Edward Piou's personal website

Stray Cats in Tokyo as seen by professional photographers.
The group project moved from here, where there are lots more. More from the individual photographers, though not just in Tokyo.

Once upon a time, before boats had motors, the only way to move vessels up the Shennong River (a tributary to the Yangtze River near Badong, Enshi) was for labourers, known as River Trackers, to haul them by hand using heavy ropes along a dangerously narrow ledge hacked from solid rock. And while naked (slightly NSFW).
Being naked was practical, as wet clothes restricted movement and caused chafing, not to mention the clothing itself never lasted very long anyway. Over the years the tradition waned, with trackers wearing clothes to haul tourist boats and while singing folk songs.

But in February 2010, Enshi's deputy party secretary Yao Benchi suggested at a meeting of the local people's congress that a return to the tradition of nude tracking would turn Shennong into a major tourist attraction, an announcement that has generated some controversy.

Yet the trackers themselves don't care about wearing clothes if it makes money. As lead hauler Zhang Houfang told a Wuhan web site: "So long as there is a demand for this from tourists, and they are ready to pay, the majority of rope handlers are happy to haul ropes in the nude. Foreign tourists and amateur photographers find it more interesting."

Soon we may see the return of the Naked River Trackers, which in my mind wouldn't be a bad thing.

Disney restyles "Rapunzel" to appeal to boys. Disney is wringing the pink out of its princess movies. After the less-than-fairy-tale results for its most recent animated release, "The Princess and the Frog," executives at the Burbank studio believe they know why the acclaimed movie came up short at the box office. Brace yourself: Boys didn't want to see a movie with "princess" in the title. Dear Disney: Boys Aren't Stupid, but renaming "Rapunzel" is.

Historian Tony Judt has been the subject of MetaFilter posts before. He has also written an essay on his struggle with ALS that has been debated here. However, it may have taken an article in the mass-market magazine New York to put his race to complete his latest book into perspective.

What a pretty little outfit, good girl! Look at you, wow, you're not just a pretty face! Now come over here, stand close to me.

Jhonen Vasquez best known for his comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac [Google Book] and his Nickelodeon show Invader Zim has decided to post Zim "Facts" throughout the month of March.
He's done nine so far.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Warning: some facts might not be entirely for the sane true. They are, however, quite entertaining.

Erik Malmstrom, veteran, writes an opinion piece for the New York Times about the purpose of war movies Malmstrom talks about The Hurt Locker and The Messenger, as well as the documentary Restrepo. He argues to give the Hollywood films some slack, yet he argues that the documentary provides "reality" because it operates without the Hollywood filter.

Cultivated Play: Farmville

A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum. Starting with the mummy of Hornedjitef.

I mean, in these days of indoor plumbing, the toilet is a naturally potent metaphor for everyday repression, for all the bile and rage and memories and sins and other impure thoughts and unclean urges that can't always kept down or flushed away. Every once in a while when the psychological plumbing gets clogged, the load of excrement becomes more than one's psychological pipes can handle, and the shit all comes bubbling back up from below and spews out onto the surface.A survey of plumbing in the movies. Wee bit NSFW in both word and image.

Blog: Daily Plays. "Reading a play a day and writing about what I read."

Gendercide, or sex-selective abortion aided by female ifanticide, is soberingly common in coutries where a strong cultural and economic preference for male children exists: 100 million women are "missing" in the Asia-Pacific region, 85% of them in India and China alone.
Improving the status of women could, among other benefits, help reverse this troubling trend: a 2008 study conducted in South Korea offers some encouraging news. Still, some parents feel that even in Western societies people just don't seem to get quite as excited about girls as they do about boys.

In the USA, where the IntelliGender test is available in your local drugstore, a bill to ban gender and race motivated abortion has been introduced in Congress – with no chance of passing – while in Sweden officials have explicitly stated that an abortion cannot be denied due to any reason, including gender bias.

Stefania Rotolo performs live! (single-link incomprehensible YouTube video circa 1979)

Things To Say During Sex

Now you can own your own pothole......

The Shannon number? Skewes' number? Graham's number? Please. When you're ready to get serious, here are some truly large numbers. (previously, but with dead links)

"Feel sorry for the people who never got to see us," he once said. "We were good." The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City faces a $200,000 shortfall for 2009. The museum is battling both the recession and its own backers, as new management tries to distance itself from founder Buck O'Neil, a move that induced long-time supporter Joe Posnanski to announce that he would "never set foot in there again." Will this chapter of baseball history be forgotten? Or can Strat-O-Matic save the Negro Leagues? (Previously on MetaFilter: Buck O'Neil denied a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

The Alban Grimm exhibit, `Text of the Apocalypse as Graphics,' displayed at the recent TUG'99 meeting in Vancouver, shows what happens when a typographer-cum-graphic artist is introduced to computer programs and finds that inputting code can lead to outputting incredible visual results.

Way Down Under The Ground. The tale of Orpheus's journey through the Underworld has been retold so many times, on stage, in film. Tennessee Williams saw it as Orpheus Descending. Neil Gaiman took the myth on in the pages of Sandman. Today, we have Hadestown, a new album from Anais Mitchell. Mitchell recorded "Hades & Persephone" for a previous release, but Hadestown is a fully-realized folk opera, five years in the making, a collaborative effort featuring contributions from Greg Brown, Ani Difranco, The Haden Tripletts and Justin Vernon (the voice of Bon Iver).
From Mitchell's story of how Hadestown came to be: "The real moral of Hadestown to me is, yes, we're f*cked, but we still have to try with all our might. We have to love hard and make beauty in the face of futility."

The judge-umpire analogy has a long historical pedigree.
Note: Some links are apparently just supposed to be mouseovers. If there's not a URL listed in the mouseover popup, clicking takes you to a 404 page.