October 2007
46 posts
Response in Poetic Form to the Question "How About...
Shall I compare thee to a winter ale? Thou art more nutty (and more heavyweight). Rough winds do shake the skies of Tokio, And ravage do typhoons…hell, it’s a date: Sometime too dry the throat of man becomes, And often is his beer withheld by work; And concentration from post-lunch is dimmed, By copious email, phonecall, passing berk: But that eternal Pint Glass shall not fade And...
Men's Knuckle →
Patrick Macias gambols joyously through the latest issue of a lowest-common-denominator men’s mag.
TokyoMango: Cell Phone App Tells Off Train... →
“When the silvery monster finally rolled onto the stage, and Carlos Ghosn...”
– Urban Dirt - Tokyo Motor Show: a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a spandex mini-skirt…
“The Indian solution to the problem involves training large monkeys to beat up...”
– The Dilbert Blog
Japanese cellphones: Disappointing →
Gizmodo is right on the mark here. Japanese phones have lost the lustre they once had; for all the features, they seem out of touch with the phone’s evolution elsewhere into a viable mobile computing device. As Mossberg notes, this is partly due to the carriers dictating what goes in the phone, and what phones go on the network, which is a particularly endemic phenomenon in Japan. At one...
WatchThere’s something very plasticky and inexpensive about much of NHK’s output, and doing an English-language show in the same idiom brings that out even more. Particularly good is the music; so, for example, footage of an insect store is backed with manic, brass-driven funk, for that is-it-porn is-it-an-inflight-safety-video vibe. (via Google Video)
Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place -... →
The idea of using clothing to signal that you’re not to be messed with may be a viable trend, but I sense the reporter has picked the wrong poster child in a designer who makes skirts that allow you to pretend to be a vending machine. Not even in Japan. (via TokyoMango)
Otetsudai Networks →
Japanese GPS-driven cellphone service that matches employers with part-time help at short notice.
Urban Dirt: Four reasons why vending machines are... →
Name Of The Day: Yvette Alberdingkthijm →
In Rainbows,
incidentally, is great. The sound has a coherence that Hail to the Thief lacks, and the songwriting is back on course. They seem more comfortable all round, having made it through the transition from conventional most of the time to off-kilter all of it and achieved some stability at last.
Nicked
(Image credit: zeraien) Sadly, the most prominent example of typically polite, old-fashioned, written-out-longhand Japanese customer service in my recent memory is the two Tokyo cops who on Monday busted me for doing a u-turn at a set of lights which my navigation system assured me were kosher for 180s. But which they were equally insistent were not. As it was pissing down with rain I was...
Sony BMG lawyer says "copying" music you own is... →
Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that “with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave [of the counter-culture] finally broke and rolled back”. While the peak of the record company era is probably already past, I imagine there being a similar high-water mark, like a line of scum left in a bathtub, that will become...
Pet Shop Boys : Integral video →
Complete with embedded QR codes…
Your history in products →
Significant gadgets arranged on a timeline; input your birth year and see what was hot when you were born, or at any point thereafter. (In Japanese.)
Radiohead, In Rainbows →
Finally, the death of the record company begins in earnest? Radiohead’s new album is available only via their website, as a download or as a multi-disc boxed package. Plus, you get to price the download yourself, from UKP1 upward.
September 2007
40 posts
