Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Giant Robot at Little Tokyo Design Week. I’m a bit behind on the LTDW posts. There’ll be one more post up soon. These photos are from Friday which was slow in our area. It was packed at the JACCC which was screening Totoro and featured another 10 containers, an alcohol area, and a swarm of people. The evening led to nice photos.
Little Bony for you. The little dude fit perfectly in the container as if he were a product.
Martin Hsu who now lives in SF. He’ll be showing at Giant Robot 2 later this year.
In Thailand, one can pretty much get any kind of medical procedure you need, from having your teeth replaced all the way up to having your gender changed. But increasingly, Thailand has become a popular destination for those wanting to rid themselves of addictions to drugs, alcohol, or both. It’s called ‘rehab tourism’, and just like any other kind of tourism one can opt for the humble, inexpensive way, or the lavish and very pricey way. On the humble end of the spectrum, there are spiritually-based treatment programs such as the one run at Tham Krabok Monastery in Saraburi Province. Here, the lodgings are simple, inexpensive and austere, and treatment focuses on enlightening the spirit while detoxifying the body. A big part of detoxifying the body involves a special herbal concoction the monks have created which one ingests every day at 6 p.m. to induce vomiting. But apparently, though very unpleasant, this method has a high success rate. It does not work for everyone, however. One of the monastery’s more famous patients, English musician Pete Doherty, reportedly lasted less than a week of Tham Krabok’s four-week program before leaving to allegedly go get some drugs. You can read more about Tham Krabok, Doherty, and more expensive Thai sobriety treatment options at the link. (CNNGo – Hurl to Be Happy in Thailand) If you’re interested, you can see the monastery’s official website here.
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Get ready, Osamu Tezuka fans, because the god of manga’s considerable body of work is now available on an iPad near you. In English. That’s right, Tezuka Productions and a Japanese software company named SOBA Project Inc. have created the Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club app, which makes available 62 volumes of the beloved mangaka’s comics to manga fans in the form of a cloud-based subscription service. It allows users to read through pages and pages of “Astro Boy” and “Black Jack” from the comfort of wherever they and their iPads happen to be. And Android device users need not feel left out, because the plan is to port the Tezuka Magazine app to that mobile operating system during this coming fall and winter. For iPad users, the app is free, but the service is US $9.99 per month. But for that fee you get access to as many Tezuka comics as you can handle, and to 39 episodes of what Tezuka Productions and SOBA are calling animated “Black Jack” “Motion Manga”. So now, it’s possible to easily carry around an entire digital library by one of the greatest comics artists in history. In Japanese and English. Pretty cool. In fact, about the only downside we can see right now is versions of Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club in languages other than English are only under consideration and not definitely planned (Mainichi Daily News – Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club) The app is available on iTunes.
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In India, they have grown less and less fond of foreign, or non-Indian, airline pilots. In fact, if the nation’s government and the agency in charge of regulating civil aviation have their way, there won’t be any non-Indians flying the commercial airways by December, 2013. But as is so often the case inIndia, the issue is complex. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the airline regulating agency, had in March, 2009 ordered all Indian airlines to dismiss all foreign pilots by July of 2010. But the DGCA backed down when it became obvious that demand for experienced domestic airline pilots exceeded the supply available from Indian flight schools and from pilots leaving the military. And apparently this situation persists. There just are not enough Indians with the training and experience needed to qualify as captains in India’s ever growing airline industry. However, the cost of the foreign pilots and the impact of that cost on domestic airlines is becoming a big problem, literally. There are about 400 non-Indian pilots in India, about 20% of the flying force; but because of their experience foreign pilots are paid much more than Indians in the same positions. This has, understandably, caused quite a bit of resentment amongst the pilots and co-pilots of the Indian airways. (Aviation Week – India Wants Foreign Pilots Out)
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The legend of the lens himself, Corky Lee. The Queens Museum of Art is currently exhibiting “Asian Pacifically New York: The Photography of Corky Lee” through August 14. In the city, everybody knows Corky. He’s at nearly every Asian Pacific American event. Has been for decades. His pictures have run everywhere from Time magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice and the Associated Press. Corky’s 1975 picture of the old Pagoda movie theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown became the cover of my second book, This Is a Bust. Yes, the museum is in the outerborough of Queens, but you haven’t seen New York until you’ve seen Queens, and you haven’t seen Asian Pacific America’s story on the East Coast until you’ve seen Corky’s work. The Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building Flushing Meadows Corona Park Queens NY 11368 Telephone: (718) 592-9700 http://www.queensmuseum.org/ info@queensmuseum.org Corky likes cool cats. Jimmy Mirikatani, former homeless artist, concentration-camp internee and subject of the documentary “The Cats of Mirikatani,” in 2007. Another Corky classic. Sikhs at a 9/11 candlelight vigil in Central Park.
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