flickering pictures

When I was a kid, comic books always had those little ads for mail-order venus flytraps, with promises that they’d keep your home bug-free by crushing the life out of unsuspecting houseflies with their razor-sharp fangs and super-corrosive digestive juices. When my mom finally got me one, I was a little disappointed — no […]

[Read more →]

I spent a bit of time in South Korea last year, and if you could sum the place up in one word — which you can’t — it would be “busy.” South Koreans work an average of 2,390 hours a year, compared to 1,777 in the U.S.A., 1,717 in Canada and 1,652 in the […]

[Read more →]

So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of […]

[Read more →]

Boasting an impressive 51.7 mpg (21.97km/litre) in city driving, the Tata Nano might be the cheapest and cleanest production car in the world. And at $2,000 apiece, India’s roads are going to see a lot of them.
The Nano has five seats, a maximum speed of 60 mph (about 97km/h), twice the fuel efficiency of […]

[Read more →]

Mao would be pissed.
Along with a bar and hair salon, the store offers 38,000 square feet of blonde-haired, big-boobed dolls. Despite its location, only 10 per cent of the store’s dolls will look Asian, apparently because of Mattel research that indicates Chinese girls and young women want American-looking Barbies.
The GlobalPost reports:

The plan is to […]

[Read more →]

To voice its displeasure about joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, North Korea is threatening to shoot down civilian airplanes that venture near its airspace — even if they don’t actually enter it. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan may have something to say about that.
From the BBC:

In the latest of a series of bellicose […]

[Read more →]

Yeah, sorry about that headline.
From the Telegraph:

A sewage treatment facility in Nagano prefecture, north-west of Tokyo, has reported a yield of gold extracted from sludge to rival production levels at some of the best mines in the world.
Tens of thousands of pounds worth of gold has been found at the Suwa treatment facility in the […]

[Read more →]

A neat new U.S.-based news service called the Global Post has started covering events around the world, with an emphasis on regions that traditionally fly under the mainstream radar and a novel insistence that its reporters must live full-time in the countries they cover. It’s too early to say if it’ll live up to […]

[Read more →]

From the inspirational self-authored obituary of Lasantha Wickramatunge, editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper, written shortly before he was shot and killed on his way to work:

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there […]

[Read more →]

Just a little stub of a post today — I’m swamped at the moment, and I my typing fingers need a rest after that little novella the other day on press freedom in Gaza.
A new mall in Nanjing, China will apparently host only stores that sell knockoff brands, such as “McDnoald’s,” “Pizza Huh” and “Bucksstar […]

[Read more →]