Wie Wins!

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

Michelle Wie’s career has been long on hype but short on victories, but her performance at St. Charles proves the victories will begin to pile up.
As finishes go, it was picture-perfect.

The pristine scene at the 18th green: Michelle Wie, the most famous of the bunch, taking a victory lap home with a two-shot cushion on the field at the CN Canadian Women's Open. Thousands of golf groupies bringing her home. Dusk just beginning to fall.

Not a breath of wind on a cool, late summer afternoon. Dead quiet except for a lone Canada goose, far overhead, going the wrong way.

But it was Wie making all the birdies at St. Charles. Three straight at 13, 14 and 15 clinched the second LPGA title of the 20-year-old's once can't-miss career.

It may be the victory that finally puts Wie on the champion's map, after her skyrocketing emergence as a pre-teen phenom from Honolulu a decade ago. After all, Wie was to be the LPGA's Tiger, the face of women's golf in the 21st century.

Absolutely. This is the face of the LPGA. She needs to start dominating the tour in order to get eyeballs watching again. Her career has been a disaster so far, from overbearing parents, to playing with men at 15 to a college life to just not being committed. Maybe with this win and all that in the past, she's now mature and can fully concentrate on a golfing career. Ochoa is gone, Sorenstam is gone, women's golf needs a star instead of all these unpronouncable Korean names. Wie winning majors will save the LPGA.

Impressing White Dudes!

Japanese makeup commercial to impress white dudes only!

Kid torches his own house, OVER GUNDAM

Source: Yahoo

A Japanese man has admitted to burning down his family home after his mother threw away some of his favourite robot toys from the "Gundam" animation series.

Yoshifumi Takabe, aged 30 and living with his mother, said he had become suicidal after she dumped some of the robots, of which he had enough to fill 300 boxes stacked to the ceiling, the Sports Nippon said Wednesday.

The blaze on August 9 last year completely destroyed their two-storey wooden house in Kasai, Hyogo prefecture, but no one was injured.

"The Gundam figures are like the partners I spend my life with," he reportedly said after pleading guilty at western Kobe's District Court. "I wanted to die with them in a fire if they were to be thrown out."

The Mobile Suit Gundam series, based on an animation TV series which started in the late 1970s, is about space wars fought by gigantic robots.

I won't totally blame the kid here. Parents just can't just ignore things and let it get out of control. 300 boxes! Obviously he like Gundam! Perhaps mom should have said something at 50 boxes? 100 boxes? If it's a concern, put a stop to it. It's been 30 years! At this point, it's too late and drastic actions will result in drastic responses.

Asian Ripoff LXXXIX - Dschinghis Khan

Chinese version of a classic German song (for the Soviet Olympics)!

Artist: Da Zhangwei
Language: Mandarin

And if you have absolutely no idea what this song is.. here's a recent version to open Eurovision 2009!



Thanks PerryPie for reminding me of this wonderful song!

Have you ever been a mascot!?

Source: AsiaOne

JAPAN - A company in Konosu, Saitama Prefecture, that specialises in making full-body costumes is riding a wave of popularity for adorable yuru-kyara mascots.

Yuru-kyara are cute, relaxed and unsophisticated--literally "loose" (yurui). As an increasing number of such mascot characters are promoting localities or other entities, the small firm Funny Craft is growing to be one of the leading companies in the industry.

The firm boasts "a lovely look, exactly the same as imagined" when filling orders for mascot suits. It receives a wide range of orders ranging from famous manga characters to a mascot for a prefectural police force. "Our full-body suits fit you so well. They aren't 'loose' at all," said the firm's president, Junjiro Kamijo, 69.

Five employees work steadily at its about 500-square-metre factory, which is filled with paper patterns and basic costume parts made of polystyrene foam.

In its about 30-year-long history, the firm has made thousands of full-body suits. Five years ago, it began to receive orders in excess of its capacity, and sometimes could not accept new orders.

.....more

I love mascots, they're so cute! I'm one of those who always runs up to greet and hug mascots!

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Recently, Japanese TV aired this hard-hitting investigative report about Japan’s various police mascots:



Their research team contacted police offices across the nation and determined that there are at least 42 different police mascot characters in Japan. Some of the police mascots are national, some are prefectural, and a few are for city/town police forces.
What exactly is the point of having cops dress up in weird mascot costumes? Here is a ranking of the top issues they try to spread awareness about:

1. Bank Transfer Fraud
2. Traffic Safety
3. General Crime Prevention
4. Pickpocketing
5. Purse Snatching

It might seem pretty stupid to have police officers assigned to mascot duty, but those wacky costumes can be pretty useful whenever the police want to distribute fliers. A mascot draws everyone’s attention, and people who would otherwise ignore police officers seem more willing to approach them when a mascot is around. Even if people throw away the fliers without reading them, there is a chance that they will still remember encountering the mascots, many of whom have names that are puns based on the message they are trying to promote.
Issues 2 to 5 are focused at children and the general public, but the #1 issue is targeted at elderly people. For years now, telephone fraudsters claiming to be relatives in distress have scammed many elderly people into sending them large sums of money. Many ATM’s in Japan now have posters featuring mascot characters that warn users about scams, and several police forces have been sending their mascots to post offices and banks to spread awareness among the elderly.

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Are there alot of mascots where you live for different sort of things? Have you ever been a mascot and what was it like? Tell us your best mascot stories!

Have you ever been a mascot?

Astroboy Poster

A large Astroboy poster overlooks a Japanese salaryman waiting for a train at the local train station

Japanese Girls and The First Pitch

You've all been to a baseball game and usually they trot out some celebrity to throw out the first pitch.

