As you can see from this candid photo of me taken only moments ago, I’m usually a very Japanese logo’ed, oddly pale, curiously veiled, relentlessly smiling sort of man.

There are times however when soda cans and other foes of liberty must be taken out as swiftly as a rubber band propelling a laser-guided pencil can muster.

Fortunately for such times, there are the good folk over at Office Guns

thanks to boing boing for the links

BEFORE LONG, once his Scientology powers have fully matured, Tom will easily be doing just this...so, beware non-belivers.

This image, which you’ve no doubt seen before if, like me, you spend astounding amounts of time drifting…anywhere…on the net, tells us a couple of things: a.) this man’s car windows are very clean b.) the soda was probably warm and flat by the time the photo was taken c.) there’s a shortage of affordable housing for 20-somethings in various parts of Asia. The last observation smells a bit grand, like the kind of thing you say after you’ve had too much to drink during Christmas dinner and you start arguing with your cousin about how to pull a fighter jet out of a perilous death descent…as if you know. But there’s some further evidence to back it up. Fortunately, new cars are stylish, roomy and well upholstered.

Petromyzon, over at Flickr has assembled images of handheld game machines of the distant past

Perhaps Imhotep amused himself with one of these while designing the pyramid at Saqqara, or setting the events of “The Mummy” in motion.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll surely remember at least one of these. You know what this means don’t you?

Of course you do.

Gaming culture and consumer level computer tech are now old enough for nostalgia to set in. A curious emotion for something perpetually associated with futurism.

IN THE AGE of subtle propaganda, events often have at least two meanings: the real and the metaphorical.

In the case of our ‘Orange Alert‘ the real is represented by an increased police presence at those areas believed to be potential targets — and since we’re always fighting the last war, this means greater patrols of public transit.

If we’re not paralyzed by fear, and more likely, therefore, to assume what we’re told is true, we might ask of what use increased police patrols and sniffing dogs may be when bombs can be carried inside backpacks and detonated via a cell phone call — and when the amount of territory to be patrolled is staggeringly large (transit systems of the entire US).

The inability of policing organizations to intercept this sort of attack marks the ‘Orange Alert’ as a kind of show business…different in real-ness from the sort of alert frontline soldiers might receive of an incoming surface to surface missile attack.

That’s immediate and the countermeasures required (activation of anti-missile batteries, seeking shelter) are as clear as the noonday sun.

But the Orange Alert enjoys no similar level of clarity and usefulness.

So that rules out the real.

This leaves us with something else, the nearly pure propaganda moment: pure because it has no practical purpose (for example, saving lives) and is built upon an undeniably real event — a terrorist attack.

We are caught now between the real murderous-ness of terrorist action and the false protectiveness of imperialists…who use the real to create the unreal; the false promise of safety via militarism.

Honda’s Asimo project is rather impressive. The robot, which appears to be completely autonomous (at least as regards the actually quite daunting task of walking upright) represents a major engineering accomplishment.

To popularize the little bugger, Honda is featuring him (um, it) in a series of videos and live action appearances (a tour that I somehow missed). In my favorite film so far, Asimo helps a multi-culti group of puzzled, yet fascinated kids learn how to cross the street safely. Asimo’s advice on this matter is remarkably precise and detailed, like a discussion of nuclear fusion.

Street-crossing skills is something you’d expect kids to learn from their parents but with today’s busy schedules, long commutes and many distractions it just might slip through the cracks. This is clearly where multi-million dollars’ worth of cybernetics comes in handy.

This comes, I’m not surprised to learn, from a S. Korean site…

You know, of course, it’s supposed to be dead sexy…the heels, the tightness the menace, the ass…But things go wrong my dears; yes, wrong (or maybe right in a way I’ll never understand).

I think the pose is supposed to put hip hop into your head but instead, it looks like she was kicked in the stomach or just truly needs to pee.

I can’t be entirely sure, but there seems to be an implosion of cultural references here — the sort of champloo you probably see most exuberantly on display in Asia (though I think almost the whole world is moving in this direction…or I hope so).

This is the band, OK Go

Ideally, instead of doing whatever the hell it is I’m actually doing right now, I’d be doing this

Yes.

As luck (or some force or the other) would have it, I live remarkably close to the Live 8 site in Philadelphia. “Remarkably” may be an exaggeration…’easy walking distance’ is closer to the mark.

I sat in my spot, aware of the concert but hearing not a peep. I expected some echoes, some faded sound washed into swooshy incomprehensibility by its journey from the stage to my porch.

But no, not a thing.

So I decided to take a little walk to see what was happening.

It turned out that what was happening was a lot of folks sitting in the sun, sweating, watching jumbotron television while enjoying a slow slide into….something.

The crowd was deceptively light heading in towards the Art Museum area. If it wasn’t for the total lack of car traffic, the people walking in the street, the police barriers and the faint audio whiff of a concert and other indicators that the day was anything but ordinary you wouldn’t know the day was anything but ordinary.

Wait a minute, wait a minute…it’s now starting to look a little more ‘mega-event-is-unfolding-y’.

Alright, now we’re talking. The crush of humanity is becoming clearly visible. Soon precious, my Live 8 fun will begin.

Ah yes, the women, as Spock said.

There’s something about women, a hot, sun stroke kind of day, copious amounts of aqua and a concert that makes me want to drink a martini in celebration.

Finally! The fun I’ve longed to have is right before me. This is the moment I’ve waited for, the moment I leave behind the shackles of no fun for the wings of boundless enjoyment. If only Jesus were here to share the moment with me.

Astoundingly, these people are having even more fun than that group of jubilant undergrads!

Yes. This is what it’s all about my friends. I bet if those Martians (wait, wait, sorry, I mean aliens) in Senor Speilbergo’s “War of the Worlds” would come upon a scene like this, they’d get out of their planet killing tripods and start to boogie.

If you look carefully…behind the super clean SUV (we Americans love our vehicles yes?) and the sat dish…you’ll note the jumbotron most people used to actually see the concert. It’s long been my dream to sit outside and watch a large screen closed circuit feed close to home. Today, that dream came true.

For oceans of time I’ve said it’s not a party unless everyone tosses their trash on the ground. Clearly, this was a party baby.

The media, that mighty army of truth tellers who revealed the Bush admin’s…wait, wait…

Yeah, the media was there in force.

These enterprising dudes were selling water…a precious commodity at any time but especially so as the concertgoers baked while watching immense television screens. Depending on which man you spoke to, the water was either one dollar or five dollars a bottle.