This is insanely incredible…
“The new short film by Blu, an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche).”blublu.org/ blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm
Boing Boing: “Jake Adelstein was the first US citizen to work as a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, but he quit after getting death threats from the Yakuza. He has a book coming out called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. This is an article about his experiences reporting on the Yakuza for The Washington Post.
I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of
the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the
Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, and covered a roster of
characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders,
child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John
Gotti of Japan.
I came to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living
in a Zen Buddhist temple, and then became the first U.S. citizen hired
as a regular staff writer for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese. If you
know anything about Japan, you’ll realize how bizarre this is — a
gaijin, or foreigner, covering Japanese cops. When I started the beat
in the early 1990s, I knew nothing about the yakuza, a.k.a. the
Japanese mafia. But following their prostitution rings and extortion
rackets became my life.”
“Here’s a little story for you: An Apple Store employee had a party in
her apartment. A couple weeks later her place was cleared out to the
tune of about $5,000 worth of electronics, including her new Mac. Days
later, a friend sees that she’s online and alerts the Mac’s rightful
owner. Since she was running Leopard with Back to My Mac,
owner-girl logged in remotely and activated Photo Booth via the
screen-share function. And what do you know, it turned out that the
thieves were some “friends” who were at the party a few weeks back. She
took the photos to the cops and — voila — busted! The thieves, Edmon
Shahikian, 23, and Ian Frias, 20, both of the Bronx, have been charged
with second-degree burglary and fourth-degree criminal possession of
stolen property. Go go crafty nerdy girl!”
[Via TUAW]
“Over at Wired.com,
a piece by David Kravets on one odd effect of the (i can’t believe I’m
typing this) global food shortages — artisanal beer brewers are
reformulating recipes to reduce the amount of increasingly costly hops:
At Pacific Coast Brewing here, brewer Donald
Gortemiller is reworking his recipes and altering his brewing styles like
never before.Gortemiller isn’t acting on a spurt of creativity. He’s coping with a
worldwide shortage of hops — the spice of beer. The dry cones of a
particular flowering vine, hops are what give your favorite brew its flavor
and aroma. Prices of the commodity are skyrocketing as hop supplies have
plummeted, forcing smaller brewmasters around the United States to begin
quietly tweaking their recipes, in ways that are easily discerned by serious
imbibers.The shortage — caused by a dwindling number of hop growers worldwide, and
exacerbated by a Yakima, Washington, warehouse fire — has forced
Gortemiller to use fewer and different hops than before, changing the flavor
of his beer. He’s also resorted to beer hacks, like “dry hopping,” in which
the hops are added late to the mix, consuming fewer hops and yielding a more
consistent flavor.“When hops were $2 a pound, compared to $20 or $30 a pound now, it didn’t
matter. We’d throw them into the boil at various times,” Gortemiller says.
“That was an inaccurate way of doing things. We’re modifying recipes and
using about 20 percent less hops.”
Link. (photo by Jim Merithew, Wired.com; thanks, Wayneco)
Neatorama: “Twenty six year old Jero looks like he’s trying to break into the
music industry. With his decidedly urban, hip-hop look, you’d be
forgiven if you think that he’s a wannabe rapper… That is, until he
starts singing!
Jero, as you’ll see in the clip below, is going to be the first professional black enka [wiki] singer in Japan.”
You have to go to the website and read the story. This is a trip!
Digg: “Zach Feinstein is the dark horse in this years NBA Draft, the dark
horse because he’s managed to register himself despite having no
serious basketball playing experience. “The short story is that I,
Zachary Feinstein, have declared for the 2008 NBA Draft. As a 5′8″ 130
pound Caucasian, I am the perfect candidate…”
Digg: “I love that bear being right where it is,” Warden Burl Cain said
Monday. “I tell you what, none of our inmates are going to try to get
out after dark and wander around when they might run into a big old
bear. It’s like having another guard at no cost to the taxpayer.”
Slashdot: “”David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks
division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a
yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson
made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system
that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with
820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of
platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup
XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters.”
“It’s the stuff of sci-fi and really crappy
awesome horror films, but now it looks like regrowing damaged skin and
limbs isn’t so far-fetched — in fact, it’s already happening. A
certain 69 year old Lee Spievak lost half an inch of finger to an
agressive model plane blade, and doctors had little hope for the
appendage. Lucky for Lee, his brother Alan works in the field of
regenerative medicine, and sent him some powder (which lee calls “pixie
dust”) to apply to the finger. Four weeks later Lee had grown back the
entire finger, as good as new. The pixie dust is actually modified
cells scraped from the lining of a pig’s bladder cleaned into a
general-purpose tissue generator — the cells basically tell the body
to grow instead of scar. Doctors have high hopes for the cells, for
everything from amputees to burn victims to cancer patients. We’re just
waiting until they can program these cells to grow that third arm we
always wanted.”
Thanks for continuing to make us look good…
Digg: “Federal authorities say a South Carolina teen accused of plotting to
blow up his high school told police that he wanted to die, go to heaven
and kill Jesus.”
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