MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY HOLIDAYS 2022

we touched this same spot with our hands, our feet, our gaze and our dreams

Monday, February 28, 2011

We got snow near San Diego this weekend.


We got snow near San Diego this weekend. The attached photo is awesome. It was taken from Point Loma looking east across North Island Naval Air Station and downtown San Diego toward the eastern SD County Mountains. Courtesy NBC Channel 7, San Diego & Bill Jenkins of Christ United Methodist Church.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Lord Save Us From Your Followers


The humorous, provocative and moving examination of the Culture Wars and faith in America. Featuring interviews from all sides of the issues, the film is a balanced, challenging and entertaining foray into the most divisive and difficult topics in our culture. Includes interviews with Al Franken, Sen. Rick Santorum, Dr. Tony Campolo, Sister Mary Timothy, Michael Reagan, Ron Luce as well as rousing man-on-the-street interviews with director Dan Merchant dressed as Bumpersticker Man, a wild Culture Wars game show pits a Liberal Media Elite team against a team of Young Conservatives and a powerful "reverse Confession Booth" at a Gay Pride event provides unexpected emotion.

Monday, February 21, 2011

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

By Lev Grossman
We're fast approaching the moment when humans and machines merge. Welcome to the Singularity movement

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Floating World

By W.S. Di Piero | Published Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011

Hiroshige (1797–1858), Japanese woodblock print of Mt. Fuji and Mt. Ashigara viewed from Numazu in clear weather after a snowfall.
 
When in 1853 Admiral Perry and what the Japanese called his “black fleet” (the ships were painted black and their coal-stoked engines puffed black smoke) sailed into Yokohoma Harbor, he couldn’t have known he’d be influencing the course of Western art. For over 200 years Japan and its grandest city, Edo (now Tokyo), had been virtually closed to outsiders, trading only with the Dutch and Chinese. Perry’s military force resulted in trade agreements: by 1858 Japan had finally opened up and its Ukiyo-e (“floating world”) art, which began circulating all over Europe, was beginning to change how Western artists represented physical reality.

According to ancient Buddhist belief, material reality and the activities of ordinary life (yo) were illusory, fleeting, impermanent. Here is how the scholar Michael Shigeru Inoue unpacks the modern meaning of Ukiyo-e:

Floating World“The original characters for the word ukiyo, used in a Buddhist context, expressed the idea of a material world filled with anxiety, worry, and affliction (uki). During the Edo period [1603–1868], which was a bohemian time of peace and prosperity in Japan, new homonymous kanji characters [i.e., derived from Chinese characters] for ukiyo arose that literally mean ‘floating world,’ but they now were used to refer to the joys and pleasures of the fleeting life on earth.”

Ukiyo-e’s gorgeous paintings and prints illustrate that the world’s delights, in time, float away. But what delights! The woodblock prints that proliferated from the 17th till the 19th Century represented the pleasures of courtesan culture, theater, and fashion, as well as legends and events of Japan’s past. Ukiyo-e artists were dream merchants. Like travel-magazine illustrators, they depicted to town folk destinations in faraway places (dreamy renderings of hammering waterfalls, swaying forests, lush country pastures) and moments of blissful respite from daily tasks. They also depicted those tasks, the daily toil of farmers, porters, miners, and other laborers.

If, like me, you know Ukiyo-e primarily because of the influence its prints — with flattened depths, sinuous deployment of contents, and restricted but concentrated palette — had on Western artists (Van Gogh owned 400 prints), an exhibition split between the San Diego Museum of Art and the University of San Diego, Dreams and Diversions, will break open a new world. It’s a generously instructive introductory course in Ukiyo-e’s origins, development, thematic preoccupations, and techniques. Most of us are acquainted with the rainy landscapes, rice-paddy farmers, and slinky prostitutes of Ukiyo-e, but the hundreds of woodblock prints on display dial in on its marvelous varieties, like the proto-collage composition called Harimaze. Very popular in 19th-century Japan, Harimaze prints were single-sheet scrapbooks containing cutouts of popular scenes, events, and places configured in an interior picture-space.

