Rock the Vote! Vote for “An Eclectic Cultural Montage”

The above video I just sent to Current TV (current tv). It’s up for votes to get picked for TV so if you feel generous, please register and vote for my pod/video at:

http://www.current.tv/watch/47178271

Current TV is a cable show that puts on viewer-created material. Check out the Wiki article for more info:

Current TV

Now the way the voting system works is that newbie voter’s score is only about 1.5 points and more active members have a whopping 10 points behind their vote. So for those who really want to help, I’d advise voting – which means Greenlighting – and commenting on other pods/videos to get your score up before voting on mine. Here’s a small eclectic selection of a few pods/vids that I like which I think deserve votes:

A surreal vid on the Old West in the Old Communist East:

Bohemian West

A very interesting vid on the incompetent sale of weapons by the US government and the apathy of media and the public:

Big Media Fails Again

An environmentally friendly car:

electric car

You may have seen him on Youtube or Myspace, anything by Mark Day deserves votes for being funny, witty, and insightful:

Secrets of the universe

markday

another chlling political vid which shows the position of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf:

toys in the gulf

A candid look at a group of soldiers in Iraq made by the soldiers themselves:

Soldiers in an Iraqi city

These are are just a few of the great videos over there so surf around and vote for the ones you like. I plan to upload remastered versions of some of the videos here for later shows so please vote for them too!

Thanks!

The theme music is Jack’s Surf Shop by the exotic ones

Warm Weather Makes Japanese Wintry Dip Seem Refreshing

Warm Weather Makes Japanese Wintry Dip Seem Refreshing
Warm Winter Weather Portents Of Severe Global Warming?

Less Blue Skin Than Last Year

“From the earliest period Shinto exacted scrupulous cleanliness … It is not uncommon for the very fervent worshipper to invoke the gods as he stands naked under the ice-cold rush of a [waterfall] in midwinter.” – Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, 1904.

Recently an annual purification ritual at Tokyo’s Kanda Myojin Shrine was held. The ritual involved men and women jumping into a shallow pool of freezing cold natural water and showering themselves vigorously with bucketfuls of icy water. These purification-through-freezing-water rituals known as Misogi are often held in Winter to display the fierce dedication of the participants.

Young Girls Brave The Cold Water And The Warm Winter

Most winters, particulary the record cold one last year, this ritual would be viewed as brave, strong, and more than a little insane. However, this winter given the abnormally warm temperatures, it actually looked rather refreshing.

Preparing For Their Refreshing Wintry Dip

With the exception of a few storms here and there, Japan’s winter has been exceptionally warm this year. This is in sharp contrast to last year when record snowfalls blanketed the northwestern coast and over a hundred people died in snow-related injuries.

Heavy Snowfall Last Winter In Nagano

Even Tokyo was hit with a significant amount of snow.

Last Winter’s Snow In Ueno Park in Tokyo

The winter has also been conspiciously late. Autumn leaf viewing has long been a popular tradition in Japan but in Autumn! Autumn and Winter seemed to have set their seasonal alarm clocks rather late. People were viewing Autumn leaves in Kyoto as late as New Year’s Eve!

Beautiful Autumn Foliage – But Two Days Before Christmas!?

A number of Japanese ski slopes only received their first heavy snow within the last few weeks. Several skiing events had to be cancelled or relocated to better slopes.

The warm weather is not only in Japan. Prior to the ice storms now sweeping across much of the US, the weather in many places felt like a fine day in April rather than January. The ice storms themselves are byproduct of the unnaturally warm weather.

Perhaps Former US Vice-President Al Gore saw the Kanda Myojin Shrine event and took note of the lack of blue skin of the participants because he was in Japan recently urging Japanese business leaders to set the example for the world to follow on environmental policies.

Gore mentioned Japan’s unusually warm winter and the early blooming Cherry Blossoms in Washington D.C. were ominious signs that not all was well.

Stretching Out Their Cold Limbs After Their Dip

“Our planet now has a fever. And it’s not going away,” Gore said. “We have a moral obligation to those coming after us.”

Gore was also promoting his documentary An Inconvenient Truth on global warming.

Obviously Smarter, The Japanese Snow Monkey Prefers A Hot Bath To A Cold One In Winter

Money Talks And Listens – Spying Canadian Coins

Coins That Spy

A Penny for Your Thoughts and Your Whereabouts
Kooky Canadian Coins

As an American, I’ve always thought Canadian currency a bit funny but not in the “ha! ha!” funny kind of way. More like the “how the hell did I end up with this goddamn Canadian quarter?”  kind of funny. I had always been particularly mystified how Canadian coins periodically would turn up in financial transactions as far south as Alabama. Usually these coins are secretly pawned off on unsuspecting victims mixed in with an assortment of change. The victim having no idea walks off and discovers too late that they’ve been hit by the chain letter of coin currency. Now they have to become the perpetrator of international money laundering.

Now it seems that perhaps these migrant Canadian coins floating about in the flotsam and jetsam of American coinage might not have been so innocent after all or even just part of a harmless but annoying currency prank.

The Pentagon has recently discovered Canadian coins tracking government contractors with high level security clearances. Why Canadian coins would want to track such people or anyone for that matter is a mystery. But it’s beleive that the coins really had no say in the matter and were being used by an unknown group.

The coins were discovered to contain radio frequency transmitters inside them. The Pentagon so far has not released information on how these transmitters exactly function but experts feel such a transmitter would have an effectively short range and be affected by the metal of the coin itself.

