The Perfect Show
The Perfect Show is cataloging the perfect things in life, one by one. Join me each episode as I examine a new experience or thing selected by myself or a guest.
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15 Pink Shoes/Punk Shows
09/26/2022
15 Pink Shoes/Punk Shows
This episode Scot dives into the world of compliments, via the story of a pair of pink shoes. What’s so special about pink shoes? Scot explores how they act as a magnet for compliments, and what is even going on there. Scot also ventures into some new territory by going to a local punk show and meeting a band there. Hear his voyage into live music for the first time since college, and discover a strong connection between pink shoes and punk shows that wasn’t obvious at the beginning. Special thanks to listener Steven, Jeff Clemens () , and of course Nicole, Jerry, Julio and Israel, aka Rival Squad for the interview and introduction to punk. You can find them online here: https://linktr.ee/rival_squad Bandcamp: https://rivalsquad.bandcamp.com/ Spotify: https://sptfy.com/LDLD Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_rivalsquad_/ Other music from this episode by: Mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31 Steveaik7 - https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7 Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov Trappy 808 - https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_ Dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku School - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:22 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I'm tremendously fascinated by compliments. Not in the way where you compliment me I drop everything and like go on, tell me more, but in the way that I contend a successful compliment pulls off the closest you can come to a real magic trick. Now, I don't believe in magical powers, but I do believe in the power of compliments. I've seen them change moods or shift whole situations. I've seen compliments stop fights and also open locked doors kind of like magic words. Actually, on today's episode of the podcast, I want to explore compliments and the energy they produce, and one surprising lightning rod I found to attract that energy A simple pair of pink shoes. So what am I talking about with compliments producing energy? Well, I'm saying what happens for me anyway. When someone gives me a compliment, especially when it's unexpected, it gives me a little, almost literal zip of energy. It feels like a little extra charge just runs through my system. That term brightens someone's day, that is what it can seem like, and after a compliment you might see someone perk up, some walk a little straighter or smile in some way. That's why I compare them to magic words. You say them and sometimes there's an immediate, noticeable real world effect. But some physicists out there may be shouting, scott, that would put you at odds with the law of conservation of energy, which says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. And that's a good point. Also, thanks for listening, weird pedantic physicist guy. I don't think we're at odds with the law of conservation of energy because I think it's not actually creating any energy, merely transferring it, like the law says. All genuinely human compliments start with one thing in common attention. That attention is then the energy that gets transferred to the other person through the compliment. You notice someone's new haircut or nicely matched outfit, pay attention to a child's work at school or some artist's new creation. It takes a little effort, it takes a little time to learn how to always be looking for those things, but you translate that attention into some kind of a compliment and when it hits its destination it can actually lift the spirits of whoever was on the receiving end. They're not the only one affected either. I mean, if I land a compliment and I can tell it was successful, I get a little zing out of it too, sort of a positive shrapnel that radiates off the compliment and gets you as well, which I guess speaks to how powerful the thing attention is and how much energy is really involved in it. So, as always when I need a little infallible wisdom on a subject, I turn to the world of Hollywood. We're talking big budget studios, rooms full of award winning writers, people who can and do work obsessively over a screenplay until every last letter and punctuation mark are perfect. So then, when I Google the best compliments in the history of movies, what comes up? I mean, it's a pretty subjective thing, but there does seem to be a consensus for number one. Actually, I think this one gets noticed in part because it's got big actors. They did pretty good with awards, nabbing Oscars for leading actor, leading actress, supporting actor and best picture. And well, it not only gives a compliment, but that compliment happens during a discussion about compliments and then it gets commented on directly. So I think it's especially highlighted in people's memories. I'm speaking of the 1997 movie, as good as it gets written by James L Brooks, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, both of whom won Academy Awards for their roles. Like I said, in the film, nicholson is a prickly writer who is rude and downright awful to everyone around him, and Hunt is a waitress with far too much patience for a person like that. But there's a famous scene in the middle where they're having dinner together and it starts like this Okay, now I got a real great compliment for you, and it's true. Speaker 3: 4:51 So afraid you're about to say something awful. Speaker 2: 4:54 Don't be pessimistic. It's not your style. Okay, here I go. Clearly a mistake. Speaker 4: 5:05 I've got this. What Ailment. Speaker 1: 5:15 And then Jack proceeds to ramble about himself and not wanting to take a medication His doctor prescribed, while Helen stares at him. And then he finally gets to this destination. Speaker 4: 5:25 Well, my compliment to you is the next morning I started taking the pills. Speaker 3: 5:37 I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me. Speaker 1: 5:41 Yup, I'm team Helen here. It's not a compliment for her, okay, so what do you have to say to that Jack? Speaker 2: 5:50 You make me want to be a better man. Speaker 1: 5:54 Ooh, okay, helen, let him have it. Speaker 2: 6:01 That's maybe the best compliment of my life. Speaker 1: 6:04 What? No, helen? I mean, they sell it. They are great actors, but that's a terrible compliment, helen. That's when you should be saying this one again. Speaker 3: 6:16 I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me. Speaker 1: 6:19 All right, we need some help here. The definitions I get when I look up compliment are a polite expression of praise or admiration and to politely congratulate or praise someone for something. So when Jack pulls out the you make me want to be a better man thing. It's not congratulating or praising anything about Helen's character, he's commenting on himself and I know some people will be like, yeah, that's the point they're making, because he's such a self-centered guy that that's all he can muster and it's a huge thing for him and sure, fine, but it still is a terrible compliment that still makes it all about him, and Helen shouldn't have said that's maybe the best compliment of my life because it wasn't even a compliment. Can you imagine telling someone about it? Like trying to tell someone about the compliment you just got? Wow, you're not going to believe the compliment I just got. Oh, tell me. Well, you know that awful guy, the one everyone hates. Well, he just said I make him want to be better. Better than awful, yeah, I guess, but not even good. Just better than completely awful, yeah. And then he gave you a compliment. No, that was the compliment, oh Right. But Nicholson and Hunt were on top of their games, delivered their lines like real pros, and it worked. I'm not saying it didn't work, just that it doesn't make sense and I think it sort of should. If it's going to get marked down as the best compliment in movie history and I'll argue, it actually took that crown from another famous romance relationship movie that came out just one year earlier, the Cameron Crow smash hit from 1996, starring Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. I'm talking, of course, about the film Jerry Maguire If you haven't seen it. Jerry Maguire, tom Cruise is a sports agent who leaves his big agency to go at it solo, and Zellweger plays a single mother who doesn't know if she and Maguire are partners in business, in romance in both or in neither. It's a great movie. Tom Cruise is doing his thing and Renee Zellweger kills it. Cubic Coding Jr Pulse down an Oscar for his role. Regina King and Jonathan Libnicki are perfect, and everyone starts quoting Jerry Maguire all over the place. Two of the most famous lines are actually in the clip I want to play In the movie. At a time when they have been apart, an emotional Tom Cruise comes to see Renee Zellweger and gives a manic, impassioned speech to win her back, which culminates in this I love you. Speaker 4: 8:58 You Complete me. I'm not just Shut up, just shut up. Speaker 2: 9:03 You hate me, I'm not. Just Shut up, just shut up, you hate me, I'm not just Shut up, shut up, shut up. Speaker 5: 9:12 You hate me at hello, you hate me at hello. Speaker 1: 9:23 Okay, renee, fair enough, jerry Maguire could probably have me at hello too. I mean, we're talking about Tom Cruise in 96. That, the peak of his Tom Cruise-iness. He could probably have at hello most of us, if we're being honest. That's not where my qualms is. I'm talking about this part. Speaker 4: 9:40 You. Speaker 1: 9:43 Complete me. Okay, Helen, can you come here real quick? What was that thing you said? Speaker 3: 9:51 I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me. Speaker 1: 9:55 Right, you complete me. Is that a compliment? Let's run it through the simulator again. Picked up another compliment, this time from Jerry. Oh, what did he say? Well, he was giving a big speech and then at the end he said you complete me and that's the compliment. Then, yeah, why? What's he complimenting about you? Well, he's complimenting my yeah Ability to complete him. But honestly, it didn't matter what he said, he already had me at hello. Totally fair, it's Jerry Maguire, I get it. But yeah, that's another one. It's like as good as it gets where it's not really a compliment at all. It's totally about the person saying it, completely self-centered and just pretending to be a compliment, and if these are the best examples that movies have to offer, well then maybe this topic needs a bit of attention so we can define the bounds of what is actually a compliment and then also maybe explore what the flip side of that would be. All of this compliment talk got me to thinking about the best compliment I've ever received, and once I decided to get into the story of what that was, I actually wanted to reach out and see what other good compliment stories I could find, so I made a mini episode about it a few months ago with a number to call in and tell me stories of your best compliments, and now I'd like to play one listener story that I received. Speaker 2: 11:23 Hey Scott, this is Steven in Silver Spring, maryland. So my story of the perfect compliment that I received was from my now wife, and the story was we went on our first date, but I had a lot of baggage because I had been married previously and my previous wife had died a year earlier, and so I talked about that in our first date and maybe I talked about it more than I should have. And so after our first date, we had a really good time. We went on to ice cream after dessert afterwards, which was usually a sign that people want to spend more time together and then I followed up with her and continued our email correspondence and let's meet up again this weekend. And then that coming weekend, I think, was a long weekend, and I went through the whole weekend and did not hear anything back from her and was getting very anxious because I had I'm not going to call it love at first sight, but I knew that this was a person. This was the person that I wanted to be with. I just knew. I didn't hear from her over the weekend and I was heartbroken. And finally, on the Monday of the holiday weekend, I got an email from her saying thanks, I had a really nice time, but I think we're just not meant to be together. I think this just isn't going to work or something. Something very sort of simple and bland and non-explanatory. And so I was heartbroken by that. I wasn't sure what to do, and then, finally, I got this idea. I remembered this sort of humorous letter that had gone around, sort of a viral thing. It was a humorous letter that was written by a hypothetical job applicant who had been rejected and they rejected. They wrote a letter rejecting that rejection, using the same language back at the original. Anyway, I decided to write a rejection of her rejection letter and my basic premise was if you're not into me, that's great. You know I'm not great. But if you're not into me, you know, I understand I'm not going to try to change that. But if it's about these other things, this baggage that I'm bringing, then let's talk more. You know, let's explore this a little bit. And so I wrote that. I worked on it really hard, I thought about it. I'm sure I did multiple drafts before I sent it, and then I sent it to her and about a day or two later I got a response saying essentially okay, let's talk, let's meet again and it's all worked out. Since then. You know not that there haven't been some bumps along the way, but it's worked out really well. And she told me later. She said it was your writing. It was your writing that really got me. I really I really loved your writing and I think that's the best compliment I've ever received. Speaker 1: 14:33 So, piggybacking off that my perfect compliment came when I was living in Japan, and it's much less the result of my own actions than Steven's. Actually, it happened when I was with my friend, jeff Clemens, who was on the Park Golf episode with me, but we also sat down and talked compliments when he was here too. I'm back with Jeff, my friend from Canada, who I met in Japan. Jeff Clemens hi, hey, how's it going? What's happening? So I wanted to have, while I was here, I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk about an experience that I'm putting into one of my episodes, but I'm thinking back to you. You were a key part of the best compliment I've ever gotten. The experience I'm thinking about is back when we had this. You reminded me it was an international. What is it? The International Society? Speaker 5: 15:23 Oh yeah, it was the International Association of Takikawa. There you go, or some. I can't remember their correct words. I don't know if they could, because they were wonderful. They are wonderful people. Speaker 1: 15:35 And it was run by the CIR in Takikawa. While we were there, Matthew Caesar and he had grouped together a bunch of some English speakers and then a bunch of Japanese native speakers to have lunch together, and the loop for us was like your lunch is going to be paid for and then the appeal is that you can. Then They'll talk to people at our table or whatever. We'll have practice English conversation. Speaker 5: 16:01 Well. So it was funny because Matt had always invited every English speaker. Matt was like this is an open invitation to every English speaker, Please come for lunch. And most people were like, well, I teach so I can't. And for us we were like, yeah sure, We'll just make sure that we have that time open. I think it was once a month, every Tuesday, or once every two weeks, every Tuesday we were like we will keep that open for free lunch. Speaker 1: 16:26 And I didn't go to that many because of what you're saying. I was. Usually I had to do something at the junior high schools that I was working in, and for some reason this time I didn't, and I was free and I don't know if school was out or I didn't have classes or whatever, but I was able to go to the lunch with you all, and so I showed up and we went and it's this. Revista was a farm restaurant. It was kind of like a large log cabin and they served kind of really nice delicate pastas and just different dishes is what I remember. I don't know, I don't know what else to when I was here, I feel I always got soup curry because they did. Speaker 5: 17:00 They always did a really good soup curry and they always put whatever the freshest vegetables were into it. Well, that's cool. And interesting enough is we almost always went to Victoria for English, like English shout was almost always at Victoria, which is steak Victoria. Yeah, I would always get the hamburger Hamburger sitting on rice with cheese melted on top the hamburger Doria. So usually we did that. So you actually have on the best one. Speaker 1: 17:26 I came on the best one we went to like a special place. Because now I'm like in my brain that's the one you went to every time, but that sounds. Speaker 5: 17:33 I think we only went once. Speaker 1: 17:34 I'm learning that's the only time. Okay, well, this is a special occasion, but I was. I remember being seated at a table across from two nice older ladies. So I had a haircut much like I have right now, and that is, I had like shaved my head all the way down I'm sure it was summer or something and I just go short so that I don't have to think about it. So I had like a buzz cut, maybe a little bit longer, and I have kind of like a light, dirty, blondish color of hair. And so the lady sitting across from me and the Japanese lady sitting across from me said you look like Brad Pitt. And I stopped for a moment. I was like whoa, did you just say I looked like Brad Pitt? And she goes yes, you look like Brad Pitt. And then she holds her hand to her forehead and she goes from here up. And she holds her hand to her forehead and goes from here up and I go from here up, mentioning basically my short hair, that is, brad Pitt hair colored. I go, yeah, and I go what about here? And I hold my hand into my forehead, I go, what about here down? And I move it past my face and she like gives me a stern look and then she's like, no, here I go, but here up. And she's like, yes, and I'm like one eighth of Brad Pitt said I will take it, I will take it. That is still the best compliment I've ever received, likely ever will receive. I'll take it. So I was officially. I, without prompting. Someone said you look like Brad Pitt. There are some contextualizations to it, but that doesn't always have to be part of the story. No, it's just I was doing like Brad Pitt and I was like, oh, and from here up, but I'm like I will take it. That's good. That's the best compliment I think I've ever gotten. It happened there. I was just so tickled I remembered it still to this day very much. Speaker 5: 19:26 So so I always found that interesting when they would compare us to celebrities Like you look like this celebrity and that similar group. One of them said you know, you look like Daniel Craig. And I looked at them and I went and I don't, I don't think you do Like I don't. I think our eyes might be similar color and I think that's where she was getting it is that our eyes were similar color. And she goes you look like Daniel Craig. And they all...
