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Some of you may remember a trip I took to the Netherlands last summer. I noticed while wandering around Utrecht, this shop display:

I had only ever seen Miffy merchandise back in Japan/Taiwan and was a bit curious as to why there was such a dedicated section for it. Turns out that Miffy is super famous for actually being Dutch, where she was ( Read more... )

The entry comes one week too late (after International Women's Day on the 8th of March...) but nevertheless, woman issues, and esp. the demographic hole on the woman's side in cultures that value a son over a daughter.


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Last summer a friend told me about someone who had drawn their PhD out in comic form. I discovered Judy Han, who drew the whole thing out in 24 hours as part of 24 Hour Comics Day. You can read the comic here, discussing and exploring the reason for South Korean Christianity, their religious fervour and global missionary reach. Sounds dry, but it's ( Read more... )

Further reading on Happiness, one was from a link off of Martin Seligman's website. Seligman is credited with being the father of 'Postive Psychology'. Read the full Times article here. Parentheses are all mine.


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Another pair of articles (in my mind they pair up somehow). A short one by Issey Miyake on surviving the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and another by an American, Joe Sharkey, on surviving a midair collision over the Amazonian forest, and the complications and trials he faced afterwards. Maybe I'm just noticing more 'survivor' stories ( Read more... )

Steampunk is such a buzzword these days (well, I first started hearing about it around last year I think) so I thought I'ld just make a little steampunk-related post as well. BoingBoing are quite into the whole idea and have a 'retrofuturism' tag so that's quite cool to browse. (I don't read BoingBoing though, not sure why. Maybe I'll start.) ( Read more... )

The Guardian have a weekly column called Bad Science, which picks apart confusing pseudo-science babble by companies trying to sell things, nutritionists, holistic therapists etc. When reading back you occasionally find updates apologising for when they attacked a person unjustly, and I think that it's a pretty balanced and informative way for ( Read more... )

On a similiar theme from this post about a fortnight ago, I bring Jacek Yerka, this time a Polish artist who paints works which are sometimes desolate and alien, sometimes familiar yet distant.

I love this one with the floating pools because somehow the red brick reminds me of some buildings I've seen around London, some very close to campus ( Read more... )