In yesterday's "Colorful Ladies' Wardrobe" post we looked at some of the young ladies preparing for their turn at traditional Japanese archery at the rite-of-passage event described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot". Before and after their turn they were as lively as you'd expect a bunch of twenty-year-old girls to be, but on the shooting platform they were all business, every bit worthy to appear along the likes of the guy seen in "More Badass Japanese Archery".

I'd been disappointed early on when I was driven out by the ridiculous crowds just before the ladies started, [...]

During the Japanese-Archery event last week that I've been posting about, after the 2,000+ young adults did their thing, a few dozen instructors also got to shoot. I don't know how they were chosen to participate... perhaps it's only the instructors of the kids who hit the target?

Anyway, as last week's "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot" describes, the goal is not simply to hit the target, but in mental and physical perfection with each step, akin to how the whole tea-ceremony thing not really being about having something to drink.

So, while on the shooting [...]

In my post yesterday about Japanese archery, I concentrated on the short moment each of the 2,000+ archers got during Sunday's day-long event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple. Except in the world of calm and concentration that they brought with them for that moment on the shooting platform, the event was an absolute madhouse, with way too many people packed into way too small an area, funneled through an even thinner bottleneck entrance path connecting the archery area with the main temple grounds.

It was absolutely ridiculous, and at one point early on I felt so bad for friends [...]

In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought I'd give it another try.

So, the other day I took three GPS receivers with me while I did some errands. As I'm apt to do lately, I walked.

This post is a comparison of the resulting tracklogs.

The three devices I took along on [...]

I came across this great spoof video today: Fotoshop by Adobé by Jesse Rosten.

I've never understood how it can be legal for a cosmetic company to digitally alter a photo in an advertisement to create the kind of result they claim their product is supposed to create (smooth skin, etc.). It seems to be a cut and dried case of false advertising to me, but apparently there's something else going on because it's been going on unabated for years. I'm so used to altering my own photographs (such as this one from yesterday) that I can see the digital [...]
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