Last night we had a send off party for a co-worker who is going to move to Nagano prefecture. The usual place where the Yamagata crew go was holding a Halloween party so we ended up at a gyoza restaurant called Mitsuboshi Gyoza. They have …

I won't be posting build progress reports on the 1/700 Arkansas (update: on Oct 22nd I posted a photo of it on Plurk with the name USS Incomplete). It appears to be pirated version of the Tom's Modelworks kit. The copy I have may be a pira…

These days the annual Yonezawa rock music festival goes by the name of the Yonezawa Rock Festival. There was a time when it was named "Doors to Freedom"...I'm not sure when the name change happened. I suspect the name change came about whe…

I took the plunge and put down about $100 on a resin plastic model kit of BB-33 USS Arkansas. I received it this morning and opened up the box to examine the kit parts. When I unwrapped the hull I made an unpleasant discovery; two of the g…

I got a few more of those Yamagata dialect drawings last night. Here are the words I learned of from that batch:"Shemakoi" - cramped (space wise)"Naeda!" - What's up?/What's wrong?"Kosukage" - Have a seat"Shikagu" - to scratch"Shinigiru" -…

Last night a student brought in some copies of drawings made by someone whose last name is "Tsuchiya" (sorry, didn't catch the given name) who had had an exhibition or event at a local museum. The drawings illustrate Yamagata dialect words…

I spotted this bottle a couple of weeks ago whilst having lunch at a local cafe bar. I took note of the distillery name and later searched for it online. I came up empty on that search. The distillery in question has a tendency to release …

I spotted this poster next to the coffee machine at a convenience store in Nanyo. What caught my attention was how much the cat in the pictures resembled my sister's cat, though the tail of the lost cat is very different. Later on I show t…

I'm not quite sure why I purchased a copy of Trumpeter's 1/700 scale model of HMS Calcutta. After putting it together, I'm still wondering why. Things didn't start off well. After gluing the deck pieces to the hull, I noticed that the hull…