2016 JAPAN CHERRY BLOSSOM ADVENTURE: Day 1--Honolulu to Tokyo

Today is Day 1 of my Japan Cherry Blossom Adventure.  I'm flying coach class on United to Narita from Honolulu.  Don't remember when I last flew below business class.  However, a business class ticket costs four times more, and an upgrade takes 60,000 miles, plus $600.  Ridiculous.

The day started poorly in the United Club, with the expresso machine down and the fact that I never got around to downloading the entertainment ap into my iPad and computer:

Also, there are now no newspapers and no magazines in the Lounge.  Then, when I tried to use my computer, I couldn't link to the United system.  On the way out I inquired, and it turns out everything has changed.  You now need a password.

So I expected the worst on my coach economy plus flight to Japan.  I was pleasantly surprised, or, more so, shocked, that United does well on this leg from Honolulu to Narita on a 777.

The entertainment system was excellent, although I used my earphone, and watched three films:  The Intern (Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave it a 60% rating, while 74% of audiences liked it), Rock the Casbah (8%/32%, but I enjoyed it) and Daddy's Home (30%/54%).  Also available were Star Wars #7, The Revenant, The Martian, Spotlight, which I had all seen, and maybe a hundred more films.

In economy, wines and beer are free.   I ordered a Bloody Mary, which had an exorbitant cost, but it so happened that I brought with me a bunch of certificates for free drinks.  I thought the deadline had passed, as I've had them for years.  But they worked.  The lunch was not only free, but terrific, with a spinach manicotti, salad and bread, with red wine and beer:

They gave me a free White Label Scotch with the dessert.  Service was fabulous, and I thanked the crew for a truly fine job.

The flight took eight hours, with an additional two hours from Narita to Tokyo on the Airport Limousine Bus.  I checked into the Tokyo Westin and went up to the Executive Club Lounge for what turned out to be my free dinner:

An extraordinary pumpkin soup with a marinated hamachi topped salad and salmon.  I drank a glass of champagne and a Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch on ice.  With the nuts and potato chips, I had a filling meal.

While I'm staying at the Westin, I've pretty much given up on Starwood, so, after this year will lose my Platinum Class status.  Why?  Marriott is taking over and they will not be kind to people like me.  However, I still have this year to be pampered.  Thus, on this Adventure, I'll also be using Toyoko Inn because they're all relatively new, close to train stations, provide free internet/breakfast, and cost way less than $100/night...versus $300+ for many Starwood properties.

After this quick Tokyo stop to see if any cherry blossoms have already bloomed,  I will leave my larger suitcase at the Westin, take small roll-on and fly to Kansai Airport to meet the Panda Sakura Tour for a mostly Shikoku Island itinerary.  I then will use Japan Rail Pass for a week of travel back to Tokyo, then on the new shinkansen to Hokkaido, staying in Sapporo, returning via Sendai and Matsumoto.

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15 CRAIGSIDE GOES TO THE PIG AND THE LADY

I tested out The Pig and the Lady two months ago, and  if you want details, you can read my review here. I returned yesterday with 12 ladies and our 15 Craigside coordinator, Martha.  Here are the photos:

The French Dip was popular:

I indicated I was allergic to crustaceans and hate the smell of that Thai fermented fish intestines sauce, which is also used in Vietnam.  That left me with nothing much else to order except for a tamarind curry, which I thought was to be on rice.  Nope, this was a Pho:

I was disappointed, and thought I smelled that odious sauce.  Worse, there was some low level rancidity to the aftertaste, even the gin/chartreuse cocktail I ordered.  I guess that's how fermented fish intestines can affect my mind.  I went to their restroom and found the movie poster intimidating:

Hard to take a pee with Kurt Russell staring at you, with a gun.  

We just about all shared beignets with a custard sauce, which was excellent:

My side of the table felt lukewarm about the place, but the other end seemed to be quite satisfied.  Next on our list?  Japanese BBQ Yoshi:While I'm into eating, I also recently went to Cafe Lani, new at the Ala Moana Shopping Center.    This is a typical Japanese famiresu (for family restaurant) for somewhat "rich" families.  Sort of an American and Italian fusion with Japanese touches.  The owner also has Gokoku Sushi at the Koko Marina Center.  There seems always to be people waiting to get in, (apparently their social media campaign is working well) so I inquired how long the wait was.  I was immediately provided a bar seat:

I thought the lunch set was a bit too high, so inquired if I could order the children's dishes.  My waiter said no, but another standing close by indicated this was possible.  So a supervisor came in to the discussion and I was allowed to order what I wanted.  My lady server seemed unhappy about this.  So instead of paying more than $40 for the set, plus $9 for a glass of Chardonnay, my pasta and chicken dishes cost only about $15, plus the wine:

The meal was excellent, but it took forever for the chicken to arrive.  A bowl of various freshly made breads kept being offered, but never the croissant, even though I twice asked for it.  A noisy restaurant,  and pricey, but okay if you can afford it.

