TIME has offered up its fifth annual list of the 100 Most Influential People, and who should appear at #78 but artist/Kanye collaborator Takashi Murakami? I have to say, he looks REALLY dorky in a bow tie, for all that his art is fantastic (regardless of what Zetsubou-sensei says).

Also of interest: the #1 result on TIME’s user-voted “most-influential” poll is none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, of Nintendo everything fame. Each of these guys gets a pros/cons list, and Shiggy’s cons mostly have to do with how fat gamers are. Thanks, TIME, we love you too.

FYI, today’s episode of NPR’s WHYY show will include a segment on the Death Note anime, according to the official page. Audio for the show will go up at 3pm EST. I think I’ll be running around scoring a new coffee table at that exact moment, but I thought I’d give y’all a heads up. ♥

I’m not exactly sure what will be discussed– just the show itself, or some of the controversy surrounding it (i.e. all those kids who get in trouble for making their own death notes)? Hm~!

True story: Britney Spears’ next video will be animated, and a lot of sites are saying that she’s “going anime.”

The art style for the animation DOES look vaguely anime-inspired. Maybe sort of an Aeon Flux meets Avatar meets Japan’s weird obsession with big, fat lips…

(Via Topless Robot)

Dear mainstream media,

It’s Naruto. Not Narutu (Fox News, not that you were all that great to begin with). Nor is it Narato, KOIN TV (I happened upon the mispronunciation on TV).

I don’t like to bring any more attention to the show than necessary, but come on. Would it kill you to take ten seconds to google this shit? If I search for “anime narato” or “anime narutu,” both offer the spelling correction. C’mon.

Follow-up to the earlier article: the boy who was buried in the sand head-first by his friends who were insipred by Naruto, Codey Porter, has died.

The good news is that it looks like no particular backlash against Naruto is in the works; even the Seattle PI’s article notes that accidents like this have happened in the past, such as when kids would jump off a roof while wearing a towel as a cape and playing Superman.

I guess that means we can go back to worrying about Death Note now…

Back in January a child in Indonesia managed to strangle himself while imitating something he’d seen on Naruto. Now another child, this time in Seattle, is struggling to live for the same reason.

Apparently three kids were playing in the sandbox and they came up with the idea to bury one of them in the sand– head first. When the boy started thrashing around wildly, the kids thought he was just playing, until they eventually figured out something was wrong and found their parents. The parents administered CPR until an ambulance arrived, and the boy is apparently still in the hospital fighting to recover. The kids say it was inspired by a show on Cartoon Network.

SeattlePI.com notes that a local TV station, KOMO/TV, is citing “Naruto Sand Ninjas” [sic] as the show that inspired the act.

Obviously, Naruto should be banned for the good of humanity everywhere. And the violence is bad too. (Kidding! Please don’t kill me, Naruto fans– I hear you’re violent.)

So I happen to be sitting here with CNN on in the background waiting for breaking news on the primaries, and an article popped up about kids in Iraq who enjoy a particular kids’ show, which acts as a particularly innocent and youthful refuge from the warzone that sits right outside their doors. Standard, slightly fluffy soft news, pretty well-done.

But then I noticed a familiar face among the characters and kids on the show…

Hey! It’s Pikachu! I wonder if they got permission to use him? (Though if Nintendo tries to shut them down I’m going to have to lay some smack down, as the kids say.) It was really cute, the reporter interviewed one of the little kids on the show, and she said she really loves Pokemon.

Pokemon comforts Iraqi children, Haruhi is the patron saint of children in Gaza…awww!

This time via Journalista: a school in South Carolina has joined Virginia, Tennessee, and Massachussetts and become yet another school to deal poorly with a kid who keeps a “death note.” In this particular case, a teacher confiscated a “death note” that a student had written seven names in– and was expelled.

Now, I want to take a particular quote from the article:

“We treat situations like this the same as if a student called in a bomb threat or brought a weapon to school,” [Hartsville Middle School principal Chris Rogers] said.

…Really? You treat writings in a private notebook the same as actively threatening a school with a bomb? I mean, unless the kid was actively going around showing the “victims” that they were in his death note and otherwise trying to threaten them, I’d say that a kid with a “death note” should probably be treated the same as, say, a kid who keeps a diary in which he suggests that he’d like some people to die.

You wanna be cautious, sure. But as cautious as you would be with an active bomb threat? Gimme a break. That kid’s life has taken a serious hit for the future, and in all likelihood, he was just venting privately.

Okay, you guys may have figured out by now that I am an entertainment junkie. Anime is my crack cocaine but I’m willing to dabble around with meth (movies) and heroin (TV) and ecstacy (games) and whatnot.

So Entertainment Weekly is a favorite magazine of mine, the only one I actually have a subscription to.

Every once in a while my loyalty is rewarded with a little something extra. In this week’s issue there’s a blurb feature on page 14 called “GAME ON?” which is a few satirical suggestions on what kind of video game adaptation the movie Juno should get (a response to some rumors that a game was in the works, which were apparently due to gamespot reading too much into things).

Anyway, the third game suggestion?

A hentai-style, digitally enhanced Juno defends herself against activists who pelt her with Blan B pills. Bonus Points for: Combo attacks with the help of sidekick boyfriend Paulie Bleeker.

…I dunno about you, but this somehow makes me think of Nanaca Crash. I’d totally buy it.

Also, I tentatively dug around to see if there had been much (or any) anime-style fanart of Juno, and instead I found this, which makes me giggle.

So a while back a guy got in trouble in Canada for having a bunch of kiddy porn, including some lolishota manga. During this time, a newspaper briefly defined all anime as Japanese animated porn. Oops.

Now Perth Now, an Australia-based news site, has done the same thing. A Singaporean man has plead guilty to importing child pornography and “anime pornography depicting sexual violence,” and their article says…

“Anime” is a Japanese form of animated pornography.

One user has already jumped on the error and demanded a correction, but man, how many times is this going to happen? Admittedly, I’m biased since this genre is my hobby and sometime profession, but as a journalist I can’t imagine how this kind of mistake gets made– and missed by editors and factcheckers.