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| October 24, 2025 |
- At GaijinPot, Japanese Police Mascots, collected by Edward Harrison.
- For some reason the Facebook algorithm feeds me reels of
Japanese dance group Avantgardey.
-
Somehow I missed these Don Quijote (aka
Don Ki) stores during my recent visit - I
saw the Tax Free Shop signs but didn't absorb their penguin logo, or their
24-hours thing, very unusual; I was still claiming Tokyo and Osaka weren't
cities that never sleep but with these big open-all-night venues and the
konbini everywhere, maybe that's no longer true.
- Hypnotisch, experimental video by Japanese filmmaker Yoshinao Satoh:
Papers, and
Desktop.
- A bottomless doom-scroll flickr of
Night
Postcards by SwellMap, mostly motels, showing off their swimming pools.
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| October 22, 2025 |
This collection, my 2011 Japan trip haul, provoked by
Mateusz
Pozar's page with the same name. No explanation (or
inventory even) although I'll note that Great Wave
tea-cup was stolen off my cubicle desk-top one night,
after-hours; but the other one is in reglar use, even
now, it's such a beautiful, tubular blue.
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| October 18, 2025 |
Macao has a
mascot, on the left; compare with the delirious five-eyed
Myaku-Myaku
of the just-closed Expo 2025 in Osaka. Incredibly, I was in both
places recently - Myaku2 was everywhere but I didn't
notice Mak2 until I got home.
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| October 14, 2025 |
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| October 11, 2025 |
The return of Rash, cool weather,
Mr.Autumn Man.
- The
Vault Of The Atomic Space Age -- pics in an endless
scroll, click to zoom.
- 29
Celebrities Who Ruined their Beauty with Buccal Fat Removal. In which
we learn of bichectomy. It's actually a listicle of young people of
means who spend way too much time looking in the mirror. Also at Bored Panda,
89
of the Most Beautiful Metro Stations. Some inaccuracies, not subways:
#29 is the top floor of the super-sized Kyoto train station, and the
last one is LA's Amtrak station.
- How Things
Work, by Hamilton Nolan. Labor,
Politics and Power.
- From 1991 Entertainment Weekly, the
100
best movies you've never heard of. I've seen 19 of them - a solid list. At the Collector,
11
Essential Movies to Watch to Understand Film Noir. Watching its first now,
Stranger
on the Third Floor, good stuff.
-
Have you noticed? July 7, the rule rescinded. The pilot has more:
At Long
Last, TSA Ditches the Shoe Rule.
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| September 16, 2025 |
Holding my copy of the Tōkyo volume from the Time-Life series,
The
Great Cities. It's an intersection of so many of my interests:
Japan, and kanji; travel, and series of books (at one point
I had ten of these); neon, and the biggest metropoles. The
character is shin, or atarashi: "new." |
| September 14, 2025 |
- The accessory you didn't know you needed: a
Remote-controlled
LED from Booty Sparks. (Reddit video demo, she actually has two of them, using one to activate the other.)
- Fascinating video, from host Andrew Henry at
ReligionForBreakfast: essentialists vs. functionalists,
Fandoms are
Religions. Comparing Hajj with Comicon (even as he
continually insists that he's not).
- AuroraSaurus.org,
reporting auroras from the ground up, a world map with
zones color-coded based on prediction and sightings.
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| September 11, 2025 |
- In honor of the day I compiled a small page of
World Trade Center ephemera, including these matchboxes. I was up in
the South Tower three times, but I never got to go to Windows On The World.
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| September 7, 2025 |
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- The krul, curl, or
Flourish
of Approval is a hand-written symbol that indicates
passing, used to grade schoolwork in the Netherlands. In Japan,
teachers write a big circle (which the American new-comer, expecting
a check-mark, might take for a zero).
- Jeremy
Frey, mesmerizing Wabanaki basket-weaver. Another profile of this
First Nations/Maine artist, in
Down East magazine.
- Rhapsodies
in Blue — Anna Atkins' Cyanotypes, at the Public
Domain Review. She worked in the 19th century; something more
up-to-date, Lisa Shea at
cyanotypes.org.
The former did algæ; the latter, bicycle sprockets, among
other stuff. Wikipedia has more about the process under
blueprints.
- This Is Colossal reviews the new
Trucks & Tuks by Christopher Herwig, who documents the elaborately decorated
vehicles of India, Pak- and Afghanistan. Twenty years ago one
of these was parked out front of the Smithsonian where
The Silk Road show was on-going; here's a scan of my
oversized souvenir postcard. I'm especially curious
about the sound their curtains of chains add to these
vehicles' sonic ambience. (Click to zoom.)
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| September 4, 2025 |
- Today's frame by Jack Kirby from a 1958 story, “The Thing
on Sputnik 4” in Harvey comics' Race For the Moon #2
from these
dense
Michael Studt flickrs. Those comics may read
from left to right, or right to left; it's rather
arbitrary but don't let that put you off.
- Smithsonian reports on injecting strontium aluminate
into succulents to make them
phosphorescent. It's the
same chemical of the glow-in-the-dark stars on the bedroom
ceiling.
- Beautiful printed circuit and microchip
photos by
Mikhail Svarichevsky.
- Lots of good stuff at Design You Trust like
the
bubble-top 1960 Ford Spaceliner concept.
- Preliminary to my travel around the world
in '08 I wrote of being inspired by
Edward
Hasbrouck, well now he has an urgent plea on his
every page,
There’s been
a fascist coup in the USA! and he's right, we
should be shouting it from the rooftops.
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