Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

Billy Herrington (born July 14, 1969, Long Island, New York) is a bisexual American actor best known for his work in gay pornography.
Herrington began his erotic career when a friend surreptitiously submitted his nude pictures to Playgirl magazine. The photographs won him a "Real Men of the Month" contest and a $500 prize. His appearance in the magazine caught the eye of famed photographer Jim French but it would be two years before Herrington would shoot his first Colt calendars for French.
Soon after that he would be shooting hardcore gay pornography for All Worlds Video. Herrington became one of the more well-known gay porn stars of the late 1990s, even appearing on mainstream talk-show "Ricki Lake."

And why is Billy so immensely popular with the Japanese folks and why has he been made into a Japanese action figure too?

Herrington has also become an internet meme among the Japanese community after a clip from one of his videos 'Workout' was posted on Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video sharing website.
Over 3000 parody videos of him have been made, many of which utilizes deliberate mishearings of his lines in the porn flick. He is affectionately called "Big Brother" among the Nico Nico Douga community, and most of his videos are deliberately tagged with "Forest Fairy", "Philosophy" or both.

Photo taken last night where I provided the translations for Billy's first ever live internet broadcast in Japan - see more photos and videos from behind-the-scenes.

An example of one of those parody videos below - you cant really see any dolphin waxing so it should be safe for work.

Blockquotes from Wikipedia.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

When I first started to follow Japanese culture back in the UK, I saw these bags in anime (Japanese cartoons), manga (comics) and in magazines. I then came over to Japan and started to wonder why all the kids had one and why there were all the same shape n size.

These bags are known as "Randoseru" which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Dutch word "Ransel" meaning "Backpack" and are used by elementary school children in Japan.
They were first introduced into Japan as a backpack for commissioned officers in the imperial army during the Meiji period and then used in governmental schools as the standard commuting bag.

A randoseru is a compulsory school item that ones grandparents usually buy for their grandchildren and usually cost 2 kidneys and a bladder - the most expensive one in this store cost 628 USD! The most expensive randoseru that I've been able to find online costs 1805 USD from Rakuten.
Some modern schools these days don't enforce use of the randoseru but those are still the minority. An ad for randoseru below.

So now we know how much it costs to buy a randoseru for elementary school children, I thought we'd look at how much more it costs to send children to school in Japan - costs converted to USD.

-Kindergarten (3 years - public): 7,943 USD
-Kindergarten (3 years - private): 17,536 USD
-Elementary (6 years - public): 21,798 USD
-Elementary (6 years - private): 89,675 USD
-Junior High (3 years - public): 15,392 USD
-Junior High (3 years - private): 41,360 USD
-High School (3 years - public): 16, 995 USD
-High school (3 years - private): 34,078 USD

-Total for all public (15 years): 62,130 USD
-Total for all private (15 years): 182,651 USD

University is not compulsory but for those wishing to go would spend an average of 54,412 USD for the 4 years.

Schooling free or cost a few limbs in your neck of the woods?
More photos and sources of figures in the Randoseru article.

Mike sez, "In this lecture hosted yesterday by the Long Now Foundation, Dmitri Orlov describes the Russian economic collapse of the 1990s, and explains how he thinks an American decline/collapse would differ:"

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. . . . Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

Social Collapse Best Practices (Thanks, Mike and all the other people who suggested this!)

This week on Mur Lafferty's "I Should Be Writing" podcast, a smashing interview of science fiction great Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted by science fiction great James Patrick Kelly. Jim and Stan talk in depth about writing instruction and the Clarion workshops, with which they're both involved (as am I). Jim was the most influential instructor I had the year I attended Clarion.

There's still a few days left to get your application in for this year's Clarion workshop, btw.

ISBW Special Episode #42 - Kim Stanley Robinson Interview

MP3 link

Indie filmmakers have filmed the first two episodes of their new Half-Life-2-based miniseries for a total budget of $500. Now, that's an indie filmmaker budget! "Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi part series. Filmed guerrilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500." You know what? It's not bad.

Half-Life 2 Short Film - Escape From City 17 (via Warren Ellis)

From the comments: Nylund sez, "Of course a small group of people filming guerilla style with no budget, no time, and no script aren't going to make something that actually rivals your favorite show/movie. That's comparing apples to oranges. But the discrepancy in resources dwarfs the difference in quality. It was done for a teeny fraction of the cost, but isn't really that much worse."

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

What would happen if you went around your local neighborhood pretending to shoot or stab somebody? Would they shoot you back with a real gun? Slap you in the face with the nearest wet dog?
Or just pretend to be shot or stabbed?

