Schmap Osaka Hurling and Ice Diving

So anyway some people from an iPhone utility called Schmaps contacted me by mail recently and wanted to use a picture I took at Kingsbury Water park and naturally I agreed. Well, for what it's worth they have included it in the widget below. When Kingsbury Water park appears you can click on See review which will take you to the relevant Schmap page - then you can scroll the pictures on the top right until you see the photograph taken by Darkfarmowl :)



Or alternatively you could just go here to see the original. One of those nice little things that happen in life :)

On a similar theme (but also not really on the same tack at all so therefore a very tenuous segue) I found myself wandering around the streets of Osaka, in Japan, via Google's Streetview. There is no reason why I should be doing this of course as I am not remotely Japanese, have no historical links with the Land of the Rising Sun, and will probably live my allotted four score years and ten without ever setting foot on Japanese soil (a phrase I always find a bit icky but it's the official terminology even if it does sound like one is stepping in a pile of oriental doo-doo's). But I noticed that Streetview had covered a few Japanese cities and I just got curious. What does a Japanese suburb look like? Do they have corner shops? Graffiti? Old ladies in tartan boots toting shopping trolleys? Well the answer to all of this is yes, mostly they do. Osaka seems to be a very sunny place, but with the sort of determined and predictable street layout that only a bunch of town planners with set squares and anal retentive issues would find appealing. I wandered up and across, and down and up , and up and across in an ever widening grid of meticulously laid out urban precision. Mostly industrial units or nondescript high rise offices. I'd done a quick bit of research and I had deliberately chosen a less than salubrious area of Osaka in the hope of wandering down darkened alleyways and seeing what nefarious activities the Streetview car had captured . But I was to be disappointed - mostly it was very clean, very predictable and very boring, But then, turning a random left and a random right, I came across this little spot - a cluster of apartments that appeared almost to be at odds with their rather stark and industrial surroundings. I almost felt the warmth of the sun on my face as I stood on this street corner. I turned to face the neat and well tended apartments and felt a strange feeling - a feeling that I used to think was unique to me but now I know different. Let me attempt to describe this feeling using an example and then see if you ever have it. Here's how it happens ....

It's early evening and you are on a train coming to the end of a long journey. You have your head pressed against the glass window and you stare out into the deepening dusk. The train slows for some reason and you look down the embankment onto the rear gardens of a row of suburban houses in a town you have no name for. The lights are on in the kitchens and sometimes you see a person at the window, washing the dishes maybe, or filling the kettle, or perhaps just staring out into the night even as you are. And suddenly you find yourself wondering what that persons world is like, who they love, how their lives have unfolded across the years before you happened upon them in their warm and cosy home. And then you realise that, as the train pulls away, you will never see them again and you lift your eyes to look across the ranks of rooftops that march away into the gloom, each one with a family sheltering under its protection, each person a whole universe unto themselves and it makes you feel both lonely and small and yet part of something immense and indefinable.

That's the feeling. I don't have a name for it.
And so I found myself wondering who lived in those neat little Osaka condos and what their lives were like and were they happy or sad. I think that Streetmap should incorporate a post-it note facility. You write a virtual post-it note and leave it stuck to their house in Streetview and then the occupiers get to read it via an email notification. A bit dodgy on the old privacy front perhaps but hey - think of the possibilities! You could wander the world leaving little post it notes of goodwill in each and every country and we would all become friends instead of enemies and world peace would be achieved, not by force or political agenda or even religion, but by millions and millions of little yellow squares. It'll never happen of course but its a nice thought.
Just as I began to develop a severe Messiah Complex, friends sent me these two YouTube videos - BE WARNED - the first one should not be watched on a full stomach. The second one is funny, not necessarily for the content, but for the genuinely uncontrollable mirth of the (guy?) shooting the vid.
Laters peeps.

Live puking - gross alert
Ice diving

Hoots. x