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14 Park Golf パークゴルフ
08/29/2022
14 Park Golf パークゴルフ
For this episode, Scot talks sports! One sport in particular. A Japanese sport that may be new to you. It’s the wonderful game of Park Golf, and we give it a glowing deep dive. Small club, big ball, rubber tee, and you’re ready to hit the course. Listen to stories about Park Golf from Japan and adventures I have in America. I talk with Kris Beyer Jones from Destroyer Park Golf for an interview with the first park golf course in America, and some of my usual unusual hijinks with my friends Jeff Clemens and Alex Yocum. Find Destroyer Park Golf at Find the International Park Golf Association of America (IPGAA) at Find Wormburner Park Golf at And find the Japanese Park Golf Association at Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: Music from this episode by: Avishka31 - Bastereon - Brrrrravo - dawnshire - desparee - Gelyanov - Gui Moraes - Isehgal - kgrapofficial - Nearbysound - rito_shopify - Yashchaware - Aandy Valentine - From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - School - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:23 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I am your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection Ah, sports. I'm not much of a sports guy anymore. I mean, I certainly had my phases both as a player and as a fan, both in my childhood. That was the end of that sentence. Both of those were in my childhood. That's why it's weird to me that I found a totally new sport and then became an avid player and fan of it completely in my adulthood. This sport may be new to you too, and if it is, please allow me to proudly introduce you to the game of park golf. Throughout my childhood I had played, and then quit, a number of sports, or rather, I would often hit a ceiling on both my natural athletic ability and my willingness to practice things past when they stopped being fun. But as a kid I had done t-ball and then baseball, soccer for a little bit early on, basketball for a bit later, and then track in seventh grade as well. All of those were over by high school, though, where I was on the high school tennis team for one year as a freshman before not making the team again my sophomore year. You know what sophomore me thought of that Whatever, because you know what sophomore me thought of pretty much everything Whatever. But on the fan side of things, as a child growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, I was of course, into the Royals for baseball and the Chiefs for football. Basketball was trickier since there was no pro team nearby. I think the Chicago Bulls were the closest to us geographically, but the Kansas J-hawks were in Lawrence, just a half hour from us, and they pretty much filled all the same fandom needs that a pro team would Now like a lot of things. That all changed when I went to Japan, but first I remember trying to keep up in absurd ways having my dad record football games and then mail me the tapes, but that stopped pretty quickly. The only game that NHK, which is the main Japanese television network, carried live was the Super Bowl, which, because of the time difference their Sunday night game actually airs on early Monday morning Japan time. Some expats tried each year to get something going, but the morning vibe, along with the strangeness of the game being broadcast, but none of the commercials. A lot of the time we were watching the players standing and waiting for ad breaks to end and eating like eggs or donuts or some morning food. I tried to get into some Japanese sports too. I went to a couple of Japanese baseball games, I tried to watch some sumo, but it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that a sport truly took hold of me again. Now I'd have guessed that sport would have been skiing. I had liked skiing as a kid and I'd even tried to go skiing once in Japan, but they didn't have any boots in my size, so actually I ended up spending my first ski trip in Japan just sitting while everyone else skied. When I applied for my next job in Japan, it was with the JET program, a program that places native English speakers into schools and town halls to help with language and culture exchange. But in order to get a position on JET, I had to go back to the US for an interview. I had put Hokkaido as one of my top choices and I was keen not to have a repeat of my first Japanese ski trip. So there, during the hottest part of the summer in Kansas, the flattest state in the US. I bought some ski boots in my size and hauled them back to Japan with me. I did end up getting placed on the northern island of Hokkaido Very, very far north Hokkaido actually and I skied some, but my real sport was something we accidentally stumbled on during my first summer there, and that sport was park golf. I had lived in Japan for over a year in Kyushu, and it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that I even heard of park golf. And that's because, even though park golf is an international sport, technically, it was invented in Hokkaido, japan, and with the more spacious nature of Hokkaido compared to the other Japanese prefectures, that's where the vast majority of the courses are as well. Wikipedia tells me park golf started in 1983, invented in the town of Makubatsu, japan, which is also on the northern island of Hokkaido, although it also says the sport is like a cross between golf and croquet, which I think is off. There's no wickets or hitting other players' balls or anything. I'd say it's more like the midway point between regular golf and mini golf. You get to crack the ball when you hit it more than mini golf, and the ball is bigger, like a baseball or a billiards ball, so you have a much larger target than a normal golf and you can put extra English, extra spin on the thing when you hit it. No spinning windmills or statues, but plenty of land and sand challenges. Rules run roughly the same as golf. You count your strokes for each hole and add them up at the end. Low scores are good and high scores are bad. That's all the same. Wikipedia also says the creators wanted it to be really accessible to everyone, so it's designed to be played with really simple equipment For park golf. You only need one ball, one tee and one club, making it cheap to play and to buy equipment for. Speaking of equipment, driving, chipping and putting are all done with that same stubby club. I'd say the club looks like you took a regular putter shaft and handle, then shortened it and stuck the head of a driver on the end of it. I'm 6'1 and I hunch over a lot to get a good hit with one. Most Japanese people weren't that tall, especially the older Japanese people I would often see out playing park golf, and so they didn't have to hunch over nearly as much, but there's still more of a well, I'll call it a hunch and whack style to hitting a park golf ball than the wind up and follow through of a regular golf swing. Meanwhile, what you're hitting is a hard plastic ball, 60mm wide or about 2, 3, 8 inches, so that's just a little smaller than a tennis ball, which is 65 to 68mm. Many are just a simple solid color. I started off with those, but I enjoyed splurging on one new ball to begin each new park golf season and I eventually opted for something cooler. Maybe a ball with a marbleized color or gold flecks that sparkle in the sun, or one where the outer plastic is clear but you can see an inner complex geodesic dome structure inside of it something like that. With the larger ball, it also makes sense that you would have a larger hole. The park golf hole is between 200 to 216mm across, making it around 8 to 8.5 inches in diameter, pretty much twice as wide as the 4 and a quarter inch hole for regular golf, which means we're dealing with a park golf hole that has four times as much area as a regular golf hole when you multiply it out. Holes are supposed to be limited to a maximum of 100 meters long, that's 109 yards, and a nine hole course is supposed to total a maximum length of 500 meters, which is 547 yards. But I gotta say I definitely played many courses in Hokkaido that exceeded both those limits and some of my favorite courses were the longest and most sprawling. So I'm not sure how strictly they monitor that rule, but that is definitely one for official courses. Wikipedia notes that, despite it being accessible for every age, there are a vast majority of the parkers which is what it says park golf players are called but that's literally my first time ever hearing that term. But it says that most of them by far are retirees, and I definitely can concur. But I also think there's a bunch of reasons why that is, and it doesn't seem so strange to me really. First off, the best times to park golf were during times when non-retirees would be either at work or school, so it makes total sense that would become a spot where you'd see it as an activity for retirees during that time. Japan also has a strong culture of activities planned and available for its older population. That doesn't so much exist in the United States. It's definitely built into the culture, but it's also built into Japanese society. A lot of care and attention gets paid to elder care and quality of life, so I also saw park golf being encouraged as an engaging physical activity, less demanding than actual golf for an older player, but it still got people outside walking, hitting and socializing in fresh air. I would probably say the next largest group after older Japanese players were younger foreigner players. My data may be really skewed, though, because every time I went park golfing I saw a group of those. As a group we rarely, but sometimes clashed with the oyajis, which is Japanese that translates to old man or old men, as we refer to the older Japanese players, who often did their own thing, but sometimes would jump in to help our group and let us know we weren't quite playing right. We'd thank them, but when they left we'd go right back to what we were doing, which was play our modified version of the game. For example, there's an out of bounds, referred to by players as OB, but when we played, unless there were other players nearby, there was no OB rule. If you could play it, you could play it Something oyajis really tisks at us if they saw, but it was important for us because we had money riding on these scores A hundred yen a whole usually, with the possibility of going on a hot streak and quitting enough for a meal paid for by your less lucky friend. And those meals those were the most delicious kind. Hokkaido snow would start sticking to the ground in October and then stay around on the ground until April a full six months of snow. Playing park golf in the fresh Hokkaido air was an amazing way to spend the six non-snowy months outdoors. It was challenging enough to be continually fun, but easy enough to do with new people the perfect pastime For my job on jet. I was an assistant English teacher in my town's junior high schools and I would often be done with work while students were still at school or doing after school activities, with several hours of sunlight still left. So I would meet up with other teachers. We'd grab our clubs and play whatever course was up next. We had favorites, but also anytime someone discovered a new course it was a good enough reason to hit that one up next. But every town seemed to have at least one course, usually more than one, usually way more. I think the first Hokkaido town I lived in had some nearby but, like with groceries, the best collection of park golf courses in the area were in the city of Naioro. There were a ton there and really all the towns around too. The second Hokkaido city I lived in was where I really got into playing park golf more often, because there were over 20 different courses within a 15 minute radius of our spot in Takikawa. There were also courses set up and maintained by onsen and hot spring hotels all across the island. In fact, my all time favorite course is at an onsen hotel in Kenbuchi, hokkaido, where there are 36 holes up in the hills with just spectacular layouts and natural views of the local river valley. Another evolution to our gai koku jimbajin of park golf was the jump tee. A normal park golf tee is a squat little cylinder about an inch tall with a wide base all made out of this rubbery plastic. You only use it on your first shot like a normal golf tee, but unlike a normal golf tee it doesn't really give you much lift at all. You can try to scoop up under it or pop it up, but it doesn't really give good lift, no matter what you do. That's why we invented the jump tee. The jump tee's sole purpose was to give the park golf ball some lift to let us pop it up and over instead of going around some obstacles, like the course designers wanted us to. The jump tee was made from two or, sometimes rarely, three regular park golf tees stacked on top of each other and then driving the ball while it's balanced atop this tower. It took some getting used to and some harkening back to those long, dormant tee ball skills, but the jump tee opened up our game vertically and probably intensified the attachment we all felt to our special brand of the sport, and for four years, when there wasn't snow on the ground, I played it pretty regularly. Winter wasn't free of park golf activities, though. That's when the oyajis would shed their old wares and get new ones. So that meant the start of a new type of season for me. Like I said before, park golf is a game where you only need one club, but some of the more well-off or serious Japanese players like to make sure that they had a new one club each season. Eventually, new one-clubs become backup one-clubs and backup one-clubs become clutter, so they get taken to the recycle shop, this wonderful, magical, amazing place in Japan called the Recycle Shop. In the US it would be called a used goods store or a thrift shop like Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but again, like many things in Japan, it has a completely different feel than its American counterpart here in America. I think the thrift stores are looked at as sort of the last stop for something like places without too much expectation or status. I think American thrift stores are probably ranked just a notch above a flea market. Maybe In Japan, though, the Recycle Shop seems like the first place things go, and you can find all manner of items there, from nice clothes like really nice clothes to electronics or furniture and interesting odds and ends to, often times, very decently priced park golf equipment. Park golf balls were a different matter, because there is some good distance to these holes. They got whacked around quite a bit so I didn't see used balls often, and when I did see them they were pretty banged up. This was another reason I would get a new one each year, especially since new ones were only like $10-$20, or maybe $25 if you want to spring for something really nice like the fancy ones I was describing Now. Recycle Shops do not pay much for the stuff they buy from you. I could say that for many first-hand experiences. But you don't sell stuff to them to get rich. You do it for the love of the game and because you got good gets from the Recycle Shop before. So when it's time to move your stuff, you just go there first. I mean, you hit up your friends first and try to offload stuff they might want for a decent amount, and then you take anything that they don't want to the Recycle Shop after that. But yeah, I'd scour Recycle Shops for clothes in my size, exercise equipment, tables and chairs sometimes. But whatever reason I was there for initially, I'd always check for park golf equipment before I left and collected a bunch of my own clubs and gear that way. Not so that I could have a set of clubs for me remember, this is a sport where you only need one club but I got a bunch so that I had enough for a group of four or two groups of four to go out park golfing together. I mean, I also have a left-handed club and I've never been left-handed, not even a phase in college or anything. Some of the nicer park golf courses came complete with places to get scorecards and rent clubs and balls, which would usually only cost 500 to 1000 yen or like 5 to 10 dollars. If you brought your own equipment, it would be significantly cheaper or sometimes even just free. In that sense, I played enough that the used equipment I bought tended to pay for itself over the season just in saved rental fees alone. But the main reason I had my own clubs was because only some park golf courses were staffed. Many were just open, like places near riverbeds or in parks, and unstaffed, so you couldn't rent anything there, but as long as you brought your own equipment you could play for free as much as you wanted. These were the places that we really haunted over and over until they became courses we knew well. Now each one of my clubs has a little sticker on the shaft certifying that it complies with the official size restrictions for park golf equipment, and each of those stickers cites the power of the IPGA, which stands for the International Park Golf Association. Just like park golf spread over Hokkaido, it continued to spread across Japan all the way down to Kyushu and Okinawa. As you'd expect, the more rural an area is, the more park golf courses it seems to have. The official ones are all members of the NPGA or Nippon Park Golf Association. Oh, I don't know if this is at all needed, but Nippon is one of the ways to say Japan in Japanese. But what makes the International Park Golf Association international, of course, are the courses outside of Japan. I found a few different park golf courses in Korea and also saw listed that there were courses in Sweden, brazil and Paraguay. It was hard for me to search in most of those countries because I don't know the language or what they might refer to park golf as, but there's only one in all of North America. On their map of officially registered courses, this course is actually the only one the IPGA even lists outside of Japan at all. It's in the United States, in Akron, new York. Akron is a small village in upstate New York, about 40 minutes from Buffalo and 45 from Niagara Falls, and it's the home of Destroyer Park Golf, the first park golf course in America. After I came back from Japan, I searched the internet for park golf in America and crossed my fingers that I could find a place to play in the US. That's how I first learned about Destroyer Park Golf. Now I feel like I've traveled all over America except the Northeast. I've never been to New York or anywhere in the New England area, so it wasn't a place I could go in person. But when I decided on doing a park golf episode, destroyer Park Golf was the perfect place to turn to. That's how I found myself one afternoon on a phone call to Akron, new York, for an interview. Can I get you to start off by introducing yourself for the podcast by saying your name and maybe your position there at Destroyer Park Golf? Speaker 3: 20:12 Sure yeah. My name is Chris Byer Jones and I'm a co-owner of Destroyer Park Golf with my husband, whose name is Chris Jones. Speaker 1: 20:20 Excellent. Well, hi, it's great talking to you. How are you doing? Speaker 3: 20:24 I'm doing very good, thank you. It's beautiful out here for a change. Speaker 1: 20:27 Oh yeah, what's the day look like out there today? Speaker 3: 20:30 It's beautiful, sunny clear skies and about 78, and not humid. Speaker 1: 20:36 That does sound perfect, yeah. Speaker 3: 20:38 For us that is. Speaker 1: 20:39 How did you first encounter park golf? Speaker 3: 20:42 if I can ask, yeah, I actually encountered...