The coins would also be at risk of being easily passed on at restaurant or vending machine. Left in a briefcase, however, the coins might not arouse suspicion or be readily spent.

Despite the belief in the ineffectiveness of such a device, the Pentagon insists the coins are real and the risk serious.

The leading suspects who would have access to such technology which might be able to track a person for several kilometers and have actively engaged in espionage in Canada are Russia, China, and France.

Canada is not a suspect but true to its nature apologized anyway. Hollow coins have been used before by US spies to hide film and messages.

So the next time a Canadian coin just “accidentally” pops up amongst your American coins, it might just be a tracking device. The evil Russkies, the commie Chinese, or the godless French could be monitoring your every move . I know I’ll be ready. I’ll bore whoever is tracking me to death with my extreme lack of movement away from my computer and Playstation.

Remembering the Scandals of the 90s or why I lost respect for the Media

A look back at the newsworthy items that American media pumped out to the masses

Coming from America, a country that is at one point news-obsessed with countless news programs on TV, newspapers, and magazines available and yet at the same time often oddly unaware of what is going on in the world, I’m used to having the news media giants dictate what is newsworthy and what isn’t. Prior to the 90s, I had little reason to question the media’s competency and objectivity. The media still seemed to possess some element of aloof professionalism. Of course, I was horribly young at the time and easily influenced.It had to be the Buttifuco scandal in the early 90s that first shook my faith in the professional media. A New England tart decided her boyfriend, a man twice her age, was worth keeping to the point of shooting his wife point blank in the head. Her aim was not as true as her love apparently as the wife survived as the story hit nationwide. For some reason this was worthy of national news. But it wasn’t just one blurb on the nightly news – spoken and soon forgotten – it became an obsession of the nation fueled by numerous follow-up reports. Amy Fisher’s Mugshot 2006 Wikipedia Shortly after came the infamous Bobbitt case where a young wife tired of her husband’s cheating ways, decided to releive him of his pride and joy while he slept. The conscequences of her actions rode a slurpee cup to the operation room and into the living rooms of millions of Americans. What should have been tabloid fodder became food for thought for the professional media to ponder over. John Wayne Bobbitt briefly became an Adult Film Star after his brush with a kitchen knife 2006 Wikipedia When that began to die off yet another scandal arose – the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding Olympic figure ice skating fiasco where Ms. Harding had decided to even the odds in her favor with a crowbar to Kerrigan’s legs. This newsworthy item dragged on to its bitter end with Ms. Harding crying pitifully to the judges over a skate whose lacing had come undone. Tonya Harding cries over loose laces as many Americans shake heads in disgust 2006 Wikipedia Then came the be-all grandest scandal that shook the media world to its knees. Not Somalia, not the Yugoslavia War, it was the (cue trumpets and drums) the OJ Simpson scandal – undoubtably the grandest of all scandals that dragged on and on and on and on like some B-grade horror monster that refuses to die no matter what. When OJ Simpson’s white ford bronco hit the LA streets one warm summer evening, media moguls must have shed a tear of gratitude as their fingers speed-dialed their news offices. OJ Simpson’s white Ford Bronco leads the LAPD on a slow chase 2006 internet By that time I had reached a point of utter disgust and distrust of the so-called professional media. Gone seemed to be the days of the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. “This is what the public wants!” was often the defense for the coverage of these stories. Perhaps, but is it what the public needs from the professional media? Let the tabloids print the tabloids. The Jerry Springer Show The True Media Circus without the Pretension The Ringmaster: Jerry Springer Wikipedia For the astute followers of American pop-culture, they are no doubt aware that the controversial talk show: “The Springer Show,” came about in the midst of these scandals. The Springer Show hosted by former mayor of Cinnicinata, Jerry Springer, allowed trailer trash, ghetto garbage, flashing exhibitionists and theirl like to debate their differences, ie swing fists and chairs at one another while the audience chanted “Jerry! Jerry!” Jerry Springer gave the public what it wanted but he never made the pretense that his show was anything other than a type of public circus. In the face of critics, he has even said his show is dumb. Therein, I think, lies the difference between his show and the professional media especially in regards to their coverage of similar topics. / David M Weber The icing on the proverbial cake had to be the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair that followed in the wake of the OJ trial. The theater of the absurd was in full swing as an American President was nearly impeached over a completely overblown non-issue. And the professional media was there to discuss the finer details of Presidential deposits on intern dresses. Monica Lewinsky gets a hug from President Clinton 2006 Wikipedia Finally at the end of a long decade of tabloid scandals which were given more media attention than was possibly needed, came the debacle of the 2000 Presidential election coverage. Here was an actual newsworthy event and they bungled it royally. Before all the votes were in, FoxNews declared current President Bush the winner. Many of the other media sources fell in line save a brave few. This premature call just caused more confusion in the months that followed as the results were being sorted out. 6 years, two wars, and thousands of dead later, one wonders how different the world might have been if the professional media had just done its job and not jumped the gun so quickly. For these reasons whenever criticism is leveled at citizen journalism, I just roll my eyes and think just how objective and professional the professional media has been in my country over the last 15 years or so as they chased one tabloid story after another. Thanks to such indepth coverage, Americans knew more about the dresses the prosecutor wore at OJ Simpson’s murder trial than they did about Rwanda and Yugoslavia.