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Amazing animated comedy, apparently in production since 2004, that I had never even heard of until I saw an interview with one of the creators on television, along with a short (tremendously funny). clip.  http://plusheads.com/ or you can find a lot of it on Youtube.  Some of the segments are only in Japanese, but those are the ones where the comedy is mostly universal language-less humor anyway.

As an aside, though I still can’t go to the movies in Japan and reliably fully understand the dialog, somehow comedy seems to usually use narrower  subset of the language that I DO mostly understand, to my happiness and amazement.

A picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words apparently, when it comes to assessing competency and leadership, says the economist in new research that will just reinforce that suspicion that there is a reason that some people just instantly rub you the wrong way, even before they open their mouths.

Clearly SEC filings should include the driver’s license photos of all the company’s executives.

SMAP (the Japanese pop group) has a weekly show where they have famous guests come and talk to them. Often the guest is foreign woman. One member of the band (always the same one) just about always dresses up as a woman, often as the guest.

Tonight was a french woman with the last name Barkin, apparently the designer of the Hermes “Barkin” line of bags. Unfortunately I know these bags cost several thousand dollars.

So I ignored most of the interview, although it was nice background noise since she was speaking french the whole time. At the end, she gave two of the members of SMAP the Hermes bag bearing her name. One of the guys asked, quite seriously and respectfully toned, do you think it would really be alright for a guy to use this bag? At which instant she grabbed the bag, threw it on the ground, jumped up and down on it a few times, then went off to her own bag, grabbed a few hardcover books, stuffed them in. Grabbed a handful of printout papers and stuffed those in. Manhandled the bag a bit more. Punched the bag a few times. Stuffed it in his hands. There she says, use it like this.  I admire her attitude, but frankly only in Japan is she correct.  I have seen guys on the subway carrying bags far far more feminine than the simple solid-colored rectangular things she gave them.
The other guy then opened his mouth to say something, at which point she grabbed his bag, stepped on it a few times, smashed it around in her hands, punched it, and handed it back to him.

The band has several more members, but only those two had received her bag.  The cross dressed one was sitting moping on the floor, having not received anything. She goes over, sits down next to him and says what’s wrong? They translate his response to her as that lately he is often sad and cries. She jumps up and goes back to her bag, and they say what? what? And she pauses and says “J’ai des pillules” (I have pills).

Awesome.

The world question center’s 2008 question: what is something you have changed your mind about? Has very interesting answers from a wide range of thinking people. Here are all the answers on one long page, and some of my favorites: On Cultural Relativism’s foolishness, the nature of memory, the obligation of scientists to enter politics, the biological drive to divorce and I have only managed to read half of them so far.

Recently finished William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition.

There are no spoilers in the rest of this, but I do discuss locations that appear in the book (though they appear early and you would be missing little to know that they are in it).

Even having finished it, I both enjoyed and disliked the main character and the tone of the telling, for connected reasons.  Her viscerally negative reactions to brand imagery and obsessively blank-slate design sense put me off, I think, because they represent an amplified version of my own experience of branding and fashion, and I think the experience of a lot of people in this age.  But the amplification, combined with the tone of the place and product descriptions that fill the story, build a sense of overall quaintness.  I feel like someone who has read a New York Times peace about his own experience, only to see that the names are all misspelled and the core details of the story have been passed through a poorly recorded audio transcript.  The places are almost all places I have lived during the times he was writing, except with London, where I have only visited (both when he was writing and more recently).  In each case, as with the main character’s excessive version of my own aversions to western branding (and indeed also a strange lack of negative response to japanese branding), the real thing tastes and looks both more interesting and more bland, more “so what”? compared to his nutrasweet version.

Gibson in his non-fiction writing (In Wired for instance, writing on Japan) has made it clear that he is intimately familiar with the places he has chosen as backdrops.  What I am left wondering then is, is the fakeness intentional to seem more “hip” for an audience (like the rabid japan-obsessives on Boingboing) that consider everything foreign inherently special and amazing, without ever leaving home?  Or is it accidental, exaggeration that fares better when, with his earlier work, there is no real version to compare to his prose?