Is that a fish on your leg...

I'm gonna let this speak for itself.

Take my son, please

The morning news had a feature today on matchmaking events attended only by the concerned parents of kids in their 30s and 40s.

The supertitle says "Desperate PR," but the tactics were anything but. They seemed to be competing for who could be more modest about their children - "if he could put up with someone like my daughter," "Oh, no, if she could stand living with someone who makes as little as my son."

What do you call that dance again?

Also, they have a dancing robot.

Takes one to know one

I went to the Miraikan today, which is cool for many reasons. Let's start with the name. The formal name is National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, but it's called Future Building/Center for short. Both neat. The building itself is as futuristic looking as you'd hope, with its spherical planetarium screen bulging out of the front, and a curved glass curtain wall along one side.

The temporary exhibit up now is called Aliens, and it's really well done. It starts off with images of aliens in pop culture throughout history, from old religious paintings to the grainy alien autopsy movie on a loop (with offensive alien parts mosaic-ed out, per Japanese law). Lucasfilm lent the museum stuff from their collection, including scenes from ET and a whole Ewok. A toothy alien from Alien looms at the entrance, and a partially dissected rubber cast of the star of Alien Autopsy prompted a few visitors to ask each other if it was, um, real. There's a heavy phone receiver you can pick up to hear an original recording of War of the Worlds.

Deep sea creatures in jars, plastic bug eyes, and rubber tapeworms and Venus flytraps demonstrate ways life adapts to different terrestrial conditions. A bank of microscopes focused on slides of bacteria that live in acid, without oxygen, under ice, and whose only nutrition is the rocks they eat set the stage for other lifeforms that might thrive in extremes.

That exhibit segues easily into projections of what aliens might look like, given theoretical atmospheric parameters on made-up planets. The hypothetical aliens battle each other on touch screen games.

Finally, the room on communication gives a brief history of projects to make and receive contact, including an explanation and image of the "wow" signal, and audio recordings of some of the multilingual greetings we've sent up. (Opera on a golden record? Who knew.)

It ends with a kiosk where you can snap a digital picture of yourself and send it off with a four-panel symbol picture attached. You use a rollerball to choose from (dubiously universal) icons like books and rockets and hearts and exclamation points. I'm not sure where the messages actually go, but the projection screen implied they rocket out into the universe.

The communication "zone" urges visitors to "imagine trying to read something in a language you can't understand." Easy. Happily, the English was good throughout, so the information was clear - even for an alien.

Best deal in Japan

Movie tickets cost 1,800 yen per person.
A hearty portion of hot popcorn and a medium soda cost just 600 yen.
Probably balances out to be about the same as the whole deal would be in New York?

Grandma, tell us again about "butter"

Two weeks ago, Jim came back from his first trip to the fancy import grocery store and said the prices were unbelievable. I indulged him his sticker shock - it takes a while to get used to Quaker oatmeal and Old El Paso taco mix at twice their American prices. It was much worse than that, he said - butter was over twenty bucks, and there was just one package of it. He said there was a sign in English and Japanese claiming short supplies.

Since then, I've read a few stories about the great Japanese butter shortage. I get it generally - grain prices, biofuel, meat-mad Chinese, car-crazy Indians. I'm always left feeling like there are a few dots that these stories connect with a circular argument or a jab at China instead of a fact. But that's probably due to gaps between my own world economics dots.

I'm still not sure how the glut and subsequent voluntary reduction two years ago of Japan's domestic dairy output (cream down drains!) affected the number of tubs of French Plu Gras avec Sel de Mer at Nissin. (Do top tier French farms get their butter milk from drought-plagued Australia?)

Whether or not I'd embarrass myself on a global econ test, the facts on the ground are that there is less butter in the stores here. Which is why we were surprised to find a box of it at the Mini Stop across the street, just minding its own business at a normal price, about three bucks.

Here then, for posterity, a box of Snow Brand Hokkaido butter.


Maybe I can sell it on the black market.

This can mean only one thing

But I have no idea what that might be.

I am grateful that this is the extent of my election coverage.

Home Whaling Network

A lot of afternoon TV is devoted to shopping shows and infomercials. It's mostly similar to QVC stuff - wrinkle creams, kitchen gizmos, and tacky jewelry. This one caught my eye.


A commercial for cans of stewed whale meat. The motherly announcer uses charts and graphs to show the nutritional benefits of whale meat compared other meats, and she hastens to point out that the white parts in the can are not fat, but tendons. She suggests lots of tasty ways to cook it up, like stir fried with vegetables or over rice. She was especially excited about serving it battered and deep fried: "It takes a long time to cook, but is so delicious that I hope everyone will try it!"
Call now!

Saving the Planet, 10,000 pamphlets at a time

I wandered into Earth Day in Yoyogi park yesterday looking for rockabillies. It turned out to be Earth Day (observed). I don't imagine Tokyo's Earth Day celebration is any more or less hypocritical or unfocused than anybody else's. There was a garbage tent, with running chalkboard totals of the kilos collected of different types of disposables: burnable, unburnable, plastic bottles, cans, etc. There was a man in front of this tent handing out plastic bags, urging everyone to take home their own trash. Does redistribution equal reduction? Maybe it was just about raising awareness. Maybe, probably, I missed something.
There was a man in wire rimmed glasses holding the rapt attention of a tent full of people on wooden benches. He was talking about Chinese vegetables and pointing to a projected slide of leeks under running water.
A domed 4-person tent was set up with the invitation to write or draw a "time that makes you happy" on the surface with marker. They were sweet and environmental - "When I'm with my mother and father and the sky;" "when I'm in the garden."
Free Tibet. Organic coffee. A heap of used clothes that were being sold "so they wouldn't be burned." (Clothes are tossed as burnable garbage a lot more often than they're donated here.)
Truthers have even made it here. One tent was showing a documentary in Japanese about the truth about 911. They had stacks of DVDs and eight-dollar paperbacks translated paragraph by paragraph into Japanese. They had something you could sign, too. I didn't stick around to ask what purpose the signatures were serving. Or how they were saving the planet.

But no cigar