This Is Just Cool!

Do you want to take a vacation that is totally unique from anything that you have ever done before? Maybe you should visit a ninja village! That’s probably something that you haven’t tried yet.

Koga Ninja Village is a tourist attraction for ninja lovers who are visiting Japan. This attraction is designed specifically for adults and older teens who are truly interested in the ninja arts. It’s a place where you can go to see demonstrations of ninja martial arts. You can even practice your own ninja skills after getting a little bit of on-site training from the experts.

Koga Ninja Village isn’t necessarily a top choice for families since it tends to be adult-oriented and more educational than entertaining. However, families do have an option as well. They can visit Togakushi Ninja Village which is much more theme-park style in nature and tends to go over well with the kids.

If you’re doing research into Japanese travel, then you will discover that there are many options to see ninjas in action. Many Japanese amusement parks offer ninja shows. However, these tend to be more dramatized and less realistic in nature than the ones that Koga Ninja Village or Togakushi Ninja Village.

People who are interested in even more educational ninja activities in Japan may opt instead to visit a ninja museum such as the Iga Ninja Museum. These types of museums do also sometimes have demonstrations but they focus mainly on showing off the art and artifacts relevant to the ninjas.

Wherever you decide to go, you’ll come home with a

The sheer number of websites available right now for bookmarking and sharing your favorite stuff online is a little bit overwhelming. You’ve got the social media sites like Facebook and Google Buzz where you engage in conversation but can also share and bookmark links. You’ve got the sites like Digg and Tip’d that are specifically designed for sharing with little other conversation. And then you’ve got a variety of other websites that serve many of the same functions to one degree or another. So why would you want to add yet another site like this to the array of sites that you’re already using? Because every once in awhile someone creates a site that is just different enough and just cool enough that it’s worth trying it out to see if it’s right for you. Pinterest is one of those cool sites.

Pinterest is a site where you can tag items that you like and arrange them into inspiration boards. It is particularly great for creative people who already use inspiration boards in their work. For example, let’s say that you are a fashion designer and you are collecting inspiration for a new line of clothing. You can create a board just for that on your Pinterest account. Then you can add the “pin it” widget to your tool bar. When you travel around the web and see something that inspires your line, you can simply “pin it” to the board. What gets pinned is the image – it’s a picture-rich site – but then you can add your own tags and details to make it more yours.

Of course, you don’t have to be artsy to make Pinterest useful to you. You may be trying to figure out how you want to decorate your new apartment or what gifts you want to buy your boyfriend or which hairstyles interest you most. You can create boards for anything that you want, scour the web for the images that are right for you and then pin them to the board. The boards can be your own personal thing or you can share them with others. You can browse through others’ boards on the site to get information (and can even easily re-pin pictures of theirs that you like).

What’s really great about the site is that it automatically links back to the original place where you took the image. This is good because it gives the proper attribution to the site that sourced the image. Plus it’s great because it means that you can go back and find where you originally saw the item if you want to use it again. Pinterest is in beta right now but you can request an invitation to join it and check it out.

If you want to see how some people are using the site, check out the Pin It Forward project. A group of 300 different bloggers all made Pinterest boards about “what home means” and then blogged about their boards on their own personal blogs. It’s a very creative project that is helping to launch Pinterest and to show the world what it can really be about.

The video above is, as you will see when you watch it, a very cool stop motion video. A woman looks like she is running in bed, her pillows moving around beneath her. Later in the video, she magically appears to be dancing with a partner although she is still lying in bed. It’s fun, flirty and definitely cool.

But there is even more to this video than meets the eye. This stop motion video, named Her Morning Elegance, is part of an ongoing art project. To create a stop motion video, one must take numerous individual still photos and weave them together into a video. More than 2000 photos went into the making of this project.

The artist, Oren Lavie, is doing a very cool project with these still photos. He is hanging them up in galleries around the world and offering each individual photo for sale. As a picture is purchased, its corresponding still photo will be removed from the video. This will constantly change the appearance of the video, taking apart the stop motion action one frame at a time in random order depending upon which photos are purchased first.

