Maneki Neko

Lovely Lucky Cats.

Quirky and kitschy, traditional but also a great little gadget. I love the superstitious japanese culture of happiness & good luck charms.

Japanese Maneki Neko, the beckoning cat, brings fortune, welth and good luck to it's owner. Usually the lucky cat holds a couple of attributes like a red collar and a bell, and almost all hold a gold coin. You have plastic ones on batteries endlessly beckoning fortune in.

Some believe, the longer the paw the bigger the happiness, so you can find silly Maneki's with a real long arm. The "beckoning" is probably loosely based on a cat's washing gestures...



too long armed Maneki Neko



The asian gesture of beckoning is quite opposite to the western, holding your hand palm out, beckoning downwards instead of our way of beckoning "upwards"...

Maneki Neko brings fortune and prosperity, so you can often see them in stores, businesses, pachinko ♥ parlors and other merchant and moneymaking places. They are often made as piggy-banks as well.


Put Maneki Neko on a little red pillow or cloth in a prominent place, mine sits triumphantly on top of my desk. It makes me happy every time I see it, so the luckbringing works just fine...




ancient portrait of Maneki Neko
on a japanese woodblock print,
around 1850.






Huge Maneki Neko in Tokoname, Japan.




Maneki Neko Club


Maneki Neko Wiki

Album Cover Wars

Stumble Upon!

Everybody loves to surf the net.

Instead of coughing up random (yeah right) results in your search engine, StumbleUpon comes up with recommended sites by like-minded surfers. When you have time to surf it really does allow you to find some unique and relevant sites...

Just click thumbs up or down to rate the site you've been brought to.

To some the future of browsing; A nice tool at least...

Stumble On >> StumbleUpon . com <<

Jaan Pehechaan Ho !!!!

Remember the exhilarating Ghost World opening? Jaan Pehechaan Ho!!! Masked dancers go bezerk dancing to a high energy gogo-like song by Bollywood legend Mohammed Rafi. Ghost World's Enid just goes along dancing the crazy dance wich is highley contagious, I'm sure you'll find as well.



Jaan Pehechaan Ho comes from Bollywoods' first "horror thriller", Raja Nawathe's Gumnaam (1965). The story is completely hilarious though, involving a very funny drunken showgirl, a planecrash on a spooky island, a mysterious book and naturally a murdermysterie and a lovestory.

Topping it all off with drunken duets, extravagant beachparties and more psychedelic dancemania. If you ever get the chance: Watch It!!

Now, thanks to WFMU's Beware of the Blog I finally have the complete clip, instead of just the Ghost World excerpt. Much obliged, WFMU's Brian & others!!!

< Take it here >

Just watching it makes you wanna join! Please do so! Throw back your head, close your eyes and shake yourself to the ecstatic Jaan Pehechaan Ho!

Birthday Hits

What was the nr. 1 song on your birthday? Wanna find out?!
What were people swinging out to when you came into this world?

You can find the right weeknumber of you birthday here,
ISO weekdate calendar. You need it to compare to the chartlists which go by week.

Here is the Dutch one > Top 4000
Uk charts > Uk Charts 1950 - 2000
US & the rest of the world > Charts all over the world

My birthday hit : Spargo's You and Me.

The Forevertron

I'm Loving this:

In 1983 the creator of the Forevertron, Tom Every, was reborn. After 3 decades of working as an industrial wrecker, Tom began to question his role in this destructive business of demolishing well designed but commercially outdated factories and machinery.

So, he gave up his demolition business and reinvented himself as Dr. Evermor. He adapted the identity of a Victorian inventor from Eggington, Britain to suit this new life. Now, as a child the fictive Dr. Evermore had been caught in a massive thunderstorm with his father, a Presbyterian minister. Evermore's father explained the huge force of the electric storm as an act of God. From that day on Dr. Evermor has made a life's work out of creating an extraordinary electromagnetically powered spacecraft that would ultimately deliver him to the celestial heavens above.


Dr. Evermor and the Forevertron

The Forevertron is a monumental sculpture weighing aproximately 300 tons and standing 50 feet high.
It consists almost entirely of iron, brass and stainless steel, welded and bolted together. A broad variety of generators, thrusters and other electromagnetic powersources are at the core of the Forevertron. The complete structure is capped by a glass ball meant to serve as space capsule.

The Space Capsule (upper right corner) in it's iron framework.


The Great Celestial Telescope

Secundairy components of the Fantastic Forevertron include a Celestial Listening Ear and the Gravitron, to reduce the doctor's body weight before take-off. At the north end the Great Celestial Telescope points to the heavens (in case someone would want visual proof of the doctor's spacetrip), while the south end holds a spiral staircase and a fancy vip-gazebo, originally reservered for the Royal Family on take-off day.

The Royal Gazebo

The Forevertron exemplifies Dr. Evermor's distinctive and deliberate creative priority; "to blend history with art". Each part of it consists and preserves some facet of early industrial technology or machine culture, now often disappearing underneath the wrecker's ball. Components such as Edison's late 19th century bipolar dynamos appear naturally linked to the Forevertron. Logically put together, imaginatively transformed or magically conceived, this industrial artifact of artifacts honors and recalls inventors and inventions of an age we have departed.


Dr. Evermor explains:

"These forms were made in a certain time frame and we can pick up the energy of whoever the creator was, whether it be a small blade or something else. That unique form comes along again and is put in that place, so that you always have that energy. That little piece may have a very historical connection to other things and beings of a certain time frame."

"If you look at this thing, it is all curved arches and circles. It is built on the principle of odd numbers -- sets of 3, 5, 7, 9. Given the historical make-up it seems appropriate that its essentially profuse, buoyant, undulating lines recall late Victorian aesthetics, from World's Fair architectural follies to Art Nouveau."

"form before function"















Forevertron Links:

roadsideamerica.com

drevermor.com

heart2art2hear

Digigarden

Totally pointless ♥

Click the spinning tree and all kinds of gardenstuff will happen...

click tinygrow

Zoom in ...

f you look closer you might discover the little fruitpeople in your own food from fresh 99.com, zoomed in food.



I knew it.. the legopotheads take my weed!!!!
from magicmushroom.org



For some really strange lego you have to see the brick testament.
The 'Rev.' Brendan Powell Smith gives you a lego illustrated bible, the uncensored version.

= nudity = sexual content = violence = cursing

Feeling a little destructive, are we?

Shred it! Wanna kill a washing machine or computer?
Watch it go down this horrifying shreddingmachine

There's a whole variety of objects to be destroyed on SSI's site!
But they even have a Shred of the Month!
Watch it shred!

Tokyoplastic

Just a cool site. Tokyoplastic.com

The Polyphonic Spree

Quest for the Rest.

Another nice way to showcase
a new album.

Aim of the game is to help the little people get home, by clicking all things clickable you'll find out how. Guide them through 3 different 'worlds' and you'll be rewarded. Nice atmospheric music and sweet graphics, game itself is simple but cute ♥

Play Quest for the Rest

Cat watching a cat watching a cat

. . . and it's called the infinite cat project


Tasha watching Duma watching '99' watching Snowball :)

Dutch Slang

Droengo of appa? Zoek 't op!
'Slang'woordenboek

Whale Song

Listen to 'live' whale songs from maui .
This is the Whalesong Project.

click picture