A new commercial by Samsung, posted by ClassicsRemastered

Japanese pop princess, Ayumi Hamasaki has been delivering her unique blend of techno-pop melody and fashion for over a full decade. Most of her tracks involve one type of synth-machine or another and her lyrics are saturated with the untethered force of raw passion. In 2007, another princess icon emerged from the rough, sporting large-framed sunglasses and a taste for fame; Lady GaGa.

Lady GaGa and Ayumi Hamasaki

GaGa matured her style from rock to dance in the streets of lower Manhattan while Ayumi continued performing overseas throughout Asia. Like Ayu, GaGa’s songs also strongly reflected her emotions and held little back. The two never met, but these days ideas travel in a single heartbeat, and the industry began to consume the similarities between the sister artists. Lady GaGa’s music became more techno and flashy, mimicking the beats of some of Ayu’s most famous tracks. GaGa also began to show off her lust for vogue within the content of her videos and by 2008 she became known as the freak of fashion that she is today.

Normally one icon veers away from the styles of another, but a machine was stirring in the Eastern Hemisphere. Ayu’s songs have always held a more western appearance and producer AVEX has never shied away from observing the New York trends. The music of Ayu borrows heavily from the 80’s and 90’s electro pulse of western pop and her albums continued to synthesize tech pop-rhythms well into the new millennium. Then GaGa brought dance back to the radio and returned the music industry to the catwalk, wearing a custom pair of the late Alexander McQueen’s newest kicks.

Lady GaGa’s global presence soon out-weighed that of Ayu, whom is centered only around Asia. AVEX could not ignore the phenomenon that became known as such. After Bad Romance was released in the states, it took only 4 months before Ayu began strutting through her music videos in 7-inch heels.

Lady GaGa in Bad Romance and Ayumi Hamasaki in Sexy Little Things

The comparison of these two talented performers is inevitable and as one artistic vision begins to project onto another the trend will once again reverse. A similar event occurred in the early 1950’s when Osamu Tezuka changed the Japanese comic world by introducing a softer, rounder version of manga that looked less Japanese and more American. His influences were that of Betty Boop and Disney and with his vision, a new form of imagery was born in the state of the Rising Sun. Later, in the late 20th century, manga imports grew in the United States and, due to the intense popularity, American illustrators began adapting a more Japanese approach to their art work. The same is now being said about Ayu and GaGa. One of Ayu’s newest songs is even titled “Lady Dynamite” and features stunning fashion concepts, including high shoulder pads and dramatic makeup.

Ayu on the left.  GaGa to the right.

So will the real “Lady” please stand up? The truth seems evident that they are creations of one another, twins of the perpetual concept of connected creations. It is evolution – in that one species lives and feeds within the same world as others. We are all connected by the drive to succeed and, intentional or not, we are bound to reflect one another at some point in our combined existence.  Of course, it might take a genius to truly break the trends of the industries… and true geniuses are rare and few between.

“They were right. It was a gimmick,” Inman admits. “So, I was, like, why not make that gimmick into its own giant thing? And that’s where the Oatmeal came from.”

Most of you will already know the greatness that is The Oatmeal and his dotcom creations. The sarcastic ire and viral presence of his visual productions and text-filled hilarity have generated a substantial sum of traffic over the googolplexes of pages on the net.

So what makes this notion of pop humor so deserving of our attention?

Perhaps nothing more than veteran minimalism.  From one extreme to the other, all humankind has been born onto this Earth with the inherit concept of approval and empathy. Near-extinct remnants echoing the skills of survival now emerge in the form of comprehension – the need to relate.

There is a single, simple element to the Oatmeal’s work – and that, friends, is where the complexity begins .

For more about Matthew Inman, visit his site or read this here article

This one has been on the air already

This one has yet to come

Old Spice – Pure Awesome

I sense a disturbance in the Force…

2000 – MentalPlex™

Inducing seizure after seizure of mind-reading, search engine fun!

2002 – PigeonRank™

900 Pigeons per cluster

2004 – Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering

G.C.H.E.E.S.E.

