If you live in Tokyo or if you plan to visit, this is what you have to do: Buy a Grutt Pass. For 2,000yen (or about $18) you can buy a booklet that gives you a discount or free entrance to 56 museums, zoos and aquariums. You’ve got two months to use it. If, like me, you love museums, then it’d be easy to get more than your money’s worth.
I used the Grutt Pass for the first time yesterday at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and attended the latest exhibit, titled “Louvre”. Continue reading
If, like me, you love maps, you’ll love a website called Worldmapper. Worldmapper is a collaboration between a British and an American university. They have created a series of cartographs, maps that represent statistical, rather than geographic, parameters. For instance, if each country’s size is based on its population, then you’d have something like this:
Most of the pictures from my Paris flickr set are pictures from the Louvre. One of my favorite finds there was this marble statue. The marble was delicately carved to allow the cape to be translucent. I also love the little flower details that are in the hair and on the cape.It’s true that it would take days to see everything in the Louvre. But I found that one afternoon was enough to see the most famous sites, and then view the areas that most interested you. For instance, I focused on the antiquities and then the East Asian stuff. Although, since Korea was one of the few places in the world that France didn’t loot from, the Korean exhibit was quite small and unspectacular, and the same could be said of the Japanese exhibit. Continue reading
My buddy Thom who does a lot of interesting ranting at Mentat Musings recently critiqued the use of a road map metaphor to describe policy strategies. He uses the Roadmap to Climate Change as his example but you can see the use of the road map imagery for many governmental plans. I agree with him that using the image of a roadmap is problematic for something that envisions reducing emissions, since it implies driving a car. And in this case probably more than a car. Perhaps a motorcade of SUVs and limousines with motorcycle support creating a traffic jam of idling vehicles backed up for miles.
It’s time for new metaphors. I’m perfectly fine with a transportation or cartographic theme so let’s look at a few. Continue reading
This past week I watched both Rocky Balboa and 300. Long ago, I learned to just watch movies for pure entertainment and then deconstruct them for fun afterwards. I enjoyed both these movies for the choreography of the fight scenes, as well as the guilty pleasure of watching eye candy cinematography (in the case of ’300′) and reliving childhood nostalgia (in the case of ‘Rocky Balboa’). And it struck me how both films follow the same narrative.
What could possibly be similar about these two very different movies, set thousands of years apart.
One movie is about a Spartan king, who against overwhelming odds, and against the wishes of his council, takes a small contingent of warriors who embody old school values of toughness and discipline, and valiantly fends off the superior forces of the Persian Empire, led by an arrogant Xerxes.
