zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from SmartMobs ]

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An Easter Egg, according to one online definition, is an “undocumented function hidden in software that may or may not be sanctioned by management”. All sorts of media can in fact have Easter Eggs hidden in them, and the same definition goes on to mention occurrences in “video games, movies, TV commercials, DVDs, CDs, CD-ROMs and every so often in hardware.”

Well, okay. As of now, they can also be found on Fox News. Someone just sneaked the name of a Japanese rock club into the list of Japanese nuclear power plants:

The definition of Easter Egg is from Your Dictionary.
The Fox News screen-grab is from Business Insider.
The image of the young rocker is from the Shibuya Eggman club website.
The song the young man is singing is undoubtedly I am the Walrus.
The hat-tip goes to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, @DaveedGR, who pointed me to another Faux-pas, this one involving Pakistan and padded bras.

The divine comedy is that we can still find humor in the teeth of tragedy.
The triple tragedy is that Japan is reeling from quake, tsunami and nuclear plant failure.

One of the key chapters in my friend Howard Rheingold‘s book, SmartMobs, is titled Shibuya Epiphany. And that’s my epiphany for today.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Two stories — continents, centuries and cultures apart — yet as remarkable for their similarities as for their differences. The first concerns a US military defense attorney’s first meeting with a defendant at Gitmo, the second a zen monk…

I already knew the zen story, so the Gitmo version positively flew off the page at me.

I suppose some people will prefer one story, some will prefer the other: for me it’s the almost stereophonic effect of knowing the pair of them that I find more interesting than knowing either one of them separately.

Either one is impressive — together, they dance.

This is something you don’t see every day. A traditional Japanese orchestra playing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water“.

Hat tip to Mithras at Fables of the Reconstruction

THE MINISTRY OF DROIDS

Getting a little ahead of themselves.

IMPERIAL CONSPIRATORS

“Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings.”
CIA file on Class A war criminal and G-2 agent Colonel Masanobu Tsuji

Declassified intelligence papers reveal that Japanese agents of SCAP’s G-2 military intelligence plotted a postwar coup to bring an ultranationist government to power in Japan. Key figures included the Yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama who had deep ties with the most pro-Nazi faction of wartime Naimusho bureaucrats, Colonel Takushiro Hattori, once Tojo’s private secretary and the infamous Colonel Masanobu Tsuji.

Deeply involved in pre-war Army political intrigue and known to his troops as ” the god of operations”, Tsuji was a fanatical ultranationalist with backing from members of Japan’s imperial family who did not shy from bullying senior generals. One of the authors of the Bataan Death March, Tsuji had also been implicated in the death of the King of Thailand in 1946 ( Tsuji had planned the invasion of that country during WWII) yet escaped prosecution as a war criminal, being elected to the Diet before disappearing mysteriously in Laos in 1961.

Evidently, the CIA regarded Tsuji, who had pulled the plug on the coup, as completely useless as an intelligence asset.