ALMIGHTY T-SHIRT

I heard that some Rock or Heavy Metal bands sometimes dislike each other and the fans of those bands avoid wearing the adversary's band name T-shirt when they go to the show.
My friends said you can wear an "Almighty T-shirt" at every rock concert, for example "Iron Maiden"'s.
Most of the Heavy Metal and Hard Rock bands love and revere Iron Maiden, so if the fans appeared in an Iron Maiden T-shirt, it wouldn't incur anybody's displeasure.

In October, I saw a show by a group with two Japanease Heavy Metal singers.
In the event, they sing their original and '70 to '90's mainstream Japanese popular songs. They organize the recital in a small venue periodically, separately from the extravaganzas of their own individual Heavy Metal bands.
The people gathered in the venue are grown-up enough and sofisticated at a level appropriate for their age, so all of them fix up to go to the show. I also considered my clothes and my friend and I had on Japanese summer kimonos at the show last summer.
However, at this Autumn concert, I was wearing a MEGADETH logo T-shirt because I had some work in an exhibition hall for my business before the show.
I felt a strange premonition when I put on the T-shirt, but I thought no one would care about my wearing it and I cast aside the feeling.

In the show, one of the two singers played trivia which I accidentally answered. He said he had a prize for me and asked me to come forward.
Then, the other singer stared at me ferociously (as I shrunk) and said "How could you wear a MEGADETH T-shirt at such a pop recital!?" Then I guessed he only read my T-shirt logo and didn't stare at me, but my favorite singer addressed me for the first time, "Geez", as pointed out on the T-shirt. The first one responsed with "Oh! Why don't we sing 'Symphony of Destruction' next time?" and made the people giggle.
I felt glad the T-shirt elicited laughter. Also, If I had put on nice clothes, he would never have said anything to me.
I kind of worked out my hunch...

At a later date, I told this story to the MEGADETH-fan friends and they said I could wear the ALMIGHTY T-shirt.
Uh...I don't think the matter was the MEGADETH T-shirt... In this case, HEAVY METAL T-shirt is the issue!

MEGADETH

Today, I saw a great show of the American thrash metal band, MEGADETH!
The show tickets were available from October 1st.
Today is October 13th... I can't believe it!
I thought that would never happen as the show tickets of such a bandwagon from abroad had been sold only for a short period of time. Well, they had the monster event, "LOUD PARK", on the day after the show day.
So there was the smallest number of people I had ever seen(However, There were hundreds people in the audience), and I could see my most favorite band up close as never before.
I met with some familiar MEGA fans after all these years, and we chatted gaily in a cafe. Before I parted company with them, I promised to invite them to my house and have a little party.
It'll be fun and I have to clean up my house!

TRAMPOBICS

A free Trampobics lesson was held near my house and I tried and enjoyed it.
Trampobics is aerobics on the trampoline, which is a small personal-type one called "Jog".
Young or continuously-exercising people can jump lightly on the jog and old or underexercised people can walk slowly on it (with hanging on somewhere like the bar).
Your power and sense of balance will develop on the soft ground and landing impact is very low for your knees.
Bouncing (even slightly) will uplift the internal organs and spirit.
Go and do Trampobics!

...Actually I 've got to get the Jog first. I heard the jog is 0.86 meters in diameter, one-fifth of a meter in height and under 7 kg in weight. I don't drive so going shopping for it will be good exercise!?

Drum school

I am busy,lazy and always tired, but I often start something new too easily from a quick thought.

Yesterday, (but I reserved the class two weeks ago, so I can't say it was a whimsical idea), I attended a free drum lesson.

Several weeks ago, my elder co-worker who loves music chatted with me about forming a rock band with some colleagues. Of course I wanted to join in.

I thought I wanted to play every instrument except the keyboards, and especially the drums, because I like a lot of drum players, for example Keith Moon, Mike Portnoy, John Bonham and Nick Menza.
I have no confidence in my sense of rhythm and motor co-ordination, but I heared training can develop one's rhythmic sense and reflexes. I bet on the theory.
The class will start in September and I can't stand the suspense.

Classical Concert

Today I went to the Tokyo University Orchestra's summer concert.
My co-worker gave me the tickets because his daughter's in the orchestra, and I had introduced a music shop to him for his daughter when she decided to take violin lessons, 7 or 8 years ago.
So I went.

