24 VII 07
tonight's tales: a quick note on an unusual bar, madness at the Natural History Museum, and baseballllll! skip and choose as you please.
met up with the crew, including far-flung fiends working in Tsukuba (say 'SCUBA') on Friday night and proceeded to Golden Gai. no, it's not the gay district - it's a labyrinth of tiny bars the size of pantries, most of which are openly hostile to foreigners. we ended up at a "safe" one called The Coin Bar, operated by an amusing Filipino-looking woman. Brendan and i befriended the locals and a crazy middle aged American expat, the Hawaiian-shirted kind you'd expect to find at any airport bar in the country. karaoke was done right in front of the bar for 100Y a pop, which was my first time before a public audience. started things off with a sing-along, "Bohemian Rhapsody," and got everyone in the bar in on it. drunken businessmen at their drinks, the barmaid, every beating heart. so epic.
hit the Natural Science Museum in Ueno on Saturday. i assure you, the flavor there, in a country with no hangups whatsoever about evolution, "The E Word," was a far cry from our censored endeavors in the States. the Global Hall was particularly superbly well done, with seven or so floors (many subterranean!) of exhibits under amazingly high ceilings. i beheld a legendary pantheon of fossil taxa - as in nearly all museums, probably mostly casts - from Archelon, the largest turtle eVar and the size of a small aircraft, to the wolflike ancestors of whales such as Pakicetus.
there are cladograms with Bayesian support indices.
yes.
you can imagine that i'm a fairly jaded person. it's not often anymore that i break into a spontaneous grin, but one of the two moments lately was upon entering the Biodiversity Hall at the museum. it is a temple to the diversity of life on earth, a veritable underground necropolis of kingdoms and classes. tremendous sharks and rays loom from the warehouse ceiling over mock kelp beds. the path winds through an assemblage of odd vertebrate skeletons great (sperm whale) and small (tiny fish). one hundred and fifty some-odd feet of preserved minke whale intestines are displayed in tight undulations on the wall... absolutely writhing with nematode parasites. that's half a football field of bloodsucking, roving white worms. it is astonishing and revolting.
i'll cut it off there, as the rest is really geeky and not all my dear readers are science fiends. :)
Wednesday, tomorrow, is my birthday! i will officially be Methuselean. but the celebrations began today, as has transpired the last three of four years. 2004 - big party at our DC apartments on the 24th with crescendo at midnight. 2006 - my birthday proper was spent in its entirety, until 1159pm, at LAX, so we partied early. and now, 2007 - kicked it off early with a great seat at the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants baseball game as they hosted the Yokohama Baystars.
entering the Tokyo Dome was the second "oh man, i'm friggin' smiling" moments of late. after weeks and weeks of perpetually ferrous, overcast weather and drizzle - Tokyo's godforsaken rainy season and consequent winter depression - i stumbled outside this morning to discover a perfectly cloudless, warm day. a superb day for a ballgame, even if under a dome. i rolled up a few minutes before the first pitch and was overwhelmed by two waves of emotion. nostalgia, as the last proper domed game i'd attended was at the Astrodome. second, an electric thrill as i heard thousands of baseball fans going berserk in unison and chanting Baseball War Hymns.
i sprang for a great seat, down low on the first baseline. the outfield sections were reserved for rabid fans, 3/4 for the Giants and the rest along left field for the visiting team. the atmosphere was like that at a college football game and then some. a palimpsest from cribbed Darwin:
"I do not believe that any one could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than [these fans] did for [their team]."
the weird part was that they only cheered and chanted, waving immense team flags and trembling colors, when their own team was at bat. during the defensive half of each inning, they were stone silent save big plays.
the Tokyo Dome knows no fat peanut dudes. the aisles were patrolled by a mercenary army of cute girls in brewery baseball jerseys, lugging around insulated minikegs on their backs. they were sexy dromedaries. others in surreal neon garb stolen from 1991 sold whiskey and tasty sundries. i ate soba noodles and killed beers. life is good.
the Giants got owned. the outfield is a rather diminutive thing... i don't suspect that any of the fences were much farther out than the left field Crawford boxes at Minute Maid Park (i.e., shallow!). while the general level of play wasn't quite up to MLB standards... even with my Astros playing as miserably as they are... there were still four or five put over the fence tonight.
the game was close from the fifth through eighth innings, and i stuck around with the diehard fans to the bitter end. i have no idea why many waved inflatable dolphins in the air. the Giants mascot... the "Giabbit", is some deformed, chibi, orange hare with a mangled left eye.
it is an inscrutable culture.
tomorrow!- (or 13 minutes from now, as i type) birthday continues with a fabulously luxurious lunch at the hotel bar/restaurant from Lost in Translation (Park Hyatt). and in the evening, a colossal crew will assemble in Shinjuku to crush the owners of karaoke parlors with such poor business acumen as to offer nomihodai karaoke to hollow-legged Americans.
feast, drink and be merry. salud.
