Arsène Lupin III is a formidable thief capable of cracking all the safes in the world. A fictional character introduced by the mangaka (Japanese for “comicbook artist”) Kazuhiko Kato, better known as Monkey Punch, in the 10 August 1967 issue of Weekly Manga Action, Lupin is supposed to be the grandson of another fictional character, Arsène Lupin, a French gentleman thief and detective created by Maurice Leblanc, the best-selling early Twentieth Century pulp fiction author. As the world’s number one thief, in addition to safes Lupin is also a master at disarming traps and alarms. His ventures have proved him quite a talented driver and pilot as well, and he is an expert shot – with a pistol, no less.

For all his skills, however, Lupin has a doltish, even idiotic look. Yet they belie his ferocious reasoning abilities and social charms; Lupin is able to get past folks with about the same ease as when negotiating safes, particularly booby-trapped ones.

When not practicing his art – he seems to steal a lot more for the challenge than for any personal gain, often discarding treasures or not caring if he should lose them after first conquering the quest of acquiring them – Lupin enjoys fishing, gambling, and dating beautiful women – not necessarily in that order!

Giving rigor to the dubious proverb about honor among thieves, Lupin will often foil other criminals who are engaged in activities of a violent, murderous nature. In fact, most of his adventures involve not only the police, epitomized by his nemesis Inspector Zenigata, but really sinister characters of deep malice.

Immensely popular and voted among the Ten Most Iconic Anime Heroes, Arsène Lupin III has been ubiquitous in three television series, five feature films, nearly two dozen television specials, and several original video animations and videogames.

Surgical masks are most often worn by health professionals, but in many Asian countries they’re worn simply as a way of protecting oneself from the smog, a common problem in that part of the world. Asians also wear surgical masks when sick in order to not infect anyone else. Interestingly, such a basic everyday thing is involved in one of the most uncanny of popular legends in Japan.

Kuchisake Onna, or “slit-mouthed woman” in Japanese, was originally a really beautiful woman whose jealous husband cut her mouth from ear to ear, taunting, “Who will think you’re beautiful now!” Ever since then, on foggy nights, she can be seen roaming around in a surgical mask. When she encounters someone, typically youth, she will shyly inquire whether the individual thinks she is beautiful.

If the answer is yes, Onna will take off her surgical mask and ask, “How about now?” Different versions of the legend give different outcomes if the answer remains affirmative, all bad: she will either cut the individual from ear to ear to resemble herself or kill the person – or both – or, inexplicably, give a large blood-soaked ruby and walk away.

Different versions of this tale offer for the same general set of alternatives even if the original answer had been negative – mutilation or murder. Basically, meeting Kuchisake Onna is bad luck. However, much more modern versions these days advise that responding “You’re average” or “So-so” or even asking her what she thinks of one’s own beauty will turn the tables on her and confuse her, providing an opportunity to escape.

And, in one of those only-in-Japan kind of things, there is even the tactic of basically informing her that you must be on your way, so as to embarrass her for forgetting her manners and making her excuse herself from your presence!

Ah, a portable ice maker. Finally, a sure-fire way of keeping cool when out of doors under a hot summer sun. You have a picnic, or a outdoor camping trip, or even just a little get-together in the backyard and do not wish to keep running back inside for ice – you want a portable ice maker.

It will not only save you trips and bother, but save you from such things as running out of ice all of a sudden. Having one of these niffty little marvels of modern engineering will prevent you from looking like a bad thoughtless host. And nothing beats a portable ice maker at the beach! Like, booyeah.

It’s just what you want when enjoying the scenery. It could even be a fantastic conversation starter. Forget about helping to apply suntan lotion – give her the gift of perfectly shaped ice cubes and see what happens next! No, really, it works (with some people, but not all). After all, the water’s salty – but fresh ice cubes? Come one, you’ll be the king of the beach.

Make sure you get one with helpful features for instance a low water light to remind you of refills. Some versions will even recycle melted water right back into ice cubes. Make sure to get the capacity you will need, too. Portable ice makers are fairly straightforward machines so you should have no trouble finding one that’s just right.

Take one to your next tailgating party. Need one for your RV? Portable ice makers are almost required on boats. These devices are helpful in a number of situations. When in the market for one, you may find that the most important aspect of your purchase is simply the choice of color! That’s how simple it is to buy one, because that’s how straightforward they have become these days.

