What a lovely weekend

I adore it here.

This is our last morning at Rose Hall Bed & Breakfast in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. The experience has been amazing.

I'd never been to a B&B before, but I expected it to be something similar to a ryokan. (Isn't it funny that I'd been to a Japanese inn but not an American one?) It turns out that that does in fact seem to be the case. This particular B&B serves breakfast only (and sometimes dessert). There are free drinks and snacks in the stairwell.

Our room is absolutely gorgeous--large, with a fireplace (electric), a vanity, a writing desk, a little TV tower, two Victorian chairs, a dressing couch, and a lovely bed with a beautiful quilt. There are elegant mirrors everywhere. We have our own bathroom with a jacuzzi tub. Everything is decorated in a rich Victorian style, with a rose theme. The entire B&B is decorated with roses; downstairs it's very pink. This room adds some hunter green, purple, maroon, and violet for a more toned-down, sophisticated grandeur. The furniture all looks like antiques. There's a beautiful lamp with a fabric shade on the writing desk, and a fabulous pink blown glass lamp in the bathroom.

I honestly wouldn't mind decorating our bedroom this way, once we get our own place :)

Now it's time to have a late breakfast and head back home. I'll be back online shortly to upload pictures and write more about the trip :)

One last thing (because it's MacGyver-related)

There's going to be a MacGyver commercial during the Superbowl! Whee!

Going out of town

Sean and I are going to Columbia for the weekend. We'll be back on Sunday afternoon/evening.

I have six posts in the queue that Blogger has failed to put up. Several of them are from yesterday.

Of course, if this post is up, then those posts are up too. Here's hoping.

Setsubun

Setsubun, the Japanese term for the lunar changing of the seasons, is celebrated in the spring on February 3 or 4 (February 3 this year). Here's a brief Wikipedia explanation of the festival, here's a snapshot of this year's festivities from Marie Mockett of Japundit, and here's an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) story of how Setsubun was celebrated at a kindergarten.

JapaneseFood.About.com has an interesting cultural note about Setsubun:

Traditionally, Japanese people eat thick sushi rolls, facing the good fortune direction for the year. The direction of this year is south-south-west. Try eating a whole sushi roll without talking.

How do you figure out which direction is lucky? Here's a little more information, from the recipe page:

To eat fortune rolls, face toward the good fortune direction of the year at first. The good fortune direction is where the fortune god, Tokutoku-shin, stays. The good fortune direction changes every year. Then, hold a sushi roll and eat it, making wishes. You shouldn't talk until you are done with eating a whole sushi roll. It's said that good fortune will be gone if you talk.

I googled Tokutoku-shin and found...nothing! There is a God of Fortune named Ebisu in Buddhism (and Kotoshiro-nushi-no-kami in Shinto), but this does not appear to be the same thing. (You do offer soybeans to Ebisu at Setsubun, though.)

A search for Setsubun and good fortune turned up this Economist article:

COME February 3rd in Japan, you might wonder at the strange sight of people trying to face precisely south-south-east while gulping down long, fat sushi rolls in one go. It is a triumph of marketing. The occasion is Setsubun, the day before the symbolic start of spring, when people ward off demons and usher in good luck. Like other festivals around the world, it is being commercialised. In Japan Setsubun looks set to become as much a boom for stores and restaurants that sell sushi rolls as Valentine's Day has become for other retailers.

The "good-fortune-direction rolls" were originally cooked up by sushi-chefs and makers of nori (dried-seaweed, which covers the rolls) in the late 1940s in Osaka. Legend has it that a famous samurai gulped one down before winning a battle. Usually the rolls are cut into chunks, but these cannot be sliced because that would cut good fortune--or so the marketers would have it. The direction that the gobbler has to face is determined by a fortune-telling formula, which shows where the "good-luck" god of the year sits.

It's still unclear whether the Osakan sushi vendors created their own god of fortune, or just applied their new story to Ebisu. In any case, is it south-south-west or south-south-east this year?

Here's a good Setsubun roundup at MIT Japanese Culture Notes, with a little more information about the fortune roll.

In the Kansai area, some people also observe Setsubun by eating an uncut sushi roll (maki-zushi) while facing towards this year's "lucky direction." This direction depends upon the zodiac sign of the year. For instance, [in] 1996, the year of the mouse, the direction was south-south-east. On this one day, sushi shops don't cut their sushi rolls, but leave them whole.

I still don't know who the "god of fortune" is or which direction I should face, but since it's still February 3 here in the US, I might see if I can't find a fortune roll to eat. (Any excuse to enjoy sushi!)

[Cross-posted to Sushicam.]

