It's been awhile but I'd figured I'd throw up this video on spider fighting. Apparently, anything can be raised for fighting these days. This guy pairs his smaller Samurai Spider up against the larger local stock in Kajiki Japan.
This tournament, known as Kumo Gassen (クモ合戦), has been around for over 400 years and is what one blogger calls "the original Pokemon" (source). Haha! In one of the earlier videos in the National Geographic documentary, there is footage of him blowing a mixture of
a Gatorade-like substance to help his spider grow. I wonder
if it worked...
It's almost two years now since the Sumo match-fixing scandal went public. Remember that? A winning wrestler would offer another a victory just so to keep his higher title (and higher-bracket paycheck). This was happening often. In fact, according to Levitt from Freakonomics, there was a 75 percent chance a 7-7 (wins/losses) Sumo wrestler would win against an 8-6 wrestler in a tournament. This means that every time the opportunity appeared for a 7-7 wrestler to lose, not advance in the tournament, and lose money, that wrestler won 75 percent of the time. So, that's like a 50 percent chance of cheating, huh?
The word 八百長, or yaochou, is the Japanese word for "match-fixing". The kanji literally translate to "800 leaders". Hmm, I don't get it. But that often happens when you're learning Japanese.
Prior to the big press stink, often a related skirmish would surface concerning some foreign Sumo wrestler. The truth is though, "the Japanese-born seemed to be just as corrupt as the foreigners" according to the statistics (source). I guess when someone got wind of the cheating, everyone tried to use the foreigner as the scapegoat. Oh, Japan.
This isn't just a problem of xenophobia either. The Japanese media is very conservative and likes to protect the country's image. Here's another clip from Freakonomics:
The moral of the story: go watch Freakonomics and check out their blog.
Kenichi Ito just broke the record for the fastest man running 100 meters on all fours with a time of 17.47 seconds. That's right, he utilizes his legs and his arms to run and quite frankly, he looks like a skilled monkey. His time is less than double that of Usain Bolt's 100m dash world record. See Ito breaking the record for yourself...
Apparently, Ito practices moving on all fours everyday indoors and outdoors. He has been studying African Patas monkeys and spent the last 9 years developing his running technique. I guess this is his last 9 years of work coming to fruition. (At least it's not as anticlimactic as some other record breakers.)
And so I was still wondering, "Why?" When Ito was a little kid, his classmates used to make fun of him for looking like a monkey in the face. He says he was never bothered by the mean comments because he always had an affinity for simians. Check out more footage of him and his training techniques here.
Illustrator Jed Henry, discussed earlier, is making some progress with his work re-imagining Nintendo characters as woodblock prints. I mentioned the complexity of creating one finished piece of work from this method. Each block of wood is carved in a different way to stamp a different color onto the finished product. Scroll to the video at the bottom to see Jed working on just one of the 11 colors in his Mario Kart piece.
Kirby - the finished piece
Pokemon - check out the guy that burnt his hand
Star Fox - Star Fox used to be a bunch of "3D" planes with crappy color (it has come a long way)
Here is the video of Jed Henry in action. Do you think you could make it through 11 woodblock carvings just to add color to one finished product?
Here is the finished Mario Kart piece from the video:
Now you can say all you want about how the Asians have funny English words and phrases on their shirts unbeknownst to them.
But I'm pretty sure this Japanese guy bought this shirt with some knowledge of the words and their meanings. Maybe, the tight pants will get him the women he wants...the women with the right kind of derrière (because he is a rump connoisseur). Or, maybe his tight pants accentuate his own glutes and he's proud of them. Not that there's anything wrong with either.
For some reason, I'm leaning toward the latter explanation.
