X-Radiation

SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 dovetailed nicely with SantaCon 2009! You can read about it at the CG Society web page!

Here’s Santa Magari’s Tokyo Santacon web page!

Santa Magari did an excellent job dis-organizing the event in spite of the difficulties involved. We gathered at the traditional spot in front of Hatchiko at Shibuya station and headed over to the LABI electronic store to the wide eyed stares of kids and their parents. Santa loaded up on cheap booze at the next sleigh stop, the DONKI store. After getting his drink on Santa marched through Shibuya to Yoyogi Park where there was some kind of Eco/Peace/DJ Techno festival thing going on. Things looked pretty grim until Santa took the stage and danced for about an hour. Santa passed through Omotesando on the way to the sleigh to Odaiba. Arriving at Odaiba a hungry santa stopped to grab a bite at the FamilyMart and proceeded to walk down the beach. There was a group of amateur astronomers who encouraged Santa to check out Jupiter and her moons on the way to the mall. Santa promply made an ass out of himself at the mall then headed over to the 1/5th scale Statue of Liberty anchored in Tokyo Harbour before calling it a night. The Santas went their separate ways. I ended up at Andy’s Izzakaya in Shimbashi with Santa Sneery, Santa Mike, Santa Sasha, Santa Naoko, Santa I-chan, Dr. Santa and several Santas to be Named Later.

More pictures after the jump!

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Pictures of my doggies remind me of home while travelling. I got a big smile on my face finding these in my e-mail box after waking up obscenely early once again.

This min-pin looks kind of stoned.

Experiment #44 shows that canines dislike adhesive backed paper stuck to their heads.

I'll bet you didn't know that dogs lay big white furry eggs.

Don't forget Bob.

Ding Cong's portrait of Honoré de Balzac

This is Ding Cong’s portrait of Honoré de Balzac. I never realized how much he looks like American porn icon Ron Jeremy. I tried to download an image of Ron Jeremy to put side by side with this photo I took at the Ding Cong museum but I was thwarted in my search by the Great Firewall of China and I’m feeling too lazy to attempt to tunnel my way under just to  snag a headshot of Ron Jeremy looking surley. I will update this post later with that image.

Update: A concerned reader sent me ta snapshot of Mr. Ron Jeremy for inclusion in this article. Thanks Jeff!

Today a group of us including a couple of comic book artists from Portugal and G. Scott Owen, the President of ACM SIGGRAPH, took a field trip to the home of renound Chinese cartoonist Ding Cong. Along the way I got to wondering just what in Odin’s name an Ewok is doing standing guard over this Taoist temple in Fengjing?

The 1980 show from Sid and Marty Krofft defies explanation.

Well, actually, there is a pretty good explanation on Wikipedia.

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Chand showed me around Mumbai a bit after our visit to R&H. Our first stop was Toto, a really cool Indian pub in a converted garage. The car lifts are still there and they’ve got a fiat jacked up over the bar. There’s a VW van jacked up on the ther side where the DJ booth is. They spin classic hard rock. We headed over to the Boat Club and had some whisky and seekh kabobs then had dinner at Papa Pancho!. 

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