Earthquake! Typhoon!

We had a good shake yesterday when something slipped under Chiba. The picture tells the story. Despite a 4 or so in Izu, not a single thing tipped over. Instead we kept on cooking and had a nice meal with John Owens.

The other map I might have added is the weather map showing the typhoons which have kept a thick cloud cover over the eastern coast around Tokyo making it wet and muggy.

Growing the FTSE team

This week my deputy Fran Thompson has been in Tokyo to go over the business, products and objectives. She will be running the sales process and helping with implementing partnership plans. Her joining the team adds another factor to the APxJ team dynamics. I believe her input and initiatives will give the team a more balanced and comprehensive approach too. I have been starting a lot of new partnerships that now need more hands on them.

The Sea

This is a really cool poem about the Sea.

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Spangling the Sea

Ruffle and tuck, river fabric wags doggedly towards ocean,
Heaping surface on surface, its cadence a gown.

Perpetually beneath lurks stillness, a calm inseam sewn
By handless needles, distinct from yet part of the sequined

Design that glints iridescent now, then dark as pine.
Beneath silt and waver live many denizens of the deep:

Zigzagging shiners, freshwater drums, tessellated darters,
Grass carp, a kaleidoscopic plentitude that yawls and rolls

Among root wads and bubble curtains drawn on riparian
Terraces, hinged vertebrae whipping back and forth

In an elastic continuum displacing the fluid milieu,
Enabling them, polarized or not, to scull along in schools.

Nothing in outer space so bizarre as episodes underwater:
The gilled emerge from bouts of massive oviparity

Staged upon plankton columns where some fry turn larval
While the majority never leave the sure rot of egg sleep.

Whether due to snowmelt in mountainous headwater tracts
Or to rainfall from cumulonimbus fancy, for whatever reason

Water appears from serpentine soil and prairie-scrub mosaic,
A small muddy trickle that gains momentum as it swells

And deepens, sweeping along twigs, carcasses, bald tires,
To empty at length into estuaries engulfed by tides

Perpetually born of a body dressed in hastening garb,
Upholstering two-thirds more surface than any ground.

Ravi Shankar

Finally a three day weekend and the weather's good

It's so hard to remember a three day weekend in Izu when the weather is actually good. I have been traveling nonstop this year and now have a stretch when I won't be out of Japan for like two weeks! Long time.

Naomi and Thor came down to Kuala Lumpur on my last ten day trip and we spent last weekend on the island of Langkawi. A bit of a disappointment because we couldn't snorkle. But the weather was good and we had an interesting ride on the second day we were there. It was a tour of the mangroves, with some time boating on the ocean north of the island. Saw some bats in a cave and watched the guide feed a bunch of eagles.

The photo is me on Langkawi holding some prehistoric crab at the fish farm where tourists like us get to feed fish and touch dwellers of the deep.

Anyhow, this weekend in Izu will be nice. I plan on playing nine holes of golf on both Saturday and Sunday. We'll see the Marshalls and cook up a storm on the bbq.