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“Fairy tales and legends” is the theme of this year’s World Sand Sculpture Festival now underway at the Tottori Sand Dunes in Tottori prefecture. On display (until May 31) are 19 massive works crafted by world-class sculptors from ten nations. The artists used around 2,700 tons of sand and took about two weeks to complete their works. Can you identify the fairy tales and legends depicted in these sand sculptures?

The Netherlands (front) [via]

The Netherlands (rear) [via]

Germany [via]

India (front) [via]

India (rear) [via]

Spain [via]

USA (front) [via]

USA (rear) [via]

Czech Republic [via]

Russia (front) [via]

Russia (rear) [via]

Australia (front) [via]

Australia (rear) [via]

Canada [via]

China [via]

Unknown [via]

Illustrator Yoriko Yoshida has dreamed up dozens of colorful face mask designs that are sure to keep you looking cool and feeling safe as fears of swine flu spread across the globe.

The mask of Octopus beard

The mask of Rising sun

The mask of Skull

The mask of Wild boar

The mask of Mt. FUJI

The mask of Beauty

[Link: Yoriko Yoshida's surgical masks]

(from PinkTentacle)

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From Photobomb. Awesome. Check the site for more classics.

Bizarre magazine in the UK conducted a rather odd interview with 1980s icon, Mr. T.

Your current Snickers campaign sees you come out with a new trademark line, telling weedy men to “get some nuts”. Who’s the weakest guy you’ve ever encountered? Pee-wee Herman. Sadly, I’ve never had the chance to train him – to get him to beef up and man up! I don’t think there’d be enough time if I had eternity. And that little wimpy suit he wears doesn’t help matters.

But you’ve worn some pretty full-on outfits – dungarees, gold lamé waistcoats, all those necklaces...
When you’re a real man, you can dress up in whatever – spangly fabrics, women’s stuff or whatnot – because you’re secure enough in your masculinity to pull it off. But you’ve gotta be a real man inside the clothes.

Have you ever seen a ghost?
I’m not sure whether it was just my imagination, and the memory might have become blurred in my mind, but again, as a child, one night I peeked out from my bed covers and I saw a court jester wearing curly-toed shoes and a spiked hat with bells on sharp points. Perhaps I was dreaming – influenced by the sound of the wind whipping around outside the house, the building creaking and the rain tapping on the windows, but it seemed very real.

"How Bizarre is... Mr. T"

Bizarre magazine in the UK conducted a rather odd interview with 1980s icon, Mr. T.

Your current Snickers campaign sees you come out with a new trademark line, telling weedy men to “get some nuts”. Who’s the weakest guy you’ve ever encountered? Pee-wee Herman. Sadly, I’ve never had the chance to train him – to get him to beef up and man up! I don’t think there’d be enough time if I had eternity. And that little wimpy suit he wears doesn’t help matters.

But you’ve worn some pretty full-on outfits – dungarees, gold lamé waistcoats, all those necklaces...
When you’re a real man, you can dress up in whatever – spangly fabrics, women’s stuff or whatnot – because you’re secure enough in your masculinity to pull it off. But you’ve gotta be a real man inside the clothes.

Have you ever seen a ghost?
I’m not sure whether it was just my imagination, and the memory might have become blurred in my mind, but again, as a child, one night I peeked out from my bed covers and I saw a court jester wearing curly-toed shoes and a spiked hat with bells on sharp points. Perhaps I was dreaming – influenced by the sound of the wind whipping around outside the house, the building creaking and the rain tapping on the windows, but it seemed very real.

"How Bizarre is... Mr. T"

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Too cute. Check a check a check it ouuuuut. Draw pictures, make noises, it's virtually impossible to make a bad song.

"Vices are like genitals - most are ugly to behold, and yet we find that our own are dear to us." From The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.

"I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul."
Jean-Paul Sartre

"Hold me like a baby!" James Warner

"We must remain fools at all cost." Norman Mailer.

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." Aristotle.

"I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work."
Thomas Edison.

"Information is not knowledge." Albert Einstein.

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you." Aldous Huxley.

“What makes me depressed? Seeing stupid people happy." Slavoj Zizek.

"There's only three things
That's for sure
Taxes, death and trouble." Marvin Gaye

"All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold."
Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice)

"So much to do, so little point." Adam Buxton

"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost."
Jean-Paul Sartre

"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."
Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."
Jean-Paul Sartre

Instructions:
1. Stare at the image for 10 seconds.
2. Look at something -- your hand, a book, your friend
3. Enjoy!