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13 Cruise Ship; 3 A.M.
08/08/2022
13 Cruise Ship; 3 A.M.
In this episode we examine what happens at sea in the middle of the night, culminating in a crazy night in a Frankenstein-themed nightclub. Join Scot on a discussion of boats, water, staying up all night, and then join him aboard a ship in the middle water and in the middle of the night for this topic. Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: Music from this episode by: Simon Carryer - Bastereon - Brrrrravo - kgrapofficial - dawnshire - desparee - rito_shopify - Aandy Valentine - From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - "School" - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 2: 0:24 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I present one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I've always been a very land-based human. I grew up in Kansas where, from the right vantage point, you can see oceans of land, with waves of crops blowing in the wind Really the only form of ocean I knew growing up. Other people tell me that looking out over the water makes them feel at ease and gives them a calm sense of peace or serenity, but I've never really felt that. To me, oceans are the home of monsters who can all breathe where I can't, which is not really the calmest or most peaceful thought. That's why it's strange that I'd want to make an episode about basically surrounding myself with nothing but water on the biggest boat I could ever imagine and about finding perfection on that ship in the middle of the night. I think being surrounded by water affects people differently. Some people find peace out in the open water, others the water gives them a different energy and brings chaos. But, like getting seasick, you don't really know how you'll react until it's too late to do much about it. I talked with a friend recently who told me about having this feeling, but even more so she told me the scientific name for it it's called the Lassophobia and it's the intense fear of large bodies of water. I don't think I'm at that level at all, but it was interesting to hear her talk about her intense feelings around water, because I recognize so much that I have, just on a smaller scale. So I said I didn't like water, and that's true. But boats are a different thing. I like a boat, though I haven't really been on that many In my earliest memories of any boat at all. I'm sitting on Smithville Lake in Missouri with Grandpa Moppen, and maybe Grandma or Dad were there too. But fishing was one of my grandpa's passions and he shared it with my sister and me from a very young age. I'm not sure how many other boats I had even gone on, and what gets included under the classification of boat. The Kansas City area has a couple of examples that I don't know if I should really count. At Worlds of Fun, the big theme park in the area, I rode on a mock riverboat that was really just being pulled along on an underwater track at the park so that one seems borderline. Probably shouldn't count it, but what feels completely out of the question are Kansas City's riverboat casinos. Now, to me gambling always seems to have the oddest hoops to jump that make it go from completely illegal, go to prison crime, to 100% A-OK, super profitable business. To go from a place where it's not allowed to one where it is, you may have to cross a state line, like in Lake Tahoe, where the California side of the state line just has hotels, but across the street on the Nevada side they've become large hotel casinos due to the different state laws on gambling. Or the line between the United States land and tribal lands, where the laws are different as well. You might even have to cross from land to water in the case of the floating casinos on the Mississippi River where, as long as there are businesses on the water, the laws are different than they are on land. So these boats sail up and down the river, fulfilling that requirement regularly. But the riverboats in Kansas City are, well, they're different. For one, they are large complexes the size of shopping malls and you might wonder how well a riverboat could float in water, being that size. But don't worry, these riverboats aren't surrounded by water at all, but rather by enormous parking lots locking them in acres of concrete on all sides. Now, it might be hard to conjure up the image of a riverboat, considering the description I've just given you, but a few of them have put forth a nominal amount of effort to remind you that they are in fact boats A lit up display, smokestack, maybe a neon paddle wheel that is completely stationary you know stuff like that. So what makes these riverboats boats, you ask. I mean, why are they even called riverboats? Well, of course it's water. Most of the riverboats casino concrete foundation is taken up with restaurants, shops, movie theaters and the like. But to go on to the gambling floor in the middle you have to first step across the threshold, a small one foot gap bridged by a textured metal plate, beneath which runs a one foot wide stream of water that has been diverted out of the nearby Missouri River and then, after flowing under the metal plate, eventually flows back out to the Missouri River once more. And that's the magic that does it in KC. Walk across a rain gutters worth of water and now you're on a boat, which always felt so weird to me, so I don't count those really in the list of boats I've ridden. I guess that would be my auto boat dog right, no, and that means I don't really have that many boats in my past at all. The short boat trip in India I talked about last episode, a couple of ferries to Bershiri and Reibu and islands in Japan when I lived there and a short one in Seattle, but until a few years ago that was really it for me and boats, fishing with my grandpa, a bunch of non boats and some ferries. But then, in 2019, we got the call from the big leagues. It was a family trip being planned by people higher up in the tree than us, and we were invited to go on a cruise with a large group of relatives, something I had definitely never even thought of doing before and before I knew it, we were booked and packing for a big trip on the biggest boat I could imagine. We'd be departing from Seattle, washington, and then sailing north to see glaciers in Alaska, where I'd never been before, then back to Seattle, making a few stops in between. Now, this ship, the cruise ship, really was like a floating city. The ridiculous premise of a shopping mall slash casino being a boat because someone ran a hose through it was the fake version, but that idea was the reality of a cruise ship. The ship we would be sailing on, the Diamond Princess, had 13 decks, held 2600 passengers and another 1100 crew members and, like any cruise ship, it had to be designed with the goal of keeping over 2000 people entertained or at least occupied all day long, day after day. On a ship, they can't leave. So there was a lot to do Things starting all over all the time. You just looked at what was happening when and you could choose which things to hit up. But more even than the non-stop scheduled events, I was fascinated by just the fundamental differences that being on a ship brought. The first surprising discovery on board the ship, one that I didn't even know to expect at all, was the way the boat moved. At first you noticed some minor rocking back and forth while it leaves the port, but when the ship reaches open water it really picks up steam and the minor rocking becomes much more intense. The whole ship moves with the waves, but because it's so big, the time it takes to rock back and forth makes it feel like whatever ground you're on is either rising or falling slowly. I'd probably have a more poetic description if I'd been on ships all my life, but walking down a hall was almost like walking across one of those plank and rope bridges where as you walk you make the thing bounce and by the middle you're dealing with the whole bridge just rippling up and down in a wave. People were having a hard time with the rocking and more than a few of our family party just stayed in their cabin and tried to deal with their seasickness. The surprising part to me, mr Land, guy. Well, I was just fine Better than fine, actually. On my first trip where I could get seasick, I discovered that the rocking up and down and sort of moving floor feeling was something, well, something that I really enjoyed. It was like being on a slow motion trampoline, or maybe like the best parts of being tipsy, without any of the cost, calories or other negative parts of drinking. I get why people don't like it and I had never rolled those dice before, but if, when I did, I had found that I get really sick from the rocking motion, I'd feel the same way too. I didn't, so I didn't. For people who have been on a cruise before, or just people with enough wear with all to actually know what one's like, please bear with me, I was not in that camp prior to this. So the ship has shops, shows, places to eat, swimming pools, a gym, a casino and even a hospital jail in morgue in case something goes drastically wrong while you're cruising. It was huge, I'll be honest. It was also very overwhelming initially. I am not an extrovert. Often, and I'm also not particularly a swim in the sun or dance the night away type. There were people everywhere, and I'm not really a fan of that either. But the boat is huge and while there were crowded spots that were easy to find and often located by whatever popular activity, party or event was being put on right then, I was able to find some quiet spots too. It was away from the main throng of passengers and places to really appreciate what I was experiencing there. On especially windy or cold days, which on a trip north to Alaska was most of them, I could find some space up on the observation deck and also look out on a site I never really get to see, being surrounded by water to the horizon in every direction. On one of these walkabouts I was lucky enough to see a couple of whales swimming alongside the boat, and on another I caught a lazy otter cruising in our wake who looked like it was enjoying a nice breakfast made up of yummy things that the enormous engines were stirring up below. And this was how I sort of got acclimated to cruising on my first few days. I would hang with people for as long as I had the energy for it, and then I would find ways to slip away from any action to recharge on my own Most of the time I'd been exploring the vast boat. This ship had 13 floors or decks, each one the size of the cruise ship, and it had been built out extensively to make use of all that space. Back when I first moved to Kita, kyushu, japan, I did this same thing At night. I would pop in headphones and just go out walking, going down streets or alleys I hadn't been down before gradually making a mental map of my surroundings as I went A few walkabouts around a new area, and I tended to get a much better sense of the space and get my bearings enough to explore much more intentionally later. Doing this, I found nooks and crannies that were interesting to me, different businesses and restaurants off the beaten path that I was curious about, parks or other green spaces that are tucked away between tall buildings, and I even made friends with stray animals on occasion, and the same tactic worked pretty well on the boat too. There weren't any stray animals there, of course, but everything else went pretty much the same as in a city. It definitely helped me feel like I knew where things were on the boat in short order, where to sneak away when I needed to, and also gave me a mental list of what things were available to see or use, and I thought this worked really well for the first few days. Then, as can sometimes slash often happen, my weirdness got in the way. I've always been a night owl. I would stay up late as a child reading with a flashlight. Once I got a TV in my room, that turned into staying up late while watching what few broadcast TV stations we got on the rabbit ears and enjoying their latest of late night offerings while laying on the carpet and drawing pictures in front of the screen. I would stay up until 2, 3, 4am on school nights and then short change myself on sleep. Not a great plan for middle school and high school, but it didn't seem to matter. I was a night owl, awake all alone while everyone else was asleep, and I liked it. In college, staying up late started to have social advantages. I could schedule my own classes and gravitated towards ones that started later when possible, and then I would just leave my dorm room door propped open. When I was up late doing stuff. Other students would come in and hang out on their way back from a night out, maybe, or taking a break from an all night cram session before a big test, possibly someone dropping by to give their roommate some privacy. But I was usually up and ready to talk, watch a movie or listen to music. The older I get, the less attractive being a night owl has become. After college I moved to Japan and worked in public schools which very much have their own set schedules and are not open to an assistant teacher setting separate hours. I mean, I assume I didn't ask, and I have found that in professional life the need for all-nighters goes down sharply from my college days. Or maybe I've just gotten better at not procrastinating as much. But that night owl skill trait, characteristic. Whatever it is, it does still come in handy sometimes. Having a baby immediately throws you into a stretch of months where time has no meaning. It's wake up time when there's crying, it's sleeping time when there is napping, it's everything else time somewhere in between. But being able to be alert in the middle of the night or conk out for a few hours mid-morning made me a pretty good new baby wrangler. Staying up all night before a flight and then sleeping on the plane is also good for minimizing the effects of jet lag on long trips, I discovered. But really the older I get, the less useful of a habit, predispositioned or a quirk it seems to be. That's why I didn't find it helpful when I started feeling completely awake in the middle of the night on the cruise ship. At home I can go to another room and turn lights on or do things without disturbing anyone's sleep, but on the cruise my family was all in the same room together. Any lights or noise would affect other people and I didn't want to just sit there fully awake in the windowless cabin for hours. So I found myself quietly getting dressed in the dark and heading out to explore in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep Well, not everyone actually. I found a few people still in the nightclub, one of the last places on the ship to shut down Literally a few like three people, and it looked like it was closing up soon. Walking out around the usually crowded spots, it felt a little like a ghost town. Everything was empty. These places that were never empty during the day because they were always full of people or getting set up to be full of people At night, those spaces and places were all abandoned, patiently waiting for the morning so they could fill back up, but in the meantime they just sat there open, curiously empty and quiet. Well, if you heard my last episode, you know I like to paint. When I have the time and a bit of inspiration, I like to sit and make watercolor paintings, but on a boat with thousands of people freely roaming at all times, there are rarely any chances to sit down and find a subject that's not going to shift or change or be different in some way over an hour or two. But now, in the still of the night, there were large chunks of time to paint spaces that were normally filled with people, and I made a mental note to take advantage of these opportunities. Later I noticed another thing about the middle of the night too. There's no shortage of staff on a cruise ship. There are tons of people on board who are there working. During the day, we would see all the hospitality professionals, entertainers and staff that you're meant to see, but at night, while they slept, an entirely new crew emerged. People I never saw during the day came out and started going over and checking everything on the ship, resetting each piece for the morning, as well as doing maintenance, which must always be needed, but I never saw it happen during the day when changing a light bulb or doing HVAC work might be unsightly and get in the way of guests, but once the cruisers had gone to sleep at night they popped out like a pit crew for a race car repaired, replaced and reset everything before the morning. I was completely fascinated by this. It's as if a shark had gone to sleep and these little cleaner fish were out in force picking out anything that didn't belong there, missing no detail. I walked a bit more and found another wonderful night-only feature. When I went to the end of the ship where the dining rooms were in the pre-dawn hours of early morning I discovered that there were whole sections of the boat that smelled like fresh bacon, because they shared some airway with the kitchen where the cooks were preparing breakfast items for some 2,000 people. I know I've talked about how smells get me before. This was another one. I would walk outside and smell the saltwater air, but to come inside and be hit with the warmth and the unexpected smell of fresh bacon is just pretty spectacular. I gotta say this first night I had been walking with just my headphones and exploring every nook of the ship. I could think of that I hadn't checked out for hours on end. Then I came back some time pre-dawn and slipped into bed for a little shut-eye before everyone got up. I had just planned to leave the room for a bit and not wake anyone else up, but instead discovered my favorite aspect of the cruise being up on the ship in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep. It really felt like during these hours this ship meant for thousands was really just my personal exploration zone and that I was seeing a secret side to the ship that other people never got to experience. I think I sort of shifted my plans then, making sure to nap during the day to make up for being awake during the night. After the first night I did this, I also planned my little night time adventures a bit more intentionally. Knowing now what the empty ship held, I was able to pack a bag with my watercolor things and over the next few days, usually at 3 or so after the final things to do on the ship ended, I would slip out of my room. I started my nights by wandering around the ship looking for a good subject to paint. I picked a spot on the top deck next to one of the swimming pools and set up facing a now closed bar and tile mural that I would never have gotten a clean view of during the daytime. Night time painting had another benefit I hadn't thought of when I planned it, and that's the light Painting in sunlight. During the day, the light changes over time, especially over a couple of hours, especially, especially on a rocking ship that's sailing and maybe turning as well, but night, well, of course, at night the ship is lit up by artificial light, which would stay consistent throughout my painting and make the process just that much easier. So there, in my windbreaker, and probably listening to some film score through my headphones, I sat and spent the next 2-3 hours on what felt like an abandoned ghost ship and loved every second of it. I could even leave my painting stuff spread out there on the table and walk around, maybe grab a bite to eat or drink, and then come back and...
