Extra88

May 15, Mark Your Calendar

William Gibson was right when commented on linking to this story, "Nobody, but nobody does cults like the Japanese." Members of a cult named "Panawave Laboratory" believe, amongst other things, that humanity will be destroyed May 15th by massive earthquakes. They also think saving Tama-chan, Japan's "celebrity seal" will save humanity. Saving Tama-chan from what, I'm not sure, but there is a separate story about Tama-chan getting hooked in the eye by a fishing line. Tama-chan has more than a passing resemblance to a number of anime characters which I think better explains the characters than Tama-chan's celebrity status.

Gibson tried to link directly to a story but appears Mainichi Daily News uses some kind of dynamically generated URLs so his link didn't work. Currently there a couple of stories on their front page, including a nice photo essay layout, but it appears you can use their search box to look for "panawave" and have good results.

A number of other snippets of text caught my eye, most of them because it's suprising to me that they're considered "Top News."

"Hard-up gangsters turn to Tokyo to flex muscles" [I'm not picturing what a down-and-out Yakuza would look like]
"Naked teen-age boy dies in apartment fire" [Why did they include the "naked" part in the headline?]
"Grass-eating hikers fall ill" [That's odd to see anywhere]
"Schoolgirl goes on deadly arson spree" [ditto]
"Tokyo Electric Power has been forced to shut down all of its nuclear power plants pending safety inspections." [Now that's news! Scary on a couple of levels, especially to someone like me who's more pro-nuclear power than most people]
"'Project Kaisei' A mystery novel on Japan's nuclear conspiracy." [This is weird because it's a link to Amazon appearing right below the above story!]

"Congratulating the people of Poland as they celebrate their National Day. (May 3) ... Congratulating the people of the Netherlands as they celebrate their Queen's birthday. (April 30)" [No way would a U.S. media outlet be that international and polite. Holy crap, this is like a regular thing, congratulating nations on their National Days and having blurb written by some representative of the state in response! That's kind of nerdy but cool.]