Spanning the Globe

While it was a chilly 36 degrees when I was walking the dog this morning in Central Park, those two great harbingers of spring – the Yankees home opener and the flowering of cherry blossoms in Japan – are in unusual sync this year.

A friend in Tokyo alerted me to o-hanami (the time of flower watching) and the proliferation of live cherry blossom cams throughout Japan. This one http://www.chiyoda-days.jp/sakura/2006/live/lcamera.html from the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo has a nice big picture, while this site http://livejapan.org/ links you to 135 different live cams throughout Japan. (Please note that if you click during the day in the US it will be nighttime in Japan. New York is 14 hours behind Tokyo.)

Meanwhile Melky Cabrera almost single-handedly won the opener for the Yanks with two amazing catches and a homer in the 6th to tie the game at 2-2. (The Japanese letters in the background of the Yankee Stadium picture are another of those unusual visual coincidences.)

And that’s the news….