alpha whiskey hotel

Years ago, I had a feature on this web site called the Picture of the Day; it was one album in my online photo gallery where I’d send a single snapshot from my mobile phone’s camera every day.  Problem was that it was costing about 6,000 yen/month just to mail the photos from my phone to the blog, and I wasn’t disciplined enough to update it every day if I couldn’t do it from my mobile phone.

Now that Softbank has finally included email traffic in its unlimited data transfer fee, I can finally start up the Picture of the Day again, and I won’t have to worry about going broke doing so!  Note that we’re not talking about high quality photos here, just a quick mobile-phone snapshot of something interesting that I saw that day, along with a couple sentences of explanation.

The Picture of the Day will be posted on this blog, but so as to not take over the whole blog, the entries are hidden from the main page and do not show up in the main RSS feed, and will not be automatically forwarded to LiveJournal or Facebook.   You can see the Picture of the Day by selecting that category in the category list to the right, or if you would like, you can sign up for the Picture of the Day RSS feed.

It was a depressing, horrible, bleak building, and I always felt like I might end up sicker than I started after a visit there. Just two years ago (in 2006!) they finally removed the asbestos from the building.

Still, no matter how dingy it was, no matter how out-of-date the equipment, it was comforting to have a hospital right there, only 500 meters away from my apartment. If I got sick, my plan was always to eschew the largely-useless ambulance and take a taxi to the local hospital instead.

But. I hurt my foot a couple weeks back and limped down the street to the hospital, only to find a “we’ve closed forever” sign on it. So instead I went to the shiny new modern hospital a couple stops away on the train… Sure, they had good equipment and good doctors, and I didn’t feel like a good earthquake could shake the place apart, but it didn’t have any of the character of the 45-year-old Marumo Hospital building.

Marumo is on the route that I take when I have my weekend morning walk, and I went by the other day to see the demolition already underway… A bit sad that 45 years of serving my neighbourhood has been replaced with piles of wood and rubble, but progress marches on I guess…

I found this in the supermarket the other day. As far as I can tell, the English translation is “Audible Cheese”, so of course it was necessary for me to buy a pack.

Well, the cheese was visible, and tangible, and it was certainly smellable (side note: I checked — “smellable” is just as good a word as any) but I was disappointed that it was not the least bit audible.

Hrmph, truth in advertising!

I’ve been a bit too busy to post much of anything lately, so I thought that I’d be lazy instead and just post a few snapshots that I’ve taken over the past little bit…

This is how you have to travel if you are planning on taking a suitcase anywhere by motorcycle. Coincidentally, this was also how I got a monitor home from Omiya just a week before…

I must admit that this is something that I never expected to see at a concession stand: Turkey Drumsticks

I was on my way home from the Grand Prix motorcycle race in Motegi, Japan, which as you might expect is a pretty testosterone-filled day. Luckily this car pulled into the 7-11 that I was stopped for a rest at, which balanced out the day nicely.

I really hate that the post office requires you to write “Small Package” right under your name and address like that. IT’S NOT TRUE, DAMNIT!

If I’d known that “Foreigner with Glasses” was an acceptable Hallowe’en costume, I could have saved myself so much time and effort!

If I had to come up with a marketing buzzword to describe Japanese people, “thinking outside the box” would not be one of the first terms on my list.  ”Because we’ve never done it like that before” is considered a perfectly valid excuse for not doing something in a new improved way.

Even so, some bright employee of Ooedo Nerima Station in Tokyo had an interesting solution to the problem that the fancy LED clock had been broken for several months: