Matt Alt explains why this:
指定された暗証番号をお忘れの場合は、列車終着駅でお荷物の引渡しとなります。
When the set combination is forgotten, it becomes a delivery of the spare prick in the train terminal station.I'd laugh if it wasn't such a simple error. It's also prominently displayed on the Narita Express for all of the visitors to Japan to read. Let's wait and see how long it takes JR to fix this gaffe.
Lewis is so funny and kudos to Bloomberg for running this:
Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools: Michael Lewis
Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.
For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs -- nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does --ever happens by accident.
(Michael Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side,” soon to be a major motion picture. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Barry Ritholtz is awesome.
How to Save Detroit | The Big Picture
Softbank's comic commercials to promote their mobile service are now promoting the iPhone in Japan with Aya Ueto and Dante Carver and the rest of the White Family clan.
More background on this series here:
Shiba SoftBank Ads - Part I
and
More Shiba SoftBank Ads (ホワイト家族２４)
and
Shiba SoftBank Ads - Part 3
and finally
Shiba SoftBank Ads - Part 4
You have to understand Japanese to get all the jokes. Suffice it to say that Steve Jobs doesn't use a white Shiba-inu to promote the iPhone anywhere else in the world.
via Hector's Kirainet
Japanese video game mistranslations are responsible for the FAIL meme.
It's nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game's obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: "You beat it! Your skill is great!" If you lose, you are mocked: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"
Microsoft Bob vs. Jerry Seinfeld. Who was the shorter-lived Microsoft campaign?
Microsoft Bob
Hard Rock Hello Kitty
