What should have been your Friday open thread, dude

by liberal japonicus

This should have been your friday open thread, but the blog gods blinded me to it until just a little bit ago. 

Eagle-eyed watchers spotted a marijuana leaf on Yu Darvish's t-shirt as he landed in Dallas today for his official introduction with the Texas Rangers. 

The "explanation," at least in the city's local news, was that the shirt (pictured right) showed a Japanese maple leaf.

Nonsense. It's weed. But, it doesn't necessarily mean that Darvish may be your next smoking buddy.

In Japan, the marijuana leaf is a popular symbol without any real smoking context. Plenty of native Japanese have leafy t-shirts, or necklaces, or air fresheners in their cars, and don't really know that they're symbolizing a drug.

Yu Darvish is a pretty interesting figure. His father is Iranian, his mother is Japanese, and they met while both were attending university in Florida and there are some things to take away from that, but the pot leaf thing was one of those things that I wanted to share. Japanese really don't associate the symbol with drugs, and hemp appears in lots of places because it has a 'fresh nature' feel. Maybe this is unwarranted, but it tells me a lot more about the US than about Japan that you've got a pack of sportswriters tittering over it like 6th graders making fart jokes. 

Comments

[Laura Koerbeer]

I wanted to make some monoprints of leaves soI went out o my deck and collected some specimens: alder, big leaf maple, one from each of my Japanese maples, evergreen clemantis, hydrangia

I made little linoleum black prints of each tyep of leaf and put together compossitions of layers of leaves.

Absolutely everybody who has seen one of the resulting monoprints thinks I tried to sneak a pot leaf into the picture.

[Countme-In]

For those whose New Year's physical fitness resolutions have already been put away with the sweater Mom knitted you, perhaps this will give you renewed resolve:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/your-moment-of-zen.html

For some reason, my response to watching this rather mesmerizing video reminded me of the funny sensation hairshirtthedonist reported from his loins when I suggested he soften up his kid's stiff baseball glove by plunging it into a bucket of shaving cream.

I swept that image aside by imagining instead each of the entire cast of Meet The Press, or better, the roundtable, especially George Will on This Week With George Stephanopolos, seated in such a contraption as they opinionated on the week's political cataclysms.

[Phil]

Luckily we can ban him from ever wearing that dangerous shirt again, since children might watch baseball games, and as McKinneyTX noted recently, talking about pot isn't political speech, and as long as it's to protect children, you can ban it.