Man charged for dumping silicone girlfriend

On August 21, the 60-year-old unemployed resident of Izu, central Japan wrapped his 1.7-meter tall, 50-kilogram silicone girlfriend in a sleeping bag, drove to a remote wooded area, and dumped her. Two weeks later, a couple while out walking their dog spotted the body and frantically called the cops. The doll body had been wrapped in a bag and bound around the neck, waist and ankles. A head of black hair was visible from one end of the bag. via Guardian

Sex dolls now available from Japan

Eco-Cardboard coffins and Natural burial sites

Eco coffins are made from environmentally sound plain cardboard (they can be customised too) to cater for a  non wasteful funeral and your last dying wish.

Reflecting a worldwide trend towards environmentally friendly burials, eco burial sites are popping up all over Australia. Relatives and friends will require a satellite navigation device to find graves of loved ones in New South Wales’s first eco-burial site. The deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary on bushland attached to Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region. The company LifeArt provide a range of cardboard coffins that can be ordered via participating funeral parlours in Australia.

The London based “Natural Death Centre” recently hosted the green funeral exhibition at the Conway Hall where exhibitors from all over the UK displayed diverse examples of biodegradable coffins, shrouds and jewellery as well as offering funeral specific green advice and services.

Workshop 6: Futures: May 8th-9th

WALTER PICHLER. Small Room (Prototype 4), 1967 Photography: Werner Kaligofsky.
Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Generali Foundation

WALTER PICHLER TV-Helmet (Portable living room), 1967

This workshop explored ways in which the contemporary obsession with insecurity is generating new forms of technical promise, offering control and protection in the wars against terror and environmental apocalypse. Discussions ranged from Double Agents in the post cold war era, how design thinking is integral to understanding, envisioning and provoking thoughts about the future, how risk assessment and scenario planning creates its own future and how the war on climate change has been created from the same language and motivations as the war on terror.

Workshop 5: Extreme Green Guerrillas by Michiko Nitta

Michiko Nitta graduated from the MA Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in 2007 and presented her recent work of the Extreme Green Guerrillas (EGGs).

Her starting points for this work came from the fact that environmental damage is extreme and the ordinary green people are in fear from upcoming disaster but the extreme green people are activists who use fear yet still are locked into the consumer cycle. The current green solutions are not working and we are only making tiny steps forward: they are hypocritical green solutions. The EGGs try to go beyond human consumerism and create their own amateur self sustaining collective. Extreme to save the earth, enjoy good quality of life.

How much is your dead body worth?

Horizon – How much is your dead body worth

BBC2 Tuesday 18th March (today)

“A modern medical revolution has fuelled a market for body parts which has seen a cadaver sell for as much as $250,000. Horizon investigates the booming industry that supplies human bodies. It has spawned a grisly black market trade in stolen body parts which includes among its victims the veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke. After his death in 2004 what happened to his body as it lay in a funeral home would reveal a story of modern day grave robbery and helped smash a body-snatching ring that had made millions of dollars by chopping up and selling-off over 1000 bodies. Dead bodies have become big business.

Workshop 5: Truth and justice in the wake of dictatorship and armed conflict by Jose Zelaquett

photos:Will Pollard

The Irdell Lecture is run by the Department of history and law at Lancaster University and is 15 year old lecture series for interdisciplinary scholars of history, society and law. As part of the fifth Designing Safe Living workshop dealing with Presentation, Documentation and Mediation, Jose Zalaquett was invited to speak with the IAS.

José Zalaquett is the Professor of Law at the Human Rights Centre at Chile University

José Zalaquett is probably Latin America’s foremost and most well known authority on human rights. He has taught as visiting professor at the Law Schools of Harvard University, New York University, the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto. Advocate of human rights. Head of amnesty international committees. President in American commission.Human rights missions to numerous countries. UNESCO + carter foundation. Arrested, detained and exiled in the past in his beliefs. Worlds most respected members of human rights. Field of Human rights in the world and in Chile.

Looking Good For Jesus cosmetics

Looking Good for Jesus: Look your Sunday best! Guaranteed to help you be worthy and get noticed by the King of Kings!
A leading retailer in Singapore has withdrawn a cosmetics range with a Jesus theme after complaints from local Roman Catholics, local media report.

A coca cola and 3 “hail marys” please!

x 5 =

The power of prayer is all it takes to relax with a drink at a newly opened Croatian cafe. Customers at the Jedro coffee shop in Zagreb are asked to say a certain number of prayers in return for their drinks.The most expensive beverage is a Coca-Cola which costs five ‘Hail Marys’. A cappuccino costs four ‘Our Fathers’.The shop, which does not serve any alcohol, is run and financed by local parish authorities in Zagreb’s Jarun district. A spokesman said: “We started out with only five tables but we have so many people coming here now that we are already up to 20 tables and it is growing all the time.”

The Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count

I came across the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count site in December and realised that it is the most moving bar graph I have seen in a while. Each .25mm(approx) on the bar chart represents 1 person who has died in Iraq.