TOKYOMANGO

PARC theme day on Boing Boing Gadgets

Hey guys, if you have a sec hop on over to BBG to check out the stories Steven and I are doing on PARC, the esteemed Palo Alto Research Center. Don't miss photos and diagrams of the first ethernet cable in the world, the carpet on which graphical user interfaces were conceived, a mirror that helps you comparison shop, a gallery of caution signs, and interviews about what it's like to work there.

Economy gives rise to a new population of protesting youth

There's an interesting article in the NY Times today about a group of young Japanese who are gathering on the streets to protest the shortage of jobs in the current economy.

Demonstrating in public is not common in Japan, and often has the connotation of a radical, peace-disrupting, unwanted activity. “This is the most significant rise in activism I’ve seen in years,” one Tokyo University professor quoted in the article says. “A movement is brewing among young Japanese.”

Interesting! (Thanks, Brian!)

Dan Osman, one of the craziest rock climbers ever to have lived

Dan Osman was a Japanese-American extreme athlete perhaps best known for the video (below), in which he speed-climbs a 400+ foot tall rock wall without a safety rope in four minutes. (I spent this past weekend in Lover's Leap, the area in South Lake Tahoe that he did this in, and climbed the same rock.) Osman later became hooked on free-jumping, which is kinda like bungee jumping but for much greater heights in much more dangerous conditions on a normal rope that doesn't slow you down at all. He even set a Guinness Record for it. Then, in 1998, he died doing when a rope failed him when free-jumping a cliff in Yosemite. A QA guy from Black Diamond, who made the rope, did an evaluation and concluded that it was a freak accident caused by the rope rubbing against itself &mdash something resulting from human error, a slight miscalculation in the angle at which he jumped.

There's a great story about the life and death of Dan Osman in Outside Magazine.

"Adopt" Bubbles, Michael Jackson's famous chimp

Remember when Michael Jackson brought his chimp Bubbles on the Bad Tour to Japan in 1987? I always wondered what happened to Bubbles &mdash apparently, he is now living in Florida at the Center for Great Apes.Here's an excerpt from his profile page:

Bubbles was born in a biomedical laboratory, but taken from his mother and sold to a Hollywood trainer while still an infant. He was purchased for Michael Jackson and soon gained fame as Jackson's pet chimpanzee. He appeared in television shows, movies, and music videos before he “retired” at age 6 or 7. When Bubbles was only 5, he toured Japan in a promotional tour with Michael Jackson. While there, he sat in on interviews with Jackson and "moonwalked" for the press. But, as he grew too strong to be around people, he lived most of his life at the trainer’s California animal compound in the company of an older chimpanzee named Sam. Both Bubbles and Sam arrived at the Center for Great Apes in March 2005 with a large group of chimpanzees, all from the entertainment world.

You can donate to Bubbles or even adopt him exclusively for a year and visit him at his sanctuary for $10,000. Pretty cool!

Bubbles' home page (via @PerezHilton)

Andrea Innocent's cute Japanese ghost illustrations

Australian artist and TokyoMango reader Andrea Innocent makes these beautiful, fun illustrations of Japanese folklore and culture. She says:

Basically I am a story teller in pictures and Japan is my muse. A couple of my works have in fact been inspired by posts on your site.

So cool! The one shown above is of Kuchisake Onna, a legendary Japanese ghost whom I used to fear when I was a little girl. You can read about that here.

(Photo via innocentgirl's Flickr)