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12 The Taj Mahal at Sunrise
06/25/2022
12 The Taj Mahal at Sunrise
This episode Scot revisits stories of the most amazing building he’s ever been to, the Taj Mahal, and the magic that happens to it during an Indian sunrise. Scot also looks more locally to see if there is anything around his area that can help recreate this experience and even complete a part of it he could never do in India. Check out all pics, videos, and for the first time a rough transcript on the webpage for this episode: Trappy808 - Gopakumar1830 - rito_shopify - Tushar Lall - mwmusic - aarchirecords - Aandy Valentine - Scot's India Sketchbook - Floating Taj Sausalito official Instagram - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:25 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospect, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. Photographs usually do a pretty good job of showing you what something looks like the colors, shapes, sort of giving you a sense of that thing. Photography is built around this idea. Tv and movies are built around this idea. Online shopping is built around this idea. Photographers and cinematographers know how to take the time to make something look so great it looks even better than the real thing. But then there are those things that are so amazing in person, so spectacular, that no photo ever does them justice. The best they can manage is a pale imitation. One of those things for me is the Taj Mahal. My mom was an elementary school art teacher for 40 years and we always had these gigantic books of different artists' work with huge, detailed pictures of their paintings. She would use them as resources in class to show students and for her own classes as she worked on her master's degree in the summers. Monet, dali, rockwell, picasso, gauguin, van Gogh, matisse I was flipping through all of them over and over again from an early age. We would also go regularly to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, so I grew up seeing paintings both in books and in person a lot. It got me interested in art, eventually allowing me to enter college on an art scholarship, and pretty much affected everything in my life. During college I would have one art history course each semester, which would put me in a big auditorium twice a week looking at giant projections of paintings on a screen. One summer, while traveling through Chicago, I made a visit to the Chicago Institute of Art Museum where I got to see a traveling exhibit of Van Gogh paintings, including one that I had seen on screen in art history class and also in my mom's books. It was small in real life smaller than the giant screen projection, of course, but also smaller than the reproduction of it I had seen in the book. The real painting was smaller than a piece of printer paper, which really surprised me and modest. It wasn't showy at all. It was just a small painting of the sun setting over a wheat field. I didn't really pay much attention to it on the screen or the book, just flipped right past it, but there in person it stopped me in my tracks. I remember having the absurd initial reaction of thinking they shouldn't allow photos of this to be in books or online because you just lose so much the type of thing where it feels almost rude to show people the photograph of it first and let them think they've seen what the real thing is like. Pictures hadn't shown me the texture of the gloves of paint or really represented the vibrance of the colors well at all. I hadn't had this sort of jarring disconnect when seeing any other paintings before and I had seen a lot of paintings. This was just the one for me. It shot up to the top of my list immediately. The photos had shown me what the image looked like, but not at all what it was like to actually see the painting if that makes any sense Like a replica that doesn't really replicate the thing. Now this sort of phenomenon has happened multiple times over my life, most often with landscapes or sunsets stuff that just flattens and dies in a photo. It's happened a few times with paintings like the one in Chicago, and once with a building. That building was the famous Taj Mahal in India. I mentioned last episode that I had my honeymoon in India and we went there without a real plan apart from visiting the Golden Triangle Trio of tourism cities, which are Delhi, agra and Jaipur, and then adding on a fourth city, udaipur. Okay, so it's geography time again. This is beginning to become a regular feature on the show, I guess, but the Golden Triangle is that trio of cities in the northern part of India. India's total population is 1.38 billion. Delhi, india's capital city, holds 18 million of those people. Then, to the south of Delhi, 220 kilometers or 137 miles, a two to three hour train ride away, is Agra, a beautiful city known for the Agra Fort, but more famously for the Taj Mahal, which sits in Agra on the banks of the Yamuna River. Northwest of Agra, about the same distance, 230 kilometers or 143 miles, another three to four hour train ride away, is Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, and it's a center for a huge market of shops and bazaars and trade. Then Jaipur is 260 kilometers from Delhi again, and these three cities form a rough triangle. So that's the Golden Triangle that people talk of when they're talking about India. Down southwest of Jaipur, the second city I told you about, nearly 400 kilometers or about 250 miles outside the Golden Triangle is the city of Udaipur. It's a seven to eight hour train ride, so that's an all day thing from Jaipur or an overnight thing from Delhi. Udaipur is a city built around a huge man-made lake called Lake Pichola. I say man-made and because I'm an American, that always serves up a certain connotation in my mind as to what time period we're talking about. But India is a way different place with a way different timeline, so you have to adjust a bit to how that changes things. This man-made lake was completed in 1362, nearly 700 years ago. So Lake Pichola has one island with a super fancy hotel on it. I mean, the hotel is the island out in the middle of the lake and it looks like a palace. This was featured prominently in the James Bond movie Octopussy, and restaurants around the lake continually remind you of that point by trying to beckon you into their nightly viewings of the film over a lake backdrop. But more on that later. I talked my new wife, misha, into my bright idea of landing in India with zero plants or reservations of any kind, because I'd read to be wary of online reservations and getting a bait and switch when you register for hotels that way. So I thought it would be better to just be dropped off somewhere central, make our way to lodging and then inspect it when we got there. Of course this was as my ideas can sometimes be terribly underthought through. I am far too quick to just think, ah, it'll probably work out somehow and not plan too much for the trip. We hopped off the plane late, I think nine or ten at night, hailed a cab and asked for a ride to the New Delhi train station. People sometimes use Delhi and New Delhi interchangeably, but there is a difference. New Delhi is one of the districts within the larger city of Delhi. While the larger city of Delhi has been in place since the sixth century BC, new Delhi was really overhauled, restructured and remade in 1911 by the British when they occupied India. A lot of the buildings and roads are made with European architecture influences. So it's a trip to go from Outer Delhi into New Delhi and then start seeing that British influence on things like Karnat Place, a large shopping area. New Delhi is where India's seat of government is and holds India's capital, but New Delhi is only 42.7 square kilometers compared to all of Delhi, which is over 46,000. So using Delhi and New Delhi interchangeably would be like using San Francisco interchangeably with Fisherman's Wharf. So it was the New Delhi train station where we had asked to be dropped off that night on our cab ride from the airport. I thought that seemed like a good place to orient ourselves, check maps and make a plan, so we hopped out and started plotting our moves right there in front of the station, which had the effect of inviting other people to try and insert themselves into that process. We got approached almost instantly by many eager gentlemen keen to show us to the spot we just must be looking for. We knew about these guys too. They get a cut from the hotel if they can bring in paying customers, so they will say anything they need to, not so much making sure it's all true. So we just started walking instead, which momentarily kept people from taking an interest in us. Stopping especially to consult a map or book, though, would get us swarmed with unhelpful helpers offering unhelpful help. We must have looked like bright, shiny idiots that night, a beacon calling out for anyone who wanted to test their luck on the two new kids. We hadn't really gotten a chance to get our india legs yet. Ultimately, we stayed at a nicer place than we had budgeted for because of this, willing to call off our search because it was late. The place was very nice, it would only be for the one night. We were exhausted and besides this was a honeymoon. Right. We had planned what cities we would go to, but not what order or how many days we'd stay in any of them. So in the calm of that nice first hotel room, we decided that maybe Delhi wasn't our speed yet and made plans to hop a train to Agra the next day. Agra is a smaller city I mean everything but Mumbai is a smaller city than Delhi, but Agra is also a slower city. This is the city with the Taj Mahal in it, and its economy largely revolves around the tourism that building attracts. That's what had brought us there. We had read that the best times to view the Taj were sunrise and sunset, with sunrise being the better of the two. The way tickets to the Taj work is you have to get in line to purchase tickets for the day separate lines for men and women get your ticket and then wait in another line for the security check. There are a lot of rules for what you can and can't bring into the Taj, and they have armed guards who seem pretty serious about you following them. No food or drink, but you could bring a small transparent water bottle, meaning like a small disposable plastic one. This is all the water you get for your time inside. You can bring your camera, but not a sketch pad or book or any writing utensils. I was making a sketchbook of my time in India, so I remember this rule well, because I had wanted to come in and sketch or draw the Taj Mahal for sure, but found out the night before that I couldn't bring in my drawing stuff. I didn't dig too hard, but it does make sense to be on multiple levels. Firstly, of course, keeping out food and drink helps keep food and drink spills from happening on a priceless monument, prevents destructive critters who might want to eat that food and drink from being attracted. And the no pens or pencils thing makes sense too, because while I wanted to bring it and draw a picture of the Taj, I can imagine the temptation for people who want to visit and then draw or write on the Taj. When I visited Stonehenge in England, we had to view it from a ways away because they used to let people just walk up and touch the stones, but too many were chipping off small pieces to take home with them. So they had to rope it off and keep people a certain distance away because if they hadn't, according to the Stonehenge people, it would have been completely gone. At the rate it was being chipped away before. So no one gets a chance to write on the Taj Mahal because we as a species completely can't control ourselves and weed to face and destroy pretty much anything and everything when given even the slightest chance. Yeah, that sounds about right. They are very serious about keeping the place nice and they post lists of the prohibited items all over. We saw ours in front of our hotel the night before, in time to leave anything on the list back in our room, and you'd be wise to take note of these signs because if you bring something on them with you, either it's not getting in or you're not getting in. Take it or no. Items on the website and sign include drones, any tobacco products, firearms, candy, any wire, bags of any kind, stickers of any kind, tripod or material for prayer. Also, no electronic devices apart from your camera or phone. Mobile phones are to be switched off or on silent mode when you're inside and they ask you not to make noise in or around the mausoleum. They even enforce a half kilometer radius from the Taj where you can't operate any polluting vehicles, so that less smog would be in the air to stain the monument. That might be the most impressive ban to me, because Agra may be comparatively small to Delhi, but it still holds 1.6 million people. I'll tell you, anywhere else we went in India, a zone like that seemed like a completely impossible thing to establish and maintain. Even so, the Taj Mahal doesn't avoid all pollution, and every so often it undergoes a process called Motiyane Mithi, a traditional mud pack, where mud is caked on by hand and then brushed off, and then the brilliant white shine returns until it's time for another rejuvenation later. Other items on the banned list might seem more curious at first books of any kind, tripods, phone chargers or extra batteries, prayer materials. But this ties into the second reason why I couldn't bring my sketchbook with me. That reason, I think, is a less obvious one, though. The Taj grounds are open from just before sun up to just after sun down, but your ticket is only good for entry once, no reentry. So if you wanted to come in and see the sunrise and sunset, you'd need to stay all day and not go out. Stay all day without food, with whatever small amount of water you got in with under the heat of the Indian sun, extended drawing projects, books to read, cell phone chargers or meals, would make it easier for people to stay longer, which means the site gets more crowded, less magical. Fewer people get to cycle in per day, they sell fewer tickets and make less money on the attraction as a whole. Speaking of tickets, they are different prices depending on your nationality. For Indians, the tickets are 50 rupees, about $1 when I was there, or 64 cents now Google tells me. For foreigners, the price is 1100 rupees, with an additional 200 rupees B if you want to go up and see the main mausoleum building, which you should definitely do. To go all that way and not see the main thing, I mean, just count the 200 rupees in the price of the ticket. So 1300 rupees total, or $16.74 today. Oh, and currently you have to buy all tickets online, since they don't have the in-person ticket window I talked about open because of COVID when Misha and I went in 2009,. It was 500 rupees for the ticket plus 250 for the mausoleum add-on, so 750 rupees total, which was about $15, and so not that different comparatively. It makes sense that the prices are so contrasted between Indian and non-Indian. It's an important Indian site and it really should be accessible to everyone there. Also, the level of wages and cost of living disparity between India and the countries people come to visit the Taj from really makes it necessary to set the separate prices. Since we wanted to see the sunrise, we requested a wake-up call for like 3am the next morning, a wake-up call which ended up being a person coming over from the hotel office and banging loudly on the door with both fists, and then we made our way in the dark over to the Taj gates for sunrise. You can see the top of the Taj Mahal from some places around it, but the grounds have a tall red sandstone wall around it, which makes going inside the only way to really see the front of the structure. After getting through security, there's a large lawn with a long, beautiful pool and some walkways between you and the main buildings. Those main buildings are up on a raised platform above ground level. This is the view of the Taj Mahal that probably 99% of the world is familiar, with the pool of water reflecting the structure. To make a second image of the Taj for the photo. We were among the first people being led in that day, so we made our way pretty directly to the main buildings. I remember it being quiet. India had been a place that, up to that point, had seemed extremely loud to me, with sounds always coming from every direction. But this was quiet, tranquil even, especially considering I was among a bunch of other tourists at the very moment. At the base of the platform there's a spot to put your shoes. It's optional, but I'm really glad I did it because, without my sandals on, I was able to stand foot to marble on one of the most amazing structures on Earth. I remember the ground being cool, not cold, but more than anything, I remember it being remarkably smooth under my bare feet. So the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, meaning it houses a tomb inside, and it was built between 1632 and 1653 by Emperor Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan was Emperor of the Mukhal Empire, which controlled a giant chunk of South Asia, and was, in many ways, india before India. He had the Taj commissioned as a mausoleum to house the tomb of his favorite wife, mubtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to her 14th child Wow, 14th. Okay, so there's the white main building that most people are familiar with, but the Taj Mahal complex is actually three buildings next to each other. On either side of the white marble Taj Mahal are giant red sandstone buildings that face inward towards the Taj. One is a mosque. That's clear. The other's purpose is a bit more ambiguous. Theories are that it could have been a guest house or used for something else. It could have even been built just to balance out the mosque and make the site more symmetrical. I read that theory too, but it seems the knowledge of why it was originally built has been lost over time. The mausoleum in the center what most people think of when they imagine the Taj Mahal is made of white marble with intricate carvings and inlaid precious stone. Most Mukhal buildings of that time were constructed of the red sandstone that made up the buildings to either side of the Taj and the nearby Agra Fort. But Shah Jahan, one of the Tajs, made out of white marble and he was sort of the first person who did that and it caused a wave of similar design in Mukhal architecture following the Taj. The building is 73 meters, or 240 feet tall at the tip, which includes the famous large onion-shaped bulb on top that accounts for 35 meters, or 115 feet, of that height. The precious stones are inlaid in Pietra Dura designs which look like vines and flowers on some of the marble surfaces, in beautiful circular and overlapping patterns. The building is also surrounded by four tall white minarets or columns, on the four corners of the platform. These minarets are 40 meters or 130 feet tall, and an interesting bit of trivia is that they aren't perfectly vertical. All four of them lean slightly away from the Taj Mahal's main structure so that in the event that they were to collapse or be toppled over something that happened from time to time, wikipedia says then they would fall away from that main building and be less likely to damage it. So the main reason why we were there at sunrise and why the guidebooks suggested it, was that during sunrise the Taj Mahal was supposed to change colors as you watch. Well, I mean, it doesn't actually change colors, but it appears to be different colors at different points in the sunrise. That was the claim anyhow, so we were there in part to test it out. By the time we reached the...
