Search Results for: japan

Don’t worry. This isn’t the beginning of some treacly drudge about Christmas Around the World or anything like that. If you’ve been paying any attention at all you know that treacle is the farthest thing from my mind. Beer? Babes? Oh yeah, they clutter up my frontal lobes. But not treacle.

My good friend Rob Pongi, think of him as Japan’s answer to Nude Hippo’s producer only with more nudity, has been catching me up on Japanese Christmas traditions and I think it’s only fair that I share.

While many of them would be instantly recognizable to any Westerner, such as the Christmas tree, the gifts, the music (for the most part) and so on, there are others that seem to have spawned from some alien clime.

The decorated Godzilla on the front page would be a nice Example “A.”

Another Japanese tradition, which I think should immediately be adopted world wide, is where women dress sexy as hell and try to seduce men. I don’t know about you but that would put a boat load of jolly in my Ho Ho Ho’s. Certainly it would add a whole new dimension to the phrase “lay the gift under the tree.”

Yet another one would be the enslavement of innocent electric eels who are forced to power Christmas lights. Then they’re turned into soup

Reuters reports on this shocking trend.

An aquarium in Japan is shocking visitors with its Christmas display — using an eco-friendly electric eel to illuminate the lights on its holiday tree.

Each time the eel moves, two aluminum panels gather enough electricity to light up the 2-meter (6 ft 6 in) tall tree, decked out in white, in glowing intermittent flashes.

The aquarium in Kamakura, just south of Tokyo, has featured the electric eel for five years to encourage ecological sensitivity.

This year, it added a Santa robot that sings and dances when visitors stomp on a pad.
“We first decided to get an electric eel to light up a Christmas tree and its top ornament using its electricity,” said Kazuhiko Minawa, on the public relations team for the Enoshima Aquarium. “As electric eels use their muscles when generating a charge, we also thought to get humans to use their muscles to light up parts of the tree and power Santa.”

Visitor Sumie Chiba was fascinated with the display but questioned the practicality of eel energy for domestic use.

“If this was possible, I think it’s very nice and extremely eco-friendly,” she said.

Another minor difference would be the, almost , complete lack of any religious significance since Christians barely qualify as a minority in Japan. That helps explain why they have Hoeiosho, a Buddhist monk, distribute gifts to the children, instead of Santa Claus. After all, Santa’s based on the real life St. Nicholas who never visited any Asian countries. It also doesn’t help that his life story’s kind of a downer; parents die of the plague, prison time for preaching the Gospel, etc. Sure he did a lot of nice stuff but it’s still a depressing read.

So, Hoeiosho it is.

Anyway, back to the important stuff; hot little elves hoping to grab a ride on your sleigh. Colin Joyce from the Telegraph UK spent some time in Tokyo to try and understand, and maybe take advantage of, this development.

Get yourself a wonderful boyfriend by Christmas; Best Christmas date spots; Christmas for lovers – the magazine headlines tell the story: all a Japanese girl wants for Christmas is the perfect date.

In a country where less than one per cent of the population is Christian, Christmas has been reinvented as the most romantic time of the year.

For many Japanese women being taken to an expensive restaurant on Christmas Eve is a crucial indicator of success, while having to go shopping with female friends marks one as a “loser dog”, the Japanese equivalent of a Bridget Jones singleton.

As you can see, the stakes are high for Japanese women this time of year. No one wants to be the “loser dog” instead of the “happy reindeer.”

In case you want to help some Japanese woman have a joyful Christmas, there are cheap flights still available.

Who says these blogs aren’t helpful?

Frank Herbert envisioned a future wherein mankind was overthrown by the machines he’d created and was only able to regain his freedom after all humans on Earth had been killed and the galactic remnants engaged in, what he called, The Butlerian Jihad. James Cameron envisioned a future where time travelling robot assassins came to the present to destroy any hopes for mankind’s salvation.

All the way back to Karel Čapek’s dystopian vision of the future, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which was released in 1921, humans have cast a wary eye in the direction of mechanical beings. One might successfully argue that the even more ancient Jewish myths of the Golem and the fiction of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein serve as historical reminders of what can happen when man attempts to play God.

And yet man marches merrily forward in continued attempts to do just that. From I.B.M.’s Deep Blue computer (which beat a Grand Master in chess) forward, man continues to tread in the Fields of the Lord. And they are not the Elysian Fields of yore.

Contrariwise, robots are now treading in the domain of man and besting him at his own, time honored, games. Never has the clarion call of impending doom been sounded more clearly than when David Moye of AOL News announced that robots now routinely best people at air hockey.

A Japanese scientist has made the next big innovation in robot air hockey by putting the paddle to the metal.

Kunikatsu Takase, a professor at the Japanese University of Electronic Communication, has just created a robot that can play air hockey against humans and win its games 70 percent of the time.

According to Dailymotion, the key is an artificial eye that is mounted in the ceiling and analyzes the direction of the puck as it moves across the field of vision.

“Speed is important,” Takase said. “The robot cannot be too strong. The difficultly of development was in making the robot so it can amuse people.”

Robot air hockey players have been around since 2006, but previous models were more vertical, presumably so humans could have more of a connection with them.

No word on when Takase’s air hockey robot will show up at your local Dave & Buster’s, but if he builds on the advancements made in this field by others such as the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, the robot will either play humans on its own or be controlled by others via a handheld device such as an Xbox 360 controller.

Building a robot that can play air hockey may seem like child’s play to some, but not to robotics experts such as Carnegie Mellon professor Manuela Veloso, president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and also leads the school’s robot soccer team.

