Interesting Facts

8th July 1949 – Celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as Communist Party members. 1953 – The United States Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons. 1965 - Ronald Biggs who was serving a 30-year prison sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery escaped from Wandsworth prison. 1968 – James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1984 – Homosexuality was declared legal in the Australia state of New South Wales. 1996 - Three young children and four adults were attacked by a man with a machete at an infant school in Wolverhampton, England. 2001 – Mamoru Takuma stabbed 8 school pupils to death at Ikeda Elementary School. 2003 - Conjoined Iranian twins, Ladan Bijani and Laleh Bijani (in Persian: لادن و لاله بیژنی ), who had volunteered to go ahead with a major operation to separate the...

Pac-Man started life as Pakkuman in Japan, created from the Japanese phrase “paku-paku taberu”, slang for smacking your lips. (According to the creator Toru Iwatani, it was to be called Puck-Man for its US release, but the name was changed because they realised someone might vandalize the “P” and turn it into an “F”, so they changed it to Pac-Man. And the rest, as they say, is history.)

According to a survey conducted by Win/Gallup International, the UK is among the least religious countries in the world. (The UK was 6th from last out of 65 countries, 30% considered themselves religious, 53% said they were not religious, and 13% said they were atheists. The remainder did not know how to define themselves. China was the least religious, with only 6% of people saying they were religious and 61% saying they were convinced atheists. Followed by Japan, where just 13% of people were religious, Sweden with 19%, Czech Republic with 23%, and the Netherlands and Hong Kong with 26%. The most religious countries were Thailand with 94%, followed by Armenia, Bangladesh, Georgia and Morocco where 93% of people said they were religious.)

Japan 1 : Scotland 0 - A Japanese single malt has been named the best whisky in the world. (In a shock to Scottish distilleries the Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 as a drink of “near incredible genius”, awarding it 97.5 marks out of 100 in the 2015 World Whisky Bible. To add insult to injury Scottish malts failed to make the top five drams. Having tasted about 1,000 whiskies, Mr Murray said "Hic" - No, sorry, he actually said Scottish distilleries were in danger of churning out drab or mediocre malts and that it was time for “a little dose of humility” from the northern whisky makers so they could “realise something is missing.”)

A Japanese restaurant has come up with a novel idea for lone diners. The Moomin House Café offers solo customers the company of a Moomin stuffed toy while they eat. (The themed cafe offers biscuits, coffee art and even the wallpaper in the Moomin theme . Diners are even greeted by a Moomin character at the door. Personally I would rather eat alone, discreetly.) If you're not sure what a Moomin is:  http://youtu.be/oiZ0eBFTH6k

Misao Okawa celebrates her 116th birthday.   Happy Birthday! She was born in Osaka, Japan, in the year 1898, when Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, the Spanish American War was raging and Horatio Kitchener triumphed in the Battle of Omdurman. Her advice is to eat three large meals a day and make sure you sleep eight hours a night. (It's not often that you get to use large ordinal numbers.)

I'm not going to pretend to understand Bitcoins, or how they work, but I've been told they are hard to forge or duplicate, and easy to trade with.  However it now seems that if you know what you’re doing, they are pretty easy to steal too. (In 2013, someone stole up to $100 million in the digital currency from “Sheep Marketplace", and now Mt.Gox in Japan (said to be the one of the earliest online exchanges of these ubiquitous bits of code) has disappeared. The website has been shut down, their Twitter account deleted, allegedly because all the BitCoins had been stolen, 744,000 Bitcoins worth about $350,000,000.00. As a result the value of Bitcoins has plummeted. They didn't even need a swag bag to carry it all in.)

The island of Ikaria is almost as far east as Greece gets,  just 100 square miles in size, the mountainous island is 30 miles off the coast of Turkey, but that's not what makes it interesting. What is interesting is the people there live longer and better than almost anywhere else on the planet. (According to longevity expert, Dan Buettner, Ikaria has that certain je ne sais quoi, and he has added Ikaria to the list of places in the world that have come closest to cracking the secret of eternal life.  A study showed that people on Ikaria were reaching the age of 90 with two and a half times the frequency of Americans. Ikarian men, in particular, are four times as likely to reach 90, often in better health. Other places on the list are: the island of Okinawa in Japan, the town of Loma Linda in California, certain parts of Costa Rica and the hills around the province of Nuoro in Sardinia. So, now you know. Oh and there's a web site (of course) of all these blue zone...

The world's largest public toilet is (or maybe the largest plot of land for a single toilet) is a 200-sq meter plot of land in Ichihara City, Japan. (It cost ¥10 million and was installed for tourists to the area, but the loo is in a transparent booth! It's boxed in glass, in the middle of a spacious garden of potted flowers and plants surrounded by a two-meter-high fence, with spy satellites and Google Earth, who on earth would use it?)

