American Madness

I LOVE this story:

Towards the end of May, a drug dog at Narita Airport (Tokyo) failed to detect 142 grams (about 5 ounces) of pot in the side pocket of a passenger’s luggage. While this must be troubling for the Japanese officials, what is a bit more troubling is how they knew that the pot was in the bag in the first place.

Apparently, a quick-thinking customs official had the bright idea to break a couple of regulations and plant the pot in a unsuspecting passenger’s luggage in order to test the dog and improve its at-work performance. The dog, unfortunately, failed his at-work test and missed the drugs completely, though I have a feeling the dog isn’t going to get in too much trouble for this one, especially since the story continues. (more…)

As frequent readers know, I went to Tokyo recently. Being completely unfamiliar with Tokyo and Japan as a whole I decided to check out a couple of guidebooks on the town. I checked out the usual big names for guidebooks: Rough Guide, Time Out, Fodors, Lonely Planet as well as a handful of others. In the end I settled on Time Out: Tokyo, Rough Guide Tokyo and a new guide that comes out later this month: Lonely Planet Tokyo Encounter. After less then a day in the city I closed Rough Guide Tokyo and ended up returning it which left me with Time Out: Tokyo and Lonely Planet Tokyo Encounter.

Now, before I say anything about either guidebook let me talk about Tokyo as a city: It is huge, it has no street names and only a couple of real tourist sites or identifiable landmarks. With (at my count) at least 4 different sets of trains (including the subway and monorail) owned by the government and various private companies it is not exactly the easiest city to get around.

Though coming from a city with a pretty complete and, supposedly, confusing subway system, I found navigating the Tokyo subways not nearly as difficult as you would think. Finding things on the street was a different story.

(more…)

As you may have read here before (since this is my third time mentioning it here in 3 weeks), this past weekend was the Sanyo Bussan International Lifesaving Cup held on the beach in Kanagawa, Japan.

You might be familiar with this beach from the iconic picture “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai. Okay, well, there really isn’t a beach in that picture, but that would be the view from the beach we were on if the weather had been nicer and their hadn’t been a tsunami.

Anyway, I go the chance to join Team USA as they competed. At first I was a bit skeptical about the whole idea of a lifeguard competition. By the end of the day I was right there next to the coach cheering the team on.

Unfortunately my cheering was not enough. The Australians swept the competition, medaling in every event (winning mostly golds) followed closely by the South Africans and Japan’s A team (as the host nation, Japan fielded 2 teams). For the USA, both the men and women won some medals, leaving at the end of the day with three bronze and one silver if I recall correctly (it would have been four bronze, but the men’s team got disqualified in the Tube Rescue event for going the wrong way around a buoy).

Though I had been following Analisa for the Beach Flags competition she unfortunately did not medal in it. She was knocked out of the competition due to a speedy Brit and a bad lane, though, like a champ, she came out of it with a smile.

Beyond Beach Flags, she also participated as the ‘victim’ in the Women’s Tube Rescue (the U.S. placed 5th) and was the sprinter in the Taplin Relay (they placed an amazing 4th and would have done better had their not been an issue with the surf-ski).

Overall, Team USA came in 4th (I believe), but did an amazing job (especially in the Men’s Taplin Relay where Chad Carvin moved from 4th place to 1st in the swimming portion of the relay and the team ended up getting a silver).

Despite having the designation as a team member, I did not compete at all (which was a good thing for both Team USA and my out-of-shape body).

If you ever go to Tokyo, make sure you go to the Sapporo Museum (and yeah, there were only 2 of us).

Well, three days have passed and there are no reports on Castro’s demise. We’ll save the obituary for when he actually passes.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post I am not blogging from my usual NY outpost but rather from the other side of the world.

I landed in Tokyo yesterday and having been spending the day wandering the streets and trying to take it all in, and boy is it a lot to take in! Fortunately, I have a couple of guidebooks like Time Out: Tokyo, Rough Guide: Tokyo and Lonely Planet Encounters: Tokyo. That last one (which is not yet in stores) I will be reviewing at the end of the trip, or at least at the end of my stay in Tokyo.

What is always odd for me, especially when I am traveling in a foreign country, is being so out of touch with the world. At home I usually get a blast of morning news and my computer at work opens up to the front page of the NY Times. The local paper (in English) delivers a nice burst of world news and fortunately, the one English channel I get is CNN. Of course turning it on now I find out that Greece is burning to the ground, probably by arson (which is below the “fold” on the NY Times Online), Dubai is also burning, well at least the ports are, the US has massive flooding and tornadoes and housing prices are dropping everywhere in the US except of course in NYC.

Oh and my favorite: Al Qaeda is apparently trying to recruit Muslim African-Americans. The morning news is just depressing. I guess this is why I don’t actually watch the news that often, it keeps me with my cheery attitude towards the world. Anyway, I’m off to dinner now, I recommend skipping the news today or only check out the fluff pieces. It keeps you happier, trust me.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, when I have a cold all I want to do is crawl up in bed and sleep. For the most part that is what I did all day yesterday, but now I am back, well for the day at least, next week I will be in Tokyo for the first half of the week and then a beach town 2 hours outside of Tokyo for the second half of the week. The reason for my trip to Japan is the International Lifesaving Cup.