Watch how folks in the Japanese city of Osaka pretend to be shot/sliced by an imaginary gun/samurai sword by a complete stranger...

Photo from Osaka Photos.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

Not only is McDonald's Japan a place for great health food, its also a great place to take a nap when you are plastered from a late nights work wrestling with your boss. There always seems to be folks sleeping in McDonald's over here.

And what do folks do over here when they don't have a Mc Dees handy? They sleep *anywhere* and *everywhere*...

Poll: Do you find people sleeping out n about where you live?
-Always
-Sometimes
-Never

Larger photos in my previous McDonald's Japan article.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

A nice photo collection of Japanese architecture - of both the old and new can be found at Kirainet.

And if you are thinking of buying some property in Japan, you can read about the interesting regulations including having your roof sloped at a certain angle so that the neighboring house gets enough hours of sunlight per day.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

Don't you just lurve the taste of fresh juicy tomatoes with yer burger?
A cross section of a Tomato from a Japanese perspective...
Living Tomato.

John Mark sez, "Some past Boing Boing posts have talked about how children's lives in the UK and North America have become more and more stifled by overprotective adults in the last few decades. This 2007 book by Tim Gill, now free in its entirety online, show how many of these efforts are largely misdirected, and even counterproductive. Focusing on the UK, but also touching on other countries, the book includes accounts and data to show how resources are wasted on dubious and costly playground modifications and 'stranger danger' paranoia, when we could instead foster safer and more mature kids by focusing more on independence, social support, and traffic safety."

No Fear joins the increasingly vigorous debate about the role and nature of childhood in the UK. Over the past 30 years activities that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabelled as troubling or dangerous, and the adults who permit them branded as irresponsible. No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds.

Focusing on the crucial years of childhood between the ages of 5 and 11 – from the start of statutory schooling to the onset of adolescence – No Fear examines some of the key issues with regard to children’s safety: playground design and legislation, antisocial behaviour, bullying, child protection, the fear of strangers and online risks. It offers insights into the roles of parents, teachers, carers, the media, safety agencies and the Government and exposes the contradictions inherent in current attitudes and policies, revealing how risk averse behaviour ironically can damage and endanger children’s lives. In conclusion, No Fear advocates a philosophy of resilience that will help counter risk aversion and strike a better balance between protecting children from genuine threats and giving them rich, challenging opportunities through which to learn and grow.

No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society (Thanks, John Mark!)

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

---

When I first came to Japan, I was shocked to see people wearing surgical masks in public. The first time was when I was on a train. I looked around to see if anybody was looking at the masked middle aged woman but spotted nobody. The only conclusion I came to was that she was a doctor - but she didn't look like a doctor and even if she was - why on earth was she wearing a surgical mask on the train?!

I soon learned that folks in Japan wear masks for a few reasons...

* They are sick and don't want their evil germs to infect others.
* They have hay fever and don't want the evil pollen to affect them.
* They are not sick but don't want to catch any evil germs from others.
* They have a tooth missing and want to cover it up.
* Their breath smells like a fart and want to diffuse the smell.
* They have no mouth and don't want people to know that they are from Mars.

The main reason however is the first one - to prevent others from being infected with ones germs. This poor chap in the photo above is being a good citizen and wants to keep his germs to himself - he wears the mask all day until he gets home. And for those who don't like masks - they choose something like the product below to plug up their nostrils.

I've only seen folks wearing masks in Japan - anybody wear surgical masks in your region out n about in public?

Photo taken during my times at Microsoft Japan with more Japanism cultural shenanigans at the Japan Portal.

Video Link. A cautionary tale for all womankind, from the mid-90s BBC show "Harry Enfield and Chums" (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Till Death Do Us Part is a new free dating site that purports to connect people with terminal illnesses. I don't think it's a joke, but the creator is all about a sense of humor, quoting Robert Anton Wilson on the front page: "Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." From the press release:

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com is profoundly different from other dating sites. We're dealing with people who know they are facing imminent death. They are aware that their days are numbered and they know, more or less, how long they have to live. This service does not require members to answer the frivolous questionnaires other dating sites provide, although they can if they want to. We are not interested, as we are sure our clients are not either, in the inane, trivial and essentially meaningless come-ons and delusional fantasies of finding the perfect mate. We assume our members don't care if someone's eyes are blue or green, whether they wear glasses or not. According to Marketing Director Joseph DiAngelo, "This site is designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful -- the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings facing their greatest challenge..."

