Riding the 72r bus up to work on select days of the week where I need to be in North Berkeley for a good part of the day I see a lot of billboards along San Pablo where the bus runs, from down town through a rough neighborhood, through Emoryville and then into Berkeley. Some of these billboards are movie billboards advertising usually a big time action movie or a horror movie, for example that movie called '300', where the advertisement is usually a bare chested man looking very angry and written across his picture is '300' but written in blood. It seemed excessively violent to me. And then there are the horror movie advertisements, a body being dragged across a desert or a freaky doll or something else advertising 'evil'. For a while I thought it was strange, one of those back in my day they didn't advertise those kinds of things so blatantly because we had values, mid-western values or something like the world is going to end soon in a climactic battle brought on by rising indifference, sin, and greed. Biblical kinds of ideas. But all this was tempered as I have been reading about the first Tokugawa shogunate and William Adams, the English sailor who got in close with the most powerful person in japan during the early 17th century (I write 17th century now instead of 1600's because of the job at the Buddha Museum seems to encourage this). Anywho, reading about the crazy violent public spectacles that seemed to of been common place in japan during that time (think mass public burnings where citizens are required to provide the fire wood), before and after that time, and then thinking about other historical information that we've learned like gladiators or public whippings or executions performed by our ancestors, how our respective societies have seem to of made a place for those kinds of activities to be broadcast, and people show up to watch them. The ad across the track in a subway station advertises a movie coming out, i forget its name, but the web site that you can visit is watchthemdielive dot com which a month ago i would of turned and said see, see what I'm talking about?