In Japan alot of the time, it's a hawt music star.

But even though it's just one pitch for fun, it's taken quite seriously and the girls practice as best they can. One has to have good posture and technique to throw a ball 60 feet.

So here are some examples.

We'll start with BoA



Not good technique, not enough leg kick and spun to fast, ball goes left.

Next is Ueto Aya



Again, too quick and fast hip turn causing the ball to go left.
At least the mascots are CUTE!

Here is Aki Hoshino



and.. well...nobody's watching the ball here.

on we go..

You see all these girls failed cause they had the incorrect technique.
This is how it's done, like a real pitcher.

First is Maki Horikita



That's good form, hands raised high in the air, leg kick, even a delay and ... just a bit short but pretty good!

Here's Figure Skating World Champion Miki Ando



Again, arms raised over the head, a leg kick and a delay. Very nice strike!

Next is Kwon Yuri



Woohoo sidewinder! Almost a strike.

But the best one BY FAR is...Lee Jung Hyun



I almost died laughing seeing that pose, and the pitch was perfect too!



So that's the trick. Get into a set position, arms raised high in the air, legkick, delay and throw.

Don't Sit For Too Long!

Source: Orange

Park officials in China have found a way to stop people from hogging their benches for too long - by fitting steel spikes on a coin-operated timer.

If visitors at the Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, linger too long without feeding the meter, dozens of sharp spikes shoot through the seat.

The spikes are too short to cause any serious harm - but long enough to prevent people from sitting on them comfortably.

Park bosses got the idea from an art installation in Germany where sculptor Fabian Brunsing created a similar bench as a protest against the commercialisation of modern life.

"He thought he was exaggerating. He didn't foresee that a very practical country like China might actually use them for real," said one critic.

Parks in China suffer from chronic overcrowding at weekends when millions of people try to escape the country's teeming cities.

"We have to make sure the facilities are shared out evenly and this seems like a fair way to stop people grabbing a bench at dawn and staying there all day," said one park official.

It's mostly young couple hogging the benches and making out.. so I don't know about the effectiveness of these so-called spikes.

Chinese set new world record for human dominoes

More than 10,000 people have set a new Guinness World record for "human dominoes" in China's Inner Mongolia, toppling a record set a decade earlier in Singapore by more than several hundred.

The 10,276, mostly students seated cross-legged and falling backwards in a line that snaked across an enormous square, took 1 hour and 20 minutes to set the new record on Thursday.

"The human dominoes were a success. The new record is 10,267 people. This is a new Guinness World record," Guinness' official Wu Shaohong said, in images broadcast on state television.

The ceremony in the Inner Mongolian city of Ordos kicked off with Chinese basketball star and former NBA player Mengke Bateer passing a basketball to the first domino in line, who then all fell backward in turn.


The participants trained more than four hours each for three days in preparation for the event, China's official Xinhua news agency said.

Previously, the human domino record was held by 9,234 students in Singapore in 2000.

Ramen shop closes; too popular

Source: Daily Yomiuri

A ramen shop where customers line up for hours to eat a bowl of noodles has decided to close its doors. The reason: customers line up for hours to eat their noodles.

Rokurinsha in Shinagawa Ward will close on Aug. 29 in response to repeated complaints from neighbors about customers blocking traffic, smoking on the street and talking loudly. "We don't want to cause any more problems for our neighbors," the shop said.

Rokurinsha, a six-minute walk from JR Osaki Station and located on a shopping street next to a residential area, opened in April 2005. Its tsuke-men, thick noodles dipped in a rich sauce, has attracted ramen-lovers and the media, and has been featured several times in magazines and on TV. As soon as the shop opens, a line starts to form.

According to Matsufuji Shokuhin, a company based in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, that runs Rokurinsha, the line stretches to about 100 people on weekends, and waiting times of two hours are common. The thick noodles take longer to boil, exacerbating the long waits.

The shop has tried to solve the problem by opening early, or changing the way customers line up, but failed to come up with a good solution.

.....more

Failed to come up with a good situation? They failed to do the most basic thing when things are going well, sometimes too well.

JACK up the price! Find out who your real loyal customers are! If the noodles are really good people will still come and if people leave because it's too expensive then no more lineups!

Come on Japanese people, be business saavy!

racist graffiti spree hits Vancouver strip mall

Source: Vancouver Sun

Richmond RCMP are looking for two white males who went on a twisted, sometimes racist rant with a felt marker at an Asian strip mall.

The two men, who were caught on security cameras, filled two levels of a stairwell with felt marker graffiti, which included threats against police and racial slurs against Asians:

One of the suspects wrote "F--k the Chinese" next to a Swastika, and wrote "KKK" beneath it.

They also wrote "187 a pig" and "187 on an undercover cop" and "F--k the police."

The term "187" is used by some police agencies to refer to a homicide, so the graffiti could be read as a threat against police.

The scrawls have all the earmarks of a tweaking crackhead indulging in a stream-of-consciousness rant.

"I just got out of jail and I'm high," one of them wrote.

The word "jailbird" also appears a few times. A number of individuals are also named in the kind sophomoric trash-talk one finds scrawled on high school bathroom stalls.

If it's on camera why weren't the arrested on the spot? Isn't anyone watching the live video? Aren't cars in the parking lot supposed to be protected? Is the security guard asleep?

And how does this happen in Richmond. Isn't it 90% Chinese? Should these guys be pummeled? Aren't there any eyewitnesses? Where is everyone!?