Beautiful Eternal Child.....

I was taking a break from practicing for a party (a little Salakavala, a dash of S>Range, some Hujaboy, and mix in some Vibrasphere or Pope of Gegga) I will be playing in SoCal on March 1st and sorting through some old image folders on a spare hard drive when I ran into my Kumiko kanji.

Ku - Beautiful
Mi - Eternal
Ko - Child

This was one of the earliest things I considered for a tattoo, before kanji tattoos became cliche. I still like the way it looks on the page, but have less incentive to permanently memorialize it or anything else on my body now.

Unrelated to that, I spent way too much money this afternoon to get a coffee table book for my mom. The book is "Eduard Spelterini - Photographs of a Pioneer Balloonist" and collects a number of the aerial pictures taken by the Swiss balloonist known in his day as "the King of the Air". It is available from Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess in Switzerland.

Since I was in a buying mood, I also preordered "Five Centimeters Per Second" the newest animated film by Makoto Shinkai coming out in the US just a couple days before my birthday. For those who do not know, Shinkai burst onto the anime scene in 2002 with "Voices of a Distant Star", a story of two friends, one on earth and the other on a one way space exploration trip "out there" to the edge of the universe, which he almost single handedly created (story, music, animation, etc., etc.) and earned him accolades as the new Miyazaki. He followed that up with "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" an equally haunting and beautiful story of separation/dreams/hope. While he has publicly downplayed the Miyazaki comparisons , Shinkai has a visual attention to detail, an ear for sound craft, and a gift for making you care about his characters that outclasses everyone else but. Everything I have heard about "Five Centimeters" indicates more of the same and that means another masterpiece. I highly recommend finding and watching any of his projects. If you do not like them, you may not be human.