Filed under: Japan, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 9:45 am
…Obviously I don’t mean real zombies, I am more reffering to something as found and popularized on the great bastion of taste, Youtube.
Zombies seems to be a dance group/troop/squad that dresses identically, save for a weird mask covering the entire head. No idea why they do this, but fine, I’ll go with it.
For some reason they appear to like dancing to intros from anime. Yes, we’ve seen videos of people dancing along to the Lucky Star theme (the one that’s been around the internet for months now) at conventions, but none go to this much trouble and with this much enthusiasm. Really!
Japan is full of cool people. Some because of their designs. Some from sheer weirdness. In this case, it’s the scientists, as those boffins from Tokyo University have managed to make a cat and mouse be in the same location without the mouse running away in fear.
They managed this strange feat by genetically mutating a mouse’s sense of smell so it couldn’t smell the cat. Cue the mouse moving up to and playing with the cats, despite the possibility of being eaten. The cats, I’m sure, were trying to work out what the catch was from this “Free Meal”, instead of chowing down.
Apparently this “Proves” that fear is genetically created rather than learned behaviour. I think this proves that the cats they chose to sit with the mice were not hungry.
Filed under: Japan, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 9:26 am
Chimp A-Pan is a well trained animal. It can ride a train, buy tickets, do sit-ups in a contest, all whilst pulling around a bulldog. Amazingly well trained. The chimp, that is. Not the dog.
This time, the challenge is to get to a cake shop and buy a package. But with 5 dogs this time. Hilarity ensues…
Filed under: Japan, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 8:20 pm
Imagine, if you will, that you have to run along a conveyer-belt rolling towards you to a finish line a short distance away. But you must eat cookies at various parts along the way. And the belt speeds up after each cookie is eaten. And you have only 30 seconds to do it in.
Oh, and if you fail, you end up in some hot water (literally, not figuratively speaking here). Fail to keep up with the conveyer, fall over or anything like that? Fall into the hot water near the start line. Stay on the conveyer for 30 seconds without completing all tasks and crossing the finishing line? The conveyer abruptly stops, making you fall over, a big banner unfurls, and the conveyer starts again at full speed, throwing you into the aforementioned hot water.
Yes, it’s probably painful and humiliating to the contestants. Yes, only the Japanese could think of this sort of competition. And yes, it is fun to watch.
Many people yearn to travel to far off lands, in search of something new, something different to their own hum-drum surroundings that they were brought up in. This leads a few people to teach english in another country, in an attempt to make people there speak english better. An example of this sort of thing is Gaijin Smash.
Filed under: Gadgets, Japan — Malcolm Owen @ 11:25 am
The random browsing session last night yielded a strange, if fantastic, alarm clock. You see, it tells the time, it wakes you up, and the world continues to turn.
However.
This clock has what can only be described as a “Fun” way of forcing you to turn it off. It wakes you 3 minutes before it is due to go off, and then you must “cut” the right wire on the bomb interface, lest a large “Bang” will sound, waking everyone in your neighborhood. Failure constitutes running out of time (Dude, 3 minutes to pull apart 2 plugs…) or by pulling apart the wrong combination of wires (Ahh, so that’s what the lights on the side are for…).
Now, I advise not importing possibly the greatest alarm clock in history, because you will be labeled as a terrorist, despite it’s payload being a large noise. This may be awesome, but you don’t want months of interrogation just to get it…
Everyone knows that the Japanese love weird, freaky stuff. That is a fact. Cue a video over at TV In Japan about someone putting a strange liquid into a speaker, and seeing it “Bubble” in a semi-paranormal way. If you remember that it’s inside a speaker and suffering a bombardment of vibrations, then you’ll see it’s a fairly normal effect that Non-Newtonian Liquids can do.
Non-Newtonian Liquids, to try and cut down the amount of text that Wikipedia gives you, is a liquid/solid that’s confused. If left alone, it will turn into a liquid, but if impacted in some way, it becomes more solid. For example, you can easily roll some into a ball using your hands, kneading constantly. once you stop, it turns runny and flows through your fingers quite easily. Heck, you can even run on it, since the sudden application of foot to liquid solidifies it enough to support your weight temporarily.
No, I don’t know how or why any of this works, but I figure you might want to see the freakiness you can do with Cornstarch and Water yourself, then dare to mess up your kitchen experimenting as well…
Urban legends are wonderful. Everyone knows of a friend of a friend’s mother’s brother’s pen friend’s girlfriend that got killed in some freakish, crazy or paranormal way. Most of these stories are just that, stories, but there’s always a niggling feeling at the back of your mind that it could happen to you, no matter how farfetched the tale is.Ring (”Ringu”) revolves around one such urban legend, which turns out to be true. One week after watching a mysterious video, the viewers die in a repulsive contortion, as if they’ve been scared to death by something.
The sudden appearance of the urban legend piques the interest of Reiko, a reporter, whom after watching the video must find some way not to die, nor to let other people close to her get killed after they watch the tape too.
I know that Christmas has been and gone, but since this is too good to wait for October or November, the prime time you start asking for clues as to what to get me for my birthday and “25 Dec”, but I figure you would really appreciate the early warning for this one, especially because it costs $2000.
The Plen is a robot kit from Japan that you construct yourself, and once finished you have your own bipedal friend. At less than a kilo, it won’t kill the cats (unless you add in a katana, please…), but it is kick ass enough to do walking, skating, grabbing and dropping and other wonderful things that a tiny robot with character can do.
It’s also going to be easier than ever before to buy me a robot, since the makers are actively looking for a North American distributor, which means it could be out in time for Xmas. Thankfully it’s been shown at CES, so everyoneontheplanet will have heard of it, and so it will be Europe-bound as well.
However, family, if you still balk at the price tag, I suggest reading those various internet links above and see for yourself…
Thanks
Malcolm.
P.S. Sorry about eating all the smoked cheese wheel. I know I told you it was Skynet awakening, but I lied.
[Best of the bunch - Coolest-Gadgets.com whom have a youtube video of it in action. Also, here's Plen.jp, the homepage of the bot]
Filed under: Japan, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 4:58 pm
Imagine you’re a Japanese Gameshow producer. You want to make an awesome final round to your very popular quiz. What do you do?
If you’re the head guy behind Nepu League, you create a Virtual Mine Cart game, where the contestants must lean the cart in the direction of the right answer whilst riding through a cavern full of lava.