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11 Morena
05/18/2022
11 Morena
This episode is a special one. Scot is going to dive into the story of Morena, the place The Perfect Show’s studio is named after, and recounts the story of one of the most amazing places he ever found in Japan. The story wanders to Indian restaurants, Hokkaido festival life, and Dr. Pepper. This one’s been on the slate since the idea of this podcast first happened, and I’m excited to finally share it with you now. Bossa Nova Chirstmas Songs: Marcela Mangabeira - All I Want For Christmas is You Monique Kessous - Last Christmas Tahta Menezes - Happy Christmas (War is Over) Here are links to Kisha Solomon’s two-part essay “Black in Spain: Beauty Standards and Exoticisms” Part 1: Part 2: NEW:The Perfect Show has a new website! Now find us at and put images to any audio you are wondering about. Special thanks for the cover song: Romaana Shakir - romaanashakir: Instrumental by Chevy71Corvette on Youtube - And for the Japanese segment: Japanese Voice Over - araccyn: English Translation - nwcoast90: Original Piano Composition - steveaik7: Music from this episode by: mikesville - nikas_music - brrrrravo - dawnshire - adam_mejghi - Desparee - Lofi_rob - Aandy Valentine - From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:25 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little negative perfection. Hey there, this one is a really special topic to me. You may hear me say at the end of most of these episodes that they're recorded at Morena Studios, which is just a name I've given to my little setup here. But for this one, I want to tell you how I picked that name and where it came from. Today, I'd like to tell you the story of Morena. I think it's pretty natural to get homesick when you're living in another country for an extended period of time. Moving within the same country to a place with a different enough feel or culture can do it too. The thing at the heart of that homesick feeling is separation from an environment that you know and immersion in an unfamiliar one. When I left Kansas for Japan, I was pretty ready to go. I was ready to see the world and live on the other side of it and discover who I was going to become. But even if someone is completely ready for that change. I don't think there's any way of avoiding missing what you leave behind. People for sure. That's the big one for most of us, or I should say people, pets, loved ones let's just extend it to loved ones but also haunts, familiar environments, favorite foods and drinks, or even just commonly available foods that you may take for granted until you look around and they're suddenly not available anymore. One that got me in Kyushu was we found a vending machine out in Fukuoka City, one lone vending machine that, along with the more standard choices you would find in Japanese vending machines like Coke or Pepsi, pokari, sweat and energy drinks, this one had Dr Pepper as an option. This one vending machine was the only place I had seen Dr Pepper in over a year. Now. Dr Pepper is not a beverage I drink. I've had maybe three in the last ten years, but seeing Dr Pepper in Japan just triggered something and my roommate and I got like six cans each. We took them back to our apartment to save her a little taste of home over the next few days or however long. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Dr Pepper as much as those. So I'd have bouts of homesickness like that here and there, usually prompted by seeing something American in Japan or hearing about something happening back in America, where I wasn't. But mostly I was on board for Japan and everything that meant. So those times were few and far between the English-speaking foreigners in the Japanese places I lived tended to know each other. When I lived in a big city there was an informal social and support network of other foreigners. We would get together regularly and travel in many of the same circles. At these get-togethers we would trade tips or stories and reminisce about the things we missed from our various homes. Honestly, just having conversations at natural speed in English was a pretty significant comfort all on its own. It lets you sort of turn off the non-stop translation machine that's usually running while you live there. Also, as just a person who loves other countries and cultures, it was a real chance to overload on them. In my daily actions I would be immersed in a foreign culture, but it was always Japan. At these get-togethers I was mingling with and getting to know people from Canada, england, ireland, scotland, south Africa, australia, new Zealand, singapore, mexico, indonesia, malaysia. I met someone from the Isle of man once. I mean just so many places. Socializing in Hokkaido was very much the same but, like with everything in Hokkaido, it was really the scale that was different. The foreigners there, like everything on that island, were a little more spread out from each other than in Kyushu. For my first Hokkaido town, I would need to drive a half hour or so to reach the next nearest English speakers and another half hour to meet the next closest. Those of us in the Northern region became a close-knit group despite that distance. We had an emailless server that operated like a text thread would now, and we would meet up fairly frequently to hang out or do things. Usually that meant heading to a bigger city nearby, which, where we were, meant Nairo. Nairo is a medium-sized city for Hokkaido, small for the rest of Japan but positively metropolitan compared to Nakatombezu, the tiny village where I was living. Now let me take a left turn at this point in the show and a moment to explain my relationship with Indian food. It'll tie back in, trust me, but I never had Mexican food in Kansas. The first burrito I ever ate was in Japan, if that gives you a sense of how adventurous of an eater I was as a child and I had absolutely no awareness of Indian food. My first time having Indian was also in Japan where I discovered that I absolutely loved it, as did many others in my circle, and it became sort of a linchpin. My friends and I would plan around if we knew we were headed somewhere large enough to have an Indian restaurant. There were a bunch in Kyushu and they weren't terribly hard to find, but I was in a really urban setting there and remember everything in Hokkaido is more spread out, which is especially true for non-Japanese restaurants. The easiest place to find Indian food was Sapporo, hokkaido's capital city and the largest one on the island. Sapporo has a population of nearly 2 million people and that meant they had a number of curry places we would hit up trying anywhere we could find that served Indian or Nepalese curry and revisiting our favorites any time. We came back. A few hours north of Sapporo stands the city of Asahikawa. It is the second largest city in Hokkaido with a population of around 350,000. So the second largest city in Hokkaido only has 17% of the population of the largest city. Just to give you an idea again of the size, drop off of cities and how the scale of things is just different up there. Sliding down the list of Hokkaido cities, you reach Naioro at number 24, with a population of about 30,000. This was the big city for my northern friends and me, about a 45 minute to an hour drive away on Waini Mountain Roads from where I lived. Naioro had wider food selection than where most of my friends and I lived, and so I'd go to the Saijo there for grocery shopping, and we do celebration dinners at the restaurants there when there was an occasion, and it was also the nearest spot to quench any fast food cravings that cropped up via the Moss Burger Drive-Thru, which is still there across the street from the Yamada Denki electronic store where I bought so many things, and it looks like there's even a McDonald's in Naioro now too, which didn't used to be the case. So, uh, good job Naioro. I guess One thing Naioro lacked, though, was an Indian food spot. We would recheck from time to time Google Naioro and Indodiyo-Di from our K-Ti phones, ask Japanese friends who lived in Naioro and just check with each other regularly to keep ourselves up to date with the latest version of the FFDB, the foreign food database. My wife and I, back when we were just dating, bonded in part over our love of Indian food. We had it at our wedding, we went to India for our honeymoon. But before any of that we would roam around Hokkaido together looking for new Indian restaurants to try, especially if a work function or teacher meeting had us going to a new city that we hadn't searched before. When I was traveling down to one of these meetings, I got a text from my Australian friend, sam, who had left his town earlier. We all were usually given like time off and a little travel money for these things and then just expected to make our way to the hotel or wherever on our own and show up by whatever time. But Sam texted that he had heard of an Indian restaurant called Morena, not Naioro, but in Shimokawa, a nearby town with a population just under 4,000. I feel like Sam hadn't even been there himself yet. He was just updating the FFDB with a new entry. So Naioro was between the towns where my girlfriend Misha and I lived. If we were headed somewhere across Hokkaido, like to this teacher meeting and it made sense in any way we would often meet up there, leave one car at the Naioro train station and then drive together the rest of the way. This time we would do that same thing, but with an extra stop plotted at Morena. Shimokawa is about a 15 minute drive from Naioro, and Morena's address wasn't in the main part of Shimokawa either. It was set sort of off to the side, over by some farmland and a river. This was a restaurant at the edge of a small town, which was on the edge of a small mountain city, quietly hidden in the far north of Japan. Shimokawa, the town we were on the edge of, had an attraction that they were known for. Every winter, shimokawa's thing as a town was the Ice Candle Festival, and they would make ice lanterns by freezing water in a container made to produce these thick walled ice cylinders and then put them around candles. The ice cylinders blocked the wind from blowing out the candles, and the flames light up the ice like lanterns. Elaborate rows of these ice candles are placed in designs, in long walls and structures at night, and people come to visit and enjoy the beautiful combination of fire and ice. Town attractions are nothing unique to Shimokawa, though. In Japan, most every city in town has its own attractions that they base festivals or parade around at specific times of the year. The biggest festival in Hokkaido and one of the biggest in Japan is the Yukimatsuri, the Sapporo Snow Festival. This is where, every year, snow, which is in abundance in Hokkaido. One year my city got 40 meters of snowfall over the winter. That's a little over 131 feet of snow Every day. It would be common to have to remove like between 1 to 2 feet of snow from my car and driveway before I could go to work in the morning, pretty much every single day, which is how you eventually get to 131 feet. Sapporo also got a ton of snow, and then they would import extra snow from all the other towns, as those towns were plowing roads and clearing public spaces. So these giant truckloads of snow being taken to Sapporo to dispose of were then dumped in giant piles on empty lots and parks that aren't used during the winter. Then, for weeks, teams of sculptors from different places and organizations start carving these giant snow mountains into unbelievable designs Huge portraits or dramatic scenes, cartoon characters, movie stars, backgrounds everything built entirely out of snow and ice. It's like a huge parade where everyone spends an unbelievable amount of time making floats with incredible detail, but instead of the parade moving past you, they stay put and you go around the city visiting them instead. Prizes are awarded to the best sculptors in a bunch of categories, and the festival brings in an additional 2 million people to Sapporo over the week that it runs. Flights and hotels are crazy booked up several months or even a year in advance and I was only able to go every year because, a I lived on Hokkaido and could just drive there and, b because we had good friends in Sapporo who let us crash on their floor a few times. But back to Shimokawa the Ice Candle Festival gave their town personality and while the various festivals and town events all have their own individuality, they're also very Japanese. Baked into the celebration of the small area was also a celebration of Japan, which makes sense. We were in Japan, surrounded by Japan, living and breathing Japan, and the amount of Japan everywhere could sometimes get to you or me anyway A slow build that you sometimes don't even notice until there's some real pressure behind it. We would use non-Japanese restaurants as little pressure release valves and somewhat alleviate or beat back those homesick Though maybe a better term would be away full feelings for the time being, until the next, little venting was needed. Not that they all reminded me of home, because Mexican or Indian, nepalese or Indonesian restaurants certainly didn't remind me of the home I had left, but it was more about periods of relief from all the there that was there. So that was the state we were in when we went searching for this new Indian restaurant working just outside of Nairo that we had somehow missed over the past year of scouring that area pretty hard. I should also say I was in the state of young love. That's not something you can always replicate. I mean, one of the things that makes it so special is the unplanned nature and irrational priorities it puts in your life for a time. But looking back on this time, that was definitely a factor helping color everything I was experiencing, making the world feel more colorful, electric and alive. So then, after a bit of driving on the small highway, we came to a gravel road. There was a hand painted wooden sign that just said Cafe Morena and an arrow up the gravel drive. We turned in and pulled up. It was just before dark when we arrived. It wasn't late, but being that far north, in the winter the sun sets pretty early. The gravel road gave way to a small shoveled parking area in front of a modest white two story house with a green door and a garage next to it. We got out of the car and were genuinely unsure where to go. There were no lights on in the garage. There looked to be some on in the house, but