August 6th

Let’s just pretend today is still the sixth. With that in mind:

  • Today I ate my favorite dish at my favorite seafood place in town (anago-don at Uomasa)
  • I walked to the beach with friends, both old and new
  • I washed nary a dish, because we ate out all day
  • We watched 5,000 fireworks at the annual show in town, barely 200 meters from the launch area
  • We watched Breakin’ and the Last Dragon (Sho ‘nuf!) in a sudden fit of 80’s nostalgia (anybody remember Vanity? Also, we discovered perhaps Jean Claude Van Damme’s earliest movie appearance – as a silent [thank god] extra in Breakin’)
  • I received calls and messages from all over the world, all day long
  • I congratulated myself for having the foresight to take tomorrow off work – this, if nothing else, shows some promising personal growth

Today was a good day to turn 32 – I feel special things are gonna happen this year. It’s gonna be a great one.
………….
Cultural Point of InterestJapan’s Economy Fueled Entirely by Cellphone Packet Fees
We watched the fireworks show from Ohama Beach, a ten minute walk from my house. Like I said, we were right by the mortars and the sound was felt more than heard. The fireworks with low trajectories lit up the surface of the sea to reveal a fleet of pleasure craft anchored just outside the danger zone; I saw twenty times more boats off the coast of Sumoto on this single night than I’ve ever seen before. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing:
20060806-sumoto-hanabi02532-fireworks.jpg
The fireworks were great, but in the end they are just fireworks


Much more impressive was the sheer number of LCD screens lighting up the night as people recorded photos/video on their keitai cameras:
20060806-sumoto-hanabi02502-keitai.jpg
Hey, if a massive tsunami had hit us right then, at least our demise would have been very well documented…
Guess my cynicism isn’t really improving with age…
Or, maybe it is.

4 thoughts on “August 6th

  1. What a fine way to spend your birthday, with congratulatory calls, best wishes, lots of teasing (uh, Dave Brown was there, right?) and a foodie fun fest all day and all night long! Happy Birthday, Jus!

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