Sorry for not posting anything recently. I've felt remarkably unmotivated in all things lately, but found some inspiration in an email from someone asking about this mountain roller slide that I'd posted about some years ago. Now that I'm into cycling (though currently generally unmotivated about it), I thought I'd ride to the location to see whether it's still there.

Here's the ride:

Along the way I came across a lovely lotus field in the middle of the suburbs.

Next was to explore a short but steep (and nicely-paved) climb I'd seen here. It starts under a new expressway bridge...

I had a pleasant evening yesterday, with a relaxing boat ride on the Katsura River, in the Arashiyama area of Kyoto. An elementary-school friend of Manseki was in town and invited Manseki, who in turn invited some friends, which included me.

I took the subway and tram across town. At the final station, there's a "Kimono Forest", a small but well-done art installation...

I then met up with others at the boat dock for the two-hour ride...

Arashiyama's famous Togetsukyo bridge has been seen on my blog many times, including here here and here, but never quite from this angle. [...]

Yesterday there was a big crash at the end of Stage Four of the Tour de France, involving Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish. Sagan was blamed, and then ejected from the rest of the three-week race.

My gripe is that half of the news articles I've seen today are just wildly inflammatory, using phrases that make for excellent click bait, but are devoid of fact.

First, let's look at what happened. Here's a view from the front. Peter Sagan has a green helmet and a white jersey with rainbow stripes on the sleeves. Mark Cavendish has the green bike and [...]
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A friend in Kyoto that I've known for years has recently opened a second location for her shop, Tea Ceremony Camellia, which offers tea-ceremony experiences in English. Her new location, Camellia GARDEN, is quite picturesque, and after many missed tries to get our schedules to converge, I was able to stop by for an hour the other day to try for some photos.

We didn't have any plan for any specific photos, and didn't have much time, so I just went for some of the low-hanging fruit, to help build ideas for a real photoshoot some day.

Here's a hastily-made [...]

This is just disgusting... "Beats", Apple's ultra-pricey line of headphones, uses marketing that's so deceitful that one can only imagine it's done to purposefully trick and deceive.

Some of their headphone models are not "wireless", which means like headphones of yesteryear, when in use they must be physically tethered to your audio device by a cable. That's fine, but their marketing photos don't show the headphones with a cable, only without.

As an example, here's a search at Amazon for "beats studio wireless":

On the page for the NOT wireless product, we have these product images:

Nary a [...]