Bear stops playing with baseball bat
A bear that drew visitors with his bat-twirling antics has mysteriously stopped playing with his bat, much to the dismay of zookeepers:
Cloud, who resides at the Asa Zoological Park in Asa-Kita Ward here, was last seen twirling on Sept. 27.
Nicknamed the Kung-fu Bear, Cloud started spinning poles in 2003. By March this year, he would spin about 15 times a day for up to 15 minutes at a time. But by September, he was spinning just once or twice a day.
Categories: Animal Videos
Batting bear thrills visitors at Hiroshima Zoo
A video news report about Cloud, an Asian black bear at the Hiroshima City Zoo that likes to swing around a bat:
Cloud had originally played with a stick, but yesterday he received a special present from the Hiroshima Carp: an official game bat. Now both the zoo and the baseball team can share in the free advertising they’re getting from the media!
Categories: Animal Videos
Topps Creates Fake Japanese Baseball Star
A weird April Fool’s joke from a baseball card company in America:
The 2008 Topps Baseball Series 1, which was released on Feb. 6, included a card for a Japanese high school pitching phenom named Kazuo “The Uzi” Uzuki.
As many collectors suspected, “The Uzi” was a fabrication. One clue: Kazuo Uzuki means “the first son of April” in Japanese.
Although listed at only 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds (1.8 meters and 75 kilograms), “The Uzi” was said to be known for his devastating 104 mph (167 kph) fastball and was on his way to becoming the first Japan-based high-schooler to jump straight to professional baseball in America.
“The Uzi” rookie card is limited to one out of every 72 packs of cards.
More details on the hoax can be found in this WSG Law Blog interview with Sensen Lin, the American who pretended to be Kazuo Uzuki.
Categories: General Japan
It was a fluke!
Kosuke Fukudome may have noticed some strange and distracting Japanese signs among the crowd during his major leage debut in Chicago. There were signs with 偶然だぞ！ printed out and held aloft. Problem is, this phrase can mean things like, “that’s just luck” or “mere coincidence” etc (lit. coincidence+affirmative copula+masculine emph particle). The Japanese media picked up on this and speculated that fans were reminding him to be humble. But ironically the signs seem to be telling us how they were mistakenly made: by a fluke of how Google Translate coincidentally handled the English phrase “It’s gonna happen.”
Read more and see a video at AsiaJin.
[via Globalvoices]
Categories: General Japan