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WILL WE CAUSE THE NEXT GREAT EXTINCTION?

The primary headline in the local Honolulu Star-Advertiser yesterday blared that humans could well be stimulating the next great extinction.  I don't recall, ever, this newspaper placing a scientific announcement from the University of Hawaii at the top of the front page.

Richard Zeebe, paleooceanographer at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, to which I also belong, published with co-authors in Nature Geoscience, an article indicating that:

...humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere about 10 times faster than during any time in the past 66 million years.

Known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event (KPEE), three quarters of animal and plant life disappeared, including all non-flying dinosaurs.  Those survivors evolved into the birds we see today.

While this time we are responsible, the first confirmed speculation by Luis and Walter Alvarez of that KPEE was that a 6 mile diameter asteroid crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, near the town of Chicxlub, the equivalent of an explosion a billion times more powerful than an Atomic-Bomb, creating a 110 mile wide crater.  Well, scientists have long been mixed on that theory, as some early data indicated that dinosaurs were already mostly gone by the time the giant rock struck.  However, more recently, the timing was refined, and scientists are now generally back on board.  United Kingdom researchers have just begun drilling at ground zero of the impact to gain additional information.

Anyway, a little more than 10 million years after that killer asteroid, something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) happened, drawing the attention of geoscientists, for there were two sudden (meaning in geologic time something on the order of 20,000 years) injections of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, zooming up the temperature on the surface of Planet Earth at least 9 F, and perhaps as high as 14.4 F.  The scary thing about all this is that we are emitting a lot more CO2 in such a short period:

Much of the above is, of course, fear-inducing, for while we might continue to be so stupid for a century at ten times the natural rate of the PETM, our planet flipped for millennia and life tolerated that sudden temperature increase, and, recovered.  Humans would not have!

While the usual suspects are mentioned (volcanoe, comet, etc.), it seems that methane had a special role to play in this event, probably biogenic clathrates, my primary villain responsible for a future VENUS SYNDROME.  Further, my surmisal was that global warming induced by humanity would catalyze the deepsea explosion of methane clathrates.  Why is methane so bad?  To quote:

Methane

Here’s the kicker: methane, the gas produced extensively by the livestock industry worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide within a 5 year period, and 72 times more within a 20 year period. The good news is that methane also leaves the atmosphere within a decade. This makes for a short-lived, but intense climate changer.

Latest experiments show that a series of causes  warmed the seas and the metastable oceanic state of methane-in-ice induced dissociation, for the temperature the tipping point was exceeded.  What makes today particularly menacing is that there is a lot more methane clathrates at the sea-bottom than existed 55 million years ago.  One indication of concern is that:

According to data released by the EPA atmospheric methane (CH₄) concentrations (ppb) remained between 400–800ppb (between years 600,000 BC to 1900) and since 1900 have risen to levels between 1600–1800ppb.^[21]

An upcoming posting will be on my progress with THE VENUS SYNDROME, a novel of human extinction caused by this Clathrate Gun Hypothesis.  Two such episodes have been implicated: 56 million years ago during the PETM and 252 million years ago during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event when 96% of all marine species died off.

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BAD FRIDAY

Why is the "worst" day in Christendom, the day Jesus was crucified and killed, called Good Friday?  And is this a holiday or what?

Good Friday is not a Federal holiday.  Many states (11?) set aside this day as a public holiday, as do some counties and such throughout the nation.  Schools are mostly closed and the stock market is idle, but your mail will be delivered today.  

It's a judicial mess, as courts have been mixed on passing judgement.  Yes, Christmas is a national holiday, and has been determined in court to be Constitutional, but Christmas was celebrated before we became an official country,  Further, 96% of those who wrote the Constitution were Christian, and the decline to 71% today is still reasonably dominate, when you pile on the business sector, which will fight off any attempt to un-make Christmas as a Federal holiday.