The 2007 Sanyo-Bussan International Lifesaving Cup will be held next week on Aug. 31st and Sept. 1st. Basically it is a life guard competition between the US, Japan, South Africa, Great Britain and Australia. Each country enters a team of 10 (5 men and 5 women) to participate, actually, Japan has 2 teams, I guess as the host nation they get to do things like that.

There are a plethora of events: water rescue, running relays, some of the events probably even have something to do with water I’d assume. The event that I am going to check out though doesn’t. Women’s Beach Flags, from what I have heard, is a bit like musical chairs. The object of beach flags is to race from one line to another and grab a “flag,” there is one fewer flags then there are participants, the contest continues until there is just 1 flag left and it is grabbed by one of the last two competitors.

As it has been explained to me the competitors start laying on their stomachs with their backs to the flags. When they get the signal they get up, sprint to the flags and try to grab one (or rip it out of another competitor’s hand). To get invited to the International competition you need to place 1st or 2nd in the National Competition from the previous year (as the 1st place competitor from alst year could not make it the 3rd place competitor was invited in her place).

As a New Yorker I am happy to see that there are 4 New Yorkers representing the United States Lifesaving Association on the team (the other 6 are made up of 4 Californians, a Floridian and a Delawarian. But the real star (as far as I am concerned) is my sister Analisa Cipriano. She placed 2nd in both the local competition and the USLA National competition last year in Beach Flags earning her an invite to the international competition. Her team-mate Emily Ward (also from NY) had beaten her in the local competition, but came in third at Nationals last year. According to an article from the East Hampton Star (because the one from the East Hampton Press still hasn’t come out) Ward has “‘been training — doing a lot of sprint exercises and practicing my get-up.’” In typical Cipriano fashion, Analisa on the other hand said “‘Generally with track I’m pretty competitive… With this, not so much. I try not to pay too much attention to the people next to me. I’m not that good at the get-up or the dive, but I make up for it with my sprinting.’”

I can attest to this, Analisa has done very little prep for the event, she even decided to bypass this years National Competition (though she placed 1st in the local competition). The Sanyo-Bussan Competition will mark her 4th time ever doing the Beach Flags Event, but with the track record she current has and her nonchalance attitude towards the event she probably has a pretty good chance of winning.

I’ll be writing next week (if I get to a computer) from Japan and reporting on the competition as well as Tokyo, I even have Lonely Planet Encounters: Tokyo which I will be reviewing while I am there, so keep an eye out for my Tokyo posts and I’ll keep you well informed about the tastiest sakes I have had.

Remember those articles I posted months ago about 3D printers that were able to produce small plastic parts designed on your computer (this one and this one)?

Well color me impressed- researchers from the University of Tokyo Hospital have developed a method to make “tailor-made artificial bones for use in facial reconstructive surgery.” The method is essentially the same as with the other 3D printing, the model is created in 3D on a computer and sent to a special 3D Inkjet printer:

To make an artificial bone with this technology, a 3D computer model of the bone is first created based on the patient’s X-ray and CT scan data. The computer model is then sliced into a large number of cross-sections and the data is sent to a special 3D inkjet printer, which works sort of like an ordinary inkjet printer by transferring tiny droplets of liquid onto a surface. However, unlike ordinary printers that print on paper, this one prints onto thin layers of powdered alpha-tricalcium phosphate (alpha-TCP). The “ink” is a water-based polymer adhesive that hardens the alpha-TCP it comes into contact with. By repeatedly laying down the powder and printing successive layers on top of one another, the printer is able to physically reproduce the desired bone to an accuracy of one millimeter.

It passed the Welsh Corgi test (okay, well, they tested it first on a Welsh Corgi) and then 10 human subjects over the past year and a half constituted the round of human testing. In the next few years the second round of testing will be in place for 70 more human subjects. The benefit of the 3D printed bones is that they are cheaper and easier to construct then the current artificial bone options, they are also 10 times stronger (though not quite strong enough for load-bearing bones). This is pretty awesome on a number of levels and a great example about how advances in technology can also lead to beneficial advancements in both health care and quality of life.

Have you seen the NY Lotto commercial with bundles of money just falling from the sky? Well, apparently that is what is happening in Japan- well, kind of.

Yahoo News reports that at an apartment building in Tokyo a number of people have discovered unmarked envelopes in their mailboxes each containing about 1.81 million yen (almost $16,000).

In an example of how different the Japanese are from Americans, they phoned the police to report the money, thinking it was fake. When it turned out to be real, they still handed it over to the police. In another apartment building in Kob, a woman received a similar gift in her mail of 1 million yen.

Continuing on the theme of money randomly appearing, a bunch of envelopes have been reported found in the restrooms of public building around Tokyo containing large sums of money and last week “bills worth 960,000 yen were inexplicably seen ‘falling’ in front of a convenience store… ‘We can just say the money came from the skies,’ a puzzled police official said. ‘There were other passers-by outside and customers in the store but the incident caused no confusion’ he said. ‘People thought it was too eerie to touch.’” Clearly not Americans, I am guessing this would have caused a riot here.

Although there is some speculation that the money may be from a public servant or new-age religious group, there is no real evidence one way or another and there really is no harm being done.

There have been other incidents reported as well. This all just makes me even more excited for my upcoming trip to Tokyo at the end of the month. I am definitely going to make sure to exam the men’s rooms in public buildings ever so closely.