter can illuminate me about their vegetable nature..

rakkity shamaru

Mike,

Have a look at APOD (below) and compare it with the original Adams picture Link (below that)..Even if you convert the color picture to B&W and fiddle with the overall contrast, gamma, andbrightness, you can never get that magical glow of light above the mountains that Adams somehow created. And the contrast in the mountains where the snowfields and glaciers were is just incredible. (Admitedly therewas more snow in 1948 than now.)

Ansel must have dodged the moon in the darkroom to make it so bright relative to the mountains. Nothing like a comparison of amateurs and professionals to show the difference between them.

Amateurs

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4848982″>Ansel’s

-rakkity–Just another amateur

Mike,

Tonight at dinner, Mukul brought down a bottle of sake that he thought we should finish off, since “Sake always goes better with dinner, right?” So after finishing it off along with dinner, I decided to go for a walk in the night. Being well insulated and especially well lubricated, I headed for the 45-m dish, which is well lit even in the wee hours of the morning. It appears to be only about 100 m away, but when I got further down the road, it didn’t seem to be any bigger. Like a mountain in the distance, it seemed to remain the same size as I walked. But after 10 min or so of walking, it did seem to loom larger. 

I had this idea that I’d shoot a picture of it with the moon over the big dish, but as I got closer, the idea lost all its practicality, as I’d have to tramp into the snowy woods about a km off to the left to get both the telescope and the moon into the same frame of my camera. Then I was under it, and it looked like the spaceship in Chicken Little. When you peered up, it was all there was.. But back in the direction I had been walking from I could see Mt Nobeyama ski area with all its photogenic but light polluting beacons on the slopes. “That should make a good picture, combined with the massive support structure of the telescope”, I said to myself. So I found a good support for the camera and took the attached picture. I think it’s one of the most interesting shots I’ve taken here. But that may just be the sake talking. I’ll be glad to hear any contradictions.

Shamaru

View image

Rakkity/Shamaru

The space-time confusium

Let’s see now, as I write here it’s 8:40 pm JST; that’s 6:40 am EST, so this email is arriving at Central St blog factory just before dawn. It’s Wednesday here, so it’s Tuesday there. These are my thought
processes as I write to my intern back at Goddard in MD. (His name is Rick, and he’s a recent graduate from UMd.)

Every day Rick sends me some figures that he’s made for the paper we’re writing together. If I write in the morning, he doesn’t get that email till the next day, which is really the previous day, and if he writes to me in the afternoon, I get it in the morning of the same day. Right? Except when I write to him late at night, and he is at work and actually gets the message in near real time. When that happened once, Rick asked, “How did you do that?”

So when I critique his work, he has to figure out what I’m talking about. Is it the figure he just sent, or is it the one he sent yesterday? Or maybe its the one he will send tomorrow, and I’ve got advance notice of it.

I don’t know how we’ve done it, but together we’ve actually done some productive work in this time warp.

Mike’s the only person that I’ve been able to quasi-IM with. But Mike’s always in a time warp. (That’s due to the Black Hole in the library.) Time is only a coordinate that measures the distance between blog entries, right?

Just before we headed out the door, Deguchi san explained what he wrote in thenote at the desk. He described the camera, the black pouch, and the blue bag.”What blue bag?” I asked. “Your blue bag on the bench. I put your camera in the pouch, and then into the blue bag”, he explained. “But I had no blue bag. That must have been someone else’s.” Deguchi san was crestfallen. “Then it was my mistake. I put your camera in another bag, and the owner must have taken it away. Wait here, I’ll go look around.” He headed off into another part of the volumnious lobby area and disappeared for awhile. I wondered what he was doing. Maybe looking for someone with a blue bag? In less than 5 minutes he came back with the camera! He said, “I saw someone with the bag and asked them if there was a small camera in it. And there was. The person who had it was very apologetic at having your camera.

On the way out, he was still crestfallen at having made the mistake. I patted him on the shoulder, and said, “there’s an old English saying, All’s well that ends well”.

So here’s some bath pictures. You can see Mt Fuji in the background. And there will be new pictures in the following week (which is my last one in Japan).

Shamaru
The Baths
Towel Racks

rakkity shamaru

Saturday Dec 9, 3:00 JST

Mukul and I met in the cafeteria and waited for Degushi san, who was going to take us to a nearby hot springs. Promptly at 3, his little grey car drove up to the entrance, and Degushi waved us in. Degushi san is a balding, thin, professorial type, who’s part of the Nobeyama “cosmic” staff, as opposed to “Solar” staff, like Shibusaki san. Apparently he’s working with one of his students using the 45-m telescope (the biggest in Asia) to observe the mm spectrum of galactic nebulae. While we waited for Mukul, still backin the shoe room, tying his boots, Segushi san asked me my first name.

I said, “Ed. That’s short for Edward.”

