the end of winter

'Hands up! How your fingers reveal so much about you...' My ring finger is longer than my index finger. ~This type is also associated with high deprivation and greater poverty~...ha ha ha you suck.

I was drunk and in a very happy mood on Saturday night. I remember I laughed so hard that tears came out when I saw this post 'miserable statues in the snow' on nifty portal Z. That is funny, but not really funny to the point of tears. Now I realize what it was. This looks like 'Spot' to me.

I picked this 'can't launch English lesson' video on YouTube. That video series has very high viewership worldwide. I checked out other Japanese videos with high viewership. Here is one. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Japanese pranks

I went to Odawara Soga Bairin 'Plum orchard' last week. We say that plum flowers signal the end of winter and Cherry blossoms signal the peak of spring. After the trees flower, they produce a lot of UME plums, which are used to make plum products like Umeshu or Umeboshi. I really love this Hiroshige's ukiyoe Kameido Ume yashiki of Meisho Edo Hyakkei (it's a very artistic ukiyoe. Gogh loved it very much too and made a copy of it. The left one is Gogh's copy, the right one is Hiroshige's original. I picked this site a long time ago. He visited the exact same place that the Ukiyose depicted. You can see how Tokyo has changed. Talking about wood prints, I found this site. His motifs are roofs, very nice.

Comments

[Martin F]

Now I remember when I visited the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, there are many unknown paintings that he did. He was so impressed by how Japanese painters showed ordinary people in their struggle with nature - snow of the harsh winter, storms, waves, floods...

ume is apricot?? honto?? I didn't know that thanks

[Taki]

I've heard that what the Japanese call "ume" translated to plum is not a plum but is in fact an apricot. ume are small like a plum but are fuzzy like a peach. Real plums aren't fuzzy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ume