Delightful News From the Middle Coast

At 1451ft, Chicago's Willis Tower (née Sears) is the tallest building in the Western World

Our associates in Chicago informed us recently that some of the news out there in this cold, dark world these days is good and we felt we should share:

The Sears Tower, lately unceremoniously renamed the Willis tower, is about to pioneer a kind of crazy-innovative window, one that produces power without obstructing the view or letting in appreciably less sunlight.

At first the Willis tower will only replace windows on the south side of the 56th floor; eventually, the whole south face of the building could be slathered in glorious high tech energy generating windows, enough to generate 2 MW of power. The windows have the added benefit of keeping out the excess heat energy that plagues glass buildings.

As incredible as these windows sound, they're only a small part of a larger, $350 million initiative to reduce electricity consumption of the entire Willis tower by 80 percent.

(courtesy grist.org)

So please, Internet, I implore you to take a moment to block out the horrific situations in Japan, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street, Detroit, Wisconsin, America, Mexico...etcetera, draw in a few good deep breaths, loosen the muscles in your neck, and soak-up a little ray of sunshine before you head back into the courtroom of public opinion and perjure yourself by saying the whole world has gone to shit because it hasn't.

Only most of it has.

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All the World Loves a Lover

For your viewing pleasure, here is an old Japanese cologne commercial made by the director of Hausu, starring Charles Bronson:



What a crazy piece of shit, eh? I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting where the director explained his vision to the ad agency and client.

"Okay, so...he's in a candle-lit bar by himself, making love to a black piano player with his eyes. After thanking an insane old doorman on his way out, he drives home really fast to take off his shirt and pour cologne all over his body as he gives himself a rubdown and shoots guns. Guys will love it!"

"Wait--there are no women in this?"

"No! There are no women in Mandom--just men. Men who like to choke each other to death with the overpowering stench of their cologne-soaked half-naked bodies as they dance around the room, giggling and flirting. And shooting guns!"

"I see...well, what the fuck do I know? I named my cologne Mandom. Let's give it a shot."

For more Mandom, click here.

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Of Gilligans and Mary Ann

For those of you out there obsessed with Lost, Survivor, and Gilligan's Island (so many of you out there, I know--GET YOUR OWN WEBSITE ALREADY!), or who haven't been able to shake Lord of the Flies out of their head since high school (mostly because it's the only good book they ever finished), get ready for this fascinating (and true) tale as old as time, courtesy of this strange but informative website:

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June 30 1951 - Anatahan Island
A group of stranded survivors of a Japanese vessel sunk by the American military found their way to the island of Anatahan, 75 nautical miles north of Saipan. The island's coast line is precipitous with landing beaches on the northern and western shore and a small sandy beach on the southwest shore. It's steep slopes are furrowed by deep gorges covered by high grass. This brooding cone jutting from the sea floor is a large, extinct volcano with two peaks and a grass covered flat field, the final resting place for a B-29 Superfortress that crashed upon returning from a bombing mission over Nagoya, Japan on January 3, 1945 killing the aircraft's crew.

By 1951 the Japanese holdouts on the island refused to believe that the war was over and resisted every attempt by the Navy to remove them. This group was first discovered in February 1945, when several Chamorros from Saipan were sent to the island to recover the bodies of the Saipan based B-29, T square 42, from the 498th Bomb Group, 875th Squadron, 73rd Wing under the command of Richard Carlson Stickney, Jr. The Chamorros reported that there were about thirty Japanese survivors from three Japanese ships sunk in June 1944, one of which was an Okinawan woman.
Pamphlets had been dropped informing the holdouts that the war was over and that they should surrender, but these requests were ignored. They lived a sparse life, eating coconuts, taro, wild sugar cane, fish and lizards. They smoked crushed, dried papaya leaves wrapped in the leaves of bananas and made an intoxicating beverage known as "tuba", (coconut wine). They lived in palm frond huts with woven floor matting of pandanus. Their life improved after the crash of the aircraft . They used metal from the B-29 to fashion crude implements such as pots, knives and roofing for their hut. The oxygen tanks were used to store water, clothing was made from nylon parachutes, the cords used for fishing line. The springs from machine guns were fashioned into fish hooks. Several in the group also had machine guns and pistols recovered from the aircraft.