Disclaimer: Worldly hang-ups don't belong here. If you have a profound sense of irony and humor, we welcome you. If not, this site may not be for you.

"Announcing Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com: The World's First Dating Service for the Terminally Ill" (press release), Till Death Do Us Part (tilldeathdouspart.com)

Joey Ellis's Letter Monsters are a hoot. He made the entire alphabet to help his son learn his letterin'.

Earlier this week, I posted about Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a disease where mentally healthy people have very strange and vivid hallucinations. It seems to be tied to visual impairments from old age or eye damage. Over at Omphalos, Aharon Varady considers the possible relationship between Charles Bonnet Syndrome and a Talmudic method for seeing Mazikin (harmful spirits, ie. demons). The magickal technique involves putting ash into the eye. From Aharon's fascinating post, titled "Reality and Hallucination: Towards a Talmudic Ontology of Consensus (by way of demons)":

Mazikin are a class of sheydim (animistic spirits) that pervaded the natural world in the Rabbinic Jewish worldview of late antiquity. From תלמוד בבלי ברכות ו ×? (Talmud Bavli Tractate Berakhot, 6a):

Raba says: The crushing in the Kallah lectures comes from them. Fatigue in the knees comes from them. The wearing out of the clothes of the scholars is due to their rubbing against them. The bruising of the feet comes from them. If one wants to discover them, let him take sifted ashes and sprinkle around his bed, and in the morning he will see something like the footprints of a rooster. If one wishes to see them, let him take the placenta of a black she-cat [that is] the offspring of a black she-cat [that is] the first-born of a first-born, let him roast it [the placenta] in fire and grind it to powder, and then let him put some into his eye, and he will see them. Let him also pour it into an iron tube and seal it with an iron signet that they [the demons] should not steal it from him. Let him also close his mouth, lest he come to harm.

R. Bibi b. Abaye did so, saw them and came to harm. The scholars, however, prayed for him and he recovered.

Could Raba’s magic recipe for perceiving demons by placing ash in one’s eye create a condition like Charles Bonnet Syndrome? Could Rav Huna’s 10:1 ratio of ubiquitous albeit invisible demons indicate a left-brained dominance when perceiving/hallucinating these creatures? Curious minds wish to know the answer to these arcane questions.

"Reality and Hallucination: Towards a Talmudic Ontology of Consensus (by way of demons)"

Three cheers to Spike Priggen at Bedazzled for compiling this collection of Mareva Galanter's faux Scopitone videos.

Galanter, as you well know, is the world famous French Polynesian ukulele player and yé-yé singer who hosts the program Do You Do You Scopitone.

The FTC's public hearing on DRM is a smash sensation -- they're being flooded with anti-DRM comments, mostly from gamers:

The Federal Trade Commission wants to know about DRM, and it's hosting a March conference on the topic. The agency looks set to get an earful—today is the final day to file public comments, and more than 700 individuals have already done so. Surprisingly, the main concerns in the comments don't appear to be about DVDs or protected music files but about video games. If FTC staff didn't know much about SecuRom, Spore, install limits, and activation codes before the conference, they will soon be experts on the topics.

The big players in these sorts of public hearings follow a predictable plan: they hold their filings until the final day for submissions, apparently out of a desire not to tip their hand to opponents and give them a chance to directly address their arguments. The strategy appears to be in play in the DRM proceeding, with only a fistful of corporate or think thank names appearing among the 700 current submissions.

700 comments tell the FTC "No DRM!"

Here's a fun tour through author Roald Dahl's cramped and -- let's admit it, filthy -- writing hut. Interesting to see where all the magic happened.

My favorite Dahl story is Parson's Pleasure, which I read in his Tales of the Unexpected short story anthology.

New Scientist reports on the research of Princeton University's Alexander Todorov, who finds that "snap judgments are based on an 'overgeneralization' of an evolved need to read facial expressions for signs of danger.

How your looks betray your personality

In the wake of the peanut butter salmonella scare (caused by rats, roaches, and other awfulness inside the factory), an op-ed in today's New York Times examines the government's standards for acceptable levels of gross stuff in food. According to the writer, you likely ingest up to two pounds of "flies, maggots and mites" each year, without being aware. Snip:

In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.

Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).

Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

The Maggots in Your Mushrooms (E. J. Levy / New York Times)

Here's that happy-fun FDA publication: "The Food Defect Action Levels - Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans." Bon appetit!