By no means go hiking without a camping tent – I discovered that the almost-hard way. I say “almost” because considering that I’m not only alive to tell the adventure but suffered no injuries, either, it probably wasn’t as difficult as it could have been had I not been so lucky.

I and my companions did not have a camping tent between us since it was just supposed to have been an simple day-hike over (and up) easy terrain. A thousand-foot mountain affords nice enough views, to be sure, such that the curvature of the earth could be faintly seen, but it isn’t considered a big deal by any who hike or climb real mountains.

So, obviously, we didn’t bring a camping tent. And sure enough we get lost, and with only another two hours of daylight left most of us decide to backtrack downhill – except for me and another companion. And although we do eventually summit, as novices we make the mistake of mistiming our descent, such that it is already twilight by the time we decide to head back.

You see, being so inexperienced we mistook the fact that there was still light in the sky for having enough time to get back down. But of course we were at the summit, where we had a excellent view of our surroundings – this was Mount Buck, the highest point in the whole Lake George area of New York.

And though the sun was low on the horizon it appeared wonderfully bright all around. Golds mixed with blues turned pink and white – it was a swirl of colours matching the happy dance of emotions within that we’ve finally reached the top.

Lost in our reveries, we did not realize that not only does the sun set in seconds, but that in a forest the canopy of foliage will make even mid-afternoon seem much, much later to the human eye….

Wine holders hold wine. They store and organize wine, and can be created of any number of different materials in any number of different sizes. Also recognized as wine racks, large ones could be found in a professional wine cellar while much smaller designs may be wall-mounted in the kitchen to conveniently display an amateur collection.

These latter kinds will sometimes incorporate wine glasses for a combination rack that holds both drink and implement. Speaking of which, the truest wine holder of all is probably one’s own mouth! But for creative aesthetics, nothing beats the man-made designs. Those constructed from metal are particularly imaginative.

The material itself provides for the greatest amount of imagination, allowing as it does fluid sinuous styles difficult or even impossible to achieve with any wooden or stone. Numerous are highly whimsical, such as a typical favorite where thin metal spirals hold wine bottles upside-down in a haphazard manner suggestive of intoxication!

Many who take their wines, and thus their display, seriously enough to consider such devices (as opposed to just putting them on a shelf in the fridge or pantry) will usually favor wood because of the role it plays in formulating the flavor of many wines.

After all, wines are aged in wooden caskets for just that all-important reason, and many winemakers are even so careful as to factor in the species of wood used for their bottle corks! Therefore the bestselling designs are still wooden, even in the most modern of decors where chrome or stainless steel predominate.

Storing wine is really a serious affair if you care about taste. Ambient lighting and even the very angle at which bottles may be tilted during storage are said to help produce the flavor of a wine. Keeping your wine in a manner that both highlights the beauty of their bottling while protecting or aiding the creation of their flavors can be difficult, depending on how exacting your expectations.

After its invention, the water cooler – and subsequently,water delivery for office – has been a permanent fixture in the modern day office environment. Rather than a water fountain – which itself has its own cultural associations and connotations, even as a symbol of the American civil rights movement, another story for another time – many offices choose the use of a free-standing water cooler fitted with the easily recognizable five gallon tanks installed to the top. The truth is, this is what gives office water delivery its title, in that these five gallon jugs are practically delivered by truck to the office, generally on a regular basis and usually in exchange for the empty jugs remaining from the prior month.

The preference for water for the office delivery and these free-standing units is normally one of function over form. Through there are the usual logistical inconveniences of having to actually manipulate the heavy, five gallon jugs received by office water delivery, the characteristics of the unit itself more than make up for it. Whereas a water fountain generally only presents cooled water out of an individual spout, water coolers usually have a number of spouts, usually two or three. Obviously there is the basic spout, which when managed with a simple lever delivers cold water, but it is not unusual to find models with spouts for room temperature water, or even extremely hot, almost boiling water – perfect for use in making tea or quick coffee.

Aside from functionality, sanitation is a common reason for preference of office water delivery over locally available tap water through a water fountain. The fairly sizable, free-standing units are frequently laden with various water purification technologies which, in addition to the large jugs of water that happen to be already sanitized and purified at their bottling plants, make for the purest water accessible. Typically office water coolers use some form of activated carbon filtering, which uses specially treated charcoal to filter larger impurities (salts, dissolved inorganic compounds, etc) out of the water.

