Last autumn when Damien Douxchamps visited Kyoto and introduced me to some new (for me) temples, he also introduced me to the delightful licorice candies from Swedish company Läkerol.

So delightful were they that, upon not finding them for sale in Japan, I enlisted the help of a friend in Germany, and came home from my New Year's trip to find a box brimming with an assortment of 11 different flavors...

I haven't tried most of them yet, but the cactus flavor (I never knew cacti had flavor, much less tasty flavor) is the one I most liked among the [...]

I've long enjoyed the "So, What the Heck is That?" column each month in The Japan Times (Japan's main English-language daily), written by Alice Gordenker. As the titles of my blog posts that reference her articles indicate, the subject can become quite wacky:

Somewhere over the years we became acquainted by email, and somehow last month I ended up doing the photography for her next column, on the decidedly non-wacky (but unexpectedly interesting) subject of Japanese candles, scheduled to appear in the paper and online next week (Update: here it is). I've been wanting to write this up this since [...]

So we're back in Kyoto after two wonderful weeks visiting my folks in snowy Ohio. The return flight thankfully omitted the drama of my trip there and of my wife's. Airline-induced drama aside, both trips were more comfortable than the normal transpacific trip for me.

Owing to a lot of business trips in the 90s, I've made the transpacific crossing about 150 times (back then mostly in business class, but at the prices today there's no way I'd spend my own money on that for myself). This time two things helped to really make the trip better:

I sprung the [...]
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The weather was wonderfully clear for our trip from Japan to my folks' place in Ohio, but we had a nice snow a day or two later, much to Anthony's glee.

Indulge me a rant...

Having flow hundreds of thousands of miles on United Airlines over the years (I had 100,000 miles/year for many years, with perhaps 50+ transpacific flights in the 90s), I've always been inclined to like them, but I think those days are over.

My wife and her folks were supposed to arrive to Cleveland Airport twenty minutes ago, but the plane that is to take them there from Toronto has not yet left on its previous leg (Newark to Toronto), so the best they can do to Cleveland will be at least 3½ hours late. Yet United [...]