The New York Times reports on an earthquake in Japan.

TOKYO, July 16 — A pair of powerful earthquakes shook Japan’s northwestern coast about 14 hours apart, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 800.

Hundreds of buildings were flattened or damaged to some degree, including the world’s largest nuclear power plant, which suffered a minor equipment fire and a leak of a small amount of radioactive water into the Sea of Japan. The utility that owns the plant said the leaked water posed no environmental threat.

Thousands of people were left homeless by the damage done by the first earthquake, which struck at 10:13 a.m. on a national holiday in Japan. The quake, its strength estimated at 6.8 on the Richter scale, was centered off the cost of Niigata, a prefecture that was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2004. Skyscrapers in Tokyo, about 130 miles southeast of Niigata, swayed for almost a minute from the tremor.

Japan has always had a lot of earthquake problems, I wish for a speedy recovery to all affected!

Btw, how can radioactive leakage not pose an environmental threat?

I saw this posting on new themes, I had to check it out! Yipee, it’s Hello Hawaii for me! Isn’t this new theme so wonderful?

Using the Sanriotown RSS Reader, I created a kind of summary postings of my last 10 blog posts almost like a kind of index or chapter page, it’s interesting from a layout perspective, where it might reindex old content for visitors to see older articles that may not be seen.

Although no ruling was made on the case of the Bible being ruled as indecency, a picture hosted on Flickr and posted on a Hong Kong website that shows a pair of naked breasts. As I am in Hong Kong I can not see this photo, because it has been blocked by the authorities of Hong Kong (requesting Flickr to do so). I found another blog that has a "censored" version without the photo, see below, it looks like a very artistic impression. Why Flickr, a Yahoo service, would continue to allow censorship given its previous PR fiasco by assisting the Chinese government to send its users to Jail indicates to me that Yahoo has learned nothing from its experience in China. We don’t trust you Yahoo, I don’t use your service and while I have liked Flickr when it was independent, I no longer will use your services.

To quote boing boing that summarized it quite well:

Interlocals.net founder and inmedia.hk activist Oiwan Lam decided, as an act of electronic civil disobedience, to protest the Obscene Articles Tribunal of the Honk Kong Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) and their classification of articles as obscene for publishing hyperlinks to erotic photography on flickr and other sites. Lam then wrote an essay criticizing the Authority and linking to a tasteful photography found by searching the keywork ‘nude’ on flickr. The result was a quick response from the TELA, and the classification of the article as a Class II indecent article by the Obscene Articles Tribunal. The maximum penalty is HK$400,000 and 12 months in jail.

Here reasons for doing so are explained in her own post here. What concerns me more however is that in the name of indecency Hong Kong gets to practice actual censorship. People will be reported for posting "indecent" material and will be blocked, fined, bullied and scared so that they cooperate with the ulterior motive - to be compliant, not just with the law, but with the facade of law so that we may pretend that Hong Kong is actually free and liberal. Hong Kong is quite free and liberal today, but keep this up and freedom and liberties will directly affect business, economy and quality of life. Someone needs to explain that to the authorities.

The headlines and covers of Apple Daily, Easyfinder, Next Media both online and offline are covered with women in far more suggestive (and derogatory) positions and gestures in far more public display than this image. If it’s about displaying the nipple, then request they be "marked" but don’t block an entire Flickr account or punish a user. Someone wants us to feel afraid of posting thoughts and opinions online in Hong Kong - phooey.

 This image from Reuters struck a terrible chord with me on China and the life of China’s next generation. This is a photo of a man cleaning up dead fishes, over 120,000 pounds of dead fish in Wuhan, Hubei province that died due to pollution and the weather. China must do all it can to control this dangerous spread in pollution, before we know it, it will devour our country.

I have made a followup post here.

There is a promotion with the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway with Hello Kitty, look at that cute carriage! that doesn’t make your day bright and happy then you’ve lost the cute gene in you!

I got this image from Hello Kitty Hotzone, where I got the other Hello Kitty Art picture. It’s a pretty neat depiction of Hello Kitty Baby Grand, but it’s actually not human sized, but cute design anyway.

In an article I came across on boingboing I came across this imagery,whereas Musti was designed a few years prior to Kitty apparently. The original source blog quoted the following:

Kitty’s design was just a crib from this!!!
This is “Musti” created by the Belgian animator/director Ray Goossens (1924-1998). Musti was started as an animation series on TV in 1968, and its picture books were also published. I read some of that books and loved it in my childhood.

There were a variety of the usual naysayers and claims made how Hello Kitty was a rip-off etc. etc. of course some of them claimed that Musti was a rip off of Miffy by Dick Bruna.

The resemblance is rather uncanny, but often people will create a big story for sensationalist reasons. Sure, Musti and Kitty have some similarities, but the very original Hello Kitty design looked like this:

Compared to the above image, doesn’t strike me as “close”. Could the original artist have been inspired by the design of Musti (or Miffy). Maybe, it’s not unheard of but there is such a thing as the court of law, and if indeed Musti had a serious chance in claiming the copyright they would have done so already.

Infact, Musti and Miffy are far closer, given the X for a mouth, and the overall design qualities. The fact that Kitty-chan has no mouth is now almost a trademark legend (why does she now have one anyway?). Besides, I think that Kitty-chan is much much cuter (and adult in design) than both Musti and Miffy, Musti has a decidedly jagged kindergarden look intentionally crooked to resemble the image of the drawings of a very young child or toddler. Their target audience is also very different.

To conclude, in the compounds of art and design, I think Kitty-chan is original creation in my view, what do you think?

Very cute Video of the sneezing panda baby and her very startled Mother. Panda’s are the National Animal of China and a source of pride and joy to the people of China. Recently two new Panda’s came to Hong Kong from China.

I got this image from blog.hellokitty.com/hotzone the photo is not particularly good quality, but I thought the creativity was very interesting, it’s Hello Kitty with My Melody, Twin Stars, Tabo, Kuririn and a slew of other characters, not surprisingly, Badtz Maru provider the dark outline, I wish I could have seen this picture in real life. Really Cool Image I got to say.