Personal aggravations developed as a result of being too long in close association within a small group on a small island and also because of tuba drinking. The presence of only one woman, Kazuko Higa, caused great difficulty as well. Six of eleven deaths that occurred among the holdouts were the result of violence. One man displayed thirteen knife wounds. Ms. Higa would, from time to time, transfer her affections between at least four of the men after each mysteriously disappeared as a result of "being swallowed by the waves while fishing." In July 1950, Ms. Higa went to the beach when an American vessel appeared off shore and asked to be removed from the island. She was taken to Saipan aboard the Miss Susie and, upon arrival, informed authorities that the men on the island did not believe the war was over.

Meanwhile, officials of the Japanese government became interested in the situation on Anatahan and asked the Navy for information "concerning the doomed and living Robinson Crusoes who were living a primitive life on an uninhabited island", and offered to send a ship to rescue them. The families of the Japanese holdouts on the island of Anatahan , were contacted in Japan and requested by the U. S. Navy to write letters advising them that the war was over and that they should surrender. In January 1951, a message from the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture was delivered.

The letters were dropped by air on June 26 and finally convinced the holdouts that they should give themselves up. Thus, six years after the end of World War II, "Operation Removal" got underway from Saipan under the Command of James B. Johnson, USNR, aboard the Navy Tug USS Cocopa. Lt. Commander James B. Johnson and Mr. Ken Akatani, an interpreter, went ashore by rubber boat and formally accepted the last surrender of World War II on the morning of June 30, 1951 which also coincided with the last day of the Naval Administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

For more information, read Saipan Oral Histories of the Pacific War by Bruce Petty, page 78, 119-120.

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Wow, right? A formal surrender to a US Navy tugboat captain six years after the war ended? From 29 tattered, stir-crazy, deranged, horn-dog Japanese soldiers who had been chugging coconut moonshine and chasing some poor woman around a small uninhabited island with their dirty dicks for five years when not busy brutally murdering each other in order to increase the odds of getting her all to themselves for the rest of the interminable war they were so busy fighting (in spirit)?

War is such gentlemanly sport.

Hey, you know what? Somebody get Aaron Sorkin, J.J. Abrams, and Rip Torn on the phone like yesterday--I think we've got the next hit series here and we need to meet up in the Bahamas and start writing episodes immediately.

We'll shoot one version of the story for every country in the television world, simultaneously so that it's cheaper. It will be the biggest undertaking anyone in Hollywood has ever imagined (eat your heart out, Ron Howard).

Also, somebody track down that recipe for tuba--that coconut moonshine is the best chance I have of finally achieving my billionaire supervillain dreams.

Kazuko Higa with rescuers

Dessert:

Wondering what ever happened to Kazuko Higa? Well, naturally the comely lass joined a burlesque tour in 1952 and regaled audiences with tales of her sexytimes on the island. Moral of her story: "...and THAT is why you never move to a deserted island with your husband!"

Hollywood legend Josef von Sternberg became obsessed with her story and, as one does, wrote/directed/photographed/narrated a movie about her called Ana-ta-han (1953), which has since been remade twice. It was a financial bust and the last movie he ever made. He died of a heart attack 16 years later.

Incidentally, three years after that, Ayn Rand sold Von Sternberg's custom-built, architecturally-significant house (for seven times what she paid for it) to a developer who demolished it--one of her many vile offenses against art and philosophy.

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It is the end of August and I feel thirsty.

So, apparently, does the mewling alleycat outside my window, but unfortunately for me, my thirst is not so easily slaked.

No passing stranger of the opposite sex can solve my hydration problem, even if they wanted to, but here this greedy cat will take all comers and get as much as she wants.

Or maybe my perspective is wrong.

Maybe satisfaction looms in the distance, tantalizingly on her radar but frustratingly never within reach. Maybe she is a tormented soul whose thirst, like mine, is bottomless. Maybe we are two of a kind.

Much like the insatiable central characters in the 1976 Japanese arthouse porno, In the Realm of the Senses, which I watched this evening in (mostly) wide-eyed surprise.

Never in my life have I seen so much penis--and I own one.

Never in my life have I seen two people engage in so much public fornication, to such blase reaction. To say the sex is gratuitous misses the point, but still--it is exhausting to watch.