Ukiyo-e was a collaborative art. Artists like Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Hiroshige passed their renderings to carvers who executed their visions in wood blocks that were then given to printers who controlled the color consistencies and intensities of texture and line; the artist then hand-colored the prints, which went to a publisher or dealer who cultivated a clientele for pictures and albums. Dreams and Diversions tracks Ukiyo-e’s changes: woodblock presses progressed from two to three to multicolored prints; artists responded to technical advances in carving and inking; the conventional courtesan figure shape-shifted from a stocky, curvy, full-featured creature to a more lithe, statuesque type. In any art form, a change in figure, stance, gesture, and grouping records a changing model of desirability. Japanese art is sublimely erotic, though viewers accustomed to other expressions of erotic desire may not respond to it. The highly stylized nature of Ukiyo-e makes it seem uniform — erotic album sets were made for a male merchant-class with shared models of idealized behavior and beauty — but Dreams and Diversions trains our eye to be more alert to variation than to standardization. Kitao Masanobu’s 1784 print of six courtesans (they’re showing off their calligraphy styles, one attribute of a woman’s refinement) pulls the tall, “new type” figures into two groups, but each figure has a distinctive personality and features, each performs a separate action, yet all are swept and tied together by confluent lines and sheeted fabrics.

Spend enough time with these prints (not all in the best of health: some are faded) and the variety sensitizes us to different styles. Hiroshige’s pictures of birds, for instance, differed from those of another Ukiyo-e artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, in their often satirical or humorous representation. Kuniyoshi’s world is a more ferocious place. However realistic the presentation of subjects from nature, Ukiyo-e artists associated birds and other creatures with certain attributes: cranes, longevity; geese, reliability; swallows, good luck (and marital fidelity). In Ukiyo-e, the natural order is a moral order.

Kabuki actors were public celebrities and another prime subject. As kids pin rock-star posters to their walls, Kabuki fans acquired prints of their favorite actors to hang in their houses. The most famous Kabuki entertainment — treated by Ukiyo-e artists sometimes soberly, sometimes as caricature — were stories of ronin, samurai warriors who had lost their daiymo, their feudal lord. The most famous was Chushingura (The Treasure of Loyal Retainers), a tense, slowly told tale of 47 ronin in the early 18th Century who waited years to avenge their daimyo’s death. (There are two fine, slow-till-slaughter-time film versions available on DVD.) Ukiyo-e trains us to “read” a print vertically, whether we’re following a mountain trail down through clouds past streams and forests or studying (eavesdropping, really) on some historical event. The long, narrow hashira-e, or “pillar print,” made to decorate a pillar inside a
house, lent itself especially to anecdotes of disclosure or nosiness. It draws us in and makes co-conspirators of us. Torii Kiyonga’s late-18th-century hashira-e (couple spying on a courtesan reading a love letter) from Chushingura, sweeps down from a samurai on a balcony who through a small hand-held mirror (we see Japanese writing reflected on the glass) is spying on a long scrolled letter being read by a courtesan on a porch below. Our eye naturally cascades down the stretched s of the narrow paper until it lands on a woman hidden under the porch holding the unfurled scroll so that she, too, can read its contents. The intimate letter is being checked out top to bottom.

Just as America received accounts of the newly explored Far West through the great advertising tools of 19th-century photographic images, the Ukiyo-e prints I mentioned earlier attracted a thriving merchant-class to visit desirable destinations, in fact or in their imaginations. Hiroshige made an enchanting, visually loaded set of prints of the famous 53 stations along the Tokaido Road, a coastal highway connecting Edo to Kyoto, with a (usually witty) poem worked into the scene. One of these, Shono: Driving Rain shows off his skills in shifting gradually across the page from heavy-skinned darkness to rain-veils made of zippy lines shaved and shredded from tree tops. One picture spins a whirlpool’s energy in a way that cranks our gaze up from the bottom of the page toward the craggy, whippy spindrift peaking and curling up and around the paper.
Another majestic place, Mt. Fuji, so spiritually important in the lives of the Japanese, was famously documented by Hiroshige’s contemporary, Hokusai, whose two major books, the color prints of Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji and the black-and-white series Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, include people going about their daily routines overseen by the grand mountain. Fuji has strong associations with immortality, so these beautiful, robust pictures remind us that the human is small and passing, indeed, and that even our closest material realization of immortality is itself a part of the stuff of this world.

Dreams and Diversions has two venues, The San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park and the University of San Diego. It will be on view till June 5, with a complete rotation of prints — the first rotation of Hiroshige’s Kyoka Tokaido, for instance, contains prints of stations 1 through 26, the second rotation displays the remainder — February 26, 2011. ■

Dreams and Diversions, San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, 619-232-7931; University of San Diego, Robert and Karen Hoehn Family Galleries, 5998 Alcalá Park, 619-260-4600. Through June 5.

