• Man’s journey from LA to Real Madrid Good Luck Charm
  You can think of this as a made-for-movies story about a guy who volunteered his vacation working for Real Madrid and having those hours pay off for him, or you can think of it as a guy who is just really lucky.

  And so he did. On the morning of Feb. 28, Rodríguez arrived in Madrid and showed up unannounced at Real Madrid’s Valdebebas training complex. He didn’t have a ticket for the game. He didn’t even have a hotel reservation. And when the security guy at the guards’ shack refused to let him in, Rodríguez was forced to sit on the side of the road. It had snowed the night before, and the conditions were frigid.

  …

  “I haven’t done anything about that,” Rodríguez said. “My priority was to see you guys and then make my arrangements. If I didn’t see you guys, I’d go to the stadium and try to get a ticket. And if that didn’t work, I’d fly back home.”

• Seeing at the Speed of Sound
  What is it really like to be a lip reader (and deaf)?
• About Face
  One of the tenets of psychology is that humans facially express emotions in the same way. This is being challenged by some other research. My gut feeling on this is that humans define specific emotions in different ways (i.e., your angry != other culture’s angry) which is why they are expressed and understood differently in some cases.
• Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi
  There have been lots of stories about defectors from North Korea, but here’s a story about a Japanese sushi chef who keeps leaving but also returning to North Korea. There must be a reason right?

  “The kids were playing with a kite,” Fujimoto recalled. “It was a Japanese kite with a Kabuki picture. But the kite did not have a tail. So I immediately asked for paper, glue, and scissors and made one. I handed the kite to Kim Jong-un, who stared at me. I said, Hold this and let go when I send you a sign.”

  No members of Kim’s entourage had helped the boys with their failed project. Assisting was simply too dangerous—would aid be construed as a commentary on the boys’ ineptitude or the Dear Leader’s poor parenting? Would a helpful executive then be blamed if the kite didn’t fly? What if the boys rejected the help? Survival necessitated such considerations, and Fujimoto was special because he never made them.

  As a nervous cadre of executives looked on, the tail righted the kite, which rose into the sky. A week later, Shogun-sama called Fujimoto and informed him that the nannies had been fired: Fujimoto would be the boys’ new playmate, a position he would hold until Kim Jong-un was 18. Fujimoto introduced them to video games, remote-control cars, and most important, basketball. Fujimoto’s sister in Japan sent him VHS tapes of Bulls playoff games, so Kim Jong-un’s first taste of Western hoops came from watching Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman—men who became his heroes.

• The Poorest Rich Kids In The World
  For some reason, I didn’t find reading about two trust fund kids who have horrible parents that interesting.

  Though many of the painful details of their childhoods are backed up by sworn affidavits from family employees and other records, other stories the twins tell about their lives have a surreal, if not downright implausible, tinge. They talk of their stepmother encouraging them to read a satanic bible, holding Georgia down to inject her with drugs, and serving them meat crawling with maggots, which Patterson can’t discuss without dry-heaving. They tell me that while visiting Japan, they witnessed a yakuza torture session; that in Wyoming, they once hid in the trees while drug dealers opened fire on their house; and that during a road trip through Nebraska, their father shot dead a posse of would-be carjackers, after which Walker slid back into the driver’s seat, bloodied, lit a cigarette and muttered, “Don’t talk.”

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: instapaper, korea, pocket