Executive Koala

After finishing Kibakichi (WEREWOLF SAMURAI... I'll blither more about this one later. It is thoroughly delightfully blither-able.) this morning I went tromping about looking for info on more Japanese Japan-ness and found this site

SaruDama: Japanese Horror Movies, Folklore and History, authored/web-mastered by Scott David Foutz

Holy wow, this is brilliant for about eight thousand different reasons. I'm a long-time fan of Japanese ghost stories and this site if chock full of interesting, extremely well-written (and awesomely entertaining) informations on folklore, the stories behind the stories and backstories behind those. I'm going to lose days here, I can tell already. So before I disappear into the abyss of demons and snow women and sword-fighting, must see recent addition to Netflix queue.

This is an example of SaruDama's awesomeness (click HERE to read full review)

Genre: Bruce-Lee-Martial-Arts Musical involving an Axe-Wielding-Psycho-Killer Salaryman who happens to be a 6- Foot Tall Koala.

review in one breath

Tamura is a highly successful and functional business manager at his beloved pickle company. Everything he touches in the realm of business turns into success to the company's great delight. The only things he seems to have going against him are (1) he is a huge, towering fuzzy Koala in an otherwise wholly human world, and (2) he suffers from frequent memory lapses. Oh, and every time his memory fails, a grisly murder occurs. Just a coincidence, right?

Popliteal pterygium syndrome

Via Wiki: "an inherited condition affecting the face, limbs, and genitalia. The term PPS was coined by Gorlin et al.. in 1968 on the basis of the most unusual anomaly, the popliteal pterygium (a web behind the knee)."

Clinical expressions of PPS are highly variable, but include the following:[3][4]

Limb findings: an extensive web running from behind the knee down to the heel (90%), malformed toenails, and webbed toes.
Facial findings: cleft palate with or without cleft lip (75%), pits in the lower lip (40%), and fibrous bands in the mouth known as syngnathia (25%).
Genital findings (50%): hypoplasia of the labia majora, malformation of the scrotum, and cryptorchidism.

PPS is autosomal dominant. A similar looking oddity is Bartsocas-Papas syndrome (BPS), autosomal recessive. Autosome is a chromosome. This blurble from wiki is helpful, "In humans and other mammal species, sex is determined by two sex chromosomes called the X chromosome and the Y chromosome. Human females are typically XX; males are typically XY. The remaining pairs of chromosome are found in both sexes and are called autosomes; genetic traits due to loci on these chromosomes are described as autosomal, and may be dominant or recessive."

Anyway, back to BPS.

Bartsocas-Papas syndrome (BPS) MIM 263650) is a severe and rare autosomal recessive syndrome characterized by popliteal pterygium / webbing, oligo-syndactyly, genital anomalies and a typical face with short palpebral fissures, ankyloblepharon, hypoplastic nose, oro-facial clefts and small mouth(1). Most of the reported cases either die in-utero or in the neonatal period, although occasional survival has been reported with aggressive management(2-4).

Source



I have this sudden urge to reread Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine.

Skull Clock

This is quite lovely... and affordable!



Available at Z Gallerie

The Death Zone

I recently watched a wonderful documentary called The Wildest Dream, about natural born climber George Mallory who may or may not've been the first to summit Mt. Everest in 1924.



Brilliant, breath-taking photography, adventure, danger, love and tons of bright shiny glittery morbidness. Altitude sickness, loss of appetite, severe dehydration, snow blindness, coughing up frostbitten larynx, gangrene, oddly cheerful nicknames for landmarks like "Green Boots Cave" and "Rainbow Alley" named after the corpses left on the mountain side.





And then, there's the Death Zone.

The lack of oxygen makes it impossible to function for long, impossible for the human body to acclimatize. The body uses up its store of oxygen faster than it can be replenished. Above 26k ft the body enters into necrosis, one is dying, humans weren't meant to survive at this altitude and you're on borrowed time.



Sources: Here, Here and the documentary

Couple of additional comments about the documentary. Liam Neeson has the neatest voice. George Mallory has the neatest face. And the most romantic quote ever, "We can't Apart as we can Together."

Mean World Syndrome

Really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_World_Syndrome

... a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean World Syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watched a large amount of television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place.[1] The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to make when watching television will have a direct influence on what the viewer perceives the real world as. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to impact on their own real life. Gerbner once said "You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour," he said. 'It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell."[2]. We learn through story telling, Gerbner describes the story telling of today as television.[3]

Gerbner claims the spread of this syndrome has become more intense over time. Gerbner describes that with newer technologies such as VCR, DVD, and cable, these do not disturb the cultivation theory, but actually allow more complete access and spread of recurrent messages, although widening access to the internet world of information can counteract that. The 1930s behaviorism models, the Payne Fund Studies, show that the effect of mass media are considerable influences on our behaviors. This is called the Hypodermic Model theory: people are injected with appropriate messages and ideas constructed by the mass media[4]. Individuals who watch television infrequently and adolescents who talk to their parents about reality are claimed to have a more accurate view of the real world than those who do not, and they may be able to more accurately assess their vulnerability to violence. They also may tend to have a wider variety of beliefs and attitudes.[5]

(Click the image if you're blind like me)