Now this is amazing….a guy who’se entire place is fitted with nothing but Hello Kitty, a veritable legend!

Image courtesy of hello mimi.

This has got to be the cutest military Tank alive, not as pink as the Hello Kitty one…but still cute and funny

and it goes *pop*

Japan’s relentless drive to merge terminal cuteness with ultimate technology has taken a curious turn. It seems that Sanrio, parent company of the ubiquitous Hello Kitty brand, is determined to leave no stone unturned when it comes to marketing their all-conquering brand. How else to explain the newest appearance of the mouthless wonder: on the Roomba robot vacuum. Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner that can clean your place automatically (by rolling and roving around your living room silently and quietly)

Roomba, a product of the cool-sounding iRobot company, is a self-contained robotic vacuum that patrols your home or apartment in search of dust and dirt. Like all roombas, the vacuum cleaner employs sensors to help it avoid stairs and, basically, is one of the only Jetson-ish home appliances to ever successfully cross the line from cartoons to reality.

However, the curious Japanese propensity to cutify, well, everything meant that sooner or later the Roomba would get a makeover. In this case it’s sooner - September 30 is when the Hello Kitty Roomba hits Japan’s department stores and online retailers. Better have your Hello Kitty credit card handy though (yes, it exists), at 84,500 yen - about $800 - the Hello Kitty Roomba is anything but cheap and as a home appliance it’s anything but a child’s toy. (via Impress Watch)

Not something I would have thought of, for sure, from Shokotan.

They are bugs and cicadas up there, they are actual Locust molts, so while they aren’t alive, they are the real thing!

Shoko Nagawa, a Japanese pop idol and actress is apparently creating a new rage with the whole bug wear thing! The crowd went wild when after a performance she flung her dried Cicada’s into the crowd.

Kung Fu film star Jackie Chan Monday admitted that he acted in a porn movie 31 years ago, responding to a report revealed by Hong Kong media, Information Times reported Tuesday.

"I had to do anything I could to make a living 31 years ago, but I don’t think it’s a big deal, even Marlon Brando used to be exposed in his movies," Chan said. "The porn movie at that time was more conservative than the current films," he said.

Hong Kong netizens tipped local media that Chan was in the porn movie "All in the Family" in 1975, with a porn movie star who was famous at that time.

The Hong Kong made movie, directed by Zhu Mu, was defined as a comedy. Dean Shek, Tien Chun, and Sammo Hung were also co-stars.

Photo: ifensi.com

If you’ve ever watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, you’ll find this one particularly weird and funny. I am not sure if I am able to eat out of a plate like this, but they’ve got the spear of longinus as an eating utensil, very interesting.

As compared to the anime below there is some likeness….I think he’s called “Adam”, personally I’d be sort of weirded out eating on a plate like this, well made though ^_^

The true story of a female lion reunited with their human foster parents after a few years. Christian is the name of a pet lion bought from the famous Harrods department store in London in 1969. After about a year with his owners the lion had grown too big to remain with them. After a chance encounter with the stars of the film Born Free, the owners handed the pet lion over to the "Lion Man", conservationist George Adamson in order to be rehabilitated into the wild in Kora National Reserve, Kenya. A movie was made documenting the translocation from England to Kenya. In this footage, a year has passed and it looks like this pet lion has adapted to living with a pride of lions when his old friends come back to visit him.

More on wikipedia.

What won’t they sell next? This just seems wrong, from the Associated Press this one.

Homeowner offers house and her ‘love’ for sale

• Story Highlights
• Woman goes online to sell her Florida home — and a shot at marrying her
• "I’m not selling myself," she says. "I’m selling love … to meet that true love."
• Home lists for $340,000 and she’s asking $500,000 for her companionship
• Handsome Italian wine and cheese taster has answered her ad , she says

She’s tried nightclubs and online dating sites, but now a 42-year-old single mother is looking for love where everyone else’s heart is breaking: the real estate market.

After a year of trying to sell her four-bedroom home and eight years of singledom, Deven Trabosh is offering her South Florida home and a shot at marrying her on the Internet.

"I figured, let’s combine the ad, because I’m looking for love and I’m looking to sell the house," said Trabosh, a Barbie-esque blonde who teeters around the nearly 2,000-square-foot house in patent leather heels.

"Marry a Princess Lost in America," Trabosh wrote in the ads she posted on eBay and Craigslist last week. She describes a life of romance and travel and a home decorated with vaulted ceilings, upgraded tile and a soaking tub in a gated community with a pool and tennis courts.

Trabosh, a licensed real estate agent who hasn’t practiced in years, knew that she would struggle to sell the home in the troubled real estate market but insists that her fairy-tale ad isn’t just a sales gimmick.

