Mothers Against Noise (M.A.N) is a group of parents concerned by the effects of noise music on their children. But it’s not as simple as it might seems. There are at least 3 different M.A.N websites; respectively .us, .net and .org.
My guess is, if one is legit then it’s the .us. The .org is clearly a protest site against M.A.N and the .net is just a one page copy of the content found in the .us.
Anyway, noise music is a disease and some of the testimonials of the concerned parents are nothing short of appealing:

“The record is by two groups called Nicole 12 and Prurient. It comes with a lyric sheet of some of the most horrid descriptions of pedophilia and fantisies of sex with AIDS patients. And I DO NOT know where this record cover could have been manufactured legally”

Another horrified mother says :

“And I thought Marylin Manson was the sickest thing around. I am just sick to my stomache that things like this exist.”

It gets worse :

“Well as I already said noise has had an adverse effect on both mine and my son’s life, in fact my house almost burnt down because of it:(( Besides that episode there has also been blown speakers on my new stereo, my dog has taken to hiding when my son is home, and my daughter Ella cried all of last halloween because the sounds reminded her of those that emanate from my son’s room.”

The effect of noise on our youth is terrifying really. Hopefully, M.A.N will be the voice of dissent in a world where the music industry has gone mad. Living in Tokyo, i have on occasion, been subjected to noise music. You see Japan can be considered the birth place of modern noise music with such atrocities as Merzbow, Massona, or the dreaded C.C.C.C.
Recently i was conned into going to a live event featuring japanoise “wunderkinds” Zuinosin and Ove Naxx.
It was not pretty to say the least but i’m a grown man with an unusually high tolerance to sonic assaults(this is due to my past career as a professional pachinko player).
One can only wonder the terrible effects those sounds would have on a child.
M.A.N biggest success up until now has been their quasi interuption of a Wolf Eyes show in 2004. There’s a mention of it in this Metrotimes portrait of Wolf Eyes.
I sincerly hope that their efforts won’t stop here. Noise music is much more nefast than just audio pollution as this article points out, it’s Antisocial, Amoral, Undemocratic and Anti-American.

My friend Aonami aka Motokick has just came back from Stockholm when he made asses shake Gameboy style. As a gift to the internet he has put a 10 minutes video on youtube.
Watch the swedes go wild as Aonami fill them with 8-bit love here.
There’s more here.

Hey wired, don’t write about the world’s fastest death metal drummer, just show the video.

Quick go and vote for the ugliest dog competition now !
Last year winner was Sam(left) who’s is already an internet celebrity. This dog is really ugly, not as in haha ugly, but as in son of satan ugly, terrifying out-of-this-world ugly, nightmare-inducing ugly etc..
This animal is now dead but someone had the heart to call it his pet.
She found and take care of it and i guess that’s how dogs are supposed to be taken care of. You don’t go and buy a dog, that’s for little girls that wants a toy, you meet a dog and you stick with it to the bitter end.
And if you don’t meet dogs, you don’t need dog.
Here’s a posthumous video in honor of Sam the dog.

Urazawa is a japanese show that gives practical tips to better your life. No, it’s not some kind of “how to be successful” or “How to lift your ass from the couch” type of show.
Those are genuine practical tips, such as “how to get crab meat out of its shell”, “how to fold a t-shirt”, “how to roll your sleeves” or “how to stir your coffee”.
You might think you already know all this but no, you don’t. You don’t know shit as a matter of fact. Because you simply haven’t been told by your lazy parents and your depressed teachers.
Geniuses of everyday life are at work in Japan and they have researched and invented the best way to do those simple things.
Until fairly recently most japanese women were housewives. This was up until the bubble bursted.
Japanese women use to marry, have children and call it a day as far as their job was concerned. Remember that also, until recently, the japanese nuclear family usually included the grand-parents.
In Japan, you don’t put your parents in a home, you stay at their house with your wife and kids and you take care of them.
It’s that way that housekeeping science was developed, passing from generation to generation. But Japan has changed lately, the cycle has been broken. Thus the invention of Urasawa, to keep young people up to date on how to do things properly and not like those pathetic mongoloids from the west.
Fortunately the internet is lifting the lid on those secrets.
Thanks to youtube user Arekure, here’s the list of things you should know (ok, you can skip the one about tofu).