The concert hall was packed..., no, overflowing, but I luckily found a seat.
The program is as below.
1. "Ruslan and Ludmila"-Overture/ Mikhail Ivanobich Glinka
2. Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in B minor, op.104
/ Antonin Leopold Dvorak
- intermission -
3. Symphony No.6 "Pathetique"in B minor, op.74 / Pyotr Ilyivh Tchaikovsky

I was suprised at the speedy playing of the first "Overture".
They gave us a brilliant performance, but because of my sleep shortage I was barely conscious during the Concerto.
Due to a cup of coffee during the intermission I was satisfied with the Symphony.

I was meant to go with Mother, but in the morning, she phoned me and said that my sister had broken a instep of her feet and
Mother was called out to help her. So my mother failed to arrive in time.
After the concert I was able to find Mother and we left the hall. She said she arrived there in the intermission.

I heared my sister broke two points of her toe bones and she need an axilla crutch, but her rooms were supposed to be messy and she couldn't walk with the crutch in her rooms. Hence I heard she said to Mother "Please go shopping for me and clear my rooms!"
Mother thought that my sis was with suspected of osteoporosis (brittle-bone disease), because she ordinarily took poor diet.
she said she had boiled two bunch of spinach and put it in the fridge. How caring she is!

Taste good and is probably healthy

Ootoya (http://www.ootoya.com/) is a Japanese food chain restaurant which has expanded recently in Japan.
They serve good dishes with reasonable prices, so at lunch and even dinner time there were lines in front of the restaurants in the urban area.
I also like this chain because their menu looks healthy and well-balanced. If you want to take more vegetables, you can add a small dish of boiled leafy greens and seaweed salad at 150 yen(about 1.5 dollars) and they have a variety of different small side-dishes.

At the same time, I can't resist the sweets.
Actually their sweet dishes are subtly sweet, but after a meal it must be an excessive calorie intake anyhow, so I asked to change the bowl of rice with the set meal to a smaller one.
I like to eat the dessert, "Soba namafu no zenzai", the special this month. It was sweet red bean soup with bread-like pieces of buckwheat gluten, and the topping was roasted buckwheat berry.
The roasted buckwheat had a fragrant flavor and was very crispy.
I totally gave myself up to it.

Keep the diary

Someone recommended to me that I can organise my diary format: introduction, development, changes, conclusion, etc. and all that is left is to change some sentences. It must be a practical and effective method, but to tell you the truth it sounds somewhat boring to me. I am awfully fickle, for example I don't chose the same route going and returning.
I have a funny episode about this.
I met my husband on the way to the post office near the station when he was on his way home.
He thought that I would come back there soon and he waited for me there to go home together.
However, I didn't know that.
I always return by taking a different route, and that's what I did on that day too. I was suprised that he wasn't at home. Later he came back home and said he got left waiting.
I thought we hadn't completely understood each other.

A ROCK CONCERT

It was a big event in a small venue.(for me)
Last saturday, I went to Meguro in Tokyo to see the event at "LIVE STATION".
The event had 2 parts, the first part was a jam session of clasical rock music (to be exact, the jam session was not improvised. Most are covers of Japanese or overseas rock music, like WHITESNAKE, IRON MAIDEN, CREAM, LOUDNESS, BOW WOW(VOW WOW), etc.)
If you were interested in signing up to join the session, you would need to apply in advance with information about your name, the musical instruments you play and the tunes you wanted to play.
Within the deadline, if each song had been able to line up the players: a singer(s), guitar player(s), bass player, drummer, and in some songs keyboard players, the song could be put on the timetable and you could play the song.

The second part is a performance time for permanent and temporary bands. Actually, I saw only the 2nd part, because I took a long time picking out chocolates to give to my boss and colleagues, and after that my friend and I chatted in a cafe for too long. We entered the venue just when the curtain for the first part had been dropped.

However, the purpose for going there was the first band of the 2nd part: "KOZMIC RIDE". I have taken the band singer to my heart for over ten years, and I went to his concert without fail for the last three years, except when a typhoon struck Tokyo or I was in hospital.
The singer looked nice in a black shirt with silver decorative buttons and a pinstripe jacket. Every time he flung up his arm, his bare and flat(it means lean frame)
midriff appeared...it was hot but I thought I wanted to be slimmer.