the door was closed and the only sign had been back at that road. So as we opened the door to tentatively enter the house, I remember feeling like maybe we were just walking into some random Japanese person's home. And if that were the case, well, the amount of surprise I would feel would pale in comparison to how much surprise I would cause by being a large blonde American just standing there inside. But my fears proved to be unnecessary, as the door led to a short hallway and then opened up into a larger, warmly lit room with tables and chairs. We had found Morena. Now I really want to take this entrance slowly, because a lot happened all at once. As soon as we opened the door, my senses were bombarded with change. So let's go through them one by one. First, let's talk sound. When we entered, we were hit with the warm sounds of Bossa Nova Christmas music. This was an album of Christmas songs in English sung by non-native English speakers over smooth Bossa Nova beats, giving us an immediate sense of things that were both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. At full capacity, the space would probably seat 18-20 people, and that would indeed feel very full. It looked to me like a place that had fallen directly out of a Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movie. Actually, that was the case for the outside too, with a thick blanket of quiet snow covering the ground and the house and smoke slowly meandering up from the chimney Touch. The other warmth that immediately hit us was the literal warmth of the inside itself. When opening the door, our bare faces were immersed in a wall of heat from a wood-burning stove. Hokkaido homes and apartments are usually heated with tonyu or kerosene delivered in these large, elevated tanks outside your house by a tanker truck once a year or more, depending on how fast you went through it. Kerosene heaters give off great heat, but there's something different about the heat from a wood-burning stove. It has a different feel, a different quality. It gives a sense that you are actually in a warm space instead of how somewhere heated by kerosene can feel to me like a cold space that's just been painted warm for the time being. Coming inside from outside in Hokkaido makes that temperature change even more pronounced. You're naturally bundled up for outside and encountering this new warmth, you'll find that removing layers quickly moves up your list of priorities, so that covers sound, sight and touch. There wouldn't be anything to taste until later, but what we smelled may have been the biggest shock of all. While we were processing the unfamiliar music, with the familiar feeling of needing to get our coats and hats off quickly, the most familiar of unfamiliar smells hit us Freshly Baking Pumpkin Pie. For non-piers, I apologize, but I'm going to go off here for a minute. Walking in on the smell of freshly baking pie is a needle scratch record. Stop the phone. Sort of moment. Even in America, apple, cherry, rhubarb, whatever, it's a gauntlet being thrown, one that says, yeah, everything you smell right now is about to happen. You'll be tasting these smells soon. To me, pumpkin pie smell says all that and in addition it just gives an overall sense that it's food time, because pumpkin pie only comes out around big eating holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. It says a feast is about to be had and is letting you know to get ready. This mythical dish, pumpkin pie, had a starring role in my presentations for classes explaining to Japanese kids about American holidays and cultural traditions. It's one of the things I had really grown to miss, without even knowing I was missing it my one trip back to the US at that point had been in the summer, when there's no pumpkin pie around. So I'm clocking probably three years since the last time that smell hit my nostrils at this point. So we stepped in and I was just absolutely bewildered by what I was smelling. My brain was trying to balance an equation with the factors American pumpkin pie, indian restaurant and Japanese house, but just coming up with question marks. I mean, pumpkin pie can be a pretty powerful smell on its own when you're already expecting it. But it's hard to describe how absolutely off guard it caught me when an amazing pumpkin pie smell just hit my nostrils out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere Japan. There's no real way to adequately describe it. So I was processing all this as we made our way into the cozy space, put our coats onto the backs of two chairs and sat down at the nearest table, unsure what we were in store for. The only person there was a Japanese woman in the kitchen, presumably the one responsible for the delicious pie smells. She came out a minute later and brought over some water and a boat import that had a bunch of papers tacked to it in different places. The woman introduced herself as...
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10 Compliment Call-In - Updated -
04/21/2022
10 Compliment Call-In - Updated -
Short episode trying something new where Scot puts out a call to action, calling on you to call in with some compliments. Tell me about the best ones you’ve ever gotten and tell me about the best ones you’ve ever given. A short 4 minute episode to introduce the new Podcast Call-In Line at 616-737-3329. Call and leave me a voicemail that could get played on a later show! That’s 616-737-3329, 616-PERFECZ UPDATE: I have made the episode this call-in was for, so I'm no longer taking calls, and the episode I used this for is ep 15 - Pink Shoes / Punk Shows. Check it out and be on the look out for more of these in the future. Visit perfectshowpodcast.com for more. Music on this episode by: Noah Makes Music: Brrrrravo - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:23 Hey everybody, it's Scott and this is the Perfect Show. I'd like to try something new today and see if I can interact a little with you all. So I set up a call-in number and I'm looking for listeners to call in with responses to two questions First, what's the best compliment you've ever gotten? And second, what's the best compliment you've ever given. That's it. So that means to you call in and let me know your answer for either one or both of those questions. Tell me the compliment, tell me the story, if it needs a little context, but I want to hear it. I want to know about the best compliments you've given and about the best ones you've gotten. You call in, leave your name or however you want to be referred to in a short message that I may use on a future show. Mind that I'm thinking of for the show as a funny one, but funny, serious, long short. I want to hear whatever you got. So, about the phone number, you know how you can pick your number sometimes and the numbers on phones will spell out things if you're using old phones or texting T9 or whatever. Well, I got the Google voice number. That spells out 616-P-E-R-F-E-C-C. That's right, 616-737-3329. Don't call 616. Perfect. It's one number different than I was able to get, because, of course, all the ones that spell out perfect or already taken, I mean I didn't have some special early invite to Google voice. So we are 616 perfect Z no T 616-737-3329. Give it a call. Tell me about some compliments. Also, you might predict that if I don't get any calls I'll be sad and think I don't have any listeners. But no, no, no, no, no. Well, you'd be half right. I will be sad because it will only mean that my listeners are all clearly very terrible, rude people who never compliment each other. But that's okay. It just means you'll need whatever I'm making all that much more. So if you're hearing this, try not to wait until the last minute. I'm a procrastinator myself. I get it, but that compliment that just popped into your head when I asked about it just now. You're going to forget that one if you wait too long, and I really want to hear it. So just call up our shiny new voicemail at 616-737-3329. Maybe unsurprisingly, I make this show pretty slowly. So if you figure it's been a month and you are too late, you aren't Up until you see an episode that uses the compliment voicemails. It's still fair game, so call in and add your story to. I am working on the next episode already. It's almost done. So this isn't for that and that will be out sooner than a month. But this will be for a different episode later on. Hello there, this is Scott from the future In rejecting to let you know I have now finished that episode and it's episode 15 about pink shoes and punk shows. It should be in the same feed. You found this just five episodes later in the timeline. So the original window for calls has passed. But I'll try to do more of these down the road somewhere in the future, especially if I hear that this is the type of thing you'd like more of. That's it. I just wanted to jump in and say thanks for listening to the show and I hope you like what I made out of this. Okay, now back to the original episode. Okay, so you can find the number here a bunch of times It'll be the show notes and on socials for you. Yeah, the gauntlet has been laid Lied. I have lied down the gauntlet. Gaunt laid, gauntlet lane. Yeah, call up the compliment line and that number one more time is 616-737-3329. That's 616-perfect Z, Perfect Z, perfect Z, perfect Z for non-Americans and lay some compliments on me. Lay, lie, lay your compliments upon me. The Perfect Show site is perfectshowsite. Perfect Show Show on Twitter, instagram and YouTube. Perfectshowshow at gmailcom and now 616-perfectz. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppen, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show. I'm going to eat 50 eggs.
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09 Multi-Language Songs
04/11/2022
09 Multi-Language Songs
Today’s episode is all about music that exists in multiple languages. Join Scot on a journey of discovery exploring the ins and outs of some of some great examples of this phenomenon. We talk The Beatles, Shakira, BoA, Encanto, Phil Collins, Avril Lavigne, Shania Twain, Johnny Cash, and more! From all over the world find out about the artists that have done this strange yet impressive feat and hear them in the act. Check videos for all the songs discussed here: Check the original songs here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxDnKc4gzWuwjpl1tz6WUw Special thanks to fiverr artists who worked on the songs from this episode: Cana Rialto - canarialto: Chloe Chan - jiachen782: Arunabh Kumar - arunabhkumar: Charu Haran - charuharan: Ekata Sharma - ekatashreya: Thomas Mennuni - thomasmennuni: Lucas GM - lucas_gm: StudioBlackroom - studioblackroom: Music from this episode by: Brrrrravo - Bastreon - Handanu - Shawn Korkie - KG Rap Official - Lofi_rob - From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku Mall - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328 A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:19 Hey, it's Scott. Quick disclaimer here at the top this episode has clips from a lot of songs and one of them has a curse word that I haven't beeped, so if that's something you like to be aware of ahead of time, well, now you are Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I find it very impressive when people are able to function in multiple languages. I've had conversations in mixed company that switch back and forth between English and Japanese frequently, and those are the moments when I really feel the seams of my own language ability stretching much more so compared to times where I only need to operate in English or Japanese. But some people just seem to be able to flip back and forth between languages mid-sentence effortlessly. I'm also quite impressed by musical ability of any kind. In particular, singing Instruments carry their own complexities, for sure. I played a few growing up and I get that. But to me they are maybe less daunting because, as long as they are in tune, they usually have an obvious mechanical action for achieving a note, like press this key or cover that hole. Singing feels like you're asked to do the same thing just without the help of any equipment or machinery. You're just expected to nail the note all on your own. So then it should come as no surprise that people who can sing in multiple languages nearly short circuit my brain. I've memorized some non-English lyrics to a few songs over the years. But to be able to perform musically in front of a microphone while operating in a language that isn't your well, I can't even say native language, because some people absolutely do grow up speaking two, three or more languages, but it's just a stack to me, you know. Difficult thing on top of difficult thing on top of yet another difficult thing and pulling it all off. That's why this episode I want to celebrate music that travels across languages and the singers putting their skills on display. Now let me jump out here and set up some guidelines, because there are some gray areas in that statement, but I'm looking for songs that follow a very specific set of rules. First and foremost, it has to be the same singer doing both languages. I came across some foreign language versions of songs, but they were sung by a different singer and I'd consider that to be pretty much a cover song, even though it's in a different language. But that's not what I'm talking about here. So the singer needs to be the same, but also I'm looking for the song to be the same too. Right, someone singing all their regular songs in English but then throwing it in an Ave Maria on a Christmas album or something? That's not going to count. Same singer, same song, multiple languages. By the way, the more language versions the song has, the happier it makes me. I mean, remaking a song in a second language is mind-blowing enough to me, but some musicians don't stop it only too. My joy about the whole thing just increases exponentially for each additional language that's involved. When I started this search, I only really knew of a handful of examples, most of which I had personally collected over the years as just oddities and curiosities, and I'll get to each of those. But in researching for this episode, I discovered a ton of additional examples and started taking notes. Remember, I love this type of song where some people may light up at the first edition of a famous book. I light up at the French edition of a famous song. In collecting all the songs for this, my multi-language music collection grew way bigger, like Grinchart style, and when the song list got long enough, I