As a result of this process, the video will no longer exist once the 2000+ still photos have all individually been sold. Of course, it will still exist in some form. Once things are out there on the Internet, it’s hard to get rid of them. But in terms of what’s available from the artist, the video will be gone, hanging in 2000+ homes as still images. What a creative idea!

Radiators aren’t typically a part of cool home design. In fact, the best interior design ideas for radiators usually describe creative ways to hide these ugly things from sight. However, just because radiators have always been unattractive doesn’t mean that they need to continue to be so. An Italian company called Runtal is now making radiators that are designed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional at warming the home.

The new radiator line from this company, called Splash, is designed to hang on the walls of modern homes. The narrow, wall-hung radiators look more like pieces of artwork than electronic devices. With white-on-white spirals that can be placed in both landscape and portrait format, these radiators emanate a very cool look for the house even while they’re warming it up. They’re definitely chic in the modern home.

These radiators are expected to be the first in a series of similar pieces that will come into the market. People like radiators because they’re very useful in warming up whole houses as well as individual rooms. However they don’t like having to sweep around them or decorate around them when they’re bulky items sitting as eyesores in their space. These artistic zen-like radiators open up doors for a new way of looking at the details of home design.

In addition to their spiral art radiators, Runtal creates a number of other great radiators for the home. For example, the have a towel radiator that serves as warming towel rack and a room radiator in one. And they have curved radiators that suit unusually shaped rooms. This is a very cool company indeed!

How many times have you watched a television show or movie in which someone was reading the newspaper? This image may become obsolete as the average person / character becomes increasingly likely to get their news from the Internet instead of the paper. For now, though, it’s still fairly common. The newspaper is a standard prop for television and movie makers.

So what?

Take a look at the newspaper in the next commercial, show or movie that you’re watching. What you may notice if you start to pay attention is that it looks really familiar. That is because the same prop newspaper is being used all throughout the industry. The headlines and images are the same from show to show.

Of course, this isn’t true in instances where the headlines of the paper are relevant to the plot of the show. But if you see someone reading a newspaper on TV just as a prop (the man ignoring his wife while she talks, for example) then there’s a good chance that the paper is the same one that’s been floating around on your screen for years.

This reoccurring prop newspaper is believed to be a gag in the industry. It’s an inside joke that most people hadn’t been aware of until recently. There isn’t a message or meaning behind it as far as anyone knows. It’s probably just a fake paper that was created to allow newspapers to be used in TV shows without the cost of royalties being added. But it’s kind of f

A Beluga Whale has recently been added to the list of animals that is capable of painting. The whale, named Xiao Qiang, is a resident of China’s Polar Ocean World where trainers noticed that he seemed to like some posters better than others. The trainers decided to see what would happen if they handed him a paintbrush and he’s been actively painting watercolors ever since.

Xiao Qiang is hardly the only animal known for his in-captivity paintings, however. In fact, there are at least 12 other species of animals that have gained attention for their artistic endeavors:

1. Dogs. Attach a paintbrush to a bone and watch Sammy the Foxhound go to town on a canvas.
2. Dolphins. Chinese water parks also show off the painting skills of these smart creatures.
3. Elephants. Several in-captivity elephants paint beautiful pictures with paintbrushes held in their trunks.
4. Horses. A horse named Cholla has painted pieces of art that sell for over $2000 each.
5. Meerkats. Two meerkats at the San Diego Zoo are known for painting with their paws.
6. Parrots. They can talk with their mouths so why shouldn’t they be able to paint with them as well?
7. Pigs. Just look up “Pigcasso” in England.
8. Primates. With hands that aren’t that different from ours it’s no surprise that primates can paint.
9. Raccoons. Raccoons at the Hutchinson Zoo actually push shells and other objects around in paint to create their works of art on paper.
10. Rhinos. A Rhino at the Denver Zoo was taught to paint by her trainers.
11. Sea Lions. The Oregon Coast Aquarium has their sea lions paint with their flippers.
12. Turtles. Koopa the Turtle has pieces of artwork hanging in 35 different states!

There is some debate as to whether or not these animals should be exploited for their ability to paint. Nevertheless, though, you have to admit that these are some cool creatures!