Metafilter is a great website. It’s like a summary of what’s interesting on the internet. It’s not always that interesting but everyday there are enough links to piss your life away reading on the web instead of pissing your life away doing what you do at your dead-end job.
Plus it’s written, most of the time, in a pretty neutral tone, so you don’t have to cope with annoying internet personalities.
Another pretty cool side of metafilter is askMefi, a paralel site where mefi users can ask question and hopefully get answers from the other users. Yes, it’s like a regular forum except that metafilter users are  well versed at that internet game. Basically one user can shower you with links to obscure and ancient (pre-98) sites while the next one will debunks them and so on until you get a pretty good answer overall. The whole thing is peppered with personal words of wisdom from the users that couldn’t be hassled to throw some more links.
Anyway, back in November (i’m late i know) a guy asked what seemed to be an innocent question about being scammed on ebay. The usual talk between internet people about internet things on the internet.
What the guy in question didn’t know, is that internet people as skilled as the mefite posse can smell bullshit from hundreds of links away.
What ensued is a terrifying investigation by the mefi crowd, revealing almost everything there is to know about that guy’s existence on the web.
Basically he’s an ebay scammer, unable to ejaculate who lives in Bakersfield CA.

Via. This my friend is a beef splitting saw.

Yurayura Teikoku is one of the most popular indie band in Japan. They’ve been recording stuff for almost 10 years and they can fill huge venues. Yet they’re almost absolutely unknown in the west. Wait, it’s not weird that they’re not famous in the west, after all they’re japanese. Only dorky hipsters like myself care about japanese music. What’s weird is that even with the dorky hipsters crowd they’re totally unknown.
Once you come here you realize that most of the japanese stuff that you heard about in the west are almost totally unknown in Japan.
Take all the indie japanese filmaker that are considered like medium geniuses in the west like Tsukamoto, Kyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike and all that bunch, completely unknown here. Same thing with bands, nobody ever heard of Acid Mothers Temple or Afrirampo or Zeni Geva here. I went to an Acid Mothers Temple show here and the microscopic club was almost empty and there were at least 10 gaijins amongst the 30 people present. Hell, Kawabata was ordering a drink at the bar when i came in.
When i saw them in Paris a couple of years back, the place was packed.
The weird thing is that japanese hipsters will talk about bands and filmakers that you probably never heard about before. It’s like there’s two completely separated undergrounds, the domestic underground and the exported underground.
Yurayura teikoku was part of the domestic underground, was because now they’re more like on White Stripes popularity level. I saw them live in the Tokyo equivalent of Central Park where they were giving a free concert. There were people everywhere coming from every background. The weird thing is Yurayura’s music is not even catchy. They’re playing this kinda weird repetitive psychedelic-garage rock, you can’t even sing along to.
It’s not like they’re fucking Weezer or anything.How they can move such huge crowd is a total mystery to me.
Now i’m talking about yurayura because recently Pitchfork every dork favourite media has written a review for their last album, Sweet Spot. Oh, and i found this video on youtube which is pretty neat.
Oh and here’s some other Yurayura related links:
Yurayura Teikoku’s american label
Yurayura Teikoku official site
Yurayura Teikoku’s profile on keikaku

To keep things simple sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a soft sampler/tracker controlled with the mouth. Basically you load a sound in the software then, using a microphone, you sing whatever melody or beat and the soft cuts the sound and select the most ressembling parts to reproduce what you just sang all this in real-time.
Remember where you’re trying to make techno with your mouth ? Well basically sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! enables to make it sound like you actually spent hours making those beats.
I think i’ve been waiting for something like that my all life.
Think about the possibilities ! This thing is like a kazoo controlled synthesizer. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!
You can watch a video about it here to better understand what it’s all about. And Wired, the geek fashion magazine, has a two pages article about it here.

Each year, people unite to decide what were the best comics achievements. They call it the Eisners and it’s going to happen pretty soon. Here’s this year nomination list. The good surprise is that there’s a lot of european comics, specifically french comics (Sfar, Trondheim, David B, Larcenet…). One of them is bound to get a price, the Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material alone features 4 french nominees for 5 total.
A part from that, it looks like there are the usual, Chris Ware, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Brian K. Vaughan, Grant Morrison and even a small appearance of Clowes (Best Graphic Album—Reprint).
I’m rooting for Top 10: The forty niners this year.