As I was walking through Tokyo Station the other night, I happened to see a familar face starting out at me on an advertisement for some condos:

It’s pretty interesting what celebrities will attach their images to in Japan. I can only imagine how much she was paid for this, and I doubt very highly you’d see her face on a condo ad in any western country.

That being said, we seem to have moved into an era of celebrities unabashedly grabbing every single dollar they can get through maximum leveraging of their brand. I think there used to be a bit more restraint about this, but the idea of A-list celebrities “cheapening” their image by attaching it to any product seems to have disappeared.

As someone with Apple products up to my eyebrows, I happened to click on the Apple home page yesterday to see if I could figure out why the new 2GB of RAM I installed was causing sudden kernel panics when I wake my iMac from sleep. Of course Apple kernel panics are also commonly known as the Apple “black screen of death”, although I can assure you they are almost never as frequent or as irritating as the Windows blue screen of death that, several years ago, pushed me over to Apple in the first place . Anyway, I’m not overly concerned about the 2 kernel panics I’ve had since installing the RAM two days ago (compared to never having had one on my iMac in the past year, although I’ve had a few on my Macbook) - if it continues, I’ll take action.

Anyway, that’s what drove me to the Apple home page and, then, when I got there, I have to admit, I was pretty surprised to see this:

Out of curiosity, I clicked over to the Apple Japan homepage and there was no Al:

I dunno…not that I am really overly supportive of the selection of Al for the Nobel Peace Prize (I don’t equate environmental issues with peace initiatives); HOWEVER, I thought the Nobel Peace Prize was a global thing, and, perhaps even more important, I thought the whole point of Al’s big push for climate change was also supposed to be a global thing. Not for Apple, I guess, when you have a new product to push in a giant, tech-hungry market….

I was out on a walk last week, on some back streets in Shibuya, and I stopped to take a photo of a dental clinic that had a sign out front saying: “Dental Clinic Gross”. I have a mini collection of weird signs - I’m assuming this was the typical L/R sound problem for Japanese people, and that they actually meant to name the clinic “GLOSS” (which makes more sense, but the “gross” is funnier).

Anyway, as I stopped to take a shot of the sign, I turned around and saw this great grouping of really classic Japanese images (a traditional umbrella, a wooden door, a cat, and somenegi). I took a few shots and then decided to turn one into a kind of ukiyoe-like image with a bit of photoshop magic:

You can see the original version here