PingMag – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Gold robots

Even cigarette lighters aren’t immune from the Japanese desire to robotise the world, one object at a time. These are real gold versions of the Lightan, robot characters from an Eighties anime series, Golden Warrior Gold Lightan, and are currently on display at The Great Robot Exhibition in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Ueno, Tokyo until January 27th, 2008. The always reliable PingMag has a good exhibition report which is fortunate since the official site is Japanese-only.

Among the antique automata in the exhibition there’s this rather splendid clockwork crab. It would have been nice to know something about this but the only information is a Japanese caption. What was it for? Were many of these made or was it unique, like the Bowes Swan?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Almacan
• The sculpture of Christopher Conte
• The Bowes Swan

Black is the new black

This is what we want—an airline that matches my monochrome wardrobe. Star Flyer is Japanese, unfortunately, and I’m guessing that black doesn’t have the same funereal associations in Japan; that livery wouldn’t, er “fly” here. Makes a change from the sky blue monotony that’s the usual colour scheme in aircraft, anyway. PingMag looks at the resurgence of interest in black as a Japanese design choice, from toilet paper to cotton swabs, toothpaste and even black eggs. If you were eating the latter you’d have to be listening to the Nightcrawlers at the same time. And drinking black coffee. But I’d advise that you avoid black pudding; that stuff is just nasty.