Chop Chop Store set up chop, er. shop, at the Boing Boing Bazaar in our Makers Market! Chop Chop Store are the makers of terrific "collection" t-shirts featuring icons of nerd celebrity, from robots to aliens to ghosts and zombies. How many characters can you identify? Collection Tees in the Makers Market/BB Bazaar

In part two of our Q&A series with Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein, we'll answer some basic questions about the yakuza: why people join, how they operate, and how much influence they have on mainstream Japanese culture. You will also find out why some parents might voluntarily send their kids to mobsters and how landing an innocent-seeming IT job could accidentally spiral you into a lifetime of crime.

If you haven't read part one, which is a more intimate look at Adelstein's own experience as a crime beat reporter in Japan, it's here.

Why do people join the yakuza?

They're usually misfits from Japanese society. The word yakuza itself comes from a losing hand in gambling. 893 (ya-ku-za)). It's the worst hand you can have. So when they refer to themselves as yakuza, they're referring to themselves as losers. It's a very self-deprecating term.

Penguin books was kind enough to send me a copy of Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine yesterday, and I've just finished it, having stuffed it up my eyeballs as fast as I could.

Lewis is a gifted chronicler and debunker and demystifier of the world of finance. Twenty-odd years ago, in Liar's Poker, he revealed the crucial story behind the junk bond debacle, turning it into something human-scale for those of us who don't live and die by the pink sheets.

Now he's done it again, with The Big Short, looking at the econopocalypse with its unimaginable sums and (literally) incomprehensible financial instruments, and unravelling it into a story that, for the first time, really made sense to me.

The Big Short follows a handful of prescient contrarian investors who doubted the subprime bubble and sought out ways to bet against it (called "going short" on Wall Street). Contrarian investment is an old institution, but these people aren't just contrarian in their views on the market -- they're genuinely a little odd. Most of them are proudly obnoxious, one realizes halfway through that he has Asperger's, all are tough as nails, some still manage to be sweet, and all are, ultimately, likeable (if only slightly, in the case of the bond salesman who set out to find people willing to bet against the bubble that his employer had created).

In Lewis's book, these individual investors -- many of whom never come into contact with one another -- are financial detectives, each with his own specialization. One is convinced that it's all a fraud because he knows the people involved, personally, and thinks that they're crooks. Another has read the impenetrable prospectuses that accompany the exotic derivatives and realized that people are investing in garbage. Others are investigating the bond-rating agencies and coming to understand the institutional failures that lead them to be criminally negligent when it comes to rating these investments.

As each detective investigates his corner of the puzzle, Lewis pulls together the whole story, explaining how a combination of genuine fraud, negligence and dereliction (of the firms and their regulators), greed and groupthink turned the economy into a socialized casino where profits always ended up in the hands of a few institutions and their cronies, and the losses were absorbed by the rest of us.

Lewis is an extraordinary writer, and the people and stories he brings to life here had me as engrossed as I would be by a top-notch novel (I shocked someone on the plane this morning by doubling over with laughter at one particularly wild scene). But he's also a great explainer, and the story that he spins here turns the opaque markets into something that make a certain twisted sense -- something that's helped by his clear delineation of the parts that simply didn't make sense, the parts that were just bullshit, and designed to make you feel stupid.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Joann Bruso, author of Baby Bites - Transforming A Picky Eater Into A Healthy Eater Book, a book on getting kids to overcome picky eating habits, has been blogging the half-life of a McDonald's Happy Meal that she bought a year ago. In the intervening year, the box of delight, plastic toys and food-like substances has experienced virtually no decay.

NOPE, no worries at all. My Happy Meal is one year old today and it looks pretty good. It NEVER smelled bad. The food did NOT decompose. It did NOT get moldy, at all.

This morning, I took it off my shelf to take a birthday photo. The first year is always a milestone. I gave it one of my world famous nonna hugs as we've been office mates for a year now! (Okay, maybe my sanity is in question.)

Ben Greenman remembers singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, who died tonight at age 59.

Alex Chilton, who died, wrote songs. He recorded songs. He made songs. He unmade them. In the end, the life was largely in song, and the songs all had life, and that's all there is to say, and there isn't anything that can be done. Once he covered "Let Me Get Close to You," which was Goffin-King via Skeeter Davis:

How long I'll never know
I've waited to tell you that I love you so
Now I have finally said it
Come on baby don't make me regret it

"It's Your Funeral" is an instrumental. There are no words.

From the title of this Victorian science book it's not out of line to assume that there might be at least a few diy methods for accidentally electrocuting yourself, but that's just the beginning.

