A bit of nip-hop for you… the retro-styled “Howl at the Sun” TV theme done by the duo, HI-PRIX.
Click to view YouTube video.
HI-PRIX are high school students Miki, 18 and Hina, 17 years who won a Sony Music Record audition, and bingo…..HI-PRIX are now “Howling at the Sun” (Taiyo Ni Hoero!) 
….the theme was a famous Japanese TV detective show which went for 16 years featuring Yusaku Matsuda who is sort of Japan’s James Dean, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee.
Weird Japanese Factiod of the Day….
“The United Arab Emirates is the biggest export destination of Japanese chewing gum products.”
—ResearchandMarkets.com Aug. 03, 2008–Analysis of Chewing Gum Market
Additional photos via vintage Japanese Chewing Gum wrappers.
New from “Wooo World“….
Engadget - 2008/07/24
Hitachi’s new DZ-BD10H camcorder, which records 1080p HD video to Blu-ray discs or to its built-in 30GB hard drive.
Hitachi’s new Wooo World digital video camera featuring an 8-cm Blu-ray disc recording system and 30GB HDD coupled with a 7-megapixel, full-HD camera featuring anti-blur, automatic exposure/focus. Wooo!
Picture of the Day
Pole dancing Japan Today: 31 July, 3008Women practice pole dancing at a fitness club in Osaka.
The heat must be getting to them.
That is, it has been over 30C/86F for weeks now and it is just the beginning of Japanese summer.
Or, maybe they are practicing for work at this Japanese club.
My drinking buddy “Mulboyne found this strange English manga from Kinky/Kinki about “Bio-coke Man” — (Part 1, pdf) and (Part 2, pdf) who helps produce steel from old Japanese tea leaves and coffee grounds.
Melting iron with tea…
Kippo News - Kansai in Focus: Vol.15 No.571 Wednesday, July 09, 2008
… makers of tea, coffee and other soft drinks that have come to be consumed extensively have spent huge sums of money for the disposal of great quantities of residue.
…. the Kinki University’s School of Science and Engineering, has been developing ‘bio-coke’ capable of producing high temperatures for use in iron manufacture from the remnants of tea and other waste materials…more…
The Tokyo Metro’s August poster for “Train Manner” (sic):
DON’T JUMP IN FRONT OF THE TRAINS
As I have mentioned before, this is a monthly series of posters in the subway cajoling the so-called ‘rude’ Japanese public to have better train manners. In previous months, posters reminded women to “Not torture eyeballs on jostling trains.”
Hee, hee.
What the world looks like naked: The amazing image of Earth’s geology laid bare
Daily Mail / 7:46 AM on 01st August 2008
This amazing image reveals what our world looks like when it is stripped bare - shorn of all its plants, soils, water and man-made structures. This, and other never-seen-before images of the Earth, were unveiled at One Geology - the world’s biggest ever geological mapping project…more….
Today CrunchGear posted about the new Sega Toys robot animal, the “Dream Hamster.”
Skipping the Richard Gere jokes (the gerbil’s name was withheld by request of the family), in their Japanese press release, Sega describes these disturbingly realistic robotic pets as, “moving with a palm restlessly anywhere when you grasp it slightly by hand and push the abdominal switch to reproduce the movement of restless hamster characteristic.”
Sega is targeting the Dream Hamster to Japanese woman ages 20 to 50 as well as children. On August 8, Sega will start selling (only in Japan) the robo Dream Hamster for 1,200 yen, about $11 USD.
—special by the 3Yen’s correspondent-at-large, Den4
As America has the Hilton sisters, Japan has the “Kano Sisters.”
More photos.
In Japan they are best known for being known and their over-the-top plastic surgery, but the sisters Kyoko and Mika will be featured at the Otakon anime convention in Baltimore to announce a new anime project with character designs by pop culture illustrator Matsushita Shin of Production IG (”Ghost in the Shell, Blood the Last Vampire).
How will the sisters react to American Otaku and how will American otaku react to the Kano Sisters at he Press Conference is on August 9th ought to be fun.
Just as the 3Yen.com has covered in past summers, here’s the obligatory Japanese summer time treat….eel ice cream, pit viper ice cream, and ox tongue ice cream. YUM!
Via the Mainichi news photospecials.
July 31 /PRNewswire/Triumph Awards Midori Matsuo, 20, Japan, for the Most Inspiring Lingerie Design at the International Final of the Triumph Inspiration Award ‘08 in Beijing. (Click for full-size photo.)
However, the press releases didn’t show the first conceptualization of this lips-lingerie design with NHK’s ‘Domo-kun’. 
‘New’ Electronic Paper has been announced for the 402th time, sheesh.
Esquire to geeks: hack our e-paper magazine cover
- Boing Boing Gadgets -
Cheap, disposable e-paper magazines on subway newsstands and on the racks of your airport’s Hudson News. Each one thin, flexible, disposable. Just a couple of pages, with bright, glossy color, wirelessly updated with the latest issues of your favorite rag. Need something to read? Buy a new e-mag — or press a button to refresh your virtually dog-eared copy to this month’s edition.
That’s about five years away, just like it has been for the last decade.
But deputy editor Peter Griffin can tell you what magazine stands will look like this October, when then the 75th Anniversary issue of Esquire with an e-paper cover …more…
‘New’ Electronic Paper has been announced for the 401th time, sheesh.
Flexible paper-like screens that can that you can roll up into and put in your pocket have been “the stuff of hype for more than a decade.”
As many times as this has been announced, I might have well have traded in my old flying car for a new personal hyperdrive spaceship and timemachine. Meh.
Sony, research body develop high-resolution, roll-up display panel - report
TOKYO —-A research team from Sony Corp and the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research has developed a new type of display panel that is extremely thin and flexible enough to be rolled up like a piece of paper, with an industry-high resolution of 79 dots per inch (dpi)….…more….
Also refer to my previous 3Yen.com reports:
—Here’s a flexible, paper-like computer screen for my flying car!
—
Japan’s newest e-paper with 4,096 colors…
—Here’s a flexible, paper-like computer screen for my flying car!
—April launch date for 20 years in the making for “e-paper”
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