Time flies. My favorite singer's performance had finished as quickly as a flash. I wanted to listen to his voice all day, so I always had a kind of void feeling when his performance ended, but it is different on this day because of the follow-on bands.
The next band was temporary but the singer, who was an ikon of Japanese progressive rock in the 80s, covered rock classics. His distinctive vocals effected a chemical change in the songs, and he dragged the audience into his music world, including me.
The last was also a temporary session band, and I gasped at the handsome drummer in it. I was suprised not that he was handsome but I might have wanted to see him(his ex-band).
He used to be the drummer of the Japanese Metal band BLIZARD, and in the 80's one of my music clubmates gave me some copy tapes of the records of BLIZARD, because he said I might have fancied the band. Actually 10 years after, because the tapes were under siege, I bought their CDs as much as possible (then the band was disbanded and some records were discontinued.)
. I had never seen how the band had played, so I was very interested in it.
But today's band was for a tribute session of LAZY which was a famous hard rock band in the 70's (actually I didn't know). The singer sung very nicely and his MC was funny. He also told the MC that he was considerate about where he stood on the stage, because he didn't want to receive complaints from the audience that they couldn't see the drummer.
The drummer surely looked cool, didn't look over 40 and had a very attractive smile.
Only a short while later I remembered he had a twin brother who was a guitar player, and the stage took on an added, bonus jam session time. Then the brother got on the stage with a guitar and they played a song of BLIZARD and he made his performance cracking and smiled just like his twin.
I was so excited but I had started a kind of challenge.

I had a plan to hand a Valentine's chocolate box to my favorite singer. Most of his audience were old and they always had a few words with him and left the venue after his concert, and I was getting to be a frequent concert goer, but to tell the truth, I had never said good-bye to him because I was shy and liked him so much. However, at that rate I would be a sort of creep or rude, because I was wanting him to get a lot more chocolates for Valentine's than anyone else, so I tried to give him a small gift.
After the exciting show, while everybody was getting ready to go, I looked around for him through the many performers in the hall, but I couldn't find him there. I thought his performance had finished early and he might have gone to the drinking party place ahead, while it was so crowded there. There was the bass player of his band, the only member of his band who was there, so I asked her to deliver the gift to him and she said she would do it with pleasure.

After that it's all done, I thought.

Watching my step, I dashed up the narrow stairs of the below ground venue. A minute after my head snapped up, I caught his eye. He was sellng their CDs with his band members.
I never imagined it would happen, so I went by them with a slight nod and guided by the law of inertia went outside.
I could return to the venue and hand the gift to him, and then I could say something to him, but I didn't.

At home, I told my husband the whole story and he laughed at me and teased me, "She gets to eat the chocolates! Ha-ha!".

Dog sitting

I have been dog sitting for these last two weeks for my sister, because she is a violinist hired by a pop singer who had a concert tour and she couldn't take her dog with her on the tour.
Actually, I had never kept pets so I am not good at taking care of animals, so I don't feel at ease with any dogs even my sister's chihuahua.

The chihuahua is long-haired and light brown and looks like a tiny deer. She (it is she) is very cute, timid and a lion at home. Her lovability is her first and last bastion and she purrs like a cat for attention-seeking, because she wants to be in someone's vest pocket at all times. She is also fragile (I happend to drop her and injured her by dislocating her knee joint once, about three years ago .) That means I worried about her all the time and I felt a bit messed up.

I don't want to live in a small cage, so I don't want to lock her up. Though I had a jittery feeling, I set her off in the living room. (She is completely an indoor dog.) She placed a small piece of her crap on my brand-new rag and joyfully uprooted a small foliage plant I had just planted. Of course, I was rather upset.

At last, my sis picked up her a few hours ago. It's a relief that it's all over now, but ... I am sort of missing her.

The trespasser

On our last holiday, Tom (my husband) said something and woke me up (near noon).
I changed my clothes and looked in the yard. I saw some police officers and him there.

Tom explained to the officers that 30 minutes ago, when he was surfing websites at the dining-room table, a squarely built white-haired man, came through the yard from side to side and tried to open the kitchen door, "chonk! chonk!" . As soon as the guy saw the door was locked, he headed to the next door(it is the garage door in the back porch.)
Of course Tom was scared of the intruder. He couldn't have guessed someone could walk in the yard, excluding us, cats or birds, because the rear gate of the yard had a chain with a dial key.
Tom opened the kitchen door at speed and bellowed out what on earth the guy was doing.
The man asked "is this house yours?" and turned back into the yard.
Tom still had his pajamas on, so he scrambled to return to the room to change into his trousers, then he ran after the man at full gallop and told the man that he would call the police.
The guy yelled back that "you can call the police!".
Tom realized he didn't have his cellphone, so he turned back to the dining-room and popped out through the front door in great haste.
Though the guy disappeared Tom phoned the police.
Tom said there was a name written with a felt pen on the guy's white Boston bag .
When I heared the name, I flashed on what my mother had said. Before, she had told me that she had been annoyed an old man who had got a little senile for several years, so I said we would be able to say who the guy was if we asked my mother.
My mother said the man was like a house stalker. Without even a glance at people and other houses, the man made him get into this house.

