Surprisingly difficult puzzle

Back in Sapporo, I was given a puzzle to solve in a bar I often visit to have dinner. This puzzle turned out to be quite difficult, and it took me several visits to this bar before I solved it. The goal is to get all the pieces into the frame, of course.

Since the pieces do not fit by just reordering them using the "obvious" way to put them into the frame, I thought the round corners and non-round corners and the fact that if you put to cat heads towards each other you get some slack etc. had something to do with the solution. but neither of these things had anything to do with the puzzle solution. These red herrings cost me two nights of puzzle failure, haha.

Ridiculously difficult "egg shaped kendama"

Almost...

The last night of September, I was shown something called "egg kendama". A kendama is an old Japanese toy. It has a ball that you are supposed to land on different parts of a wooden handle. The egg shaped kendamas similarly had marbles and you were supposed to shake the thing to get the marble to stay on top of a small pedestal. When it was placed there, the egg would balance upright, when it was not there the egg would fall over.

This turned out to be very difficult. I finally managed to get the egg with only one marble balanced, but the one with two was too difficult for me to finish before they closed the bar. For some reason they gave me a piece of cloth made out of some material that was "extra good to wipe smart phone screens" with.

I came back a few days later to try to clear the two marble challenge too. I did manage to do it that day. And then they wanted to take a photo with both eggs balanced together, so I had to redo the first one too.

Last yukata day of 2015

My friends tell me that you normally don't wear a yukata after August, but I had a new obi and a yukata I had only used once, so I used that yukata in September too. I had dinner at a friend's place and was asked to do some magic to some people who also showed up. Doing magic in a yukata is pretty inconvenient because it has no pockets and your sleeves get caught up in everything on the table if you try to move your arms.

I was also shown some magic prop that I had not seen before. There were three plastic koalas that apart from the colors seemed exactly the same. Despite this, the magician can determine which koala he is holding without looking. It took me quite some time to figure out how, haha. A clever idea.

Funny faces and funny underwear

I met a guy who runs a ramen restaurant and we had to put on coasters that you hang on your nose to make the lower part of your face look like an animal.

There were also coasters with human faces

I was also asked to show my underwear (this happens to me all the time in Japan). I had on a pair that says 粗品, which means "trifling gift" and is decorated like envelopes that you give presents with but where you have to excuse yourself for the present being such a worthless and trifling thing.

Corn and magic

I dropped by Ropossa not dressed as the kuchisake onna a few days after the costume competition, and they still had some very nice fresh corn. This time I just got the corn and had to eat it using hands and mouth only, though. No special service unless you glue stuff to your face, I guess.

I also ran into another regular who I had not met before but who had wanted to meet me after seeing all kinds of crazy photos of me many times. She was there with a friend. I was asked to do some magic for them, and they seemed to enjoy that.

Meeting lots of magicians

Photo taken using my phone to control the innocent looking camera standing all alone on a table

The day before "team Jonas" was scheduled to appear in the Bon-Odori costume competition, I bought a new camera. The costume competition usually has many entrants with impressive costumes, so having a good camera with you is nice. The new version of the camera I used up till now (but which I managed to break when falling down the stairs with the camera in a pocket) had just been released, so I bought that one. Ricoh GR II. A nice camera that does not do much more than the last version, but that is pretty good. The only really new feature is that you can leave the camera and control it from your cell phone. You can see what the camera sees in real time on the phone, and change any settings etc.

When I went out to get something to eat, I ran into lots of magicians. One guy was a student at my university and was in the magicians' club there a few years after me. I also met Birdie Koyama, possibly the most famous magician from Sapporo. He is more or less retired now, but used to be a big thing in stage magic and used to have his own magic bar in Sapporo. He has now moved to Niigata, but he was in town for a few days, he said.

Birdie Koyama has lots of magicians that trained under him. Several of them, and some magicians that are just friends of Birdie Koyama, were also there. Despite there being at least five magicians (there were people I do not know there who may or may not have been magicians :-) in the room, I was asked to do magic for a group of non-magicians. No one else was asked to do anything, so either I have to work harder to earn my food, or I am just that much more entertaining than the other magicians. Must be the latter, I am sure, haha.

Me doing magic

A photo that is almost but not exactly the same

People happy after seeing my magic

Showing magic to people who have seen a lot of magic

A while back I met a man who lives in Tokyo and apparently watches a lot of magic. He has been to most magic bars in Tokyo, for instance. I have only been to around 10 magic bars in Tokyo.

An iPhone stand picks up a named number of cards from a shuffled deck

Counting out exactly 23 cards picked up by the iPhone stand

I was asked to show him some magic and since I was the last magician to join our magic bar and since everyone makes sure not to do any tricks the other magicians do, I do a lot of "rare" tricks. I pulled out the least known but still entertaining and puzzling tricks or most original tricks that I do and showed them to him. He seemed quite puzzled.

Determining the perfect match

Stabbing a pen knife into a deck of pretty girls

And it keeps coming back to a picture of me (dressed like a geisha)

Puzzles and magic

In the bar Ropossa where I often eat, they have a new 3D puzzle. The standard set has 6 identical plastic bars that you can position so that they stay together in the shape of a cube. I was told that I should use two sets and make this slightly more complex shape. Which was pretty difficult.

Me and the magician Akkey trying to assemble this puzzle

Noticing that someone is taking pictures

Annoying face for the camera

It took me a few tries before I figured out how the puzzle was supposed to be put together. Then it took a few tries to put it together like that, since it would be really great to have one or two extra hands when assembling the pieces...

Incorrect configuration

Incorrect, but still something

The cubes should not be this loose

Finally getting everything right

There were other guests there too, of course, and I was asked to show some of them some magic tricks. They seemed to enjoy that and then took photos with me while wearing poo-shaped hats and weird glasses.

I also met the cousin of my friend who runs this bar. She was funny. She also played along very well when I was asked to do magic for her and the people sitting next to her.

When they were playing with Japanese spinning tops ("koma"), one of the other guests fell asleep. His friends managed to get a spinning to to spin on his head without him waking up.

I was, as is so often the case, asked to show my funny underwear too. I like this design, which has the Japanese symbol for "driver under training" that you put on cars to indicate that the driver does not have his licence yet. The text says "beginner" or "inexperienced" in Japanese.