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Gave up on writing the Whistler blogs.
Starting again now.

Utada Hikaru's 'Stay Gold' debuted today (January 7th in Japan) on Japanese radio. Its part of her upcoming single 'HEART STATION/Stay Gold'. I think I've mentioned it before.
The radio rip version, as far as I know, was first found on Korean fan site 'utada.top.to' (where it plays right when you enter the page, so if you're interested, you should go and see), which was later posted on hikaru.sc today at 7:00 PT. As far as I know, JWAVE in Tokyo played it at 5 something AM Japan time, so that makes it 11 this morning, I guess.

The previews were just so good that the full version is slightly disappointing. But whatever, its still a good song, and in my opinion, much better than Beautiful World/Kiss & Cry, or even Flavor of Life. Sometimes I wonder of Flavor of Life sold that many digital copies because of her divorce announcement and the drama tie-in, Hana Yori something 2, (most popular of the year with ratings at something like 75).

Well, it'll probably be until February when anything about Heart Station comes up.
Oh yeah, UH's birthday is somewhere around now, but I don't know when.

I would love to be able to listen to JWAVE here, except the thing is that they don't' stream their music online.
Oh, and we don't have a radio in Japan.
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Oh, and I just discovered that Ayumi Hamasaki, who I've also talked about before, has lost all hearing in her left ear.
Nevertheless, she says that she will continue singing.

Oh dear.

She has had problems with her ear ever since the summer of 2000. It seems that her heavy touring, and several accidents have taken a toll on her health. Elliot Yamin had some problems with his ears too, if I recall correctly.

From what I've read, her fans say that she hasn't been singing so well, as in singing somewhat off-key, and having to press her earpiece in during performances.

Some of her fans are already starting to fold paper cranes, going back to the story of Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes.
For those of you that didn't hear it before, Sadako was born during the war, and was subjected to the radiation from the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack. She later developed cancer, which impeded on her running career. She and some of her friends started folding paper cranes, because of a legend which said that once you folded 1000 paper cranes, your wish will come true. Although Sadako was in remission from cancer for a while, she eventually died of it. I'm not sure if she finished folding all the paper cranes though.