Here is a remarkable video of a middle-school orchestra, embedded in a news article in the Asahi Shimbun:
http://www.asahi.com/articles/TKY201311220289.html This video was taken at a middle school in the middle of nowhere in Shimane Prefecture. The school does not have many students these days. There are only 8 kids in the school orchestra, all girls. They manage to play a 6-minute piece here by jumping from one instrument to the other. The rest of this article (available to subscribers only) says they have one the prefectural music contest several times. They seem talented to me. They say they sometimes forget to jump up and move to another instrument. In other news from Japan, here is an article about a bear named Gonta who has figured out how to steal honey from a trap without getting trapped in it. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/news/20131122-OYT1T00699.htm Gonta was snared in this trap twice by naturalists who probably poked and prodded him before letting him go. I can well understand why he wants to avoid that. As you see in the illustration, he leaves his hind legs outside the trap. He takes the honey, the wooden door comes down, but he pushes it up, works his way out, and eats the honey. They left a video camera at the site to figure out how he does this. They are now making a bigger trap. I hope he figure out how to defeat the new trap, perhaps by bringing a branch in. One the naturalists said, "I have never seen a bear like this." - Jed
