(via mudwerks)
Hello! I'm a warehouse foreman, and my wife is an educator.
Just "Ask" me at this link!
Number of visitors today
About
January 15, 2012
March 30, 2011
10 things to learn from Japan
1. THE CALM
Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated.
2. THE DIGNITY
Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture.
3. THE ABILITY
The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall.
4. THE GRACE
People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something.
5. THE ORDER
No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding.
6. THE SACRIFICE
Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?
7. THE TENDERNESS
Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak.
8. THE TRAINING
The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.
9. THE MEDIA
They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage.
10. THE CONSCIENCE
When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left quietly.
March 24, 2011
The Atlantis of Japan — a sunken temple off the coast of Yonaguni Jima, Japan.
March 15, 2011
The Fukushima Fifty; or, Uncommon Valor as a Common Virtue.
They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.
They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.
They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.
Heroes.
March 15, 2011
"
AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile and Sprint are helping out individuals who are trying to reach Japan-based friends and family in the aftermath of the recent earthquake by providing free calling to the country.
AT&T is offering “billing relief” for its customers on calls made to Japan between March 11 and March 31.
This means that postpaid wireless customers will not be charged for international calls made to Japan from the United States or Puerto Rico — or for text messages to Japan which originate from a U.S. wireless number.
"
March 15, 2011
Miracles in Japan: Four-Month Old Baby, 70-Year Old Woman Found Alive.
Amid the silent corpses a baby cried out - and Japan met its tiniest miracle.
On March 14 soldiers from the Japanese Defense Force were going door-to-door, pulling bodies from homes flattened by the earthquake and tsunami in Ishinomaki City, a coastal town northeast of Senda. More accustomed to the crunching of rubble and the sloshing of mud than to the sound of life, they dismissed the baby’s cry as a mistake. Until they heard it again. (See 7 ways to help earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan.)
They made their way to the pile of debris, and carefully removed fragments of wood and slate, shattered glass and rock. And then they saw her: a four-month old baby girl in a pink woolen bear suit.
The tidal wave literally swept the unnamed girl away from her parents’ arms when it hit their home on March 11. Since then her parents - both of whom survived the disaster - have taken refuge in their wrecked house, and worried that their little girl was dead. Soldiers managed to reunite the baby with her overjoyed father shortly after the rescue.
“Her discovery has put a new energy into the search,” a civil defense official told a local news crew. “We will listen, look and dig with even more diligence after this.” Ahead of the baby’s rescue, officials reported finding at least 2,000 bodies washed up on the shoreline of Miyagi prefecture. How the child survived drowning - or being crushed by fallen trees and houses - remains a mystery. (See pictures of the calamity of Japan’s quake.)
In a nation short on good news, other rescues have buoyed morale, too. In Iwate prefecture, northeastern Japan, the devastating tidal wave swept away an elderly woman along with her entire house - but it couldn’t extinguish her will to live.
Rescuers found the 70-year-old alive inside her home on March 15, four days after the black tidal wave wiped out much of the region. Osaka fire department spokesman Yuko Kotani told the Associated Press the woman is now receiving treatment in a local hospital. She is conscious but suffering from hypothermia. (See how to tend to Japan’s psychological scars.)
Elsewhere, 60-year old Hiromitsu Shinkawa survived two days at sea by clinging on to his floating rooftop. He was discovered 10 miles off the Japanese coastline. “Several helicopters and ships passed but none of them noticed me,” he said after his March 13 rescue. “I thought that was going to be the last day of my life.” (via Daily Mail)
(Source: Yahoo!, via fatimahfeatnoam-deactivated2011)
March 13, 2011
Remember them.
March 12, 2011
It’s the day after Japan’s most disastrous earthquake and tsunami, and I’m heading down Osaka’s Animal Park arcade — a seedy, Showa-style passage with whores on one side, flophouses on the other — to neon-garish supermarket Tamade, where I’m planning to stock up on rice and other basics. With such chaos to the north and east of us, with the yen in freefall and nuclear power stations on the brink of meltdown, Japan’s food supplies may soon get scarce or dear. But on the streets of Osaka people are cheerful, smiling and laughing and chatting. It reminds me of the day after 9/11, when I went up to Central Park and found children happily sailing yachts on the pond, oblivious to the plume of smoke rising from Ground Zero. Life goes on. Life revives. Life survives, in part because it has an in-built adaptive obliviousness. Or is it just that we’re so entirely aware, all the time, that “in the midst of life we are in death, et cetera”?
Halfway to the supermarket I stop, pulled up by the sound of frenzied bongos, screeching violin and honking avant-garde saxophone. A street performer is using the pavement in front of the oden restaurant as his stage. He’s a middle-aged man wearing stockings and suspenders, his face and legs daubed in the distinctive white make-up which inscribes him in the tradition of Butoh. Draped in a banner I can’t read, he’s emerging from a gigantic vulva constructed of cans and wire. For me it’s a metaphor for Japan’s rebirth after yesterday’s disaster. Life goes on. New life emerges. A bird, a woman, a foetus, it flaps grotesquely around, here beneath the freeway flyover. The bongos beat, the violins stagger and slide, the sax quacks. People shoot photos, or simply squeeze past on bikes. After videoing for a few minutes, I continue to the lurid neon lights of the Tamade supermarket, strangely reassured. Whatever happens to it, this country — precarious yet resilient — is extraordinary. Will and brilliance can overcome, time after time, whatever risks and spills come Japan’s way. The sun also rises.
(via luthiermark)
December 31, 2010
Good morning friends and neighbors!
August 1, 2010
(via e-pic, gardenofthefareast)
The RSS for this blog is http://imall4frogs.tumblr.com/rss