Just like us, only better

Posted on: Feb 15 2011

Seems like everybody over the age of 40 likes to talk about how messed up this new generation is: how we’re raising spoiled underachievers who (eye roll here) have no work ethic, feel entitled, and need an app to get out the front door.

The underlying assumption is that previous generations were smarter, savvier, scrappier. What’s going to happen to our country? We all need Dragon Moms to whip these kids into shape.

So I was happy to read the report this week that set it all straight: America hasn’t fallen behind the rest of the world in academic achievement – we were never world leaders when it came to math and science. It’s a myth that we’ve fallen from our glory days. Our standing is actually improving, thanks to the current generation. According to the Brookings Institution report, there never were any glory days – they were just the exaggerated dreams of older generations looking back through rose-colored glasses. Back in 1964, American 13-year-olds took the First International Math Study and ended up ranking in 11th place. Considering that only 12 nations participated, including Australia, Finland, and Japan, our next-to-last performance was pretty abysmal. Other international tests American students have taken over the years have also never showed that we were in the top spot.

Personally, I think that our children are improving with every generation. They’re much more progressive, open-minded, and intelligent than we ever were.

I spotted this message on a high school student’s Class of ’12 T-shirt the other day: “It’s not the end of the world, we’re just taking over.”

All I can say is, what took you so long?

JON PETERSEN'S LATEST NEWS


Japan
 
If you know me, you know I'm half Japanese and am convinced that sushi will be available at the marriage supper of the Lamb.  So to be invited back to Japan was a treat beyond words. 

Japanes Kimonos
JAPAN - Alpha, led by Andy Game has probably been more effective in the nation than most endeavors over the past 65 years (since the War).  You would love Andy - he is extremely funny, single, 40 something and a real servant to the Church in the nation.  He has a stellar reputation from what we could see.  He has helped launch Alpha courses from Hokkaido in the north to the island of Okinawa.  He is a Kingdom guy and is now putting all of his energy into using the internet to share Jesus and launch Alpha Courses in the business community.  We met the leader of a business leaders' ministry called VIP.  These business leaders have hundreds of chapters in Japan and in other nations, . The guy is a "pray-er", lives next to the emperor and begs God for a move of God in his nation. 

Prayer is not nation wide but seems to be growing and the desire to see it become more central to the Christian community is rising.  The church is beginning to make a connection to the redemptive story of Jesus in Shintoism (the national religion) and it seems like a huge onramp for a framework for prayer.  It's like walking through tabernacle:  you come in through the sacrifice of blood (now a red arch), cleanse with water, enter a room with bread (rice), incense and light, past a veil into the next chamber where a box sits that represents the seat of "god" and which priests carry through the streets once a year - hmmmm, sounds familiar. 
 
I am thinking of a trip back later this year to look more intentopnaly of launching 24-7 prayer in the nation.  We are praying for a team of people to be formed who have Japan on their hearts.
  
Asia Team
One very exciting encounter was with a church in Yokohama that is truly missional, young and FULL of Jesus. They were growing in love with each other, leading people to faith and were a picutre of a what a redeemed Japan can look like.  Made me cry. 

For now we are filtering through the opportunities and vision to see where we might find an inroad for longterm involvement.  Very encouraging.

Here is our fearless team!   Jon, Andy, Joe and Wendy...Taking pictures in a mirror at CAJ, the school in Highashikurume where I was "educated"...welll maybe...

Tokyo's Haneda Airport makes life easy for international travelers


After Narita International Airport opened in 1978, Tokyo's Haneda Airport (officially Tokyo International Airport) was used predominantly for domestic flights within Japan and for some charter flights within Asia.
But this past October, Haneda Airport officials christened a new runway and cut the ribbon on a swanky new International Terminal filled with shiny arrival and departures halls, gleaming gate areas and dozens of intriguing restaurants and shops.

·         PHOTO GALLERY: Tour Tokyo's Haneda Airport

A robust schedule of international flights to North America, Europe and Asia began rolling out in late October as well. Now travelers can fly to Haneda from Detroit, Honolulu, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Seoul, Singapore and a steadily increasing number of cities on a variety of major airlines. This week, for example, American Airlines, which already has regular service to and from Narita, is adding a daily flight to Haneda from New York's JFK airport. 

Flying to Tokyo is one thing. Getting from the airport to the city is another. A frustration of arriving at Narita has always been the hour (or more) it can take to get into town. Haneda Airport is much closer to Tokyo's center and, with a sleek new monorail and train connections, passengers can now arrive downtown within 30 minutes.

