Anthony's Vending Machine
We have no idea from what part of his mind it came, but Anthony drew a vending machine. It specializes in “Monkey Juice” (whatever that is, I'm sure it's related to his Curious George), as it sports it in four of the positions. The others seem to be carrot juice, strawberries, or maybe apples. The one with an × is sold out.
It's a bit late in the year, but I made a calendar for my friend Shimada-san, using some of the photos he's taken recently that I happen to have copies of. One of my posts a year ago featuring some of Shimada-san's photos is consistently one of the most popular on my blog, so I thought I'd share the images I chose for the calendar.
He had many good shots to choose from, and I tried to get a good mix, but still, there's so much left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.....
Here are the photos I used, with simple titles just to identify them.
Bento Anthony made for Mommy
Following on from yesterday's post about all the bento lunches that Fumie makes for Anthony....
During the winter, the preschool warms the bento lunches for the kids, so yesterday, Fumie got another bento box so that Anthony can have stuff to be warmed in one, and stuff that's to be kept cool in another.
Prior to using it for real bentos, Anthony could play with it a bit, and made a bento for Mommy:
Plastic hamburger
Two rubbery breads (including a fun Shimajiro tiger shape)
Paper apple slice
Cloth potato
Mommy said it was tasty!
I've written before about the bento lunches that Fumie makes for Anthony to eat at preschool (see It's All About The Bento and First Bento of the New Semester).
I take a picture of every bento, and now have a page that shows them: Anthony's Recent Bentos. It's updated with the morning's fresh bento at around 9:30am on bento days, usually Mon, Tue, Thur, and Fri (which is the previous afternoon/evening US time.)
This Morning's Bento
There are some great features in Adobe Lightroom that made this automatic update easier for me to set up. I'll write more about it once Lightroom leaves beta and has been launched as a product.
Kyoto has a new tram system. Well, it did... just for a few hours yesterday.
I wouldn't have believed it if I'd not seen it myself, but for three hours, they shut down half the lanes along a crowded 4km stretch of road, intending the claimed space to be considered as a trolley track. They then had city busses pretend to be trains, and they plied the route for those three hours.
Apparently, the city is considering to add a new light rail system, to connect a rather affluent but disconnected area with the subway and railway system. The plan, Kyoto's LRT (Light Rail Transit), has apparently been in the works for some time.
So yesterday, they wanted to test something — perhaps how smooth things would be — by lining a heavily-used main thoroughfare with an abundant number of police, 200+ private security guards, and Lord knows how many traffic cones. About 8 busses carrying 300+ pretend riders on the pretend trains ran on these pretend tracks.
I really have no idea how they think the test could possibly be useful, since the test conditions are so wildly different than what any light-rail system might actually be. First off, any real light-rail system would not involve 250+ people milling about at the edges of the street, nor such a strong police presence. Perhaps the latter offsets the chaos imparted by the former?
Also, during the test, some of those 200+ private security guards were tasked to stand at the outside edge of the street (not the “tracks”) with little “NO STOPPING!” signs, to admonish taxis and other selfish drivers who might otherwise be inclined to block traffic “for just a bit,” as they normally do incessantly. For this reason alone, traffic seemed to have been much smoother than normal, and all in all it was probably substantially better for the average driver during the test.
It just makes me want to roll my eyes. “Your Tax Yen At Work.”
Just 10 years ago, the city spent considerable sums, I'm sure, to remove the tram system that used to run along Sanjo Street (one street south of mine), putting it underground to become the subway's “Tozai Line” (“East-West Line”). I've heard that the Sanjo Street tram was the first in Japan, and I believe it, because it ran directly by Japan's first hydroelectric power station, meaning that there was abundant electricity to power a tram.