Eclipse excitement building up

The solar eclipse craze is building up less than 2 months before the big day. This nice map resumes pretty well what you'll be able to see from major cities in the country with and the times to adjust your schedule. (click to zoom)

eclipse-map_small

Better hope 梅雨, the rainy season, will be over by July 22nd...

eclipse-sunglasses

Amazon Japan also started selling eclipse sunglasses for the occasion: buy 4, get one for free.

Interesting language point: solar eclipse in Japanese is 日食 which basically means "eat the sun"... Sound pretty cool.

Also I'm extremely disappointed as I was invited by a now retired colleague to come to his home on 奄美大島, one of the only islands dead center on the full occultation path, but I was not able to get plane tickets to get there. There is only one plane per day from Tokyo, operated by JAL, and they sold the exclusivity of all the seats for a week to their travel agency branch JTB who sold out their insanely expensive tourist packages months and months ago... Of course, in a typical Japanese move, JAL never thought it might be a nice idea to buff up the number of flights for the once in a lifetime occasion.

If I still were a student, I would've taken the 48h boat trip. Alas, my salaryman life does not permit it anymore...

I give you my books!

photo by flyzipper

As you might have seen in a previous post, I will soon be moving to a smaller apartment closer to Tokyo center. This causes some minor logistic problems like: where to put all my stuff?

Since it seems apparent that my girlfriend will not reduce the size of her consequent wardrobe and shoes collection, I am quietly expected to get rid of as much of my stuff as deemed necessary...

Having a pretty long 1 hour commute where I can sit most of the time, I read quite a lot in the train which has left me with quite a big pile of books over the past year and a half. And although I love my books, if I have to choose between a bulky library and my electronic gadgets, I will not hesitate long.

These are all Science Fiction novels in English (I've been going through the list of Hugo Award nominees on wikipedia) and are very hard to sell here: Book Off will not take them and I am yet to sell any of them on Amazon Marketplace. So rather than just dumping them with the magazines in the ゴミ, I offer to give them out to anyone interested.

Please check out the list on my book giveaway page and contact me if anything whets your interest. I will keep that page updated with my stock and put comments here if I add any books to the list.