Lately I’ve found myself watching this nice, well-made, nostalgic-feeling Kodak commercial from around 1960 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBWVWjdNWC0). I previously posted it on FaceBook.
When looking at the album in the commercial though I have this feeling like, “The physical photos are so fleeting. I’m glad I have digital photos now so I always have them.” My mother, on the other hand, when she looks at photos on her iPad sometimes asks, “Can I have this photo?” I say, “You do have it” but I realize she means she doesn’t feel like she “has it” unless it’s an actual printed photo.

We feel a slightly different sense of what it means to “have something.”
And what about memories? We have those as well, don’t we? doug

This is what you see when you get off the bus by the Edogawa Hospital. It’s right next to the Edogawa (Edo River), which is the border between Tokyo and Chiba prefecture. Today was an especially nice, breezy, comfortable late spring day by the river. doug

Lunch today was another cooking adventure. 

Believe it or not, until yesterday I never cooked a potato.

OK. I would hardly call this a “recipe” because it’s too simple to make. But please understand that I am a 55 year old male and “survivalist cook” who can barely make anything. Yesterday I cooked a potato for the first time in my life, and had to look up how on the Internet.

Sludge samples taken at the mouths of two major rivers emptying into Tokyo Bay showed radioactive cesium contamination linked to the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant crisis grew by 1.5 to 13 times since August, a researcher at Kinki University said Monday. The contamination poses no immediate health risk since no seafood from Tokyo Bay has seen contamination levels exceed the government-set threshold. But close, long-term monitoring of the seabed mud is needed, said Hideo Yamazaki, professor at Kinki University’s Research Institute for Science and Technology.

“Contamination is flowing into the bay from rivers, including the Edogawa River, where cities with high radiation levels like Kashiwa (in Chiba Prefecture) are located upstream,” Yamazaki told The Japan Times. “Contaminated sludge appears to be … accumulating on the bottom at the mouth of the rivers,” he added.

Yamazaki, an expert on how radiation and chemical substances impact the environment, and his team took the samples at three locations at the mouths of the Arakawa and Edogawa rivers on April 2 following studies carried out in August. Samples of mud pulled from 1 meter below the seabed at the sites turned up cesium contamination ranging from 7,305 to 27,213 becquerels per square meter. The August readings were between 578 and 18,242 becquerels per square meter.

Yamazaki noted a thirteenfold rise was detected in a spot where the August readings were relatively low. He said, however, the contamination does not pose a health threat, even if a child were to play in the water. Although radioactive mud will continue to flow into the bay, the peak contamination concentrations should be within the next couple of years, considering that the half-life of cesium-134 is about two years, Yamazaki said.

“If the contamination were to spread to fish, it is possible that radioactive isotopes could accumulate when bigger fish feed on smaller ones,” he said. “We’re scheduled to continue our monitoring in the following years” to study such cases. ref: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120515a4.html