I saw this story on Marmot’s today and it caught my eye for a number of reasons. The above statue is being built by North Korean workers, in Senegal.
The story in AP doesn’t mention the statue is being built by North Korean workers until the 16th paragraph of this story, which I guess I find [...]

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You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say fall arrived in South Korea tonight. It’s a tad early, so I suspect another hot blast will be on the way, but at the same time there’s usually a late afternoon sometime in September when the air becomes tangibly cooler. That late afternoon came tonight.
I [...]

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A brief break from baseball news to bring you an art history moment: Japanese Shunga are erotic ukiyo e paintings, usually found in woodblock format. Inspired by Chinese medical manuals, Japanese Shunga date back to the Heian period (794-1185) but had their artistic apex during the Edo period (1603 – 1867). [...]

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It’s a frequently used scouting quip — he’s got some sack, usually referring to pitchers who aren’t afraid of throwing inside or coming right at a hitter. The term is a bit intuitive, but whatever. These are woodblock prints created by Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) of Tanuki (raccoon dogs) using their large scrota in all [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4KRQHvGUb0

“Unko-san,” a new anime series about a brown turd-shaped fairy with lots of luck, is fast becoming the rage among high school girls in western Japan. Short episodes of the anime are now showing in the Osaka area on Kansai TV’s “Otoemon” music program. The stories revolve around Unko-san — whose name is a play [...]

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I promised myself that if Brian ever posted these on his site again I’d post a couple and link to them. They’re that funny. This is the kind of thing I start laughing out loud as I walk down the street when I think about it.

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Jose Canseco’s Mixed Mixed Martial Arts debut in Yokohama lasted all of 1:17 as he was KO’d by South Korea’s 7′2 Choi Hong-man in what Japan Times reporter Kaz Nagatsuka described as a disgrace to professional sports.
From the Japan Times:
In this brutal, no-mercy sport, it’s not unusual when a fight ends a moment after the [...]

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by Itchy
France is currently hosting the annual battle royal in cinema otherwise known as The Cannes Film Festival. The French, who gave us the auteur theory, love directors almost as much as the women of the world love Brad Pitt. And with the roster of big-name auteurs scheduled to compete for the Palme d’Or this [...]

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Classic post by Pink Tentacle concerning Japanese dolls that were popular items in misemono — educational carnivals that travelled throughout Japan during the 18th and 19th centuries. Apparently the dolls were originally used as training exercises for midwives, but records show the dolls became big attractions themselves.

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From The Sun:

Gavin’s identical brother died in the womb early in their mum’s pregnancy. The 4cm foetus then became embedded in Gavin’s tissue and stayed in his stomach for the next 30 years.
There are just a handful of cases worldwide — with the majority reported in Asia. Former firefighter Gavin, of Witney, Oxfordshire, [...]

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Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the [...]

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Last November I did a piece on Ben Sakoguchi’s “Unauthorized History of Baseball in 100 Odd Paintings“. The California-born Sakoguchi–who spent his early days in an internment camp in Arizona before establishing himself as an artist in Los Angeles–has continued his prolific work and released 85 new paintings in 2008, including a series [...]

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A goody from Pink Tentacle. This is from the homepage of Osada Genki, a physicist turned painter and ambient noise artist.

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From manga artist Shintaro Kago. Not for all tastes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbYZnOFWFDw

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An ice version of Namdaemun, or Sungnyemun as it’s also known by, is attracting some attention at the Sapporo Snow Festival, which started yesterday and I posted about here. 
You can find a live cam here.

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I’d really like to visit Sapporo. Not so much for basebally reasons, but largely because I became drawn to the place after I saw a film called The Rebirth at the Pusan Film Festival a couple years ago.
That was a dreary film about a guy who moves into the middle of nowhere and basically goes [...]

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Or so asks the above 1970s Japanese credit card magazine ad for Sanwa Bank.

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Really striking model of Shanghai made out of poker chips and dice. This is “Unreal Scene” by artist Liu Jianhua on display now at Galleria Continua in Italy.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7zf9uLKGNA

I came across this in a Top 5 Art Picks for 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a condensed version of San Yuan Li, a multimedia project by Cao Fei, currently featured in an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum.

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Pink Tentacle put up its Top 10 posts for 2008. Not surprisingly I’ve linked to a few of these. I couple others I meant to link to but didn’t. In the top spot is the recent Scientists extract images directly from brain, and just a little further down is Old School Horror: Edo-period monster paintings [...]

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