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,
There is a continual life of pants and panties,
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.
The salary man, after a while,
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,
Has decisively fucked his neighbor,
And now takes her to the miserable movies,
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband
Come together like bed sheets and bury me,
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,
And the animals mount each other openly,
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,
And cousins play strange games with cousins,
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly
On beds big and tall as ships:
So, eternally,
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth
And black roots like fingernails and shoes.

Pablo Neruda.

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Check out the wild futuristic dancing in this classic German 1960s space opera Raumpatroullie.

The anti-consumer brigade thinks there is a fairer, more rational, alternative to capitalism just round the corner. There isn't - Daniel Finkelstein in The Times.

What - exactly - is consumerism? I've been bumbling along for ages, too embarrassed to ask, but this morning, as the City protesters search the hall cupboard for their missing balaclavas and prepare to set off, I feel I need to know. It must mean something, mustn't it, since so many people seem to be against it.

I know what a consumer is, obviously. And consumption (it's what Keats died of). But consumerism? I have never heard anyone say that they believe in consumerism, only people who say that they don't. If there really is such a thing as consumerism, where are the consumerites with their placards and seaside conferences?

So when people - archbishops, G20 demonstrators, the preposterous psychologist Oliver James - attack consumerism, and as the credit crunch brings them bigger audiences and more credibility, I think they are really attacking something far more banal. I think they are dressing up their assault in fancy language - like undergraduates who get involved in college politics and start calling themselves student unionists - to make a prosaic idea sound impressive.

I think that they have looked back at 5,000 years of human history - at pestilence and famine and disease and degradation, at genocide and civil war, at fear and loathing, at bigotry and ignorance, chauvinism and dictatorship - and concluded that our biggest problem is... shopping.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Honda has developed new brain-machine interface (BMI) technology that allows humans to control the Asimo humanoid robot simply by thinking certain thoughts.

The BMI system, which Honda developed along with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation, consists of a sensor-laden helmet that measures the user’s brain activity and a computer that analyses the thought patterns and relays them as wireless commands to the robot. (Watch video.)

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When the user simply thinks about moving his or her right hand, the pre-programmed Asimo responds several seconds later by raising its right arm. Likewise, Asimo lifts its left arm when the person thinks about moving their left hand, it begins to walk when the person thinks about moving their legs, and it holds its hand up in front of its mouth when the person thinks about moving their tongue.

The high-precision BMI technology relies on three different types of brain activity measurements. EEG (electroencephalography) sensors measure the slight fluctuations in electrical potential on the scalp that occur when thinking, while NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) sensors measure changes in cerebral blood flow. Newly developed information extraction technology is used to process the complex data from these two types of sensors, resulting in a more accurate reading. The system reportedly has an accuracy rate of more than 90%.

The use of EEG and NIRS sensors makes the new system more compact than previous BMI systems that rely on bulkier fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology. Although the system is small enough to be transported from place to place, the developers plan to further reduce the size.

Honda, which has been conducting BMI research and development with ATR since 2005, is looking into the possibility of one day using this type of interface technology with artificial intelligence and robotics to create devices that users can operate without having to move.

[Source: Honda press release, via Pink Tentacle]

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I found this genius short on boingboing earlier. It reminds me of when I lived with Benet. If Eastenders was particularly boring or we'd already watched the Guns of Navarone that week, we'd go on to Christian websites to discuss the existence of god and stuff. Occasionally the people on their message boards would make truly bizarre statements. There are some true gems here, along the lines of 'if we are descended from monkeys, then why don't human babies look like monkey babies'. More at 'Fundies Say The Darndest Things'. Well worth a visit.

"I am a bit troubled. I believe my son has a girlfriend, because she left a dirty magazine with men in it under his bed. My son is only 16 and I really don't think he's ready to date yet. What's worse is that he's sneaking some girl to his room behind my back. I need help, God! I want my son to stop being so secretive!
Linda, Good news prayer room [Comments (3100)] [2006-Oct-28]"

Wow.

ps - the comments on the YouTube page are AMAZING.

Story from North America from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

This is the full version of "Story from North America" (2007) by Garrett Davis and Kirsten Lepore.
Music written and performed by Garrett Davis
(garrettmdavis.googlepages.com)