Here is what Mr. Criterion has to say about the movie, for all you bumpkins out there that ain't never heard of it:

SYNOPSIS: Still censored in its own country, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida), by Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, remains one of the most controversial films of all time. A graphic portrayal of insatiable sexual desire, Oshima’s film, set in 1936 and based on a true incident, depicts a man and a woman (Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda) consumed by a transcendent, destructive love while living in an era of ever escalating imperialism and governmental control. Less a work of pornography than of politics, In the Realm of the Senses is a brave, taboo-breaking milestone.
SYNOPSIS: WARNING: THIS FILM IS SEXUALLY EXPLICIT

I wish I could agree with their pornography versus politics angle, but there was so little politics involved in this movie that I was bored stiff. Imagine saying that! I wanted more politics!

What exactly...were the politics? I saw some soldiers march past in one scene, but who knows what that's supposed to mean. What I do know is that the entire movie involves a former prostitute fellating, ravaging, and beating/strangling her master-cum-husband, whom she rapidly turns into her willing sex slave.

I'll put it this way--there is a good reason the narrator feels the need, at movie's end, to reveal the events took place in 1936, because any other movie that took place in Japan in 1936 and even hinted at politics would have found that designation superfluous.

Game, set, match. Verdict: Porno. Sorry Criterion--there was no need to salvage this one.

That being said, if you are in for an initially titillating movie that ultimately makes you never want to have sex again, this 'masterpiece' is for you. Enjoy!

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Talk About a Shitty Week...

Rad Journal may be a site devoted entirely to all things radiation, and it may have avoided upgrading its layout since ARPANET launched in 1969, but it's worth checking out nonetheless, as there is some pretty cool stuff there.

Stuff like this:

March 25, 2009

TOKYO – Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.

Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

"As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognized as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki ," Nagasaki city official Toshiro Miyamoto said. "It's such an unfortunate case, but it is possible that there are more people like him."

Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation — including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs — but Yamaguchi's compensation will not increase, Miyamoto said.

Yet, Yamaguchi is satisfied that his record is now a historical fact.

"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," Yamaguchi was quoted as saying by the nationwide Mainichi newspaper.

Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.

Thousands survivors continue to seek official recognition after the government rejected their eligibility for compensation. The government last year eased the requirements for being certified as a survivor, following criticism the rules were too strict and neglected many who had developed illnesses that doctors have linked to radiation.

And you thought you had it rough!

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Be the Envy of the Upper East Side

Get your square watermelon today!

These totally unnecessary items are only $75.00 each and available wherever obscenely wealthy people might actually spend that much on something worth $3.00--New York, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.

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Japanese Cowboys

Japanese businessmen don't give a shit--they will continue to kill whales, bluefin tuna, dolphins, and themselves, whether or not it is legal.

It's what they do.

Perhaps a manageable solution--for those of us who like whales, dolphins, the Earth, and sushi--is to start killing Japanese fishermen and the men who work for the companies that employ them. This will not only help us out in our cause, but will also save them the trouble of killing themselves in three years when there are no more bluefin tuna left and they are ashamed because their companies goes bankrupt.

This could be done fairly easily, by cornering their boats--one at a time is best--in a discreet cove somewhere, hopping aboard, hacking them to pieces until the ocean turns red, and dumping their lifeless bodies overboard. They will understand this method and respect you as an adversary in the cutthroat world of marine survival.

Once everybody onboard has been dispatched, attach a tow rope to the boat, take it out to deeper waters, blow a hole in the bottom with explosives, and watch the evidence sink to the bottom of the ocean. Repeat.

Whoever gets mad at you should also be killed, since these are the people that own the boats, channels of distribution, etc.

Take solace in the fact that your efforts were not in vain--not only did you preserve the beautiful marine ecosystem for a while longer, but you fed millions of animals with the delicious decaying corpses of fishermen, by the time those nutrients work their way up the food chain.


Seems like a perfect solution, right?

Who's in? Australia? Greenpeace? Greater-Michigan Dolphin Fanclub?

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Enter Ronaldina

" I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that--did you say 'one big mac'
or 'shit your pants and say your prayers, America?' "

In trying to discover why this is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen, I learned things about myself about which I would much rather have remained blissfully ignorant.

I won't share.

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Can't Wait Til This Trend Hits the Lucrative U.S. 'Unselfconscious Fat Girl' Market

Although these photos are 'allegedly' digitally manipulated for Japanese porno magazines (soft-core, I assume), according to Snopes.com, you know it is only a matter of time before some Joe Francis / Forever 21 wannabe decides to actually create them.

Or will Bebe beat them to the punch?