Gold Bunny

One of my friend, Claudia, gave me the rabbits. She says that this chocolate is a speciality for Easter, not a St. Valentine's Day gift.
Before we eat them, my wife fed them with a carrot. Thanks for the kindness.

My favorite guitarist

He is Tommy Emmanuel having amazing technique of playing acoustic guitars with much sense of entertainment.

Beautiful melody and harmony is here.



His crazy technique and fun play.



For him, a guitar is a good percussion too.

Fighting, coping, or surrender?

I'm thinking about cancer. No, this is not my own matter now, though probably become matter in future. I would like to prepare for it mentally, to prevent falling into a panic.
Many people applaud those who have fought against cancer, even if they failed in vein. Trying new therapy and bearing side-effect (major-effect?) of anti-cancer agent may look so brave but awful for me. I might try to seek a sub-best solution in some ways of coping with cancer, rather than making my mind up to fight them. Off course I would not want to surrender.
Next week I will visit my father suffering from prostate cancer. How can I cheer him up, and how can I let him cope with the diseases? He is old enough. He should not take a risk to suffer from awful pain. How can he keep his quality of life? Not so easy questions....

Finished scoring exams

I have just finished to score exams of my lecture on biochemistry. This lecture will discontinued by this semester because of a curriculum rearragement in our undergraduate course. So I'm feeling little bit sentimental in scoring the very last exam. The main topics of the lecture were metabolism and enzyme kinetics. The achievement of their study in average looks fine, but only a few are expected to fail.
From next year I will create a series of lectures on fish genomics and aquatic biochemistry, so need to prepare for it by making several presentation file in PPT format.

Happy Thursday night!

This is because of the TV program "Begin Japanology", broadcasted in English from NHK (a Japan public TV casting company) in midnight.
The program introduces Japanese topics probably interesting for foreigners, such as Nabe (the hot pot cuisine, which I introduced in my last issue of this blog.), Sento (public bath), Bento (a lunch box cuisine), Kendo (Japanese swordsmanship) etc. Mr. Peter Barakan, a middle aged guy from London) plays as a caster. I love his English speaking (pronounciation and voice), and his speaking speed is quite good for me as an exercise of listening.
Several issues of the program have been archived in YouTube. All are quite fine. I wish we could get all the back numbers from YouTube or even NHK web site.

Today I would like to introduce a Japanese board game, Shogi, like Chess. I enjoyed Shogi with my father in my childhood. Another game of my favorite was mah-jong, played with my family (mother, father, grandfather, and my younger sisters) with no bet of cash.