So why is Good Friday called Good Friday?

• Because this was a great table-setting day:
• One person, Jesus, died for "our"sins.  Terrific ratio:  one for more than a 100 billion.
• Jesus lived on anyway, for two days later he was resurrected (apparently he died and came back to life...in Heaven--which is exactly what will happen to the good people who believe, they think)  and will someday soon return to re-save us again.

• This is a matter of etymology:  What was Sacred Friday and/or Holy Friday a millennium or so ago, a day of mourning, transitioned to become "good."
• Some say this was once God's Friday, and segued over many centuries, into Good Friday.  There is again etymology at work here, but might well, too, have been simple enunciation shift.  And for those who wondered what etymology is...a study of how words change meaning over time.
• Brilliant word-smithing.  The transition from Bad Friday to Easter Sunday, the shift from terrible to terrific, can only inspire new religions to be formed, that is, from all the turmoil of life on Earth to the perfection of Heaven to come.

Ever wondered why Good Friday, unlike Christmas, keeps changing dates?  First of all Jesus Christ was almost surely not born on December 25.  November 18, March 28 and end of September are more likely candidates, but that is a posting for another day.

From Wikipedia:

Notionally, the paschal full moon refers to the ecclesiastical full moon of the northern spring used in the determination of the date of Easter.

Now that you are as confused as I am, let me try to simplify all this with a timeline.  

• First, all the above calculates to Good Friday occurring from March 20 to April 23.  
• The paschal part refers to Passover, the one week celebration linked to the Exodus of Moses-led Jews from Egypt to escape from slavery approximately 2500 years ago.
• Then, it was more than two millennia ago that Jesus, on a Thursday night, had a Passover meal with his disciples, commonly known today as the Last Supper

• Was Mary Magdalene present?  Almost surely yes, but, only to wash feet.  My recounting from my visit to the painting by da Vinci is more romantic.  Here, just to the right of Jesus--John or Mary?

• The story goes that Judas betrayed Jesus for something like $400 today, but other viewpoints indicated, nah, Satan stepped into Judas, and yet another suggested that this was all orchestrated by Jesus to maximize publicity.  Hey, we're talking about the bible and biblical scholars, not quantum theory, which in itself can't find 96% of what we see and don't.  That's Judas, then in the direction of Jesus, Peter to John...or Mary?

• So anyway, Jesus is arrested just after midnight.  From all reports, Pontius Pilate, Roman governor, sided with Jesus, but Jewish high priests, jealous of Jesus, prevailed, and Christ was condemned.   On Friday, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (incredibly enough, according to Rotten Tomatoes, 80% of moviegoers like this film) is the most vilified of all the movies depicting this day (although you might want to  also look at the 10 worst Christ movies) on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

• Apparently through Holy Saturday the tomb was well-guarded, and nothing much else happened.  Today, this is mostly a solemn day with minimal merrymaking.
• On Easter Sunday, the large stone covering the entrance was removed, and there was no corpse.  Here are at least four possibilities on the fate of the body, but the Resurrection theory became an important foundation of Christianity.

So to close, my final sermon for the day.  If Jesus was Jewish, why aren't all Christians Jews?  In the Islam faith, when Prophet Muhammad died in 632, a schism occurred in the transition scenario:

• Shias:  leadership should be kin of Muhammad.
• Sunni:  new leaders should come by vote.

In Christianity, it was more like evolution, where beliefs spun off over time.

It is so detailed, that you can't read it, but go to THIS if interested.  Today, less than 1% (0.8%) of Christians are Jews.  Likewise, almost 90% of Muslims are Sunni (99% of Indonesia, for example), with the great preponderance of the rest, Shia, located in Iran:

Can Muslims celebrate Easter?  Well, same venerated Jesus, but, apparently, no.  Christmas...well, no too.  Save for Malaysia (there is a national holiday for Muhammad, that jumps around from October to February--and Christmas is also a holiday--Muhammad Day this year was on December 24), basically Muslims don't honor birthdays, for there is no universal national holiday for Muhammad. More recently, all that crass commercialization makes it all the worse.  Then again, the United Arab Emirates last year declared December 24 as a public holiday for their Prophet.  UAE and Qatar are, some say insidiously, dragging the Middle East into the future.

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