Urban Dirt - Times Online - WBLG

"Bears $#!+ in woods!" warns TCI chief...

Despite one or two misgivings (see below) I actually rather like John Ho - the increasingly desperate- sounding Asia director of the Children's Fund and star of one of Japan's most entertaining market farces in years.

Mr Ho is exceptionally bright, unerringly passionate and angry about all the right things. He is also, to his undoubted stress and misery, a man who has ended-up shouldering all the dirty-work that hundreds of other foreign funds should have done themselves. In one very compelling sense, Mr Ho is a reedy voice of sanity in a market which far too many have allowed to be far too eccentric for far, far too long.

And I mean that. There are clear flaws in Mr Ho's spiralling pleas for better governance and fatter dividends, but (numbers aside) the basic thesis is spot-on: Japanese listed companies look like listed companies, smell like listed companies, and are nominally set up to behave like listed companies - it's just that none of them think of themselves as listed companies.

Mr Ho, bless him, has probably lost a great deal of money making this discovery. His anger is righteous. His excuses for not realising all this sooner, however, are embarrassingly slim.

Take three of these with every console

In over 25 years as a gamer, I have sustained various pathetic injuries. There was the Konix Speedking joystick which nearly dislocated my finger. There was that sprained wrist from hyperactive waggling of the QuickShot II in Daley Thompson's Decathlon. There was a chipped tooth from blowing imaginary smoke from the barrel of the Sega Master System Light Gun. And, most recently, there has been a whole new range of aches and pains from Nintendo's Wii Fit ordeal.

And not once, during all that time, did the medical profession seem to give a tuppenny damn about these risible ailments.

Finally, however, a Japanese company has sat up and taken notice of the health needs of people like me. People whose addiction to video games is writing cheques their bodies can't cash. People who press pause, get up and draw the curtains as rosy-fingered dawn breaks over a 12-hour online session of Resistance: Fall of Man. People who keep a packet of salt near the console to prevent hand-cramps, and who consider toilet breaks an unreasonable chore.

Yes, from now on, I'll be taking Game Suppli health supplements, produced by a company that has spent most of its life making precisely the kind of console peripherals that have scraped, snagged and slashed me for decades. The Bluberry one is for my pasty face, sunken eyes and other atrophied motor functions. The fish oil one will supposedly help me with the sort of game that requires me to delve deep into the IQ stash.

I spoke to CyberGadget - the outfit that produces these pills - and was told that this little foray into healthcare was really all about improving the public image of gamers. Apparently (this is according to CyberGadget) Japanese society looks rather unkindly on gamers and views them as either actual felons, or criminals in the making. When they are still school age, they don't do their homework; when they are grown up they hang around Akihabara with rucksacks enjoying themselves. Deeply suspicious, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, if I've understood the company correctly, the pills serve two purposes. First, they help the gamer game better than he or she did before. Second, they give gamers the sort of lusty, ruddy-cheeked glow that elderly Japanese feel they can trust.

Official: the world's worst wind farm

There is a scene in Peter Sellers' A Shot in The Dark, which, no matter how many times I re-watch it, leaves me helpless and wheezing with laughter. For many years, I have fondly believed that nothing would ever be quite as funny as Clouseau's attempts to play billiards with the warped cue.

Until today.

A single picture [right]. Nothing special, I imagine you're thinking, but in fact weepingly funny.

You see, two years ago, I went to see this unhappy wind generator in the Japanese city of Tsukuba - the place where scientists tinker around with space rockets, robot suits, radio-controlled insects and a whole load of other brilliant gubbins. It is, supposedly, a city that represents the absolute cutting-edge of Japanese technology and innovation - and is very, very generously funded by the taxpayer to be exactly that.

Which is why it was all the more insane that the city should have become the site for the World's Worst Wind Farm. As I reported at the time, the utterly dismal urban wind farm - a collection of specially made generators dotted about the city - had an unquestionably fatal flaw. Tsukuba is a city with virtually no wind. Not a breath in summer, and strangely calm even during Japan's howling typhoon season.

The mad effect of this little oversight is that the expensive generators generated absolutely nothing. Not a single watt of output. To make matters worse, the embarrassed local government was so ashamed of the ill-researched waste of public funds that it started to run power to the sails and have the generators work in reverse - turning the sails to make it look like they were being blown by the non-existent gale.

For two years, it looked as though the Worthless Wind Farm would just sink into that bottomless pit of farce that has been filled, over the years, with pointless Japanese wastes of money. A joke yes, but ultimately on us. But suddenly, yesterday, there was a big gust of wind.

Finally! The kids rushed out of their schools, the elderly twitched their curtains in awed appreciation and the good folk of Tskuba charged into the streets to see their folly at last doing what it was supposed to. Except that, as it now turns out, the Worthless Wind Farm has a second, more ridiculous flaw: it can't withstand a light breeze. And lo, in what I believe is the funniest photograph ever, we have the twisted metal wreckage of one of the Tsukuba windmills - bent out of shape and twisted beyond repair by a gust you could barely fly a kite in.

Lovely.