So I decided I’d seen enough of the kid’s face in the previous post, and trolled through my Downloads folder looking for something to replace it. After I finished admiring the many nude and lightly-clad young women, I remembered saving this:

(St Patrick Catholic Church, Miami Beach, FL)

But I didn’t remember where I’d gotten it, so I did an image search by filename, and got this:

more...

It was the summer of 1981, and I was hanging out with my dad at a cottage in Bear Lake, Michigan. I was a little bored one afternoon, flipping through the latest issue of Omni magazine, and came across this:

Four pictures, a very small amount of text, and three tennis balls. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been standing at the top of a hill, though…

My first rings were carved from an old oil painting with a jigsaw, by a family friend; they were sort-of round. I think my first clubs were Jugglebug, picked up at a game shop in the Lane Ave Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio. I became a fair 3-ball trick juggler, but never really had the patience to get serious; in college I taught my friend Andrew the basics, and he later ran off to tour with a pro for a while. (this Andrew, I think; we fell out of contact decades ago, but it looks like the right guy. I should ping him)

From here:

Don’t practice martial arts barefoot on artificial turf, on a hot sunny day. My sunburn and my rugburn are competing to see which one is the most annoying. Apart from that, the Shinkendo seminar was terrific.

"I can't believe I just got rickrolled by your cubicle."
-- Jennifer

…because I taped this to the wall.

So we did our usual Shinkendo demo at the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival, and while it went over well, the crowd was a lot happier to see the followup act, Performer Kana, a street performer from Osaka. Can’t say that I blame them.

(picture from Oyaji no Hitorigoto blog)

She has some videos up on Youtube, and a blog.

This is the cover of Miko-Ama-Sister!, a serious exploration of religion in modern Japan, in which a scholarly young man probes the depths of Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity with the help of a shrine maiden and two nuns.

Nah, just kidding, it’s a porn novel.

(or, “fun with obscure fonts that are hard to buy outside of Japan”)