In latest years, it has also been common for these units to be fitted with some form of ultraviolent light treatment, which usually eliminates what might be left over after charcoal filtering: dissolved organic compounds, bacteria, and the like.

Though unbelievably basic in design and purpose, the insufferable banality of the current office cubical labyrinth has made the ubiquitous water cooler a sort of social hub at the office. So recognizable is this fact that colloquial terms like “water cooler show” have been coined off of it, in reference to the type of trite dialogue about well-liked culture expected amongst employees gathering around the unit. Even the phrase “word around the water cooler” in reference to rumors or gossip has entered the cultural lexicon. Interesting that such an oddly ordinary things as office water delivery may be, in a way, accountable for such widely identifiable cultural phenomena.

“Multimedia” and “virtual reality” used to be big buzzwords throughout the second half of the ’90s, before the “dot bomb” when internet start-ups were popping up like mad and the stock market couldn’t get enough of them, throwing money at almost every one in a confident shotgun fashion.

And now those days are long gone, having moved onto the next big bubble (which was, by the way, subprime mortgages, something that’s still a crisis the world over), but virtual reality and multimedia have only become better and better – though full sci-fic implementation is still quite some way off. That’s because a lot is involved in complete sensory duplication, though for many, the “rated-G” audiences of families on a vacation package, say, something like the New York Skyride by serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber would be just fine (it is, briefly, an IMAX-like helicopter fly-over of famous city points of interest synchronized to motion seating). But in research and development laboratories around the world, all the biggest names in consumer electronics are busy figuring out how to apply declassified military technology in a relevant way to ever more immersive videogaming and other kinds of entertainment.

Two trends appear ready to finally come to fruition: 3D and kinetics. First, three-dimensional technology is one of the most heavily investigated fields in home electronics, and it seems poised for a prime-time debut in the form of extraordinarily advanced television screens that require no 3D glasses to view 3D imagery. Secondly, the multiple billion-dollar videogaming industry has been crucial in developing kinetic controls, whereby user commands are conveyed not through a physical interface but through the user’s own body movements. These two advances are being marketed right now by some of the biggest names in the business, famous labels such as Nintendo and Microsoft, companies that have a proven record of success in most of the things they do. A far cry from the likes of Zalman Silber!

Besides entertainment, the most obvious other uses for these technologies would be in real estate as well as education. Teaching subjects like chemistry and physics will surely be revolutionized by the implementation of intuitive user controls and interactive 3D graphics that do not need a special interface. Wholesale property investment already makes broad use of virtual reality by providing 360-degree views and video walk-throughs of real estate to prospective buyers from around the world. Using virtual tours over the internet, prospective buyers can determine from the comfort of their own homes whether an actual site visit is warranted, though property is also often bought purely on the basis of the virtual tour!

Greek vases are among the most well-known museum replicas anywhere, and no wonder. The pottery of ancient Greece aren’t only gorgeous objects of art but bear witness to one of the most intellectually important civilizations of humankind. Having a museum replica of Greek vases oneself is a way of linking to a glorious golden age and lends a “blue-blooded” kind of elegance to any setting.

After all, it can be argued that the Greek vase has set the aesthetic standard for the Western Civilization for hundreds if not thousands of years. Having one on your desk, mantle, or shelf can produce the right atmosphere for yourself to be inspired! There is something to be said about having a faithful reproduction of a museum masterpiece in your very own home or office. Imagine the experience on your next trip to the museum as you walk through a collection, identifying those which you own a personal copy of!

Museum replicas allow us all to play the part of a refined collector of antiques – not “antiques” in the now commonly debased sense of someone’s grandmother’s grandmother’s quilt abandoned at a yard sale, but treasures of the ancients now owns to enjoy thanks to the painstaking skills of replica sculptors who work in the traditional methods with conventional materials.

Almost always handmade, such replicas of vases can be so faithfully reproduced as to fool even professional appraisers! Offered in a wide variety of styles, these fine works are truly no less art objects in themselves, so exquisitely crafted as to warrant being their own museum pieces!