started to see some similarities among the different tracks, and what I came up with was three different categories for these songs on my list. Category 1 Category 1 the first category is for singers who release music in multiple markets regularly. Usually, if I find out about them, there's an English version involved, and oftentimes, if there's another version of the song, it'll be in Spanish due to the large overlap of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking markets where I live. I'm sure there are a ton of examples that I have no idea about out there with songs and pairs or trios of languages that just don't involve English. Now, this may seem obvious, but a lot of the artists in this category are multilingual, meaning they speak two or more languages. I mean, it's got to make it easier to sing in a language if you're already comfortable communicating in it, right? Ricky Martin, who became a huge star in the late 90s, early 2000s, has a ton of songs like this. A good example is Liv and La Vida Loca, which, like a lot of his songs, has an English version and a. Spanish version released simultaneously to play in both the Spanish and English-speaking markets. Same thing with Gloria Estefan, who has released a ton of her songs in two languages for those two markets, as both a solo artist and as a member of the Miami Sound Machine, making her an icon of Latin music. While Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were battling it out at the top of the English pop charts, christina was pulling double duty, with her songs climbing the Latin music charts at the same time. The first time I heard Christina's voice sounding like this but it was also on different radio stations and rotations sounding like this Shakira is another great example for this category of musician. Shakira is a Colombian singer who got huge in Colombia and other Spanish-speaking countries. Then her success started to prompt her to venture into other markets, first from Spanish to Portuguese for the nearby Brazilian market, then from Spanish to English, starting in 2001. So on her crossover album Laundry Service, shakira hit it big with the lead single Whenever. Speaker 3: 6:13 Wherever. Speaker 1: 6:31 But I remember this happening. It was everywhere and taught the English-speaking world the name Shakira, but where she was already hugely famous, they were hearing this wonderful version. There are a ton of examples from this group, especially in African, latin and South American countries, that I haven't mentioned because I just don't know about them. I have huge blind spots here for sure. I feel like I'm trying to skim over all the music from everywhere in the world from all of time, so I expect I'll miss a ton. Sorry, it's not on purpose. I'm gonna miss some and not for nothing, but that would be a great type of thing to make a note of and email me to let me know about through the show's email address, perfectshowshowcom. Okay, at the core of these songs is the language ability that the singer already has or sometimes develops. I mean they can conceive of doing the song in another language because the language ability is already there In each case. I think the singer's language skills are at the heart of the idea, and being able to be the song's voice in more than one language really helps them gain footholds in each language's music industry. Speaking of singers with impressive language talents, shakira is fluent in Spanish, english, portuguese and Catalan. She can also sing in Italian, french and Arabic, which is justwow. Looking at that list, arabic might stick out as a language not as closely related to the others, but Shakira is of Colombian Lebanese descent and has released music in Lebanon, where the official language is Arabic. Now, if Whitney Houston had sung Whenever, wherever, instead of Shakira, I'm sure it would still be a great song and probably even a massive hit, because Whitney Houston is a hitmaker, but she probably wouldn't be able to sing hers perfectly in seven different languages. As an honorable mention to this category, I want to list someone who did something sort of the same and sort of different. Canadian singer Shania Twain also wanted to cross over between two different music markets, but they weren't in different languages. Shania was a country music star to this point. She was selling tons of albums but wasn't a mainstream pop artist. So she put out her own crossover album in 2002, meant to take her not from a Spanish market into an English market or vice versa, but from the country charts to the pop charts. That album is called Up, and the unusual thing about it is that it came with two discs. Each disc had the same songs, just mixed and remastered in a different way. One was a green disc with the songs mixed in the modern country music style that she had been doing up to that point. The other CD was a red disc with the exact same songs but mixed and built for pop and top 40 radio stations. Being an American with an older sister who was into country music, she owned Shania's album, so I was familiar with both of these versions. But outside of the US there isn't really a market for American country music. So Shania Twain's international CD also had two discs the red one mixed as pop songs, and a blue disc where instead of country music it had the same slate of songs but this time mixed in more of a world music style with some eastern instruments and rhythms. So the same song would sound like this on the red pop disc and then like this on the green country disc and then like this on the blue international disc, and it worked. All that effort really paid off. That album was a number one smash and it was huge for Twain's career. It also really wrote a playbook for how future artists like Taylor Swift would make the same move. Well, maybe without the world versions. I haven't heard any T-Swift songs like that, with the sweet sitar sounds playing underneath, though I'd be into it. But the first multi-language songs that I ever became conscious of were when I was living in Japan and first got really exposed to the world of J-pop. J-pop is a genre of music where the J stands for Japanese and pop stands for popular music like how we use it. There's J-pop, k-pop, of course, for Korean pop music, but also C-pop for Chinese music, v-pop for Vietnamese, t-pop for Thai and so on and so forth. You get the idea. Pretty much every language is going to have its own pop music scene and stars, because these markets can be smaller individually. The mega, mega stars often have appeal that overlaps into multiple music markets, appeal that even reaches the teenagers of another country and has them singing the lyrics and doing the dances of these pop idols BTS, anyone. This is where I came in. Well, not the singing and dancing part, but when I was teaching junior high schoolers in Japan, they'd often have questions for me about what it was like, where I was from and what the kids their age did in America. I would share my experiences, but also ask what kind of TV or music they were into too. Then I would head down to the rental store with a list of media to look for. I say the rental store to set it apart from a video or DVD rental store Not that those even exist in America anymore, but because of the bigger rental stores in Japan, like Tadaya Rented Movies, sure, but they also rented video games, books and music CDs too. I'd talk to my students and ask them to check my list to make sure I got the names right, which you may think is an unnecessary step or an exaggeration, but I would need to remember new artist names and sometimes weird J-pop music group names, so that I could go to the store later and search for the latest single from bands like Rip Slime or Bump of Chicken, small detour. My daughter saw this bit in my notes and was really curious about the Japanese band Bump of Chicken and what their name meant. Having lived for years in Japan. I got pretty used to seeing strange English phrases like that so I hadn't wondered about it. It was just Bump of Chicken's name, if anything. I guess I would have assumed it was about pieces of chicken that you eat, although no form of chicken I know of is measured in bumps. But sure Turns out it's actually a sweaty English translation for the Japanese phrase Jakshan no Hankeki, or counter attack of the week. In this sense, chicken is their way of saying like a coward or weakling someone you might hear called a chicken, and the Bump is more along the lines of a pro wrestling term, meaning a hit or an attack. That's interesting to me. I'd never do that before. Okay, bump of Chicken aren't out there singing their songs in English, so I should probably get back to the main topic, end detour. Anyway, I would find these singers that my students were listening to Deep dive on their albums for a weekend or so, photocopy the lyrics from the lyrics book and try to memorize some lines to show my students that I cared about what they were into, and in turn I would usually get students more engaged in my classes. It was a mutual benefit. This also wasn't any kind of torture for me. I like J-pop. I like all music for the most part, and while I'm aware that's an obnoxious thing to say, I just don't know any other way to describe it. I'm way more particular about any spoken audio I'm listening to than I ever am about music. So I already liked rock and rap and alternative and R&B, but I also liked super pop music like Backstreet Boys, hanson, you know whoever. That part made the transition to J-pop easy and pretty seamless. I gave anything a chance and since I wasn't listening to the radio or seeing whatever anime it was from, I would just pick the songs I liked off the albums with no real context apart from the way they sounded, put them on my iPod and then listen whenever I rode the bike or the train. This was the way I discovered Boa. That spelled B-O-A, or more specifically, with a capital B, lowercase O and then a capital A. I don't have anything more interesting about that. I just thought I should say it, since I'm not confident that you could just pick up with your ears, and I'm pronouncing it with a capital A at the end Boa, okay. Boa is a J-pop star and was on top of the charts when I lived in Japan. I dipped in on a lot of the chart-topping music. This was the era of Ayumi Hamasaki, tadahikaru Kotokumi Otsuka-Ai. The boy groups were there too, like Orein, shidaenji, glee and News, but Boa was a juggernaut. She's one of only a handful of artists in Japan to ever have six albums in a row hit number one on the Oricon charts, which would be like the Billboard charts here in America. Boa fit right in with the classic J-pop songs of the early 2000s, with her bouncy dance tracks and soulful ballads. It really was wild to see the pop aesthetic of American artists like Britney and N-Sync fully replicated in these Japanese pop acts, all the way down to the outfits, vocal ticks and dance choreography. The thing that set Boa apart, though, was her scope. She wasn't the biggest selling artist in Japan, sure, but Japan also wasn't the only place she was selling music. Boa's full name is Boa Kwan, and, for those unfamiliar with East Asian languages, kwan is not a Japanese surname, it's Korean. I was hearing Boa in Japan for the first time like this, but music fans in Korea were hearing her like this. Other people heard her singing Mandarin Chinese like this, and then there's also the people that heard her first in English like this. Boa was first discovered by a talent agency who decided she was someone they wanted to turn into a pop star. So they got her taking lessons in singing, dancing and Japanese, because a crossover career was very much in the plans from the beginning. She debuted with moderate successes in Korea as a teenager and then switched to focus on the Japanese music market and a music career in Japan. Her first Japanese album came out in 2002 and debuted at number one, which was the first album by a Korean artist to ever do that in Japan. A huge part of her being the first Korean to do that had to do with timing. Boa was very much a case of right person, right place, right time. Not only was she young and talented, boa was achieving her popularity right as the worlds of Japan and Korea were changing forever. So there's a huge history under this. It's complicated, it's ugly and I certainly won't do much of it justice here, but Japan and Korea have had tensions with each other for a very long time. It's pretty mild now, but there's a lot of history there, from World War II and many years after Korea was occupied by Japan, and it wasn't until decades later that they could end the occupation, form a democratic government and become the South Korea we know today. In the wake of ending that occupation, south Korea also implemented bands on Japanese music or media from being imported, sold or broadcast on Korean stations, which led to a mutual ban between the two countries for decades. Right now, in the year 2022, it's still against the law to broadcast Jappies music or TV over South Korean terrestrial stations. But the first part of the ban started to be lifted and open back up in 1999 and 2000,. Then, slowly, more and more, over the next couple of years. Bowa was a Korean artist atop the first wave, the hallue of Korean music popularity that was gaining real force in the early 2000s, right when the restrictions in Japan were finally lifted. Those restrictions were pretty much all out of the way by the end of 03, culminating in the date of January 1, 2004, when it once again became officially legal for stores in Korea to sell Japanese music media movies, animation, comics, etc. After the ban that had lasted for decades was over, bowa released her first major albums, originally in Japanese, where she had gained immense popularity, and then, writing that popularity, she started releasing albums in Korea, again containing many of the same songs on her Japanese albums, but now in Korean. Of course, some of the singles on those albums came out Mandarin, chinese and English as well, which allowed her music to move across nation and language boundaries, cementing her popularity in multiple countries across Asia. She is a humongous star, and I was just diving into Japanese music when she was doing her thing and cranking out hit after hit, so naturally a lot of her music wound up on my iPod. I want to also add Sebastian Yatra as a really current example. He sings the song Dosorugitas, or Two Little Caterpillars, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda for...
