a blog about soybean cake and other essential topics
I’ll admit it: Since I was a kid, I loved watching Japanese taiko drumming. The beat. The movement. The booms.
You name it. It has everything a person would want out of a musical art.
So when I heard that The School of TAIKO would perform on Friday at Uwajimaya in Seattle, well, I made sure that my family and I were there.
I’ve been busy with a few odds and ends recently. But certainly, a flying car – in 2010 – will catch my attention.
The people at Terrafugia are the brains behind this flying vehicle, the Transition, which has received much online and television attention.
I should note that while it captures human attention, there was another flying car from Moulton B. Taylor of Longview, Wash. It was called the Aerocar – and yes, newsreel cameras captured it flying in the 1950s.
The Aerocar is on display at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. And I will say this about the Terrafugia Transition – it is inspiring.
Oh, yes. You also can own a flying hovercraft, if you like.
I’ll get to more blog entries as soon as I can. I know there’s much to talk about these days.
The June weather in Washington state – and specifically, the Seattle area – has been sufficiently cloudy enough that I thought I’d post a stop-motion experiment I conducted during my vacation.
What you see above in the stop-motion series is a bevy of gray clouds floating across the Pacific Ocean and the Kalaloch area of Olympic National Park.
The question is, though, are clouds compelling enough to stop and watch for an extended period of time?
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I’ve only seen a handful of waterfalls in Washington state. But Sol Duc Falls in the Olympic National Park has to be one of the most impressive I’ve witnessed.
I’ve posted three video clips – the other two are after the jump – which total more than three minutes. Really, I could watch this waterfall for more than three hours.
If you live on the West Coast or just can’t make the fourth annual NYC Food Film Festival, have a look at this enticing video reviewing last year’s gastronomical extravaganza.
It’s great, especially with last year’s tagline, “Watch What You Eat.”Â
You’ll get the idea of what you’ll experience should you attend the festival, which runs from June 23 to 27. If you do go, you can study your favorite food being made and eat samples of it, too! Yes! At the same time!
Yes, after seeing the clip above, the only thing I’m waiting for is an actual online video game in which a person can go to Google maps (or some version of them), pick out a car and drive it (virtually) in a city just like this great video from Honest Directors.
Such a video game might actually exist. But you know, I’m a bit old school. I might be out of the loop.
Ah, yes: Google maps. You can do much with them these days. I actually still have paper maps of China, if you can believe that.
I stumbled upon this interview of Chris Anderson of Wired talking about the economics of Free – which is the title of his book – and I thought: I think I’ll pay attention.
We’re all actors in one way or another in the free market. Mainstream journalists, in recent years, have been grappling with the idea of free in the context of money in a full-on way - since, well, economists talk about covering costs and earning profits for business survival.
As we know, low advertising dollars have created a churn in which thousands of people have left the industry. Mind you, this is in the context of people growing more and more used to – and in some way, expecting – free online content.
It is tempting to post a consecutive string of stop-motion clips of various sights because, well, they’re so fun to make.
I was ready to move on to other types of postings since I made stop-motion clips of a larger-than-normal chess match and Snoqualmie Falls in the past few days.
But then, I spotted a pretty big jar of kimchi at a local Korean grocery store. We’ve bought seaweed salad, seasoned squid and kimchi there before. My wife suggested that I buy more kimchi. This $10 jar seemed to fit our needs. We didn’t have any and it was an easy move to replenish our supply.
As I type this, the sun is appearing over the Seattle area – or at least that I can see. It is a sight to be welcomed, especially since this is late May 2010.
But it rained Saturday. So, my family and I looked for one of the best places to visit when water drops to the ground – Snoqualmie Falls, which is about a 20-minute drive east of Seattle.
The water drops about 270 feet.
It might be easy to criticize many U.S. suburbs for lacking a central public square – where you can sit, people watch and enjoy the type of civic life that other cities offer.
But in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, there is one place that’s worth visiting – Crossroads Bellevue, a mall that offers a large, boisterous food court with plenty of offerings, a stage with live music and a great larger-than-normal chess board.
Yes, it is not a grand square that many European cities have and it’s not a central place such as Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
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