Our friend and BB guest blogger alumnus Lisa Katayama (right) says "My friend Hina and I did this today as part of my reporting for an upcoming travel feature." I became a maid cafe maid for 30 minutes

The BBC set up a video camera in front of the icy steps at Waterloo Station, and taped people slipping and falling. Kind of weird that they didn't warn the people. As Zentinal commented on Twitter, "ho ho ho! jolly good telly! he cracked his coccyx!"

I'm looking forward to seeing Amy Crehore's "Dreamgirls and Ukes" solo show at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles tonight, Fri, Feb. 13th 7-11PM. Amy and her husband Lou will be playing some old timey music at the opening reception tonight.

The exhibition runs through March 6th.

The incredible Mark Ryden opened a new show of paintings last week in Tokyo. Kirsten Anderson -- proprietor of Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery, author of Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art, and editor-at-large of Hi-Fructose Magazine -- made the trip over and kindly shares this report and photos:

Last week, a gaggle of cohorts and I descended on Tokyo to see the Mark Ryden "Snow Yak" exhibition at Tokyo's prestigious Tomio Koyama Gallery, Ryden's first show since 2007's "Tree Show" exhibit in LA. We were treated to a room full of delicate drawings and sketches, with the cavernous main room set aside for the paintings. The new show signaled a slight departure in Ryden's oeuvre, with a marked change in palette, which consisted mainly of different tones of white, grays and blues, with occasional rosy tones thrown in. Closer inspection also revealed a rougher painting technique than his usual creamy and seamlessly blended technique, with some paintings even layered with globular paint applied by spatula. Backgrounds were kept minimal and the frames were a simple clean white as opposed to Ryden's usual hyper-crafted, surreally ornate frames of the past. Staying consistent however was Ryden's trademark imagery that often uses pop iconography for archetypal themes including delicate girls (tellingly named "Sophia" and posed in Madonna-esque poses), bees, disembodied Lincoln heads, and supposed-to-be-really-cute-but-actually-highly-disturbing toy animals, including the ridiculously-expressioned but immaculately-painted title piece from the show, "Snow Yak". Other highlights included "Sophia's Bubbles" featuring the title's goddess figure with strategically-placed bubbles representing the solar system. The show favorite seemed to be "Heaven" featuring a platinum blonde waif and her companion, the benevolent yet mighty Snow Yak.

Mark Ryden's site

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is TV Guide writer Michael Davis's book that chronicles the complete history of the show that pioneered educational television. I grew up on the program (who in the US didn't!?) and I'm now watching the new episodes with my own son, and the old ones thanks to the DVD reissue. But I realize that I know next to nothing about how the Street got paved. From CNN:

"The idea they came up with was kind of radical: If you can sell kids sugared cereal and toys using Madison Avenue techniques, why couldn't you use the same techniques for teaching counting, the alphabet and basic social skills? And it works," (says Syracuse University pop culture professor Robert Thompson.)

Indeed, as Davis notes in "Street Gang" (Viking), the genesis of "Sesame Street" was when the 3-year-old daughter of a Carnegie foundation executive was fascinated by television, waking up to watch the broadcast day begin and memorizing commercial jingles. He talked about his daughter with a friend, producer Joan Ganz Cooney. In the liberal ferment of the mid-'60s, both wondered whether educational TV could go beyond the staid classroom shows of the era.

Cooney became the driving force of "Sesame Street." She put together the plan, helped recruit talent, located financing and oversaw production...

Cooney didn't hold much back in telling her story to Davis, and neither did others. From its debut on November 10, 1969, the show was a hit -- within a year, it was on the cover of Time magazine -- but it was not without its personality clashes.

The original Gordon, Matt Robinson, was a producer uncomfortable in the spotlight. Northern Calloway, who played David, struggled with mental illness. The show's primary songwriters, Joe Raposo and Jeff Moss, were constantly in competition; Raposo "fairly seethed with envy" when Moss' "Rubber Duckie" hit the Top 20, Davis writes. The book provides balanced biographies of a number of principals, including producer Jon Stone, whom Davis calls "the heart of the book."