“Games like air hockey and soccer are an excuse to study the problem of getting robots to act autonomously,” she told AOL News. “That requires three steps: perception — how the robot assesses the puck; decision-making — what the robot should do in a limited time; and actuate — sending the control to the motors.”

Ominously enough, those same three skills are what are required to fire a gun, fly a plane, drive a car or, eventually, take over the world.

Sure, there are those who will argue that all robots can be programmed with a version of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but even Asimov had his doubts about how well that would work. His I-Robot series showed what could happen when mankind attempted to work around them. And, like any child with a new toy and a prohibition against playing with it in certain ways, we all know that mankind will do exactly that.

In the meantime, if you wish to be useful to our Robot Overlords, you can always learn to speak binary.

01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01100111 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01101001 01100101 01110011

… to Grandmother’s disco we go? While most people think of grannies as the sedate foundations of their lives, making cookies, baby sitting, maybe doing a little Tai Chi for good measure, Ruth Flowers, a/k/a DJ Mamy Rock, is hitting her golden years like the crippling backbeat of a D&B anthem. While other grannies may be finally getting to that long overdue knitting project they’ve been thinking about, Ruth is setting up her wheels of steel to lay down bone crushing grooves for the masses.

Simply put, this clubland sensation is quite a bit different than your granny. The only golden era around her is the bling she fronts at her gigs. Romain Raynaldy from Yahoo News takes a look at her amazing career.

Giving a whole new meaning to Lady Gaga, a British granny is proving you’re never too old to get down, rocking top clubs on both sides of the Atlantic as a DJ at the grand old age of 69.

Ruth Flowers, aka Mamy Rock, is a politely-spoken grandmother from Bristol in southwest England who has just taken Los Angeles clubland by storm after moving across from Europe.

“I love people, I think that’s what carries me through. I love the young ones too, because they get such a bad press often. And I haven’t find them to be anything but wonderful,” she tells AFP.

Forget the cliches of retirement homes, afternoons in front of the TV and knitting: although well beyond pensionable age, Flowers seems to have more energy than most of the 20-somethings dancing to her pumping rhythms.

“I am still awake when the younger people around me are sleepy. I don’t have a problem with night work,” she says. “It doesn’t seem so strange for me because I’ve always been a little bit different.

“I have good health. I am fortunate with my health. If I had many of the complaints of other older people, I couldn’t do it.”

She came to California to record her new single, “69”, and to make her US debut at an electro festival in Anaheim, south of Los Angeles.

The gig in front of 3,000 young clubbers went so well that she has been invited to DJ in New York on November 29, before heading for China and Japan at the end of the year.

From a musical family, Flowers always sang but once married devoted herself to her work in a fabric shop. “I had a wonderful life,” she says, adding that she has ‘no regrets of any kind.”

But after retiring to Portugal for 10 years and being widowed, she started to grow bored — and that’s when electro entered her life.

“I went to a party for my grandson, and after the party he took me with his friends to a disco. I was quite impressed by the enjoyment, the energy. And I thought, ‘Could I do this for young people?’

“And so I said to my grandson ‘You know darling, maybe I could do this,’ and he told me ‘It would be so cool!'”

At first it was just an interesting thought, but it developed rapidly: through a mutual friend she met French producer Aurelien Simon, who told her about his idea to launch a “mamy” (French for granny) DJ.

“I said: ‘You know, that is one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard.’

“And here we are,” she says with a smile.

Her only US gig this year will be on November 29th in New York, if you’re up for a road trip. Otherwise, you’ll have to settle for all the cool stuff she has on her website to get you through your day.

Until then, sing with me now, “Play that Funky Music Grand-Ma, Play that Funky Music Noowwwww….”

As many of you know, and thanks for all the nice cards and letters, Tony Lossano was unceremoniously added to the ranks of the unemployed recently. He now joins me and Steve Dahl in our quest to get a Link Card. However, unlike Steve and me, Tony has experience in the fast food industry. And, bonus, Tony’s well known for not really wanting to work more than an hour or so a day.

Why else would he be a TV producer?

So, it is with a song in my heart and a smile in my eyes, that I can announce that I’ve found the perfect job for him. Reuters (Tokyo) reports that Domino’s Pizza is hiring one lucky person to fill a $31,000.00 per hour job.

Take-out pizza chain hiring. Aged over 18, no experience required. Uniform provided. Salary: $31,000 an hour.

As part of a series of events commemorating the 25th anniversary of its arrival in Japan, Domino’s Pizza Japan is set to hire one lucky person at the rate of 2,500,000 yen ($31,030) for an hour’s worth of work in December.

A company spokesman declined to provide further details until November 10, but the company’s website said that anyone who wants the job will need to file an application. Those passing to the next stage will undergo an interview.

“Basically it’s anybody over 18, no questions about education or experience,” the spokesman said. “We’re actually a little surprised by how much of a response it’s getting.”

Hourly pay for part-time jobs in Japan averages just under 1,000 yen ($12.41).
Many of the comments on a Japanese article about the offer noted that the salary was cheap for the probable advertising impact and that there might be better uses for the money, such as raising workers’ pay overall.

“If I got this, I couldn’t work for being afraid of what the people around me were thinking,” one wrote.

In another of the promotions, anyone born on September 30 this year — the actual date the first Domino’s opened in Japan — will receive a free pizza on their birthday until they turn 25.

Now that Domino’s has improved their recipe to actually make the food more palatable than the box it comes in, this could be an exciting new venture for Mr. Lossano. Besides, he’s short enough to pass for a local, so I see this as a win/win situation for everyone.

Dō itashi mashite Lossano san.