At the Rusborg 2016 Middle Ages festival in Russia, a re-enactor spotted a drone in the sky and did what anyone in the 9th century would: He knocked it out of the sky with his spear. Talk about period rush!
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Medieval reenactor spears drone from the sky
See sample pages from this book at Wink. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater by Eric P. Nash Abrams ComicArts 2009, 304 pages, 8.6 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches $29 Buy a copy on Amazon Manga Kamishibai tells and shows the fascinating history of Japanese paper theater, a lost storytelling form and the link between Edo-era Japanese ukiyo-e prints and modern day manga and television. I say “and shows” because this art form combined the spoken word with compelling visuals in uniquely Japanese storytelling performances and this book is rich with many wonderful reproductions of the hand-painted artwork. Picture this: In devastated post-WWII Tokyo, a man stops his bicycle on a street corner. On the back of his bike is mounted a large, sixty-pound wooden box. The man flips a few panels around to reveal a stage-like picture frame. He noisily clacks together two wooden sticks, hiyogoshi , to call the neighborhood children. As they gather to see and hear the free show, the man sells them home-made penny candies, including a not-too-sweet taffy that’s pulled and stretched using a chopstick (like today’s movie business, the real money is in the profitable concessions!). The paying customers get a front row seat to the performance. The man slides a sequence of large, colorful panels in the frame “screen” as he tells adventure stories, quizzes the audience, and weaves tales of suspense, all with character voices and sound effects. As the story ends on a dramatic, to-be-continued cliff-hanger, the man packs up his two-wheel theater and pedals away … until next time. They are all but vanished now, but these performances date back to the 1930s when 2,500 kamishibaiya in Tokyo alone entertained 1 million kids a day. Any fan of manga, anime, as well as comics in general will devour this book. The reproductions of the lurid images of action heroes, monsters, villains, and damsels in distress in the stories embody a potent mix of influences: Japanese ink brush work, movie posters, silent film and cinematic design, and plenty of Western references. The army of artists that painted these panels freely borrowed from many genres, from Betty Boop to folk tales. In turn, kamishibai set the stage for the manga and anime that took its place (many of the same artists moved along with them). As the advent of television made these live street performances obsolete (television was first called denki kamishibai , or “electric paper theater”), the artists lifted from popular TV shows for their dying art form. Holy copy-cat, Batman! You’ll enjoy the witty captions, wide–ranging historical references and the clever writing style. This book also shows and tells how kamishibai was used to disseminate news, spread propaganda, illustrate war survival techniques, and fight prejudices. In a parallel to the congressional hearings and criticism by Wertham of the U.S. comic makers, kamishibai also was investigated and regulated. You’ll read (and see) other interesting facts, like the technological and historical reason why comics have always been an important media form in Japan. (Hint: what if your language doesn’t suit itself to using Gutenberg’s movable type?). Manga Kamishibai is a real treat for any fan of Japanese pop culture (candy not included).
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Before anime, Japanese paper theater entertained 1-million kids a day
The beloved Tower of Terror ride at Disneyland California Adventure features some of the most elaborate themeing and set-dressing of any of Disney’s built environments, consisting of a series of staged scenes that are reminiscent of interactive theater troupe Punchdrunk’s sets, followed by a spectacular thrill-ride — it rarely has less than a 30 minute wait. (more…)
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Disneyland’s Tower of Terror is turning into a Guardians of the Galaxy ride
The Bodleian Libraries at Oxford acquired a recently-discovered map of Middle-earth annotated by JRR Tolkien , “which reveals his remarkable vision of the creatures, topography and heraldry of his imagined world where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place. The annotated map went unseen for decades until October 2015 when Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford put the map on display and offered it for sale.” (Thanks, Gary Price!)
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University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien
Our solar system is awesome. (more…)
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NASA releases 4K high-def video of a recent solar flare, and it’s pretty awesome
Once again the MPAA has released its box-office numbers for the year, and once again, this year has smashed all records (as has been the case throughout our young century ) ( really !). As always, the astronomical rise-and-rise of their fortunes is somehow used to launch a call for more publicly subsidized enforcement against “piracy.” (more…)
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Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another record-breaking box-office year
Radiooooo lets you pick a decade and a country, and will dispense popular music created then and there. (Note the “weird” option, disabled by default.) Thanks to this, I rediscovered Blue Boy’s Remember Me (UK, 1990s, fast, weird), which remixes Marlena Shaw’s Woman of the Ghetto into something very different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKKNPLowteY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMOGy3MXQSA
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Radiooooo: Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era
Like many other corporations, Airbnb and Uber use offshore shell companies to avoid taxes. The companies aren’t profitable yet, but they have set themselves up to avoid taxes once they become profitable. For years, pharmaceutical and tech companies including Pfizer, Merck, Google, and Apple have slashed their U.S. federal tax bills by using offshore tax havens and shifting profits abroad. Airbnb and Uber are starting to extend this strategy across vast new fields: PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that sharing-economy businesses generated $15 billion in revenue in 2014 and will take in $335 billion in 2025, growing largely at the expense of companies that pay billions in U.S. taxes. Bloomberg: The Sharing Economy Doesn’t Share the Wealth [ via ]
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Uber assigns "its IP to Bermuda, leaving less than 2% of its revenue taxable by the US"
A rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio turned up on a Scottish island, reports the BBC . Only 230 copies are known to exist, or thereabouts, and the last to be sold fetched £3.5m (about $5m) in 2003 and £2.8m in 2006. Countless fakes are knocking around, too. This copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, was found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Academics who authenticated the book called it a rare and significant find. … Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: “Like hell they have.” But when she inspected the three-volume book she found it was authentic. The folio represents the first legitimate compendium of Shakespeare’s work; we wouldn’t have much of Macbeth were it not for its publication, among many other works preserved in it.
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Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle
For April Fools, Google rearranged Gmail’s UI to replace the normal send button with one that attaches a Minions(TM) Mic Drop GIF animation to outgoing email . “Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Everyone will get your message, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won’t see it,” Google explained when it launched the button on April 1. Unfortunately, this resulted in things like this: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715752594551869440 Google quickly realized what it had done and turned it off… Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year.
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Google launches worst corporate April Fools joke ever, quickly takes it down