"I’m struggling. … I don’t want to lose my house, and I want to find somebody," said Trabosh, who changed her name in the ad to Traboscia to keep people from finding her in the Florida phone book. "So I came up with this dream plan, because I’ve always dreamed about being a fairy-tale princess."

She listed the home for $340,000 on a sell-it-yourself Web site but upped the price, adding a $500,000 shipping fee to include her companionship on eBay.

Trabosh says eBay removed her ad, though she planned to change the wording and repost it. Under the site’s prohibited services policy, eBay does not allow the sale of human beings, body parts or relationships, spokeswoman Catherine England said Friday.

Trabosh hasn’t received any serious offers but says she’s had nearly 500 responses, mostly positive, including one from Ottie of Surrey, England, who e-mailed to say, "You are offering the perfect life with the perfect American princess."

She whips out her laptop to show off a picture of Claudio, a handsome Italian wine and cheese taster who she’s been corresponding with since he responded to the ad. Seated on a white leather love seat in her living room, she giggles almost girlishly about him. They’re hoping to meet in Miami in a few weeks.

She’s gotten criticism too. Her 21-year-old daughter, Haley, says she just wants her mom to find love, but her 14-year-old daughter says her mother is embarrassing her. Other have e-mailed to say she’s selling herself short.

"I’m not selling myself. I’m selling love … to meet that true love," Trabosh said. "Of course, it’s gonna take more chemistry and connection. It’s not going to be instantaneous that I’m just going to be automatically for sale. … It’s a package deal for true love."

Trabosh isn’t the first to use the Internet to hawk the unconventional. A heartbroken Australian man recently tried to sell his life online, including his house, job and friends. Others have sold body space, promising to display advertisements for the highest bidder.

"There is a plethora of quirky ads on craigslist that pop up on craigslist every day, and this appears to be one of them," spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said in an e-mail. "Scads of couples have met and, thus, married through craigslist over the last twelve years sometimes marrying the person who bought their tired couch."

Ideally, Trabosh hopes a European man will close the deal and says she’s willing to move overseas.

"I know I’m putting myself out there. I’m sincere. I believe in true love," she said. "I want to get married again."

This is like everywhere..

The story of Hello Kitty rediscovering its japanese roots (even though she is an english girl according to her bio)  but the most interesting quote is that Sanrio themselves don’t seem to know why Kitty is so popular…wooot?

Even for Japanese fans, Hello Kitty, associated initially with elementary school-age girls, is wooing newcomers, with boxer shorts with glittery cat designs targeting young men and lingerie with cat-inspired lacing for adult women.

“We have to keep changing so people won’t get bored,” Sanrio manager Kazuo Tohmatsu said. “Ideas we would have thought out of the question 20 years ago are perfectly fine today.”

Sanrio officials acknowledge they don’t know for sure why Hello Kitty has proved so popular. But the absence of the mouth, a key feature for reading emotions, is believed to be one reason, allowing onlookers to add their own interpretations to the character.

For those of us who know Tokyo’s famous Akihabara district (Electronic town) and love it for what it is, and all the craziness, cosplay, anime and whatever else we think is cool, screwy, funny and dorky all at the same time, a tragedy emerged there just a day ago.

Taken from Patrick Macias blog, the summary (worth checking out in more detail) is as follows taken from his blog.

The growing tension and push-and-pull between the cops, the normal people, and the otaku in Akihabara was shaping up to be a grand saga, complete with flash mobs and organized protests. But now, all of that has been preempted by some loser who just wanted to kill people.

(Here’s the part where I have to cover my ass by saying that I have friends who work in the area and who visit that very spot where the shit hit quite regularly, including me. So no, it’s not some abstract GTAIV sandbox where this all took place and I understand what it means when real human beings die real horribly.)

Meta Tame calls it the AKB Massacre. This is tragic because real people died and got injured because some insane person decided to go there, crash his car into people and then take out a knife and stab people before being taken down by police. It was said he announced his intention to kill to the public via the Internet days before.

Then, from the morass of it all comes an internet mob hunt against those that were less than respectful infront of news cameras… as posted in Japanprobe amongst other things and are now being hunted down by japanese internet mobs in more acts of hatefulness and other stupid things with posts and forum discussions debating the pro’s and con’s of effectively lynching innocent, yet arguably very stupid people. Were they stupid to do what they did? Yes, do they deserve to be lynched? I don’t remember reading in the constitution of any "democratic" country that you may be lynched for being stupid. As was commented, two wrongs does not make a right.

For more news related information check out the Times.