Wish Upon A Star (For All The Good It'll Do You)

Well, it's official. Hopeful Star Trek fanboys everywhere, I hate to be the man to break the bad news, but it seems warp drive is in fact impossible. A group of physicists at an Italian university reviewed Miguel Alcubierre's famous spacetime distortion ("warp bubble") calculations from a bit over a decade ago and discovered that while such a thing still remains theoretically possible it would be highly unstable once light speed is reached and filled with deadly Hawking radiation. This is really unfortunate because for a while there it seemed like someone had actually come up with a mathematical model for tweaking the universe to attain FTL speeds and that is, needless to say, balls-to-the-wall awesome.

I don't think about space and the cosmos as much as I used to, which is lamentable. One thing to be said about growing up on the edge of that bastard suburb of SF, Castro Valley, was that the night sky visibility was much better than many other surrounding cities. I used to look up a lot more and just let the grandeur and majesty of the stars wash over me in a spectral wave. Try it some time; just look up and think about what you can see--so many pinpricks of light in the aether representing countless planets, whole galaxies--and know that it's not a millionth or even a billionth of what exists in the universe. Feel it pass though you and know that you are a part of it.

Yesterday Maia and I wanted to head to the city of Kurume in Fukuoka Prefecture to watch a movie, pick up applications for the Japanese proficiency test held this summer and buy a few other odds and ends, and along the way decided to take a detour south into the mountains to the secluded village of Hoshino. Literally translated, the name Hoshino means "star field" and the village's mascot is, unimaginatively, a cute little star and its supposed offspring. Whether just a product of taking the village's name way too seriously or if in fact it's been known through the ages as a top notch star watching spot the village is home to just about the only astronomical observatory I've ever known in Japan.

The Star Culture Center's (sounds cult like, no?) pleasing facade belies the utter lack of anything to see or do there during the day. Next, a picture for you WoW players out there--step this way if you need any help leveling to 80.

Hoshino is a place off the beaten path for sure, and reaching it from our direction took us on some one-lane roads that reminded me of the rambling mountain paths that lead to some of my more back country schools. This road must be a popular spot for touge-running drift boys since each of the 30+ curves that thrust steeply up the mountain are numbered for easy reference. As it winds up and through the ridge we leave the familiar rice paddy monoculture behind and end up in another monoculture—tea. For as much green tea as Japan drinks you sure don't come across tea farming very often. I wonder if there's some prohibitively expensive start-up cost that keeps farmers in rice or potatoes or dirt farming or whatever keeps the government subsidy checks rolling in. Perhaps I just answered my own question there.

The observatory does offer gorgeous views of the foggy valley below at least. On the right, the tiny flame you can barely see inside this monument is an eternal flame brought by an area man immediately following the Hiroshima atomic bombing and has been burning since 1945.

I sincerely wish that it wasn't miserably drizzling rain that Saturday afternoon as the town seems like a genuinely beautiful place to explore, preferably on foot. We were disappointed again at the observatory, which online sources built up to be a museum but actually turned out to be a restaurant and sort of community hall or something. Sure there was a telescope, but it was daytime, rainy and I wasn't going to pay an admission fee to see it. We used the toilet and left.

Our destination from Hoshino was Kurume's YouMe Town shopping mall and the Starbucks nestled inside, but I managed to get us lost along the way thinking that there was a faster way than just going back over the pass we took to get there. It's not that we didn't reach Kurume, it's only that we both had hoped for a tamer, less white-knuckled road that left our stomachs intact for coffee. But coffee and juice we had, all while sitting on a second floor bench watching the freaks and fashion jokes mosey on by. I tell ya, people watching is an activity here that will pay dividends.

At the movies we saw Watchmen, which, at something like two-and-a-half hours, was certainly worth the 3600-yen I paid for the both of us to get in. Whatever people may say about the lack of any psychic squids there at the end the remainder of the flick was virtually identical to the graphic novels. Hell, I'd go so far as to say the excission of that ridiculous cephalopod and the addition of a surprise frame-up did the story a favor and I stand by that no matter how much Alan Moore and fans would probably like to put my face in an industrial fruit juicer for even thinking it. Anyways, afterwards we hit up perhaps the skeaziest kaitenzushi joint either of us had ever laid eyes on. (In their defense, I think Maia and I are ruined after having visited Kappa Sushi in Hita, a.k.a. The Holy [Fish] Land. More on that later.)  I doubt there was a customer in the place without a criminal record; their faces told the story of hundreds of liquor store smash n' grabs and dozens of senior citizen pension check defraudings. And the sushi...it ranged from unremarkable to complete garbage. What a way to cap off the night.

--Matt