I went out for a stroll the other day; it was the day after New Year’s Day, I think. Anyway, in Japan, New Year’s is a 4-day holiday and in those first few days of the year almost all Japanese people visit a shrine or temple for at least a few minutes (I wrote more extensively about it last year here and here) and many line up for quite a while in order to throw their coins in the offering box.

Anyway, what I was struck by the other day was the contrast between these two scenes (pictures taken only minutes apart):

Yes, some people line up on January 2 for the traditional visit to the shrine and others line up for the traditional box of Krispy Kreme donuts…! You can’t really see it in the picture above, but there is a sign indicating that the waiting time to get your greasy dough rings is (are you ready for it?) one hour and twenty minutes. A year ago, I was amazed that people were lining up so long for donuts. Then, in the summer, when it was 40°C, I was amazed to see people standing in that heat waiting for donuts. Now, about a year-and-a-half later, I’m just dumbstruck…

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PS: A devout reader, Hali, and Adonica, thanks for your kind words…

Shari, I can’t remember if I thanked you for your comments about the bad RAM - I definitely got a bum stick, but have adapted to the inconvenience temporarily. I will take your advice and check our Crucial for RAM for my MacBook.

hmmm….cannot believe that I have left Madonna’s face staring out at you for so long!! Apologies…

2007 has obviously NOT been the year of the blog for me. The truth of it is that earlier in the year, when my brother was dying in hospital (as the result of an assault), the thought of writing blog entries just didn’t seem very appropriate or necessary or interesting or compelling. Quite simply: I had nothing to say. Death will do that to you…

I am not sure I have anything to say even now…I’ve been directing most of my down-time into photography and just can’t seem to find anything to write about. At the same time, I can’t leave Madonna’s ghoulish face staring out at you from an ad for condos.

I actually started to write this about 2 weeks ago and then my whole blog site crashed (cue: sinister organ chords signalling a spooky coincidence). Nothing earth shattering that I really had to impart, so I left my blog in purgatory for a few days. What I actually wanted to write about is quite mundane - it was this:

I had just made myself a “Toast and Tomato” (as my father always called it, although he’d never put cheese on it: he was a purist). As I was savouring the flavours, I had this flood of really happy memories of my dad. When we were kids, just lounging around or reading or whatever, he’d saunter into the room and say: “Ya-wanna-toast-and-tomato…?” - it was, he knew, hard to resist because he was probably the world’s best toast and tomato maker (generous amounts of salt, pepper, and butter - there is nothing worse than a toast and tomato that has skimpy amounts of any of the key ingredients). Of course, I’d never turn him down and I think he really, truly, enjoyed preparing them - he had this thing about feeding people, being hospitable, offering them a drink. It was more than mere politeness: I think it truly made him happy to be able to make you something to eat; maybe it was more than that - maybe it was because he remembered scarcer times during the War and maybe because he could…who knows…? I certainly never thought that much about it when I was on the receiving end of a T & T…

After having these thoughts, I felt compelled to find this particular picture of me, my mum, and my dad - it was 1972, in Scotland (I think in Oban, “Gateway to the Highlands”, but I was too young to remember key details of our visit). I guess my sister was taking the picture (because she’s not in it and there was certainly no one else around to take the shot) - I love the big sky behind us, and it brings back a lot of happy memories each time I look at it.

I suppose this is a good way to end 2007…happy thoughts and memories of my family (although only my sister and I now remain…). I won’t dwell on the events of 2007: I am looking forward to 2008 and, if there are still any readers of this blog remaining, I hope that 2008 is full of good things for you too.

Almost New Year’s Eve here (a few more hours to go) - I’m heading out with my camera…

As I was walking through Tokyo Station the other night, I happened to see a familar face starting out at me on an advertisement for some condos:

It’s pretty interesting what celebrities will attach their images to in Japan. I can only imagine how much she was paid for this, and I doubt very highly you’d see her face on a condo ad in any western country.

That being said, we seem to have moved into an era of celebrities unabashedly grabbing every single dollar they can get through maximum leveraging of their brand. I think there used to be a bit more restraint about this, but the idea of A-list celebrities “cheapening” their image by attaching it to any product seems to have disappeared.

As someone with Apple products up to my eyebrows, I happened to click on the Apple home page yesterday to see if I could figure out why the new 2GB of RAM I installed was causing sudden kernel panics when I wake my iMac from sleep. Of course Apple kernel panics are also commonly known as the Apple “black screen of death”, although I can assure you they are almost never as frequent or as irritating as the Windows blue screen of death that, several years ago, pushed me over to Apple in the first place . Anyway, I’m not overly concerned about the 2 kernel panics I’ve had since installing the RAM two days ago (compared to never having had one on my iMac in the past year, although I’ve had a few on my Macbook) - if it continues, I’ll take action.

Anyway, that’s what drove me to the Apple home page and, then, when I got there, I have to admit, I was pretty surprised to see this:

Out of curiosity, I clicked over to the Apple Japan homepage and there was no Al:

I dunno…not that I am really overly supportive of the selection of Al for the Nobel Peace Prize (I don’t equate environmental issues with peace initiatives); HOWEVER, I thought the Nobel Peace Prize was a global thing, and, perhaps even more important, I thought the whole point of Al’s big push for climate change was also supposed to be a global thing. Not for Apple, I guess, when you have a new product to push in a giant, tech-hungry market….

I was out on a walk last week, on some back streets in Shibuya, and I stopped to take a photo of a dental clinic that had a sign out front saying: “Dental Clinic Gross”. I have a mini collection of weird signs - I’m assuming this was the typical L/R sound problem for Japanese people, and that they actually meant to name the clinic “GLOSS” (which makes more sense, but the “gross” is funnier).

Anyway, as I stopped to take a shot of the sign, I turned around and saw this great grouping of really classic Japanese images (a traditional umbrella, a wooden door, a cat, and somenegi). I took a few shots and then decided to turn one into a kind of ukiyoe-like image with a bit of photoshop magic:

You can see the original version here

I wrote about mikoshi (神輿、みこし) at exactly the same time last year (here), so I won’t bore you with the whole explanation of what one is and what they represent. I was, however, out and about yesterday and could not help but come across team after team of mikoshi carriers (in the 5 minutes it takes me to ride to the next station, I saw 4). I really like the whole atmosphere, with all the yelling and moving and shaking and colour, so I stopped a few times to take some pictures.

I’ve been fooling around with “selective desaturation” in Photoshop recently (see more examples here), so I thought I’d combine the two as a way of adding something new-ish to the the mikoshi-picture-taking thing: