That Old Shitamachi Spirit

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When I hear of something like the Tokyo Skytree, I react with a completely irrational thought: how could they wait to build it until it’s inconvenient for me to see it?

Tokyo Skytree Dec 2013During Yuriko and Ann’s recent trip to Japan, they visited the Skytree, which is now the tallest structure in Japan, and the tallest TV/radio tower on Earth, completed only in 2012 and coming in at more than 2,000 feet. The Skytree itself is a broadcast tower and tourist attraction, but it’s also part of a mixed-use development that includes office space, convention and meeting facilities, a theater, parking garages and more. The Tobu Railroad and a consortium of broadcasters developed it.

The tower also gives Japanese web site designers a chance to describe the place in English: “The ‘town with a tower’ promises a lifestyle that is not uniform. The facilities are developed with the aim of producing a community brand transmitting new local values to the world by generously introducing facilities and functions that will manifest the charm of the shitamachi spirit and produce a synergy effect.

“Note: Shitamachi means traditional old town area with Edo atmosphere.”

The observation deck’s got quite a view, my wife and daughter tell me. And what do you see?

Tokyo, Dec 2013A slice of the vastness of greater Tokyo.

How Many Watts Was Byron?

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Not so cold today. By that, I mean just above zero F. The garage door opener started working again — luckily it had been stuck open — and the dog spent a little more time outside. By the weekend, I understand, temps will be above freezing. Which means meltage and then ice hazards when the refreeze comes. Winter’s a gas, that’s for sure.

Before the snow started to fall on New Year’s Eve — the snow that’s the bottom layer of our two feet or so now — I was out buying a few things and acquired a pack of 60W incandescent bulbs. Just to have some around for those few fixtures left in which we use them.

I read about the phase-out of 40W and 60W bulbs in PCMag, and the article assured readers that, “For now, though, just understand that no one will be taking away your light bulbs, only that you’ll see fewer incandescent ones in stores through the next year.”

That’s no fun. Time to start Internet rumors about squads of government hit men going around smashing incandescent bulbs. People believe less plausible things about the government, after all. (I Googled “Byron the Bulb” and the bit I wrote nearly seven years ago is on the first page.)

Subzero

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The National Weather Service and its ilk weren’t kidding about how cold it would be today. According to the NWS itself in its all-cap style (a leftover from teleprinter style?):

* A PROLONGED PERIOD OF DANGEROUSLY COLD AND POTENTIALLY LIFE THREATENING WIND CHILLS WILL OCCUR THROUGH TUESDAY MORNING.

* TEMPERATURES…‌LOWS 15 BELOW TO 20 BELOW ZERO THIS EVENING THROUGH TUESDAY MORNING.

* WIND CHILLS…‌35 BELOW ZERO TO 45 BELOW ZERO THROUGH MIDDAY TUESDAY. THESE FORECAST WIND CHILLS ARE THE LOWEST IN NEARLY 20 YEARS.

* FROST BITE AND HYPOTHERMIA CAN OCCUR IN A MATTER OF MINUTES.

All day, despite abundant sunshine, the cold seemed like it was pressing on the walls of the house, reaching its icy fingers into the small crevices under the doors, frosting some of the windows, impairing the glow of the compact florescent bulb on the back porch, interfering with the operation of the garage door opener, causing problems with our broadband service, and inspiring the furnace to switch on constantly. The good old gas furnace, boon of modernity.

As expected, no one had to go to school, and we got calls in the afternoon confirming that no one would on Tuesday, either. The mailman made it, though I wouldn’t have been upset if he’d skipped the day. The garbageman and recycle truck driver didn’t make it. It was too cold even for the dog. She’d dash outside for a minute, do her business in her favorite patch of back yard – buried pretty deep now – and hurry back.

The Snows of Yesteryear Are Still Around

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On New Year’s Eve 2013, snow started to fall in northern Illinois. Nothing dramatic, just steady snow that kept coming down, well into the new year. Good thing I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go around the turn of the year. For her part, the dog had to be content to bound around the drifts in the back yard.

Payton Jan 2, 2014It’s been snowing on and off since then, like a slow-motion blizzard. Word is that temps will be significantly subzero tomorrow, as low as it’s been here in 10? 20 years? Both schools have called off classes.

I’ve read that it was down to −27 °F in January 1985, the record low. We’re not expected to break that record tomorrow, but it’ll be unpleasantly close enough. Glad I wasn’t here for that low. Someone who lived through it once told me that when the temperature got back to zero, it felt almost warm.

Noel ’13

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Christmas1934Merry Christmas to all, with a good Boxing Day thrown in for good measure. One of these days, probably long after I’m gone, Americans will have the day after Christmas off, too.

Posting will resume again around January 5, 2014.

To the right is a paper ornament that hung on my grandparents’ Christmas tree in the mid-1930s, now mounted against a red-paper background and usually hanging in my office. For a short while, it’ll be on our Christmas tree here in the mid-2010s.

Santa Has No Mouth, and He Must Say Ho Ho Ho

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I spent a little while looking at this blob, trying to see a conventional Santa in it. It was hard to see. The scan seems to make it a little more representational. Made it’s the lighting.

SortofSantaNo matter. Its purpose wasn’t to be admired visually, but to taste good on the way down.

That got me to thinking — it doesn’t take much to start a tangent — that the next big thing in custom chocolate could be treats based on famed abstract art. That’s the sort of thing that the Sharper Image or SkyMall might sell: Henry Moore milk chocolate shapes or Isamu Noguchi foil-wrapped dark choco Easter bunnies or a Dada Whitman Sampler.

Tuesday Recommendations

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Butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wis., a burg southwest of Fond du Lac. Every year a PR company I’ve long dealt with sends me a box for the holidays. It’s the only time I eat toffee. It’s insanely good. Only a few pieces will make you feel a little queasy, so rich is the confection. But you eat them anyway.

The Man of Bronze. It’s the first Doc Savage novel, and probably the only one I’ll ever read. With genre pulp, that’s usually enough. I have memory fragments of the mid-70s Doc Savage movie I didn’t see – not many people did – so I’m probably remembering the commercials. My friend Kevin recommended Doc Savage as an entertaining read of no consequence, and I’ll go along with that so far. You have to like a yarn that begins with the sentence, “There was death afoot in the darkness.”

Gravity. It’s a really engaging Man Against Nature story, or to be more exact, Woman Against Vacuum. With a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that keeps your attention. Also, worth the extra money to see in 3D, and not too many movies are. In fact, the depiction of space alone is worth the price of admission. A few of the space-science stretchers bothered me a little – I don’t think hopping from spacecraft to spacecraft is quite that straightforward – but not that much. I don’t want exact space science from a movie, just high verisimilitude, and this movie delivers.

Lizard Point Consulting’s geography quizzes. Every now and then, I make Lilly and Ann take some of the easy ones, such as U.S. states or capitals. It’s my opinion that every adult American citizen without cognitive impairment ought to know all of the states.

But I can’t brag about a lot of the other quizzes. It’s clear that my knowledge of, say, French regions is fairly meager, and sad to say I don’t do that well on Japanese prefectures, either – I tend to remember only the ones I’ve been to, plus a scattering of others (like Aomori, where Aomori apples come from, because it’s due south of Hokkaido).

Even quizzes that ought to be easy-ish, such as African nations, have their confusions. Without looking, which one is Swaziland, which one Lesotho? Which is Benin, which one Togo? Which one is Guinea, which one Guinea-Bissau? (That should be easy, Guinea’s bigger.) Similarly, it’s hard to keep track of which –stan is which in Asia, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakstan.

To Dully Go When No Man Has Gone Before

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More snow today. Seems like we’ve already gotten more snow this winter than last, even ahead of the Solstice. Which is just the Solstice, not the “beginning of winter.” Winter got out of the gate early this year.

File the following under (1) movies I’ve seen pieces of lately and (2) movies I saw long ago that I never need to see again in their entirety, which is actually most of them. I chanced across Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other day, about which I have vague recollections from early 1980. That is, I vaguely remember it being a yawn.

So I watched about 10 minutes of it. The Enterprise had encountered one of those sprawling, amorphous energy beings that it seemed to run into with some regularity, and the ship was boldly going into it. Or at least going in with some trepidation.

Two things struck me. First, the purpose of the scene seemed to be to show off the movie’s special effects, which probably did look swell on the big screen in 1980. But the scene went on and on, with the characters and the audience seeing light patterns go by, something like the “through the star gate” scene in 2001, only a lot slower.

Also, everyone on the bridge just stood there, wide-eyed. This is the bridge crew of the Enterprise we’re talking about. They’ve seen a lot of outer-space marvels and weird things in their time. So why weren’t they at their instruments, trying to figure out what the thing was?

Pizza & Doughnut Run ’84

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Nothing says holiday cheer like pizza and doughnuts. At least, we’re looking pretty cheerful in this picture, preparing to feast on those victuals on a cool December day in San Antonio in 1984. They weren’t just for us, of course. I think.

PizzaDonutDec84High school friends (five years out of high school) Nancy, Tom, and me. My brother Jay might have taken the picture, but I’m not sure.

A Dispatch from the War on Christmas

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“War on Christmas,” huh? Seems like a fairly robust holiday to me. You hear a lot about the holiday this time of year, after all. I can’t think of any jurisdiction in Western world that has suggested banning it, or suppressing the Christmas tree trade, or sending street-corner Santas to re-education camps. Not even the Russians do that any more.

But what about a real War on Christmas? And by real, I mean with artillery.

Ellesmere Is.—The forces of Christmas suffered a serious setback on Thursday when anti-Christmas forces overran a major redoubt near Ft. Kringle on Ellesmere Is., putting the fort in a perilous position. Should Ft. Kringle fall to the hands of anti-Christmasites, the path would be open for an assault on the North Pole, which has been pounded in recent weeks by aerial bombardment.

An estimated 2,000 elves were killed or captured when the redoubt was taken. Dasher, a spokesdeer for the Claus government at the Pole, said that the little ones died heroically in defense of Christmas, and vowed that the redoubt would be retaken during an upcoming counteroffensive, though he declined to give details. Units of elves are rumored to be massing in northwestern Greenland for a flanking counterattack, but that could not be independently verified…