Flaming Lips are cooler than Radiohead. See below for proof:

Fortean blog Mysterytopia takes note of an 80-year-old Japanese robot built for the Japanese emperor Hirohito in 1928. According to Mysterytopia, the animatronic oddity was misplaced in Germany before eventually being returned to Japan where it was retrofitted with modern innards and brought back to life.

Watching the video (embedded below, courtesy once again of Mysterytopia) I’m reminded of the parade scene in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also included so you don’t have to scour YouTube yourself.

Man, what is up with this? I’ve heard of the infamous ‘website suicides’, in which websites encourage visitors to off themselves using a number of methods (jumping in front of passenger trains seems to be fairly popular), but this is just crazy…

Apparently the new craze is to mix a bunch of household detergents to create a poison gas - the problem being, of course, that gas is notoriously indifferent as to whom it kills. In this latest incident, nearly 400 residents of Otaru, a town in northern Japan, were forced to flee after one of their neighbors apparently cooked up just such a cloud.

In Otaru, on the northern island of Hokkaido, a 24-year-old man mixed the chemicals in his house after midnight. He died and the gas — hydrogen sulfide — escaped his home, and neighbors were alerted by the smell, a Hokkaido police official said.

The man’s 58-year-old mother, who was apparently overcome by the fumes, was found unconscious nearby and was taken to a hospital. Police said she was recovering.

About 350 neighbors fled to a nearby school playground where they stayed for about two hours until the fumes dispersed, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

Last week at least 90 people were sickened by fumes in southwestern Japan when a teenage girl killed herself by mixing laundry detergent with cleanser in her apartment.

Also Thursday, police in Kori in northern Japan arrested a farmer for allegedly trying to kill his 82-year-old mother with the same gas by mixing toilet cleaner with mothballs in a bucket.

The farmer, Nobuya Matsuno, was mixing the chemicals on Wednesday when his 80-year-old father caught him and called police, a Fukushima prefecture police spokesman said, also on condition of anonymity because of policy.

Alarmed by the wave of detergent suicides, Japan’s National Police Agency urged Internet providers Wednesday to delete materials from Web sites showing readers how to mix the chemicals, officials said Thursday. Some sites reportedly provide “poison gas” warnings that viewers can print out and hang outside their doors when they kill themselves.