My friend Jessica live in the countryside, north of Tokyo; a placed called Higashi-matsuyama.

I don't know if Ashleigh has told you this, but she's been taking bellydancing classes for quite a while. I think maybe 8 months or so. One of the teachers at Aiko has been doing bellydance and decided that she wanted to teach a class. So she started a class at one of the community centers. COMS is the local we-help-people place. It's really qui...

So I came home from work one day to find a small but entire purple octopus sitting placidly on the top shelf of my refrigerator. Well, no, actually, it was exactly half of an entire octopus - four tentacles and one eyeball (the beak was the only thing that had been removed, as far as I could tell). I immediately went to inquire about its presenc...