Poor Mojo's Newswire

Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda is a photographer and journalist who’s been obsessively documenting the underground rise in popularity of Japanese extreme body modification for the last twenty years. He also happens to be the man responsible for bringing the bubbly saline injection-based forehead look to Japan. Obviously, it’s now huge there. Saying that, even though it’s exactly what you’d expect from the country of loo-roll dispenser hats, apparently body modification is still somewhat of a taboo out there, with journalists who choose to cover it usually doing so at the risk of their own careers. I had a chat with Ryoichi to try to help me understand why people are choosing to inject themselves with fluids in order to temporarily change their appearance.

Cocaine used to just get you high. Now it rots your skin. Doctors say the cocaine hitting the streets in New York and Los Angeles is now cut with a drug that veterinarians use to de-worm livestock, causing cokeheads' skin to rot off. In a June report published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, doctors described six cases where users developed ghastly splotches of dead skin after snorting or smoking cocaine laced with the drug levamisole. Dr. Mary Gail Mercurio, a dermatologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who co-authored the study, said her hospital had treated five cases in the last year. "We've seen very profound areas of necrosis -- dying skin -- usually located on scalp, ears, face and elsewhere on the body," Mercurio said. "It's very alarming." Nearly a dozen more patients have been admitted to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, KTLA television reported.

If you're looking for something different to do on vacation this summer, how about playing in a giant sandbox driving bulldozers and earth movers? That's the idea behind "Dig This," a "construction theme park" opening in Las Vegas this summer. It's a 5 acre dirt park with two Caterpillar D5 track-type bulldozers and three Caterpillar 315CL hydraulic excavators. A 3 hour-package for $400 gets you a half-hour of safety and handling instruction and then you're free to let it rip. Build a 10 foot deep trench, pile a mound, or pick and move 2-ton tires and snag basketballs from safety cones.

Every time we write about boardgames here on RPS the same comment rears its pointy little head. It goes like this. “Sigh, looks like fun. If only I had some like-minded friends to play it with.” Because of this I’m going to be doing a roundup of incredible board games designed for just two players, but NOT THIS WEEK. No, this week I’m going to talk about a monster of a game that you’ll need four geeky friends for, and a colossal table, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours, and I’m doing this to you because to exist is to suffer. This game is called Descent: The Road to Legend, and it’s the single biggest, most brilliant game you’ve never heard of. The basics: Descent is a dungeon crawling game. A team of four hero players have to progress through a grid-based dungeon under the control of a fifth player, the Overlord. The Overlord moves monsters around, spawns new monsters, and casts traps and spells on the players with the aim of either impeding or killing the heroes. So it’s a bit like Dungeons & Dragons, except with all of the roleplaying and talking stripped out and replaced with a Dungeon Master who’ve actively trying to murder you. As I was saying, Descent is a big girl. . . .