Foreign Dispatches

Fantastic Pictures of Japan

Having taken a fair number of decent pictures myself, it takes a lot to get me excited by the work of someone else, so when I say that the work of Alain Davreux is extremely good, you should take that as an indicator of just how highly I regard his images. This guy combines extreme technical proficiency with a keen eye for composition, and best of all is that - unlike many less accomplished shooters on sites like Flickr - he's actually willing to provide his pictures in sizes large enough for them to be properly appreciated. Treat yourself this Sunday and take a leisurely virtual stroll through Alain Davreux's online galleries.

A Hard Lesson in Respect

There's something about traveling abroad that seems to turn many a Briton into a complete asshole; whether one can attribute this to a mental hangover from the days of Empire or to some other cause is unclear to me, but nevertheless, a great many British people seem to go out of their way to annoy the locals they encounter. Sometimes this attitude can lead to rather ... unfortunate consequences, take the charming gentleman in this video, for example.

English Man Brutally Knocked Out In Bangkok Bar

Lesson of the day: just because the locals you're dealing with tend to be soft-spoken doesn't mean you get to run your mouth off at whomever, wherever. Not all the people of the world are like the conflict-avoidant Japanese, who tend to give far too much leeway to Western morons with no respect for others.

[Via Digg].

Google Wave: Pulp Fiction Edition

Have you heard about Google Wave and wondered what exactly it might be for? Here comes enlightenment, courtesy of the following video.

So, now you know!

The Daily Mail and the the Not So Subtle Art of Gay-Baiting

The Daily Mail has never been a periodical to resist a dig at a disliked individual or group whenever the slightest opportunity has presented itself to do so, and as such it should come as no surprise that the death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately has been seized upon to rant and rave about the wickedness and depravity of those evil homosexuals:

Euphemism of the Day

Being taken up the Oxo Tower. Compounding the hilarity of this one is that the Oxo Tower actually does exist, and it also has a restaurant at its top, so one can find examples of people using this phrase and being utterly unaware of the other connotations ...

Obama's Undeserved Nobel Peace Prize

No one who's been reading this blog for any decent length of time will ever mistake me for some sort of Obama-hater: on the contrary,  despite the fact that Obama's politics and mine differ considerably, I have repeatedly made clear on here how much I despise many of those who oppose him for supposed reasons which are merely thinly veiled covers for racist animosity.

Ditte Arnth, Translated

A few days ago I put up a video of a Danish TV show appearance by Ditte Arnth Jørgensen, the actress who played "Karen26" in the notorious hoax. At the time I mentioned that my grasp of spoken Danish was just too poor for me to provide a translation, and expressed my hope that someone would eventually volunteer one, but in all honesty I was far from optimistic that this would happen any time soon. As it turns out, my pessimism was unfounded: thanks to the efforts of Jonas Kirkegaard, we now have a full English translation of the contents of the interview. Following is the full text:

Not Everything Has to be about Race

While browsing Metafilter, I ran into this rather "interesting" article:

MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.”