The Truth Behind Japanese Icons

It was recently revealed that the iconic Japanese Sanrio character Hello Kitty is actually a little girl and not a cat. Interestingly, this is not a new change. Christine Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii, is the curator of an upcoming Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. In some of the written text for the exhibit she referred to Hello Kitty as a cat. "I was corrected — very firmly," she says. "That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."


But Hello Kitty wasn't the only Japanese icon revealed to actually be a little girl.

Tattooing Receipts On Your Body

There's an entry in the urban dictionary which defines Young-minded as "When a person does something that is so stupid, you simply must dimiss their actions as coming from an immature perspective."  I think this next entry is a perfect example of being young-minded.

Back in March, 18 year old Stian Ytterdahl of Norway had a McDonald's receipt tattooed onto his right forearm. Allegedly, Ytterdahl was at the restaurant when his friends decided he needed to be punished for being "a little too active towards the ladies". They said he had a choice of either getting a Barbie doll tattooed to his butt or the receipt on his arm.

Ytterdahl received a fair amount of media attention for the stunt which I'm sure was intoxicating for the young lad. In a seeming attempt to get a little more of the public's attention, Ytterdahl decided to double down on his first antic by having the sales receipt from the tattoo parlor tattooed onto his left forearm.

So will this be the final act in the Ytterdahl saga? Who knows. Whether or not he continues the insanity (perhaps tattooing the receipt for the second tattoo on his leg), we can appreciate and thank him for his contribution to the list of award winning WTF tattoos.


Metro: Teenager gets McDonald’s receipt tattooed on his arm as a ‘punishment’ from friends

Daily News: Norwegian teen who got McDonald's tattoo keeps promise, gets tattoo parlor receipt inked on too

Uncomfortably Numb

So I came across this wonderfully bad cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. Haven't laughed that hard in a while.

Rap Genius GMCFOSHO

GMCFOSHO

My first introduction to gmcfosho was the strangely hypnotic comeupoutdawahta.




But he has plenty of other jems including imdabes, which brought him into the limelight back in 2012.

Performance Artist Michal Samama

WARNING: CONTAINS NUDITY

Michal Samama is a performance artist who, according to her bio, creates "body-based art works that incorporate movement, sound, objects, text, installation and site-specific practices....In my works I seek the space where opposites overlap. I explore how weakness, at its most extreme, utter vulnerability, uncovers a peculiar, uncanny power. I do that by creating obstacles for myself, actions to perform on stage of which I could never achieve full mastery, and keep me exposed to the possibility of failure. This structure produces images that are at the same time humorous and disturbing and evoke a sense of insecurity rather than comfort and ease...My aim is to trigger, in my most intimate, private, almost idiosyncratic images, the texture of the scars the collective leaves on the individual body, in my very flesh. It is there at my most intimate that I find the traces of collective memory, the hidden choreography of our life, for which there is no author...Much of my research is devoted to the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal; performance art and visual arts; I test the power but also the risk and uncertainty of live-presence with its ephemeral, passing quality against the static quality and the possibility of perpetuation in the visual arts."

Wow, most of that fancy intellectual talk went over my head but it sounds like her performances must be some really deep, philosophical stuff. Let's take a look.

Michal Samama: The Chicken Memorial

Michal Samama: Block