New York Comic-Con

Check out ADV's latest newsletter. They are really pimping their Macross release at the New York Comic-Con. I almost (almost) want to go, to see Mari Iijima sing again :>

The nickname story

So, I posted the story of how I got my nickname over on Sushicam.

:>

Here's a picture ganked from the Intarweb, in honor of the Year of the Dog.

Awesome

MSNBC: After years, breakfast secret is revealed

(Is that a hilarious headline or what? Reveal...the breakfast secret!!!)

Blair, an asphalt contractor, said he pulled up in the parking lot at Bunny's in nearby Suffolk one day and was touched by the sight of several cars with POW license plates. Inside, he noticed a group of men at a table and asked the restaurant owner about them.

Told they were Pacific POWs, Blair decided to pick up the check, insisting his identity not be revealed. He continued to pay the tab as the years passed, and as the number of vets dwindled through death and illness from about 20 to just a few.

About a year ago, though, a waitress accidentally let the secret slip, said Donna House, a Navy veteran who began attending the breakfasts after befriending one of the POWs. The group had been trying, unsuccessfully, since then to meet Blair.

Blair said he intends to keep paying for the group's breakfasts.

What a great story :)

New haircut

I had my hair done today, and here's a picture!

This picture, the second of three, is pretty good if you ignore the fact that the camera's red light is reflected in my glasses.

Stupid bumper sticker

So today as I was waiting for a light to change color I noticed a bumper sticker on the back of the Sonoma in front of me. Conveniently, I had time to snap a picture.

At first I was like, "Whoa, that's a good point."

And then I was like, "Wait, no. That is totally stupid."

Just because I don't want you to kill the human being inside you doesn't mean I necessarily want (or trust) you to raise her. Give her away. Give her to me. But for the love of all that is good in the world, don't kill her.

My position has nothing to do with the woman who 1) got herself into this mess and 2) is trying to escape her responsibility, and everything to do with the child this woman sees as nothing more than an inconvenience.

When that thought came to me, the true flaw in the logic of this bumper sticker's argument was revealed: It's not advocating abortion for extreme cases. It's talking about abortion as if it were birth control.

Opponents of abortion are never going to be swayed by that kind of argument. At best, you can hope to convince us that abortion is a necessary evil in some cases. But we will never agree to killings of convenience.

TMI Health Update #5,875,783,921

I've been having a lot of cramps the last few days, but no period yet. Here's my most recent chart (click for glorious full size):

My endocrinologist said that if I didn't have a period by today, we'd probably go ahead and start back on provera (progesterone). I'm kind of hoping my period will start before I get the prescription, though.

Of course, this weekend would be a horribly inconvenient time to have a period, as Sean and I are going out of town for an early Valentine's Day getaway...:P

A job for Hai

When my friend Hai--writer, martial arts enthusiast, motorcyclist, and all around cool guy--finally decides to ditch the white collar lifestyle, I know just where he can go for work.

Around 40 members of a local karate club have been enlisted to protect around 140 classic cars due to visit an alpine village near Mt. Cook on New Zealand's South Island on Sunday, the New Zealand Press Association reported.

The karate experts will protect the cars from Keas, sharp-beaked native parrots which have been known to damage vehicles in their search for shiny items, NZPA said.

Ninja those birds!

So wrong.

So very, very wrong.

And yet...I love it.

Brokeback to the Future (via BoingBoing)

This was not my understanding

Don't you love it when you're told that the template is done and all you have to do is tweak it, only to find out that the template has been designed but not coded?

Yeah, me too! ;P

I am learning so much about CSS these days...

My first post is up on Sushicam

And I wrote about karaoke!

The post isn't as funny as normal Sushicam fare, but I think it turned out okay.

I hate [graphical] smileys.

I don't mind them so much in IM, just like I don't mind abbreviations and poor grammar and a severe lack of capitalization and punctuation in IM. IM is closer to a speech format than a written format, and as such is the perfect place for shortcuts and visual cues.

But smiley on blogs drive me nuts. Forums too. I always cut smileys off on those rare occasions in which I find myself posting on a forum. But I'm unable to do so on most blog software, much to my chagrin.

Still, I assumed, there were bastions of hope: Penny Arcade, for example. Ain't no damn smileys there, nossir!

So I open the page today...

Tycho...how could you do this to me?!

Actually, thankfully, Tycho didn't do this to me. It was an email sent to Tycho that did it. (And WTF is up with smileys in email? Honestly...) I'm sure Tycho included the smiley for completeness, or out of a sense of resigned irony.

Surely he didn't think it was cool.

...right?