According to this article in Parade, Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire has been vegetarian (almost vegan) for 14 years.

I'm looking forward to the new Spider-Man movie - it will actually be opening here in Japan before the U.S., I think it will be subtitled not dubbed, so I'll be able to see it.

In the garden at Tenryuji.

I know what I want my backyard to look like now...

It's close to closing, and now that the crowds have thinned on this fine spring day, there's some quiet to be had. Wondrous.

(Are the legs of a pretty girl any less beautiful than a Zen garden? Any more? I think this, and I recall that Ikkyu trained here.)

Swallows(?) nesting in the rafters of the Heavenly Dragon temple. I think this perhaps makes the place more holy.

Then I think of birds and rabbits nesting in my house, in my yard; consider my blessings.

the temple bell
the cry of birds
the temple bell again

I just heard on BBC World TV that Kurt Vonnegut has passed on, died, expired, left us.

I recently read Mother Night on the plane over to Japan. In his introduction to that novel, he wrote:

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvellous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

...

There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead, you're dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

"Antibiotics are now under threat because of the explosion in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A third of all deaths on this planet are the result of infection so there is an urgent need to create new therapies," says Robert Hancock, principal investigator and Canada Research Chair in Pathogenomics and Antimicrobials. "The beauty of this peptide is that it acts on the host to trigger a protective response and doesn't act on bacteria directly. That means it's unlikely bacteria will become resistant to it."

The team found that a peptide, or chain of amino acids, they have dubbed innate defense regulator peptide (IDR-1), can increase innate immunity without triggering harmful inflammation, and offer protection both before and after infection is present.

Reuters reports on a man who text messaged a phone number that came to him in a dream, and found a wife.