I'm pretty sure that they don't know that BJ has alternate meanings in different cultures. As you can imagine these are great selling souvenir T-shirts for Westerners. 

Have you seen something like this in your neighborhood when you're out walking your dog? Little libraries are a growing trend throughout the world with more than 100,000 of these book boxes scattered throughout neighborhoods around the world. If you see one in your travels, please use them! Everyone should read more, we especially need to get kids away from touch screens and back to turning pages. Books always need good homes and they are happiest when they are being read. Leave a book if you're done with it for someone else to enjoy.

I always wonder where all the blue food is. Here's Pepsi blue tastes like pepsi but it's clear blue.

We've all heard Leonard Cohen's Classic hymn many times and given the state of the world today with potential conflict and hatred escalating seemingly daily, we need to take time out to listen.

These shoes make me ask questions
Why would a grown man buy these shoes?
Why would Nordstrom sell them?
Why would Skechers design them?
Thoughts? Comments?

Ok here's some beautiful renditions of classic pop songs played on traditional Japanese instruments.  
​I would pay good money to go to a full pop concert of cover songs played like this. 

These dudes on Beat It are kind of intense!
If you like these covers you should subscribe the NHK Blend Channel on You Tube. They cover everything from Taylor Swift to Ricky Martin. I'll post one more just for fun. I bet delinquent hamsters listen to music like this.

I saw this cartoon on Amazon Prime. It's from Japan featuring hipster hamsters with crazy hairstyles. They speak Japanese with hamster accents. I couldn't stop watching it. The show is called Delinquent Hamsters!!! Enough said watch the clip below and you'll be hooked too!

Watch the video below and see that even the great Martha Stewart can't fold a fitted sheet. She recommends washing the sheets then putting them right back on the bed when they come out of the dryer.  Martha, do you want to come look for Bigfoot with us?

For all of those domestic goddesses out there and for the domestically challenged, I think that one of the greatest mysteries in life is: HOW DO YOU FOLD A FITTED SHEET!!!!! I'm sure you all lose sleep over this. When we buy sheets they are folded but once they leave their hermetically sealed package they can no longer be tamed and folded again. Flat sheets behave but damn those fitted sheets take on a mind of their own.

​The other great mystery is Bigfoot. I'm sure these two things are related. I bet Bigfoot knows how to fold a fitted sheet and he also knows where all of the single socks go when the disappear from the washer before they get to the dryer. He and DB Cooper laugh everyday in the rainforest in the pacific northwest with their perfectly folded fitted sheets and piles of lost socks.

Last night Maddie and I went to an interesting event put on by the Department of Music at UCSD in collaboration with the John A Majda, MD Fund and the UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Richard Kogan, who is a concert pianist, clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Weill University and the artistic director of the Cornell Music and Medicine program, presented Tchaikovsky: Music & Melancholy, a lecture and performance analyzing the mental illness and presumed suicide of the great Russian composer P.I. Tchaikovsky. We learned that Tchaikovsky was deeply depressed for most of his life and he had multiple conflicts throughout his life that shaped his music. He composed music as the only way he could emote his feelings, that is when he wasn't self medicating with copious amounts of alcohol. He was deeply conflicted with his homosexuality as it was and still is toxically illegal in Russia. In the days of the Czars, homosexuals were banished to Siberia and put into gulags. He was a long tormented figure, who was only able to tell his life's story thorough his compositions.  I've put a youtube link to his greatest hits below. We know about his life as he was a prolific journaler and he wrote lots of letters (5,392 to be exact) to his brothers, sisters and patrons. He lived to the age of 53 and it is now widely believed that he committed suicide as an alternative to being turned over the the Czar for his homosexual indiscretions with a nobleman's son. He was probably the most famous Russian at the time of his death and he was famous the world over for his symphonies, ballets and concertos. I am also enclosing a link to the Tchaikovsky Research project if you'd like to know more about his life. I think it would make a good movie. 
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