The tome in its entirety is supposed to be available for free as a hi-res e-book sometime this month, but for now you can see a full list of some actually really beautiful sounding demonstrations, (like how to make phosphorescent displays using oyster shells), and some other cool heirloom science excerpts at Lateral Science.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link.

Northern California artists Savanna Snow, who I've previously featured on BB, and Michael Eli have a magickal show opening Friday evening at Oakland's Art At The Oakbrook gallery. Titled "A Golden Dawn," the show runs until April 19, with an artists' discussion on April 10. (Click the lovely invite below to see it larger.) A preview of the show is also viewable on Flickr. Savanna writes:

This show of paintings & installation of a Hermetic Lodge seeks to place the viewer at the dawn of a New Romantic era. These two artists offer up a meditation on the Magical Order & past Utopian movements of late 19th century California. All the exhibited pieces were created via collaboration utilizing only found materials, these elements wrought from nature directly correlate to the history they evoke. Key figures such as Joaquin Miller, William Merrit Chase, Bernard Maybeck, John Muir & Ordonez De Montalvo are some of the Esoterics represented by the artists.

Downhill skiing is a team sport in the Paralympics. Visually impaired skiers hurtle down the mountain at highway speeds, guided by another skier, who goes a few seconds ahead and calls back changes in direction and terrain via radio headset.

Visually impaired ski racer Danelle D'Aquanni Umstead says:

It is a "visually impaired team," not an athlete and their guide. Guiding is not something just anyone can do. As a guide you have to be just as committed, ski faster and also be able to turn around at any given moment to look behind you at the other athlete when at high speeds. This is not an easy task, and takes a lot of training as a team. Finding the right guide is definitely the hardest part for a visually impaired skier. To be able to trust in that person one hundred percent, and find a guide who has the same goals as you.

My documentarian friend Andrea Dunlap over at the Seedling Project pointed out this great footage of a 'scissor dancing' contest in Peru, something she saw when she was living and filming there a few years ago. It happens a few times a year to mark Easter, Christmas, and Yacu Raymi (an annual water festival).

Andrea says participants travel everywhere with an entourage of harpists and violinists, doing intricate, rhythmic, often acrobatic dances using pieces of metal shaped like broken scissor halves as percussion, "eventually degenerating into stunts like dancing with cactus stuck all over the dancer's body, breathing fire, throwing firecrackers, etc...They make their own costumes and they have fierce names like Terror of Puquio, and The Lion." And you thought you were rebel for running with scissors!

Andrea has some scissor dance footage of her own and more photos from her time in Peru on her site. In addition to her focus on the food movement in California, she's currently working on a documentary about the incredible Cusichaca Trust, a group of archaeologists who are studying ancient Incan agricultural techniques and trying to revive them for modern farmers.

Watch above in delight as a Wilford Brimleyesque feline named Cooper demonstrates the fine art of BANG DEAD. It's the fisheye lens what makes it magic. MOAR at sweetfurr.blogspot.com. (thanks, Susannah!)

I've been a huge fan of Robbie Conal ever since Mark asked me to profile him for The Happy Mutant Handbook back in 1995. Conal is the Los Angeles-based artist who creates unflattering portraits of (mostly white, male, right-leaning) political and other public figures -- think Reagan, Bush I and II, and their cronies -- and prints them on 2-by-3-foot posters. Then in the dead of night, he and his posse paste 'em up, guerrilla-style, in U.S. cities, in bus shelters and construction sites where, in the morning, folks on their way to work get an eyeful of funny, gritty, cheeky political satire.  I first went "postering" with Robbie in San Francisco, and can testify it's some of the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I've done it several times since, and still have a gloop of dried wheat paste in the trunk of my Honda. 

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now.

Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics.

Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.  

I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation.

And now you can see the whole talk online here.

It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song.

The first chunk is above.

Parallel Lines is a project by from Ridley Scott Associates that will be released April 8. It's a neat premise!

Five directors were each challenged to create short films in different genres using the same dialogue. The five 5 beautifully diverse films are by Greg Fay, Jake Scott, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch and animators Hi-Sim and their genres range from drama, animation, action, to sci-fi and thriller.

Trailer for Parallel Lines

The world's shortest walking man, 21-year old He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, died this past weekend from heart complications. Sadly, we do not know much about his life aside from the fact that he was a 27-inch tall chain smoker who spent much of the last few years traveling to Japan, the US, and Italy after being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. I wish people focused more on what kind of person he was and how he coped with the constant stares and media attention instead of just displaying him as a freak show. He's pictured here with the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is also from Inner Mongolia.