He repeated the nickname and the name, which were both new to him. He’s on a first name basis with Mukul, but it takes time for a Japanese person to use a gaigin’s first name, so I didn’t ask him his first name (which is Shuji; you can google him using deguchi nobeyama).Mukul entered the front passenger seat, and we sped out of the lot.

We drove towards Kiyosato on the same roads I had taken on my snow-biking tour. Just a few 100 m before I had given up and turned back home, we turned right at the “Nokyo” sign (one I recalled as the only English sign in sight.). We drove past hundreds of discreet apartment-like buildings, mostly hidden behind pine trees. Degushi said they were condos. About 15 minutes after we started, we were driving up to Yatkasutake ski area. My ears popped, so we had climbed a lot, and suddenly there was a great view of a spectacular mountain like Mt Adams or pre-eruptive Mt St Helens. I asked Degushi san, “Is that Fuji?”, and he said that it was. So one of our objectives had been accomplished. we’d be able to see Fugi san from the baths.

But the baths were not at the ski area any more, so we headed down hill to another town about 15 min away. Behind a parking lot with about 30 micro-minivans and and many non-Toyota-Honda-Nissan, nondescript, blocky cars that would never sell in the USofA), was a flat-topped building like a bowling alley. Inside, there was the mandatory shoe corral, where we dutifully shelved our shoes. We stuck 1000-yen bills into a machine (Y700 apiece), which expectorated 3 tickets. Five m away, we proffered the tickets to a little lady at a desk, and walked through the inviting lobby to another machine that, after some touch-screen finger gymnastics, popped open a locker for our use. We put in our keys and wallets, and proceeded to the men’s locker room.

Up to that point, we were about as far as you could get from the ancient steam baths of the Shogun era. But the locker room was partially modern, partially traditional. In the middle of the room were wooden stands with bamboo baskets for your clothes. On one wall were lockers where you could stash your clothes (all of them, no bathing suits allowed) and take the key with you on a bracelet. On the other wall were sinks with modern plumbing and mirrors. But out the door you could see a darkish, steamy room with stone walls and a big pool.

We entered the dim room, each with a towel draped modestly in front. Degushi san scooped up some water from the pool and poured it over his head. He indicated the showers on the left wall where some old guys were industriously washing with soapsuds and sprays. We stepped into the hot pool and looked at the view. A large glass wall on the far side of the pool kept out the wintry winds, but allowed us a good display of Fuji san off in the distance. The pool was just hot enough that you had to go in slowly, but it was wonderfully relaxing. We chatted a bit, and I observed that there was another pool right outside. Maybe we could go out? We waited for Mukul again, and shortly after he arrived, we decamped for the outside pool. After a few minutes of soaking, I told Degushi san that I wanted to take a picture, and went over to the bench where I had left my camera.
With damp hands, I carefully extracted the camera from its little black pouch, and got a good shot of the submerged bathers with Mt Fuji in the background. Deguchi san offered to take a picture of me, so I handed him the camera, and pulled back into the depths. After he took the picture, and verified with me that the picture was good, he put the camera back on the bench, and returned to the pool with us.

We chatted and soaked for about half an hour, and decided to head on back to the lobby for a drink or some ice cream.

DISASTER! END OF JAPAN BLOG PICTURES!

My camera was nowhere to be seen on the bench. It had nominally been in sight all the time we had been bathing, but all of us had been looking at the view, not at the bench. Deguchi san said, “I’ll ask at the desk.” He donned some shorts and disappeared out of the locker room. It took me a little longer to go out to the lobby, since somehow I had managed to drench my towel in the pools. But when I got out and met him, he downcastedly said that the desk people hadn’t heard or seen any camera.

We sat around on one of the benches numbly eating ice cream (a box of chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons for only Y100. Great stuff!) Deguchi san decided we should leave a note at the desk with names and phone numbers, in case someone returned with the camera. “Sure”, I said, disconsonantly. My faith in the honesty and reliability of the Japanese had been shattered. But at the desk, Deguchi san wrote up a detailed description of where he put the camera, what it looked like, and all the circumstances, including the blue bag that he had put it in. This was all in Japanese script, so I had no clue what he was writing until he told me afterwards.

We sat some more, and I bought another package of ice cream bon-bons for my dessert back at the dorm. I thanked my lucky stars that I had taken the 512 MB memory card out of the camera this morning, and was running on camera memory, so no pictures were lost–except the two of us in the bath! So I was crossing my fingers. Maybe one of the bath customers would call Deguchi san and say that he had taken the camera accidentally. It was a long shot. I’ll tell you later if we get a call. Unless someone calls, this is the end of the Japan pictures.

To be continued

rakkitty/shamaru

rakkity/shamaru

Mushrooms

Houses

rakkity/shamaru
My perambulations around Nobeyama Observatory via foot and rattletrap 2-speed.
And next door to that observatory is a museum with…..

(Editor’s note: I think shamaru’s having entirely too much fun.)