2005 – Google Gulp

3GBs of DNA

2006 – GoogleRomance^TM and Contextual Date^TM

With Google Romance, you can:

• Upload your profile – tell the world who you are, or, more to the point, who you’d like to think you are, or, even more to the point, who you want others to think you are.
• Search for love in all (or at least a statistically significant majority of) the right places with Soulmate Search, our eerily effective psychographic matchmaking software.
• Endure, via our Contextual Dating option, thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date.

This one’s still somewhat probable…

2007 – Gmail Paper and Google TiSP

Digital archiving has never been so tangible

Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers indeed

2009 – CADIE and Chrome 3D

http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/

Poke the Panda and slap on those 3D Googles goggles

2010 – Topeka

Some more amazing work by origami artist, Joseph Wu

Warai Frogs

Arctic Char

According to an article published last year by the BBC, researchers “concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalization.”  Essentially the subject is stating that East and West see eye-to-eye quite differently.  I am reminded of this due to a more recent and similar article published on CNN International.

The topic itself is about relationships, specifically regarding personal ones, yet I found it painfully difficult to ignore the (what I felt to be)  less-than-subtle marketing plow for the Lie to Me show itself.

If you’ve never heard of micro-expressions, it’s time you did. They’ve been famously studied by Paul Ekman, Ph.D. (the real-life model for Dr. Cal Lightman of the hit show “Lie to Me”), who found that all humans display the range of emotions with identical facial expressions.

-Martha Beck
CNN Contributor for the Oprah Magazine

If you read the full text, you might notice just how obtrusive that one little phrase in an article of over 1098 words truly is.

Once again, the British Broadcasting Company will remind us that, in fact, the team of 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians evaluated different responses to a set of standardized images depicting the seven main facial expressions.

The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust.

-Judith Burns
Science Reporter for the BBC

This easily signifies how and why certain cultures perceive information in general so differently.  The norm for one may not be the norm for any given other.  From Hollywood to global politics, the separation is relatively constant though I suppose it really speaks to the efforts of those who try to fluidly comprehend one another.

Gotta admit, the Micro-expression assessment is pretty fun.

Ripe from the pages of The Huffington Post and the BBC – as if these two needed any other reason to host their own sitcom together, Former Presidents George W.  and Bubba Clinton embark on a quest to aid the citizens of Haiti.  President Bush takes the opportunity to perform some off etiquette manuevers on President Clinton.

Now Canada’s second favorite sporting event, the concept of Curling has always been to get the ailsite to deliver swiftly and cleanly via broom, (without ever leaving the iced-over surface,) to the marked target known by players as simply, “The House”.  The sport was said to originate in Scotland and might be considered an alternative form of the more prominent Hurling;  with the exception that Hurling is a sport which requires quite a bit more physical exertion.  Then again, I have never taken up the broom myself.  Perhaps the sport of stone-sliding is truck loads of fun.  Curling was made an official Olympic event in 1998 and has been played ever since.  What surprises me most is the sudden spike in popularity.  Curling has not received this much attention since the 1965 release of the Beatles movie, Help!

Even The Simpsons seem to have picked up the passion for sweeping hog-to-hog.

…the show’s writers used a little creative license to declare mixed curling a demonstration sport. Other details they tried to get right by watching curling on YouTube and talking to actual curlers, including the Clarks and Rick Patzke, the chief operating officer of USA Curling.

“I would trouble them with the most mundane questions about curling,” LaZebnik said. “It was the equivalent of asking A-Rod, ‘Where do you stand in the batters box?’”

-NBC Olympics
Associated Press

Well, maybe not quite that similar.  Half the world knows who A-Rod is; no imputation to Clark and Patzke.   It seems that most of the reception with regards to the Simpson episode, featuring both Homer and Marge participating in the Olympics as Curlers, saw the event as little more than an effort to derive attention to the sport from the show’s diverse audience.  In actuality, this may or may not be the case; regardless…the concept worked.

Curling is now making its way into the sub-cultural pastimes of youths and young professionals alike throughout North America.  It may not be baseball, but in terms of entertainment, it sure beats shuffleboard.