Feb 6, 2009

Agence France-Presse brings us this little gem: SINGAPORE - A Singapore lawmaker has a simple explanation for the city-state’s lack of babies: procreation, he says, is “not our forte.” […] “We should accept that as a people, our procreation talent is not our forte – nothing to crow about,” Loo [Choon Yong] told the legislature on Wednesday. Really, it’s not that hard. (Or maybe that’s the problem! Boom-tish.)

Sep 4, 2008

At the beginning of August, the Zimbabwean central bank knocked ten zeroes off the Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate, and suddenly one USD was worth about forty ZWD. At the beginning of September, one USD is worth four thousand ZWD. That’s… what… 10,000% inflation per month… or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% per annum (a hundred trillion trillion percent, for those keeping score at home). Which, admittedly, is a vast improvement over the old rate: 430 trillion trillion trillion percent.

Sep 11, 2007

Presented without comment, via Boing Boing and Reuters: _A protest action by a group of Singaporeans with Japanese anime figurines such as the 5-inch tall Ultraman, robots and monsters with placards met some real-life police in the city-state._ A handful of fans of Japanese anime had turned up at a Singapore public park on August 25th with armfuls of the toys to protest against a clampdown on Internet downloading of anime material by Singapore animation distributor Odex.

Jun 21, 2007

Roy Morgan Research has just completed a comprehensive survey of AFL supporters, and found a few little gems. Compared to other AFL supporters: Carlton fans are 30% more likely to agree that “I sometimes use force to get things done”; Collingwood fans are 12% more likely to agree that “None of this stuff about the information super-highway makes sense to me”; Essendon fans are nearly twice as likely to have consumed Red Bull in the last seven days;

Apr 18, 2007

In 576 A.D., Japanese temple-building company Kongo Gumi was founded. In 2006 A.D, burdened by an unserviceable debt load and suffering from a downturn in demand for temples, Kongo Gumi sold itself to another Japanese construction firm, ending the company’s run as Oldest Company in the World. (The current winner is also Japanese: the Hoshi Ryokan (hotel) in Komatsu was founded in 718 A.D., making it 1,289 years old this year.