On the first time, Mother asked him why he opened the door of her house, and asked him to show his ID. When he showed his senior's bus pass, Mom realized that he had got senile and remembered the name on the pass. After that, the guy soon left straightforwardly and Mom asked the city office who he was and also where he lived; a relief facility(I think it is a kind of rescue home) for people who are very poor, handicapped or sometimes released from jail.
Mother told the institution several times and the police twice, and put a latch on the yard gate, but the guy still sometimes appeared. At one time she found he had taken her stepladder from the garage and put it on the second floor balcony.

However, this time, the police found the chain chopped off with a tool near the gate. They caught the suspect on his way home and found a wire cutter in his Boston bag. They caught him and asked Tom to write a declaration which took all day! The man likely made an open confession but it was incoherent.
We don't know if he hid something or got completely senile, but we hope he won't appear again, above all from the back door!

Rogue trader

The more you conceal failure, the more things worsen.
I think I learned it in the field, and in that sense Nick was wet behind his ears then.

"Rogue trader(James Dearden 1999)" is a film based on a true story, Nick Lesson's private papers in prison, starring Ewan McGregor.
Nick was employed by Barings Bank in England. His academic qualifications were not so good but he had an ambition to become a trader. He solved a problem in Jakarta and met Lisa as a colleague there. Barings Bank gave him credit for the operation in Jakarta and they decided to send him to Singapore as a trader of advanced business. After getting married Nick and Lisa went to Singapore and started their happy life in their excellent, modern-designed apartment. The bank gave him permission to employ cheap and local labor. He trained his new, unskilled staff and he managed both the dealing and accounting division.
At first, one of his staff made a bad mistake, he tried to save her, and he hid the loss in a dummy account. The first year, he was barely helped by his luck. He made a large amount of profit, even covered up his big losses, by an illegal trading technique. But the second year, in the beginning of the year, he determinded he would never have to use the dummy account in which he hid the losses, but to prop up the market he bought too much, and as a result, in the bonus month his losses reached a huge figure. The bank was so satisfied with the pevious year's profit that they didn't discover his ruse. He worked for living up to his wife, his family, and his bank's expectations, so he never used or hid their money for himself. Hence finally he made up his mind that he would have got nowhere. He submitted his resignation via fax and bailed out with his wife from Singapore.
Because the bank didn't put a stop on the accounts soon enough, the balance of the debt trebled and it became bankrupt. On the flight his wife said she still loved him, but after he was captured, she divoced him and got married to another trader. He was not a bad man but I think gambling will never bring you true fortune.

Betty Blue

Last week, before the Christmas holidays, I moved to a new place. However "new" is my parents' old house. My parents moved to a retirment condo and they left a great amount of things, from a car to a potato masher. The car is very convenient for us, thanks Mom!, but I don't need two potato mashers even though I love mashed potatos a lot, and also other utensils.
At first, I planned that we would clean up our house during the Christmas holidays but in reality I was laid low with the flu and my husband went out to an orphanage as a volunteer and except for unpacking some shoeboxes during that time I had to unpack and fold up like crazy for the last three days at the end of last year.
My husband had an event for his hobby group on New Year's Eve and he had gone out to prepare for the event while I was unpacking. He is an easygoing person and he said "we can clear away bit by bit," though I felt we wouldn't clean up our house in a year if we did it at his slow pace.
Today, after having lunch, I said we should be very busy because this situation was very incovenient and we should throw away a lot of things and install the equipment.
When I did something in the other room and returned to the living room, my husband lay in front of the TV and laughed at a stand-up comic show. Of course I got mad and my husband said that this was a recess after a meal. Just as I broomed off a box of his hobbies from a bedroom to a hallway, I thought of "37°2 le matin".
"37°2 le matin (aka Betty Blue)" is my most favorite French movie, and it was very popular in Japan when it came out. After all is said Betty is so cute and attractive. The main character, Beatrice Dalle, has a great acting talent.
I prefer the "uncut" version definitely because the "cut" version lost some important scenes and Zorg's feelings. (Zorg is the narrater of the story and Betty's lover.)
In Japan, this film is liked by women more than men. Women understand Betty's feelings and men, maybe, cannot make head or tail of her intensity.
Today I wanted to throw everything out of the window. If Betty were me, she would have done the same and set the house on fire ! Gah!