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08 The Ten Yen Arcade
03/20/2022
08 The Ten Yen Arcade
The Perfect Show is back with a new look and a new episode! Scot dives into the video game world and puts a magnifying glass on a special spot from his time in Japan, the Ten Yen Arcade. Explore the world of bits and bytes with him in this episode all about arcades and playing games Special thanks to: Drew, Lee, and Shane, my video game playing friends. Music from this episode by: Cloud Cuddles - (who did the amazing chiptune cover of Otsuka Ai’s ‘Amaenbo’ at the end of the episode.) Brrrrravo - Bastreon - Igthun - Ismael Eldesouky - From the and used under a Creative Commons License: Komiku - Songs: School - Mall - A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - Beach - Creo - Song: Memory - Rolemusic - Song: Alamak - AI-Generated Transcript: Speaker 1: 0:26 Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Tell me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I was never a really big video game guy, but there was a point in my life, when I was living in Japan, where video games were the core of a perfect experience for me. When I say I wasn't a big video game guy, I mean specifically the mainstream video game path that everyone my age seemed to have. I never had any of the Nintendo consoles, nes, super Nintendo and 64 Gamecube Wii none of those. I did have an old working Atari from a cousin's garage sale with a ton of games and Sega Genesis, but with only three games ever. I've had a PlayStation once I think it was a PlayStation 1 and an early Xbox, but I didn't own either one for longer than a couple weeks. Those are separate stories. So If I was going to go about playing a game now, I'd probably rather play a board game with people in person. If I'm going to play a game on my phone, it's probably an app version of a board game like Risk or Majon. I'm pretty basic. Now I do have a computer that I will download and play games on, along with all the other computer duties that I have it do, but that's a relatively recent, only since the start of COVID thing. So, yeah, I'm maybe not the typical video game guy. In fact, when I'm playing games now online and get frustrated, you can frequently hear me saying stuff like I hate video games and making plans to cut them out of my life. Basically, my ability to handle all the well just the normal stuff about video games is on the level of a 10 year old or younger, because I never really got used to dealing with it as a kid. I mean, that's my theory. Maybe I'm just a big baby man when it comes to video games, but hopefully the first thing Alright geography time. After college I moved to Japan, to Kita Kyushu, a city of about 1 million people in Fukuoka Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. So Kyushu is the southernmost of the four main islands in Japan. Hokkaido is the northernmost island. Below it is Honshu, the biggest and most central island of Japan. That's where Tokyo, osaka and Kyoto all are. Now Honshu is kind of an elongated island. It stretches pretty far north and south, but off its southeast side is the island of Shikoku and down south of Honshu is Kyushu. Kita Kyushu, the city I first lived in, is on the northern end of Kyushu. The Kita in Kita Kyushu is north or north Kyushu, so it's just on the other side of the water from the southernmost tip of the main island, honshu. In fact, and I know this from personal experience, if you are going home on the train late at night and fall asleep, you just might wind up missing your stop, going under the water between the islands and being awakened by a nice Japanese train conductor at Shimono Seki station on Honshu, then needing to make your way back down to Kyushu. The winter and spring were very mild in Kyushu, but in the summer the weather got hot. I was working in the public schools, and in Japanese public school there is a summer break, but it's not as long as the traditional break for US schools. It happens later in the summer and it's treated more like a mid-year break, how we do winter break, because the Japanese school year starts in April and ends in March. Once it really heated up, I was often in sweltering, unericonditioned classrooms during the hottest hours of the afternoon I call the classrooms sweltering. Like any of the other rooms were any different? They weren't. The heat was pervasive. I was really sweating those first few weeks. I remember being puzzled why no one else looked like they were having a hard time. And then, a few weeks or so into being in that heat all day, every day, my body sort of adjusted. I stopped sweating everywhere all the time and was pretty much normal like everyone else. Kita Kyushu is also where I learned about the fifth season of the year. Like I said, kyushu is down south in Japan and much farther south than anywhere I had grown up or lived in to that point. Latitude wise, it's about on the same level as LA, but it's an island environment. So that means, as the locals would explain to me, that there were five seasons there, not four. Fall goes into winter, which goes next into spring and then summer. That's all the same, but between summer and fall in Kyushu anyway, that's when it was to you the rainy season. It stayed as hot as summer, but added a heaping helping of humidity for good measure, setting the stage perfectly for the occasional typhoon that would come through. I never had school off for a snow day in Kyushu, but we had multiple days off for typhoons. What was new to me was how the weather didn't really change the heat. Where I grew up in Kansas it would get oppressively humid, but then after it rained, the air would clear out and feel lighter for a bit. In Kyushu, during the rainy season it would be at maximum humidity, downpour rain for like an hour and still be exactly as humid afterward, and it would usually rain downpours like that a few times a day every day. Stepping from air conditioning outside during Tsu-yu felt like hitting a wall. The difference was that noticeable. My first rainy season in Kyushu I was living in an apartment with a roommate and the place was fine, but we didn't have air conditioning. I was alternating weeks teaching at two different public schools and neither one of them had air conditioning either. I rode to work and then back home on my basic mama-charity Japanese bicycle again no air conditioning, and this was pretty much my regular weekday pattern. In the evening it wasn't so bad, but during the heat of the day it got to be 40-45 degrees Celsius, which is 104-113 degrees Fahrenheit, and practically everywhere you went was sweltering. My brain started making a mental map of the places along my roots, where you could get free AC, even just for a quick walkthrough, much like the mental map I made back when I first arrived to the places in the city where you could find a western toilet if you needed one, as opposed to the traditional Japanese toilet. Basically, information that could come in very handy for either myself or someone else in their time of need. In fact, the main places where we did get access to free air conditioning were retail establishments Some restaurants, big department stores, smaller ones were hit or miss, but it would mainly be places where you had to pay to be there in some form or another. Kokura Eki, the train station closest to where I lived, had a shopping center with a number of nice stores in AC, but they were pretty well tended by clerks who for some reason seemed to be more interested in helping you shop than just giving you space to cool off and avoid melting completely. Convenient stores were often well air conditioned, but you couldn't stay in one of those for too long without attracting even more attention than I already did as a non-Japanese person. I did try. I got pretty good at the whole pick the thing up and turn it around and be like oh, what's this item. Let me examine it very slowly. Ingredients, you say, Let me see what those are. Oh, a magazine rack? Better make sure I look through every option on there. Yeah, sometimes when you're hot, you got to do what you got to do. Near the station, though, just across a huge pedestrian plaza, was a mall called IME. Like the contraction, for I am IME, that's the name of the mall. That's Japan for you. But it was a really nice spot for shopping and eating that had recently been built, and there was a beautiful courtyard with an open central area inside of the building where you could even look down over all the floors. So this would have been a great spot to hang out and soak up some artificially cooled air, except for one small thing. The rumor I heard was that it was built on the site of an old Shinto burial ground and that the mall was cursed because of that. Now, I do not believe in curses, but if enough of your Japanese and non-Japanese friends decide that they do, you end up having to look for a different spot anyway. So the train station was out, the cursed mall was out, and this led to my friends and I exploring a bit. And on the other side of the pedestrian plaza, we found a towering building that was a little run-down but filled to the brim with different small shops and random businesses crammed into every level, accessible through one tiny elevator and presumably a set of stairs that I never saw. The stores and the levels had no real rhyme or reason, just businesses that could survive and attract clients to a beat-up building next to several fancier and more modern ones A small bookstore, a little cafe, a collectible store. But there, on one of the levels, sat the place that would become our air conditioning lifeline, our go-to cool-off and wind-down spot, the Ten Yen Arcade. Japan has tons of arcades. Like, imagine a place with a lot of arcades. Now, double that or maybe triple it, but yeah, a lot. Here's where my lack of familiarity with video games kicks into high gear. So please forgive any terminology blunders I make here, but a big arcade in Japan would have tons of cabinet games with regular joysticks, dozens of different games where instead of joysticks you use a guitar or a dance pad or a drum set, or a sushi table with a giant plastic cleaver yeah, that is one I saw once. Also, it would have tons of UFO catcher games, which is the Japanese name for the claw machines where you position your grabber claw and try to drop it down and grab a prize with it. Because there are so many arcades, there are homes for tons of video game franchises and several generations of the really popular games. Games numbered one higher than the last one, with a sign on them hyping what's new in this version, and it seemed like there were new ones of those replacing old ones nearly every time I turned around. What this also creates is a whole ecosystem of places where the games go after they're no longer the latest and greatest version of the block, like a plinko ball falling down and bouncing on pegs. A game machine in Japan will hit several levels before it gets all the way to the bottom. They may move around their original arcade a bit, from being in front and center at first to maybe back in a corner later, but whether they're updated with a newer version of themselves or something shiny or takes their place, eventually they leave the top shelf arcade. Mid-level arcades will snap up most of these, and then some might go to the entryways of Daiei grocery stores or the parking lot of a Don Quixote variety store. Like I said, there are lots of places for a video game machine in Japan to land on its way down to the bottom. One of the last stops they hit before they are shipped out of the country is the Ten Yen Arcade, and this is exactly the place I found in that stack of random shops, complete with its own big, beautiful, steadily chugging air conditioner. It's called the Ten Yen Arcade for the obvious reason that games inside all cost ten yen to play. So right now the exchange rate is 115 yen to the US dollar, so ten yen would be roughly 9 cents. In a new arcade the games would cost more like 100 to 200 yen per play. So ten yen to me felt like nothing If you haven't handled yen before. There are different denominations of bills, but the smallest bill is the thousand-yen note. So about the ten dollar bill? Everything under that is handled only in coins which come in one, five, ten, fifty, one hundred and five hundred yen varieties. The Juandama, or Ten Yen Coin, is the second largest coin after the five hundred and the only one with its unique bronze color. They had changed machines at the arcade that spit out Ten Yen coins, but Japan is also a way more cash-based society than the US and without a 25 yen coin in the currency mix, I actually wound up getting Ten Yen coins as change a lot, so after that first time I usually just saved up my change and brought the Ten Yen coins with me to the arcade. Maybe this is a good place to jump out and say as I've been working on the next chunk of episodes, I'm refining the theme of this show and instead of just telling stories about these perfect things or experiences, I'm going to see if there's a way to recreate them, either for myself, like in the Tiny Tense episode, or for others, like in the Perfect Road episode. And then also, after I run out of my experiences to share, I want to see how it goes replicating other people's nuggets of perfection too. As I was looking for ways to recreate this perfect experience, I ran across a 5-cent arcade named the oh Wow Nickel arcade in Fresno, california and I was going to be in Fresno, actually so I stopped in for a visit when I was down that way a few months back. Speaker 3: 14:31 I'm going to clip my microphone on here. I'm wearing a mask, though, so it's a little weird. Alright, let's do this. Get 100 nickels. There they come. Speaker 2: 14:47 Oh, that. Speaker 1: 14:49 Games for only a nickel 5 cents. I mean by those numbers. I may have even found a place that was twice as perfect as a 10-yen arcade in Japan. Speaker 2: 15:00 Oh, my God. Speaker 3: 15:01 Oh, it's dropping Nickels, nickels. Alright, seems to be done. Now Pick up the ones that I dropped. Hand sanitizer here there. Speaker 1: 15:21 Okay, sure, some games cost two or three nickels, but I wouldn't really know what was up unless I checked this place out. Speaker 3: 15:27 Here's a punching thing. It takes three nickels. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, let's try the first one. Here we go Two, all right, three, sorry, wow. Oh, 898's the high I got 522. I'm pretty weak. All right, let's see what else we can do. All right. Old school games, fighting games. Speaker 2: 16:17 That's what. Speaker 3: 16:18 I'm looking for All right. Marvel vs Capcom takes two nickels, 10 cents, perfect. Let's try the right side. Maybe there we go. Let's see how this goes. Speaker 2: 16:41 First off what. Speaker 1: 16:45 I wandered around with my Styrofoam cup of nickels checking out all the games, playing anything that looked fun or interesting, but, being by myself, met no one to talk to, so oh, no, oh no. I wound up with long stretches like this one of me just playing a game. Speaker 3: 17:09 All right, there it goes. Speaker 1: 17:13 And also much shorter stretches like this one. Speaker 3: 17:17 Galaga is fun. One nickel, I don't really play Galaga much, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, I'm bad and I'm dead, all right. Well, I'm not good at Galaga. Speaker 1: 17:38 I cut it way down for the show, but I was there for about an hour on that $5 and played a lot of games. Speaker 3: 17:43 This backman solid Donkey Kong there there. Oh, hungry, hungry, Hippos, dance, dance Revolution. Oh, no, not that, just a similar Interesting Daytona USA. Daytona USA, cruisin' World. Yeah, I'll play that for two nickels, absolutely All right. Sitting in the seat. One One, there it is All right. Oh, that's cruise Japan, right, we gotta go to Japan. Speaker 1: 18:29 All right, man. Most of the games were old, not all were good, few didn't even work. But this is a place that is trying to blow you away with quantity, not quality. There you go. Speaker 3: 18:39 This is a little hound game, man Ready set go and enough. Speaker 1: 18:45 We're up and running to keep me playing and entertained for an hour you can do it. Speaker 3: 18:52 I can second All right, done, done with that, what else is? Speaker 2: 19:03 there. Speaker 3: 19:03 Alien game, ski ball machine Shooting, basketball game. That's out of order. Little kid stuff. Well, that's it, let's go All right. Well, that's, oh wow, actually better than I thought it was going to be. You know, that's fine, it's not. It's not really what I was not really what I was looking for. But then again I didn't really think it was going to be, and, yeah, not bad. Speaker 1: 19:49 I went during a cooler part of the year so I wasn't really testing any air conditioning component of this experience. The games were older, how you'd expect a lot of classic arcade games and others that seemed like leftovers that ended up there somehow. But it was nice and I had a good time. I wouldn't, however, call it perfect. Even though it was super cheap video gaming, it lacked some major pieces of that 10 year and arcade experience in Kyushu like being there by myself, and I thought there must be better ideas for recreating that experience than this. But back to the 10 year arcade the space was cramped but there were no clerks caring whether you were actively playing or not, only open doors and, amazingly, artificially chilled air. It was just the place I had been searching to hide, and when the days got their hottest, I put out the word to my roommate and two of our other friends and we decided to meet up there on a future afternoon after teaching. Meanwhile I soaked up all the cool air I could while I perused the games that they had. I figured we'd mainly be playing fighting games like Street Fighter, because that was practically the only thing I had experience with, and playing them the same way I did back home too, which meant mostly button mashing and crossing your fingers. But when we actually got together and started hitting up the machines, two games far and away outpaced all the others in terms of getting the majority of both our time and our dimes Our Juendamas and our Tamas. Nope, this is where I learned about Mobile Suit Gundam or Kiro-Senshi Gundam, which is part of the people in giant robots fighting other people in giant robots. Genre Gundam was everywhere in Japan on the toy shells and the magazine racks, tv movies and, apparently, in video games. Off to one side in the Tenian Arcade, over in a little cove behind the base deray of air conditioners, were eight machines connected to each other with built-in stools to sit on. It was the Gundam Arcade game. It was amazing. You chose your Gundam robot, picked your special primary and backup weapons and then you were dropped into a 3D city environment and tasked with finding and blowing up the other team of Gundam robots. Since there were four people in our group, we could frequently play as a full squad that seems like such a weirdly intense term for friends playing a game, but whatever and then we'd often play against another squad of four, usually Japanese junior high or high school students in the after-school versions of their uniforms, which meant maybe a missing tie or rolled up sleeves, earrings or spiked hair that wouldn't have flown in the classroom. And they were also there in the afternoon doing exactly the same thing. We were avoiding the heat. The four of us in my group were myself, my roommate Trell from Atlanta, ken from Alaska and Cesar from Mexico City. We all worked for the same...
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007 Tiny Display Tents
12/11/2021
007 Tiny Display Tents
Scot chases down the tiny display tents that used to be in stores, and trying to find out what happened to them takes him on a tiny adventure in this episode. If you’ve ever marveled at one of those miniature camping set-ups you are not alone, this episode is for you, and anyone who wants to join the fun.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/21449996
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006 Mononoke, Miyazaki, and Maebashi - もののけ姫 - 宮崎駿 - 前橋市
10/22/2021
006 Mononoke, Miyazaki, and Maebashi - もののけ姫 - 宮崎駿 - 前橋市
This episode Scot explores being in Japan for the opening of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) in 1997, and trying to see it again before it was available in the US. Mononoke Hime was Scot’s introduction to the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki and began a life-long appreciation for his work and films.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20899937
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005 Musical Interlude - The Haunted House Song
10/02/2021
005 Musical Interlude - The Haunted House Song
Scot takes a quick break from format for a few announcements and to introduce a new Halloween song: The Haunted House Song. I also learned how to do video editing by making a music video for it! It’s silly and dumb and I’m also very proud of it.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20680781
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004 A Perfect Road: K-10 to I-435 North interchange
09/08/2021
004 A Perfect Road: K-10 to I-435 North interchange
In this episode, Scot tries to convince a friend to chase down a perfect drive on the perfect stretch of road, and things don’t go completely according to plan.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20403665
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003 Baseball on the Radio
08/30/2021
003 Baseball on the Radio
In this short episode Scot goes over the perfect pairing of Baseball and the Radio, exploring a bit of its history as well as his history with it.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20304041
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002 My Year with MoviePass
08/14/2021
002 My Year with MoviePass
This episode Scot explores the year he was a MoviePass subscriber and the ups and downs of that company. We also talk with Scot's dad and actor Vivian Aalis.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20143958
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001 Billy's Balloon by Don Hertzfeldt
08/05/2021
001 Billy's Balloon by Don Hertzfeldt
Welcome to The Perfect Show! Let host Scot Maupin introduce the show and himself and then tell you about today’s perfect thing - Billy’s Balloon, an animated film by Don Hertzfeldt.
/episode/index/show/perfectshow/id/20042231