But if there's no need to rush, stick around. Haneda's new International Terminal offers free wireless Internet access, posh lounges and a wide variety of other amenities that make it a destination all its own.
Here are some highlights:

Shops and restaurants: honoring the old and the new 

Beyond the ticket lobby, but still pre-security, travelers will find two distinct dining and shopping areas.
A shopping street lined with Japanese lanterns and antique-looking facades is designed to evoke a traditional Japanese Edo village. There are restaurants here serving traditional Japanese foods, conveyor belt-delivered sushi, pizza and French bistro dishes. A garden-like setting overlooks the entry hall and offers a quiet spot to enjoy green-tea soft swirl ice-cream from the newest branch of Kyo Hayashiya, a sweets vendor that has its roots in a teahouse established in 1753.

The Edo Marketplace shops stock everything from made-in-Japan clothing and elaborate floral arrangements to elegantly boxed gourmet and regional foods and organic cosmetics. 

One level above the Edo Marketplace, in the brightly-lit Tokyo Pop Zone, it's definitely the 21st century. Dining options here include a café with a built-in planetarium, and a branch of R Burger, a fast-food restaurant dishing up Japanese-sauce-topped burgers (pork, chicken, tofu, veggie, salmon, etc.) served on white steamed buns that boast wrinkle-reducing marine collagen among the ingredients. 

Tokyo Pop Town also offers some entertaining and unusual shopping. There's a toy store here with a giant slot car racetrack, a shop filled entirely with JAL Airlines-branded character souvenirs, a huge Hello Kitty marketplace and Design Japan Culture, a showcase for artist-made clothing and accessories that has a vending machine to dispense arty tote-bags and other treats. 

"Convenient and agreeable services"

In addition to upscale airline lounges operated by JAL and ANA (All Nippon Airways), Haneda's new International Terminal offers common-use airline lounges with shower rooms, massage chairs, Internet access, business facilities and places to nap.

An outdoor observation desk, free and open to the public, offers great views of airfield activity, including the arrival and departure of the occasional Pokémon character-adorned plane. Back inside the terminal, the amenities include smoking cubicles, a medical clinic and a brightly colored children's play area where everyone is required to remove their shoes. 

And in a country well-known for its high-tech toilets, the airport restrooms are a delight. "Ordinary toilets" have wider-than-normal doorways to accommodate both manual wheelchair users and travelers with suitcases. Folding doors on the cubicles include a sign indicating whether or not there's a baby seat and a fold-down changing table inside. And inside each women's restroom area there's a urinal for use by small boys.

"Multipurpose toilets" are exactly that. To accommodate wheelchair users, passengers traveling with babies or toddlers, elderly people and anyone with a special need, there are restrooms equipped with just about every facility imaginable. In addition to diaper changing tables, beds and changing platforms, these restrooms have ostomate showers and sinks, layouts that allow for right or left hand transfers to the toilet seat from a wheelchair and an emergency button linked directly to the airport's Disaster Control Center. 

And, in what is certainly an airport first, there's even a restroom designed specifically for use by service dogs.

Harriet Baskas writes about travel etiquette for MSNBC.com and is the author of the airport guidebook Stuck at the Airport and a blog of the same name.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Japanese women seek right to their own identity

TOKYO - FOUR Japanese women will go to court on Monday to challenge a law that now compels almost all females to drop their maiden names and assume their husbands' surnames when they marry.
The group - plus one of their husbands - want a civil code clause from the late 1800s declared unconstitutional and are seeking financial damages for their emotional distress at the Tokyo District Court.
The legal action comes after the centre-left government in power since 2009 failed in a push to revise the civil code because of stiff opposition from conservatives, including a minor ruling coalition partner. It is part of a drive for greater gender equality in Japan, where women still face strong social pressure to leave their jobs when they marry to handle household chores and raise children.
But the country's prolonged economic slowdown has prompted more women to continue their careers after marriage, often without changing their maiden names in the workplace, leading to growing calls for a dual-surname system.
One of the four women among the plaintiffs, Kyoko Tsukamoto, 75, said that having been forced to use her husband's name officially for more than half a century had caused her 'psychological trauma'.
'My name is a reflection of my self,' said Ms Tsukamoto, a retired school teacher who uses her maiden name for private purposes but must use her husband's surname on legal documents, her passport and her credit card. She declined to disclose that name to AFP. -- AFP

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

BASEBALL IN JAPAN