Category: Miscellaneous

Long Time Man

March 3, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?

Tokyo 6: Goodbye

January 20, 2020

I’m in my seat waiting for takeoff. I’ve had a great time and made many more Japan memories that will last me forever. Watch your mailboxes too: I sent many postcards.

I spent the last on my Yen buying unusual Kit Kat’s at the airport (that I won’t eat!) and I’m ready to relax on this long trip.

It’s been a lot of work daily blogging throughout: I hope you’ve enjoyed it. In time I’ll do follow ups on a few things I learned or bought on this trip (both from here or Oz), but given work starts tomorrow I think I’ll take a while off before the next post 🙂

Now… what movies are available to watch…?

Tokyo 4: The Day Jesus, The Devil, King Arthur and The Magical Emperor of Light, Nero Griffith, Make My Dream Come True Once Again!

January 18, 2020

I’ll cut to the chase: Today I went to Theatre G-Rosso and saw (with ~500 other people) a live action Power Rangers stage show. It was so good were I an emotional man I may have shed a tear.

It’s all in Japanese but the story was easy to follow: bad dude uses a germ weapon to turn the rangers evil! Eventually through their heroic spirit and the support of the audience they return to normal and vanquish the bad guys.

The 45 minute show was filled with acrobatics and special effects (wire work, smoke effects, digital projections) and was genuinely thrilling. Kids even cried when Red Ranger died (by fighting his evil double) but then when he was resurrected from the dead by an older Red Ranger the adults had their chance to weep with joy.

It was bloody fantastic! I loved every second. I could have watched it all day. It was every bit as good as the last time I saw a show like this 10.5 years ago (!) and is easily one of the highlights of this trip.

When I got out of the show the rain had turned to very light snow and it was extremely cold. I trained across town to a big shopping center to stay warm. This was an adventure in its own right, since the mall (Sunshine City) had a live idol performance going on (a boy group called Nine; there were legions of young ladies there to see them) and some sort of Pokémon event that drew truly gargantuan crowds.

I walked and browsed and shopped and then hit a wall of exhaustion. It was time for a recharge, and these guys helped:

That’s a selection of the cats I saw in the cat habitat called Nekobunkamura in Ikebukuro. KLS and I had been here aeons back and since I’ve been missing Zoffy and needed a sit away from crowds I figured this was a good choice. And it worked! The cats mostly ignored people and did their own thing which was fine; I sat and recharged. Eventually I (and almost everyone else!) left due to some weird old ladies who were acting possessive with regards to specific cats, but the cat energy I’d managed to absorb kept me going the rest of the day 🙂

There’s not much else to say about today. I didn’t take many photos due to rain and I spent much of the evening packing. But it was a good albeit very busy day.

I’ll end with some more unusual gashapon selections. Miniature chainsaws?!? UMA lights??!! Weird snakes, can rings, bling teeth and iphone fans. It’s all so unusual and yet I bought two of these. Can you guess which ones?

Tomorrow is my final full day and will likely be the last blog post from this mega trip. If you have any more questions that need answering, be sure to ask them!

Robot Claw