Feeling the heat? Then get out of the kitchen and check out these two great blog posts by my Nara Lady English bloggers:
Need still more cooling? Check out these Nara Lady English Bloggers:
Jencks’ latest project is in northern England and is called Northumberlandia (the “Goddess of the North”). Commissioned by a UK coal-mining company, Jencks is creating to a giant land goddess sculpture that’s 112 feet high and 1,300 feet long. Due for completion in 2013, it will be the world’s largest human form sculpted into the landscape.
via Charles Jencks’ Mind-Bending Landscape Architecture – My Modern Metropolis.
Looking at the two figures, there are apparent (no pun intended) likenesses and gaps. For a lot of the images, it feels like looking at a split-screen of the same person at different stages in their life.
via Observing Generation Gaps – My Modern Metropolis.
I have the honour of knowing personally some great Japanese amateur photographers and bloggers. These ladies blog in English which is not their native language (I blush to think of the results if I tried blogging in Japanese), and they do a great job, don’t you think?
Let me introduce some of them to you via their most recent blog entries, all on the subject of the changing of the leaves:
Jyojakko-ji, (常寂光寺）, a temple located in NW Kyoto prefecture
Gorge, Yoshino, Nara - from Cosmos English writing blog. Click photo to see it in full size.
Gingko trees in Tenri City, Nara, Japan
Pagoda and rice field, Nara, Japan
Red leaves' reflection - Todaiji, Nara, Japan
Nara, Japan
The week in pictures 19/08/2011 Photos | The week in pictures 19/08/2011 Pictures – Yahoo!.
Want a laff? Click the link above and see the slideshow. Great pics, but the comments are pretty funny. (You need to register if you want to add your own comments.)
Earlier this month, Kazuma Obara became the first photojournalist to gain unauthorised access to the power plant and produced an exclusive glimpse of life inside the facility
via Inside Fukushima – interactive guide | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Mouse-tip to EX-SKF
Some interesting nuggets of information provided by Obara:
Fukushima Dai-ichi. Photo by Kazuma Obara. Posted on the Guardian website
This guy was lucky: he survived. Many did not. Read the story here.
Swept away: A series of photos taken by a transport and tourism ministry employee shows Toya Chiba, a reporter for the local daily Iwate Tokai Shimbun, being taken by a tsunami in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, on March 11. KYODO PHOTO
via Survivor’s tale caught on camera | The Japan Times Online.
One Time One Meeting blogger narastoryteller tells the unusual story of 2 modern Japanese poets: one a murderer in prison in the U.S., and the other an enigmatic homeless person. As usual, narastoryteller includes her own stunning photos in this blog entry.
Take a break and read her latest post.
"Lonesome" author Go Hayato has been serving a life term in prison on a murder charge in California, USA.
sky over Nara
One Time One Meeting: Current Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves.
Personally, I like the cherry blossom when they start falling off the trees, falling like snow. So I really enjoyed Stardust’s photos and text about the “passing sakura”. Here’s one.
There are more beautiful photos and text at Stardust English Talk: Passing sakura.
In a November 4th article in the Daily Yomiuri, Mike Guest wrote about marked language: “phrases like, “Japan’s four seasons” instead of the seasons, or “American joke” for any joke told by a foreigner. Marked by redundancy. ”
Many Japanese will insist that Japan is unique because it has four seasons, and if pushed will admit that other countries do too, but that in Japan the seasons are very clearly distinguished!
And how right they are. As you can see from the photo, autumn in Britain is a very mundane affair, and no different from the other 3 seasons which are all equally miserable and quite undistinguished, even indistinguishable from each other. Autumn colours? What autumn colours?? (See more dull photos here and here).
“Ode to Autumn” – John Keats (1819)
| Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! |
| Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; |
| Conspiring with him how to load and bless |
| With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; |
| To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees, |
| And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; |
| To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells |
| With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, |
| And still more, later flowers for the bees, |
| Until they think warm days will never cease, |
| For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells. |
| Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? |
| Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find |
| Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, |
| Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind, |
| Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, |
| Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook |
| Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers; |
| And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep |
| Steady thy laden head across a brook; |
| Or by a cider-press, with patient look, |
| Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. |
| Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? |
| Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – |
| While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, |
| And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; |
| Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn |
| Among the river sallows, borne aloft |
| Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; |
| And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; |
| Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft |
| The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft; |
| And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. |
A journalist (Gilder) seeks out a young black accused of rape, follows him and his family around for a few years and comes up with a devastating critique of the modern welfare state in the U.S.A.Although Gilder insists everything in t…
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