After allowing Olympic figure-skater Miki Ando to be Police Chief for a day, those wacky Japanese have decided to award more crucial, foundation-of-commerce-and-government jobs to be held by people completely and utterly unqualified to do so. In today’s case, not because he’s not good enough, but because he doesn’t exist.

No, I don’t mean Jesus, but Ultraman.

Ultraman Mebius, seen here wielding the most powerful weapon in human history,
acted as Postmaster at the Nagoya Naka post-office on Thursday. He apparently managed to carry out an entire day’s worth of Postmasterly work without uttering a single affirmation, command, or thank you. He warned underperforming employees to improve (ganbatte!) by flashing his eyes a bright shade of yellow and crossing his arms across his chest in an “X” formation. The visiting hero also took care of lunch for the day, providing workers with nutritious meals of barbecued Mothra meat.

“We’re trying our best as we head toward privatization. Mebius has given us energy,” said 58-year-old postmaster Yoshinori Suganuma after Ultraman’s arrival.

Too bad the energy doesn’t last more than 3 minutes!

Complain about the quality of your local THX-certified cinema here! Lucasfilm will give them a nasty call and send someone over to straighten shit out.

I know Singapore’s Cathay Orchard Cineleisure multiplex is on my shitlist. Movies there are often played way too loud (and it starts from the commercials, so you know it’s going to be one of those days. Technically, this gives me ample warning to go outside and complain, but I’ve done enough of that and I’m sick of it. Now I can go straight to the cops.)

Make time today for this 9 minute video of Prince performing on a recent Saturday Night Live. I don’t care if you’re not a Prince fan. I don’t care if you’re on dial-up. It is truly, truly important because it signifies a milestone in the history of our pop music. The performance is great, yes, but I don’t mean that it’s the greatest ever. In fact it’s probably just a regular performance for the guy. What’s happening here is one of the greatest artists ever to be mentally-shelved by many as irrelevant is making a mainstream comeback nobody expected.

These are sad times for pop music; I won’t go into the reasons why. People not raised on it are wishing for, and valuing, musicianship more than ever. People want musicians who can really play guitar, goddamnit. The new album he promotes here debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts. If he keeps this level of visibility and promotion up, we could be in for a sea change in the industry as the public realizes that nothing than the best should do.

Today’s MacZOT is the absolutely beautiful world-as-wallpaper app, EarthDesk. Also available for Windows, but you won’t get the special price of $12.95 (UP $19.95). It updates itself online and renders moonlight and daylight taking into account reflectivity and live cloud cover information. I believe that means what you see is pretty much what you might get from space. If there are any tornados going on at the time, you’ll see them too.

I’m thinking about it… but I might wait till I get my 20″ iMac. It’s probably not the same on a 1024×768 laptop screen.

Take Salon.com’s Machiavelli personality test! It’s about 7 years old, but has only now surfaced on digg.com for some reason.

I was just talking to somebody last night about the unsurprising and commonsensical nature of Machiavellian thought. So my results weren’t unexpected, but they could have been higher.

The Machiavelli personality test has a range of 0-100
Your Machiavelli score is: 79
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli’s opinions.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but there’s a significant minority at either extreme.

Apple made about USD$410m in profit last quarter, and nearly $1bn in the last two. iPod sales are up 61% from last year’s equivalent quarter, with 8.5 million sold. Mac growth is slower at 4%, but this is still a lot more money than most people, myself included, would have given them credit for.

Link

Another magic-related thingy. Two previously-feuding British magicians whose blogs I frequent have made up and are going to tour the country together a bit. What are the chances that they’re passing through my old 2nd home on my birthday?

This is one of the funniest magic parodies I’ve ever seen! A David Copperfield wannabe named Daniel Chesterfield(?), complete with flowing white shirt and hairsprayed do. [via Styra “I punch thrice my weight” Foam]