A Japanese restaurateur at Japan's Tsukiji fish market has paid nearly three-quarters of a million dollars for a single tuna. (This is the most ever paid for this endangered species; bluefin tuna. The beautiful animal weighed 269-kilogramme (592-pound), which means it cost a whopping 210,000 yen per kilogramme. It was caught off the coast of Japan's northern Aomori prefecture. Japan consumes three-quarters of the global catch of bluefin, a highly prized sushi ingredient known in Japan as "kuro maguro" (black tuna) and dubbed by sushi connoisseurs the "black diamond" because of its scarcity. Of course tuna is often loaded with mercury and a mix of nasty industrial chemicals such as dioxins, pesticides and PCBs, which have been dumped in our seas and oceans, and with the risk of contamination from the nuclear waste swept away in the Tsunami, this fish may have the last laugh.)

In what is probably the most expensive car crash in history, eight Ferraris, three Mercedes-Benzes, a Lamborghini and two other vehicles crashed in the southern prefecture of Yamaguchi, Japan. (Media reports estimate the damaged cars are worth at least 300m yen ($3.85m; £2.46m) in total. The good news is no-one was seriously hurt. As they say in Germany "Es ist nur Blechschaden" (It's only damaged metal).)

According to a report published by the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, in 2010, South Korea had the fastest broadband in the world. (South Korea recorded a nice, healthy, average speed of 14.6 Mbps, while Japan occupied the second spot with an average speed of 7.9 Mbps. Constanta in Romania was found to be the fastest European city for broadband, with internet users able to download at an average of 8.23Mb. And the UK? 26th place! I checked my speed last week, and found I get a measly 3.5Mb. So, it's no wonder it takes me so long to post here!)

Criminal trials in Japan have a 99% conviction rate. (Seemingly their conviction rate soared after their jury system was done away with, it has since been reintroduced, but only for serious crimes. Even China only has a conviction rate of about 98 percent and Russia a rate of about 90% (virtually unchanged in spite of the end of communism). Britain has a conviction rate of about 74 percent, and in America it's around 80%, but in both countries it's a lot lower for serious crimes.)

In the Japanese town of Isesaki the local government banned employees from growing beards. (The facial hair ban is believed to be the first of its kind in Japan. Funnily it's part of a 'Cool Biz' casual office dress code, which allows male staff to work without jackets and ties in summer in order to cut down on air-conditioning and reduce global warming. I guess they figure beards make your face too warm.) Full Story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100519/tod-japan-town-bans-public-servants-from-c359f57.html

A humanoid robot has conducted a wedding ceremony in Tokyo. (The happy couple Tomohiro and Satoko Shibata had their ceremony in a rooftop garden restaurant in Tokyo's Hibiya area, where The four-foot tall wedding-machine, called the i-Fairy, officiated. The robot was built by Kokoro, a subsidiary of Sanrio, the company that created that cute cat Hello Kitty. It's all very clever guys, but I'm still waiting for a robot that will do the housework for me.)

According to the Japanese Ministry of Labour 35% of the Japanese workforce are temporary workers. (In 1988 only 18% of the workforce were temps. Japanese companies which were once committed to providing employment for life have been hit by the recession, but not all positions can be filled by temps. Regulations list the following seven occupations which should not be dealt with by private fee-charging employment agencies: 1) clerical occupation done by persons who have not yet passed one year after their graduation from school; 2) sales occupation done by persons who have not yet passed one year after their graduation from school; 3) occupation of services except for occupations of housekeepers, barbers, hair dressers, Kimono dressing helpers, laundering and cleaning technicians, cooks, bartenders, waiters and waitresses at formal restaurants, models and demonstrators of goods for retail; 4) occupation of security guards; 5) occupation of agriculture, forestry and fishery; 6) occupat...

Computerised scanners around 15 Tokyo railway stations have introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough. (The system measures the smile's curvature to ensure it is broad enough. Say "cheese" everyone.)

A survey by the Japanese government has said that the dwindling birth rate is expected to cut Japan's population by 30% over the next 50 years. (Seemingly the birth rate has been falling steeply for over half a century. In the early 1970s it passed the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman and in 2005 hit a record low of 1.26. Luckily we are all living longer.)

According to Richard Black of the BBC, in the 17th Century Japanese whalers buried the foetuses of the pregnant whales they caught in a special graveyard facing out to sea. (In Nagato, Japan, they gave the whales killed Buddhist names. I just wonder how many of the species interred are now extinct.)

It is illegal to buy cigarettes under the age of 20 in Japan. (Good for them. I guess after 20 you should know better. But wait! What's this? About 51% of men smoke in Japan.)