The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

This ad for the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo starts off like a cooking show, but it soon becomes clear that something’s a little odd. This is Japan, after all:

We’ve got shrimp in tubes, flour in some kind of dispenser:

Now we’re loading a tank with egg yolks:

And the ever-so-necessary Big Red Button to start things with a bang:

When I said “start things with a bang,” I was being literal:

Here’s what happened from another angle:

And here’s a step-by-step close-up. First, the shrimp are launched from the tubes with a big blast of compressed air…

…and into the path of the flour, which is launched at precisely the right moment…

…then the egg yolks…

…can’t forget the panko…

…some heat to cook it…

…and after all that, they rebound off the target and onto the plate:

Apparently, all this was done to demonstrate the speed of their cellular LTE network. Now that you’ve seen the stills, go watch the video below!

As George Takei quips: “Perhaps we should hold elections on the last Friday of November, with polling stations at Wal-Mart, Target and Apple.”

Found via George Takei.

You’ve seen the Star Wars teaser trailer, but have you seen the LEGO Star Wars teaser trailer?

It’s got LEGO John Boyega:

…and LEGO new-droid-on-a-ball…

…LEGO Daisy Ridley…

…LEGO mysterious-new-Sith-lord…

…and the LEGO Millennium Falcon!

Enough teasing — here’s the LEGO trailer!

Practice, practice, and more practice:

This year’s Black Friday Death Count

Black Friday Death Count’s leaderboard says that Black Friday 2014 resulted in 8 deaths and 96 injuries.

I wouldn’t have counted the murder attempt/suicide at the Nordstrom in Chicago. That’s not violence or injury as a result of marketing-generated shopping madness, but a domestic assault carried out on someone who was working at a retail store on the day.

More and more of the Black Friday incidents on their list are taking place in the U.K., where they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have borrowed the post-Thanksgiving shopping gimmick from their cousins across the pond.

The violent history of Black Friday

Here’s Machinima’s entertaining history of Black Friday, which wasn’t always a term used the way we use it today:

The science behind why people kill each other over TVs on the Friday after Thanksgiving

The photo above shows two sets of shoppers in Wembley, an area of northwest London (and remember, I mentioned earlier that Thanksgiving isn’t a tradition in the UK), fighting over a TV. It appears along with an article in the British paper The Independent, where they say that we’re hardwired in such a way that under the right set of circumstances, we will commit acts of violence, and Black Friday lines up those circumstances all too well.

Last year’s Black Friday Haiku, just because

I’ll close with Kenzie Lind’s three greatest sequential tweets from last year, which became an accidental haiku (right down to the 5 – 7 – 5 syllable scheme) that captures Black Friday so well:

Until this scene in the just-released teaser trailer…

…it’s been decades since we last saw a black actor playing a stormtrooper on the desert world of Tatooine, and the last time, it was in Spaceballs:

In case you don’t remember, it happens in the classic “Comb the desert!” scene:

…and yes, there’s a Millennium Falcon combat scene!

And new X-wing fighters flying just above the water, raising waves, either to avoid enemy scanners or just because it looks cool!

And big-ass speeder bikes!

And a soccer ball droid!

Here’s the trailer: