dada78641

Alright, I've gone on the record with my predictions and I'm ready to be wrong about all of them. I assume our votes will be visible after the poll has ended. I think our Juryo wall rikishi are all gonna have a hard time, except Ura. Terunofuji is gonna continue his impressive record and maybe even surpass it, even with the two yokozuna present.

Frankly, what I want is just straight up full TV coverage without editing, scanned in high res and preferably on something with a higher encoding quality than Youtube. I know I'm never going to get that, maybe unless Japan has a sudden political shift and people realize "hey, if this was shot using public money, and the reels are being stored using public money, then why shouldn't it be public data?" Part of why I'm saying that is, of course, because I'm an archivist and data hoarder, but still—you can't keep reels around forever. They eventually degrade. Whatever the NSK does, they should be digitizing all of this and storing it in high quality. In a way this should be easier to start offering on a paid service, because if you just publish entire uncut days of sumo you don't have to do any editing. While we're at it, someone tell the NSK that when you stream something live, like a training session or an ozeki promotion speech, you should always record a clean local copy of it at the same time. So that when you're done, you have the actual high quality original as a file you can upload, rather than the only remaining copy being a poor quality stream that's constantly shifting in bitrate because you were broadcasting from someplace with poor wifi. If you don't then that's quality you permanently lose. You really don't want important historical moments to be permanently locked to 240p just because someone happened to be torrenting トラック野郎 at the same time.

I'm assuming this is just the number vaccinated per day in Sumida, right? Sumida has about 250k inhabitants so that would take 167 days at 1500 per day.

I initially thought he went out after the basho, but it turns out it was during: Stablemaster Tokitsukaze went to a mah-jongg parlor during the New Year Grand Sumo Tournament, which ended on Jan. 24, in violation of the Japan Sumo Association’s guidelines to prevent infections, sources said on Jan. 27. Really makes you wonder how many other violations have occurred during the tournament itself. If one person taking part in the basho is infected, everybody is infected. It would be unfair if they didn't crack down hard on him, especially since it's not his first violation.

Here's another silly question: if someone goes 15-0-D (zensho, but loss in the playoffs because someone else also went zensho) twice in a row, would they be promoted to yokozuna? The standard is two consecutive yusho, but in such a situation one wonders if the NSK would consider an exception.

Just subtly dropping here that I'm planning to be in the Ryogoku area (in Kinshicho specifically) in the summer...

On the final day, Yutakayama stole the Bento Award away from Kotoyuki: Some pics of the yusho ceremony, for posterity: Really excellent performance by Daieisho!

Like the famous Kameido Gyoza izakaya (only two stops from the Kokugikan btw), which serves gyoza until they run out of their ingredients for the day, they can just do 大相撲放題 until they run out of salt.

Isn't Hakuho already a rich man by most standards? He's had the most distinguished career in sumo history and then there's sponsorships and things like commercials he's done. I'm sure he doesn't need to do anything at this point to get by. I'd like to think he'd want to get some time off and enjoy his freedom after ending his career as yokozuna though, rather than instantly starting up his oyakata duties.

This should be a TV show, to see if regular people can defeat the worst sumo wrestler.

I don't see any articles about it, but sumo fans online seem to be almost universal in their view that the hair pull was a foul and should've resulted either in a hansoku loss for Daieisho or maybe a torinaoshi. For example, see the replies on the NSK's tweet. (I'm hoping Twitter's translate function will do a decent enough job.) If you search Twitter for something like "大栄翔　まげ" you'll see basically the same reactions. Or on this Yahoo Answers post they basically came to the same conclusion, with maybe some ambiguity over whether it was intentional or not. Everybody seems to say that they only appear to have discussed who was out first during the monoii. Looking at news articles, they just don't mention the hairpull. It's all about how brilliantly he maneuvered at the edge. Maybe I've missed a mainstream news article somewhere, let me know if I did.

Today's gratuitous screenshot is this close-up of the dohyo craquelure.

I can't agree with this. It looked accidental to me. Or to be exact, he tried a leg grab just as he fell, probably purely reflexively, and that's why when he fell down and rolled over he briefly hooked Midorifuji's leg with his arm. But it certainly wasn't out of spite.

I was curious to see what this looks like so I ran a search. There's a video here (starts at 1m17s): You can also see the 引分 scroll. I'm sure they still have that somewhere, and I wonder if they'd be able to find it in time if it were to be needed again.

When watching that Terunofuji-Takanosho match, I was thinking they might call a torinaoshi. It's true that Terunofuji stepped out first but it also looked like a case of shinitai. But ultimately I think the decision was correct (sadly, I really wanted Terunofuji to win). Face of a man who just got away with MURDER.