Buy "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street" (Amazon.com), "How Do You Get To Sesame Street?" (CNN.com), Street Gang web site (streetgangbook.com)

Image: A bacon lamp shade, by Kris Kelley of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

bacolicio.us
tiara
bacon of hate
lampshade
usb drive
bbq explosion
bacon cheese sushi
candied bacon ice cream
chocolate covered
maple cinnamon smoked
blt game
bacon list
bacon links
lords of bacon
bacon of the week
bacon fridays
bacon today
bacon haikus

previously on web zen
bacon zen
leftover bacon zen

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

For the past couple weeks, I've been working with Thomas "cmdln" Gideon (host of the fabulously nerdy Command Line podcast) on a free software project for writers called "Flashbake" (which is to say, I described what I wanted and Thomas wrote the code). This is a set of Python scripts that check your hot files for changes every 15 minutes, and checks in any changed files to a local git repository. Git is a free "source control" program used by programmers to track changes to source-code, but it works equally well on any text file. If you write in a text-editor like I do, then Flashbake can keep track of your changes for you as you go.

I was prompted to do this after discussions with several digital archivists who complained that, prior to the computerized era, writers produced a series complete drafts on the way to publications, complete with erasures, annotations, and so on. These are archival gold, since they illuminate the creative process in a way that often reveals the hidden stories behind the books we care about. By contrast, many writers produce only a single (or a few) digital files that are modified right up to publication time, without any real systematic records of the interim states between the first bit of composition and the final draft.

Enter Flashbake. Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog's RSS feed (I've been characterizing this as "Where am I, what's it like there, and what am I thinking about?"). It also records your computer's uptime. For a future version, I think it'd be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.

The effect of this is to thoroughly -- exhaustively -- annotate the entire creative process, almost down to the keystroke level. Want to know what day you wrote a particular passage? Flashbake can tell you. Want to know what passage you wrote on a given day? That too. Plus, keeping track of my todo.txt file means that I get a searchable database of all the todo items I've ever used, with timestamps for their appearance and erasure.

Additionally, since git repositories are made to replicate, you can publish some or all of your projects to the public web or to a private site. I'm hoping that my publisher will use a public git repo to check out the most recent versions of my in-print books every time they go back to press for a new edition, and use the built-in compare ("diff") function to find all the typos I've fixed since the last edition.

It's all pretty nerdy, I admit. But if you're running some kind of Unix variant (I use Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, but this'd probably do fine on a Mac with OS X, too) and you want to give it a whirl, Thomas has made all the scripts available as free software. He's working on a new version now with plugin support, which is exciting!

I love adapting programmers' tools for my writing. They tend to be extremely well-made and stable (because if they aren't, programmers will fix them or find better ones) -- it's like using chefs' knives in the kitchen.

Cory wanted the version to carry prompts, snapshots of where he was at the time an automated commit occurred and what he was thinking. I quickly sketched out a Python script to pull the contextual information he wanted and started hacking together a shell script to drive git, using the Python script’s output for the commit comment when a cron job invoked the shell wrapper.

I added my own idea to the project, borrowing from continuous integration build systems the idea of a quiet period. I could easily imagine Cory actively working on a story, saving continually and a commit happening mechanically in the midst of that writing being less useful than if the script could find a quiet time to commit. This enhancement prompted me to ditch my shell script wrapper and pull that logic all into Python.

Flashbake (Thanks, Thomas!)

Rob sez, "Thought you'd want to know about the first concert for the deaf that will be held in Toronto on the 5th of March. Some of the band members that are going to play the gig are students a Ryerson University and have developed a chair filled with speakers and vibrating devices that communicate music via vibrations to the people sitting in the chair. Results apparently are amazing and deaf people say to have experienced 'the feeling of music' for the very first time in their lives."

Concert for the deaf and the hard of hearing in Toronto (Thanks, Rob!)

I just spotted this new edition of Michael de Larrabeiti's stunning young adult novel The Borribles, packaged to attract a new generation of kids to this marvellous, unflinching story of unrepentant sly criminal immortal children romping through the invisible belowstairs world of London. This is, hands, down, my all-time favorite young adult series. How wonderful!

What is a Borrible? Borribles are runaways who dwell in the shadows of London. Apart from their pointed ears, they look just like ordinary children. They live by their wits and a few Borrible laws-the chief one being, Don't Get Caught! The Borribles are outcasts-but they wouldn't have it any other way....

One night, the Borribles of Battersea discover a Rumble-one of the giant, rat-shaped creatures who are their ancient enemy-in their territory. Fearing an invasion, an elite group of Borrible fighters set out on what will become known in legend as The Great Rumble Hunt. So begins the first of the three epic adventures in Michael de Larrabeiti's classic trilogy, where excitement, violence, low cunning, greed, generosity, treachery, and bravery exist side by side.

The Borribles (Book 1)

The Borribles Go For Broke (Book 2)

The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis (Book 3)