So, I got email from my sister letting me know that my blog's comment-submit process was broken. This must be what my mystery fan referred to in his kind message to me this morning.

It turns out that I'd introduced a bug into my comment-processing mechanism the other day. It's fixed now, but I really can't apologize enough. The poor guy tried to submit his "you're a jackass" comment 11 times, and after it failing through no fault of his own, you certainly can't begrudge him the subsequent "you suck" he tacked on.

My sister tried [...]
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This by far is the most funny email message I have ever received:

The lack of a subject line almost got this message blocked by my spam filter, but luckily it got through.

I think it's a great testament to my writing skills that someone who knows me only from my various writings can so well and truly know me. The only part of the message that gives me pause is the comment about the "blog form" not working -- which form, and what's not working? I need more details...

(I've elided the name and [...]
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The sun rose at 4:49 this morning here in Kyoto. Ugh.

It was the first time so far this year that the sun rose before 5:00am. Unfortunately, it won't be the last -- the sunrise gets steadily earlier until it hits 4:42am and stays there for most of June. It won't rise during the 5:00 hour again until late July.

The picture to the right is from my GPS unit, which can compute the theoretical sunrise/sunset data for any point on earth. The point in question today is my apartment.

All this early sunrise stuff is [...]

Here's a photo which I think captures a lot of Japan:

I took this near Daigo Temple in Yamashina, Kyoto, Japan, after visiting the temple during cherry-blossom season last month.

The big yellow sign says "Ramen" (as in "noodles"), and is for a shop on a major street that you can't otherwise see in the picture. The thing that looks like a cemetery is a cemetery, although there are no bodies, just monuments and likely some ashes.

As a bonus quintessentially Japanese thing, in the very upper right, you can see some futons hanging over [...]

I used to love garlic, but I think that all changed this morning when I woke up leaking concentrated garlic extract from every pore of my body.

Yesterday while relaxing with a beer, I enjoyed a snack best described as "corn-nut garlic". Cloves of garlic deep fried and turned into big puffy crunchy snacks, very much like hyper-seasoned corn nuts. They were strong, of course, but no more than a good garlic potato chip or other well-seasoned snacks.

I didn't have too many of them, though -- maybe a third of a 120-gram bag (a total [...]