Archive for the ‘myninjaplease’ Category

Slight Technical Difficulties

In the course of battling warlords, shogunates, and unfortunately other ninjas, sometimes even we, the most elite of freedom fighters, run into technical difficulties.AA If you noticed that the site was down today, rest assured, we are winning the battle.AA That’s why we’re here.AA Thanks for supporting us, and back to business as usual.

mnp staff

No a Apocalypto

Having viewed a screening of Apocalypto at UCSB on December 3rd, I walked away recognizing three main points within Mel Gibson’s movie. This first colors the entire story, seemingly as a kind of guiding moral: "the good Indian is the savage one in the forest." There is absolutely nothing appealing about Maya city-life in this movie- no indication that Maya urban centers flourished in the region for hundreds of years. Instead, religious figures are depicted as fraudulent or heavily drugged; political figures are fat and passive (both of these characterizations having been lifted straight from The Road to El Dorado); and everyone else seems to be living a nightmare of hard labor, servitude, famine, and/or disease.
[thanks to Carlo for sending this] Read the rest of this entry »

Ninjariffic! Mobile phones don’t give you cancer!

Niiiiiiice - looks like all those fears of cancer were unfounded:

Long or short-term mobile phone use is not associated with increased risk of cancer, a major study has found.

Mobile phone antennas emit electromagnetic fields that can penetrate the human brain. But a Danish team found no evidence that this was linked to an increased risk of tumours in the head or neck as had been feared.

Story via BBC

Blogosfear

I once was invited to examine Chinese bronzes at the Freer Gallery of Art. The purpose of the gathering was to develop suggestions for research into the technology of Chinese bronze casting, to share knowledge and to avoid duplication. We were about six or eight, and I will never forget the scene. Most participants were art historians or museum people; I was the only researcher coming out of Engineering. We were all looking at bronze fragments and we all had magnifying glasses, but my magnifying glass was different […]. ‘They’ had magnifying glasses that they put to their eyes and then lifted the object into proper viewing distance. I had a magnifying glass that I put on the object, and I manoeuvred my head into a good viewing position. They took one look at my magnifying glass and I was out. I was classified as an outsider.

Always ok for mnp when we see a critique of the blogosphere like this!

at craphammer

The War Against Terror Unfolds

In the form of a llama.

Llamas are not just for transportation anymore. It turns out that the animals’ blood could be useful for detecting all sorts of maladies in the surrounding environment-from deadly pathogens to industrial emissions. A research effort has done just that, manipulating a rare type of antibody found in llamas to make an inexpensive and diverse biosensor.

article at sciam

From a Cessna

from englishrussia

Here is a shocking story of Russian pilot, now living in the USA who was on the air 9th September 2001 and have made photos right from the air when planes crashed the WTC.

He worked at that time as a programmer in one of the dot coms and had some free time which usualy he spent flying Cessna 172SP plane around NYC.

We have this photos today.

Just when he took off he spotted a smoke coming from WTC towers. He was very surprised and headed in that direction

gallery

from an italian perspective

The Web as You Know It

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from hello.eboy

Soon to be

top ten ugliest sports uniforms gallery at msn.foxsports

My Ninja, Please! 12/1/06: ART! - ARF!

People, at myninjaplease.com, every day is a milestone, ya dig? Today, as you know, is ART DAY! Some of you already know the drill, which is that if you want to check out further art, there are several ways to do it within this site.

You can click on the ‘art‘ category, which encompasses the categories of design, architecture, contemporary art, film, music, and photo. Or, seeing as anybody with common sense already knows that, you can click on any friday in our ninja calendar over there on the sidebar (dating back over 1,000 posts, which is 9,000 posts in dog-posts). Or you can click the ART DAY! link in this post, which automatically searches myninjaplease for the term ‘ART!’ That will bring up all the ART DAY! main posts.

Also, some of you more diehard followers have noted the absence of the My Ninja, Please! posts. This is the triumphant return.

That being said [and beaten like a dead horse], today is a special ART DAY! because our in house ninjas have cooked up quite the eclectic treat for you, the masses. I’ll let you scroll down and find out. Also, our first microsite, arch.mnp, has opened for business! You can check it out my going to architecture.myninjaplease.com or clicking on the link in ‘the dojo’ over yonder to the right. Now without further ado…

Tillie the canine artist!

So it’s not like we usually watch late night with Conan O’Brien [aka big-headed ninja], but for some reason the ninja fam found ourselves sitting around at the correct time. And who do we see? Tillamook Cheddar, the canine artist. She has been described as:

"The most successful living animal painter."
-The Art Newspaper

"A masterpiece of conceptualism."
-Time Out New York

"A sham."
-Jerry Saltz, Village Voice

"When possessed by an artistic vision, Tillie is fearless."
-AKC Gazette

"[Because of tillie] I have had to rethink two of my most basic assumptions about art and life: first, the notion that animals cannot have an aesthetic sense; second, the core conviction that no sentient being could possibly paint anything worse than what Julian Schnabel recently showed at the Gagosian Gallery."
-James Gardner, New York Post (May, 2002)

Damn near all I can say is, My Ninja, Please! Check out a national geopraphic article on Tillie, and her artist bio. I’m not gonna link to him here, but you can also check out the webpage for that big-headed Conan. She also has a book out. Don’t laugh too hard: "Portrait of a Dog as a Young Artist"

The artist’s primary process is a dynamic color transfer technique. In preparation for each of Tillie’s works, her assistants assemble a touch-sensitive recording device by affixing pigment-coated vellum to a sheet of lithograph paper backed by mat board. The artist takes the prepared "canvas" in her mouth and brings it to her workspace. Working on the outside surface, she applies pressure with teeth and claws in a methodic ritual marked by dramatic shifts in tempo and intensity. The resultant sharp and sweeping intersecting lines complement the artist’s delicate paw prints and subtle tongue impressions, composing an expressionistic image that is revealed on the paper beneath when she is finished. She works with shocking intensity, sometimes to the point of destroying her creations.