They also tend to be really affordable, as well, allowing true connoisseurs the opportunity to own more than one. Finally, they make great gifts, as well: thoughtful, and a little out of the ordinary, after all its not everyday you get a Greek vase as a present.

New York is one tough town. And it prides itself on its cut-throat lifestyle, even while the number of charities blossom as nowhere else. The serial success story that is Zalman Silber is an example of the businessman-turned-philanthropist. But isn’t it ironic that a place which worships material success gained by one’s teeth and nails, as it were, should find itself so concerned about appearing charitable, too? As if the rich are secretly embarrassed by their fortunes – as if Balzac was right, that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” or as if Jesus was correct, that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle….”

As if, to be blunt about it, the rich give in order to assuage their guilt.

What is it about this world that should so often find the elevated so close to the base? One can observe dichotomies existing side-by-side, many times in peace and, even, complete ignorance of one another, even in New York, even in the 21st Century.

And one wonders if such philanthropy, targeted towards one’s own community, set up to benefit one’s own interests, are perfectly true acts of charity or just another way in which the ego manages to further inflate itself.

Such concerns, of course, likely do not concern those like Zalman Silber, who give freely as they please and couldn’t care less about such quibbles. Indeed, it is safe to say that for those who do have the funds to give, giving is a pleasure in itself – akin to any other form of spending money.

Now that’s not as cynical as it may sound at first. For spending money is a form of experiencing one’s own power, one’s own ability to produce satisfaction and pleasure. It may well lead to egotism, and it often does, to be sure – but at its root is a simple human joy at being able to affect one’s surroundings, one’s world. It is the same joy that accompanies a child who can crawl, then walk, then run, then ride a bicycle, then drive a car, then pilot a boat or helicopter or airplane. The proper spending of money can be life-enhancing in a very deep way, far more so than the mere accumulation of creature comforts. The proper spending of money – as in charitable donations – allows one to give of oneself, in a sense, a very important sense. For money is power, and in cases of honest work to give money is to have given of one’s time and one’s very life – the time spent earning the money, the life devoted to productive work.

And such is, as the humanist Erich Fromm had noted in his many works on human psychology and human society, the most demeaning aspect of poverty, that one cannot give of oneself. For it is not he who has much, but he who gives much, that is rich – and yet, to give requires one to first have! And it is the misfortune of the poor that they can barely provide for themselves, never mind share with others – though, ironically, survey after survey has found that the less money one has, the greater a percentage of one’s income tends to be given away in charity. It is as if the poor know something which escapes the rich. It is as if the New York of lights and smiles is unaware of something so basic that it can only be known to those whose lives involve the basics and no luxuries.

Ah, summer – baseball, backyard barbecues, and swimming pool resurfacing. That’s correct, swimming pool resurfacing. Once an occasional chore every other year, it is now practically a once-every-other-decade spring or even summer pastime (for those who like to wait until the very last minute) – all thanks to the new do-it-yourself fiberglass pool resurfacing in a can made possible by modern chemistry.

Swimming pool resurfacing done right means fiberglass in this day and age. Swimming pool resurfacing is an important aspect of pool ownership, just the sort of restoration that is made periodically to counter the effects of corrosion. Whether constructed of gunite, concrete, plaster, or wood (especially wood), swimming pools will deteriorate over time to the point that a complete resurfacing isn’t only advisable but required.

Thankfully, as previously mentioned, modern technology has made it possible for the best kind of resurfacing, fiberglass resurfacing, to be performed entirely by oneself safely and fairly quickly. Best of all, it’s as permanent as any job handled by licensed contractors but much less expensive.

Fiberglass swimming pool surfaces have a proven track record of more than three decades now as a durable coating that happens to also provide other benefits, such as reduce operating coasts. Fiberglass is a material that bonds extremely well with existing surfaces, giving pools a nice sheen that makes them appear to be brand new.

This wondrous item is now available in simple cans like paint, easily applicable and requiring no sand-blasting. Approved for both commercial and residential use, do-it-yourself fiberglass resurfacing will require less maintenance than even marcite or vinyl pools. Additionally, with the right care you won’t have to worry about your swimming pool’s surface for another twenty to thirty years or more!

Much less prone to staining. Beautiful shiny protective shell. All easily applied and ready for duty within one day. That’s pool resurfacing in the 21st Century. Now that’s progress!