There is no better way to describe this: Amazing Japanese Kids Horrify Johnny Depp with Nightmarish Pirate Circus Techno Performance. (via reddit)

While watching, yet again, the video for Jason Webley’s Eleven Saints, I was reminded of another video I hadn’t seen in forever: FITNESS VIDEO for being appraised as an EX-FAT GIRL. Many of you probably know it (probably by its more common name, “Poodle Exercise with Humans”, or similar), but for those who don’t, it’s a little strange. From the Wikipedia page:

The film is a typical work out video except for the fact that the video’s instructor is dressed in a body suit giving her the appearance of having muscles shaped like the fur of a groomed poodle dog. Also, exercising with her in the video are six actors dressed in dog costumes with actual live dogs’ heads superimposed over their real heads.

If you read the YouTube description, or visited the Wikipedia page, the video is directed by Nagi Noda, an award-winning art and commercial director from Japan.

Besides her commercial commercial work, Nagi Noda has also done a good many music videos. In general, her work tends to include many of the same elements (e.g., duplicates) or draw upon popular tools of other Japanese art (e.g., Scissor Sisters - She’s My Man, in which actors dressed in all black are used for a MUCH more surreal feel than usual CGI gives), but she is always enjoyable.

My favorite:

Second favorite:

Others:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRnvPu6aY90 (Yuki - Sentimental Journey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb4cwRB7Sgs

Of course, her commercial work is no less interesting.

Her production company is Uchi Country.

A lot of cell phones come with games, but most of those games are pretty terrible. Thankfully, vampent has created a mobile Nintendo emulator. Of course, you’ll need good games to go with it, so start off with Mario Adventure. Hell, just go play Mario Adventure on your computer.

Mozilla is hosting a contest, a really awesome contest, if I may say so myself. With the Firefox Flicks ad contest, you can win some cool prizes for creating a 30-second Firefox advertisement. This seems like a great win/win situation.

Albumart.org is a great site to find any CD or DVD covers. And it’s AJAX powered, so it’s fast and classy too.

A lot of importance is placed on getting the right amount of sleep. However, a Vietnamese man has spent the last 33 years of his life entirely sleepless. Admittedly, that is an extremely rare case, but new pills are being developed to cure the need for sleep. Until then, get a good nights rest, and maybe read up a little on how your sleeping life affects your waking life.

More RIAA goodness: space and format-shifting (such as ripping CDs to your iPod) are now deemed infringing by the RIAA. Okay guys, seriously, the RIAA is a bunch of assholes.

On a lighter note, Genesis in Rap Songs. Best mixtape ever.

And back again to those heavier notes. The Los Angeles Times recently published an article on evangelist Ken Ham, who seeks to “arm you with Christian Patriot missiles.” Forget evolution, because “the Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Bernard-Henri Levy, who appeared on The Daily Show last month, has published an impassioned Letter to the American Left. “Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.”

Google Talk, another of Google’s steps towards complete web domination, recently added the ability to connect to Jabber servers. This might not sound very exciting to many people, but with a little tweaking you can now connect and talk to people on AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Pretty snazzy, I would say. And while on the subject of Google upgrades, Gmail is now available for your domain. Although most website hosts provide some email addresses, Google is offering their usual unlimited amount of address and unlimited amount of storage. Pretty snazzy, I would say.

Japanese television is absolutely insane. For example, Nasubi.

Nippon Television’s (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $100,000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

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