Trip to Osaka 12

Before I got on the Shinkansen, I bought a can of coffee. I picked it because it was the largest can and because I knew that the Boss label usually has pretty good coffee, considering that it comes from a vending machine. Also I thought the name Silky Black was interesting, and hopefully descriptive.

The blue is the back of the seat in front of me. You can just see the book that I brought with me to read Buddhist Logic. I have had the book for 40 years and have started it a number of times but never got very far into it. It is a translation of a study done by a Russian academic in the 1930s, comparing the various types of logic that appear in Buddhism with each other and Western logic - very dry and heavy. I have decided that each time I take a long trip on the Shinkansen I will bring it with me and get a few more hours of reading finished. The book is not one for casual reading at home.When I turned the bottle around, I discovered that Silky is not descriptive but instead is an acronym. You can see in the following picture what it stands for.
I am not sure how coffee can be intelligent, but it did taste pretty good.

That ends my trip to Osaka. After I got home, I got emails thanking me for my provocative presentation and a feeler for the possibility of doing it again here in Sendai.

Before ending this entry, I thought you might be interested in a photo that appeared in our local Sendai newspaper, the Kahoku Shinpo, on October 19. The bears are window shopping in a city in Hokkaido. Because of the excessive heat this summer, there is not much food in the mountains and many wild animals are slipping into towns to raid the trash and look for other sources of food. We also have bears in the western part of Sendai city, which is mostly mountains. Occasionally, they appear in our area, wandering around near my old school and the faculty housing where we lived for two years.