Japan is weird part 760,825

My the chickens are coming home to roast: After years of me making fun of the Japanese for their weirdness, the very essence of what makes them so mockable -- their wacky and humiliating TV game shows -- are coming to the United States.

Now it is Americans who will be forced to negotiate obstacles courses dressed as bugs, attempt to eat marshmallows dangled from fishing lines as their face is forcibly restrained by bungee chords, and subject themselves to a "ball slapping machine" -- which does exactly what it sounds like it would do

Of course there will also be farting -- sometimes competitively -- and a fair share of indeterminate goo. If the Americanized versions can also replicate the samurai-like war cries of the host, and the spastic high-pitched squeals of the studio audience I will be very impressed indeed.

Two Japanese-style game shows are premiering on ABC tonight, and a third is scheduled for this fall.

Stuart Krasnow, a producer of one the new shows, believes the motivations are different for American and Japanese contestants.

Americans, Krasnow says, "are in it for the cash and prizes" while for the Japanese it's "true escapism."

In others words Americans will let you pummel their balls with a springy mechanical arm as long as you pay them enough, but the Japanese do it just because it feels right.

A-ha, I knew it! Japan is still weird.

April Fools' starting to contaminate the whole year

On the first of April I was extra vigilant, as I always am, and scoffed when Google claimed they were going to colonize Mars and the BBC shouted headlines about the discovery of penguins that can fly.

Then yesterday, the second of April, I was sent a link to a story about a new game for the Wii system, available only in Japan, called Super Pii Pii brothers. As the name of the game suggests, the player puts on a strap-on style accessory and then uses the Wii controller to simulate the act of urination into various virtual toilets. According to the translated text on the box Pii Pii brothers "promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing."

As a leading chronicler of Japanese weirdness, I couldn't be more thrilled with what was going to be the latest, and possibly strangest, installment.

Of course I eventually realized it was an April Fools' Day prank that I had fallen for 24 hours later.

And therein lies the danger of the internet and this prankster holiday we have. It's April 3rd now and the Super Pii Pii prank (complete with corresponding Youtube video) is still live, and with no indication it was created on Tuesday.

In the future will more and more year-round Internet searchers be tricked into believing classic April Fools' jokes like Alabama changing the numerical value of Pi? Or the saga of Sidd Finch, the Buddhist-trained New York Met rookie with the 168 MPH fastball? Or the numerous April Fools' Day pranks that tricksters have been coming up with lately and disguising in the templates of legitimate websites?

Being that millions of people are still thoroughly fooled every year on April Fools' Day, I can see this becoming a problem.

Opening days are upon us

After a bizarre mid-preseason jaunt to Japan, and yesterday's festivities at the Nationals' new ballpark, today is baseball's opening day version 3.0. Nature thinks there should only be one opening day and also hates that stupid decimal point. Thus we have rain all over the country.

Here are my predictions for 08, in order of finish. (I'm going to toot my own horn, my 07 predictions were really, really good.)

American League East
Boston Still the class of baseball, even with injury concerns in the starting rotation.
Toronto Not a lot of big names other than Roy Halladay and the ghost of Frank Thomas, but the Jays are solid everywhere.
Yankees In bomberland, the ownership just got a lot younger. Now the starting rotation needs to do the same.
Tampa Bay The endless supply of talent continues -- and they still have nothing to show for it.
Baltimore Nationals' new stadium can't be good for the hapless Orioles.

American League Central
Detroit Look for Miguel Cabrera to contend for the triple crown.
Cleveland The bullpen will let them down.
White Sox Team should mash, but shaky pitching will lead Ozzie Guillen to many a well-publicized hysterics.
Minnesota There has always been a spit and bubblegum aspect to the Twins success, and now they have lost a couple rare bricks in Santana and Hunter.
Kansas City Currently the worst franchise in American sports.

American League West
Seattle NL-styled team could be really special if Felix Hernandez and Erik Bedard perform to their potential.
Anaheim (WC) Have been slowly adding parts over the last few years.
Oakland The players change, but the decrepit ballpark remains the same.
Texas Since they are both on my fantasy team, I like their middle infield.

National League East
Mets So much talent. If they fade again, many heads will roll.
Philadelphia (WC) Philly will battle for Detroit for the best offense in baseball -- and maybe baseball history.
Atlanta With Glavine back in the mix, is Terry Pendleton far behind?
Washington Lots of buzz about the team (in Washington) but I'm just not seeing any pitching.
Florida The fact that this disgracefully run franchise has managed two World Series titles is a cruel indictment of the rest of the teams in National League East, for whom World Series wins don't come easy.

National League Central
Chicago Cubs have a Pie in center and a Fukudome in right.
Houston Look for Miguel Tejada to have a big year.
Milwaukee Prince Fielder is 23 and Ryan Braun 24.
St. Louis The Pujols elbow injury is so scary I passed up the opportunity to draft him in the second round of my fantasy draft.
Cincinnati Griffey to get to 600 home run at age 37. Would easily be going for 700 if not for an inordinate number of injuries.
Pittsburgh The only thing the Pirates have going for them is not being the Royals.

National League West
Arizona If their young hitters make the next step -- and I think they will -- watch out.
Los Angeles Since he has some talent in LA, Joe Torre's legacy will depend somewhat on how the Dodgers perform over the next few years.
Colorado The thin air should help elevate Troy Tulowitzki to the level of the other great NL shortstops.
San Diego Petco Park is where hitters careers go to die.
San Fransisco Bonds hangover will be long and painful.

AL MVP
Miguel Cabrera, Detroit Only the buffet table can keep Cabrera away from 150 RBIs.
AL Cy Young
J.J.Putz, Seattle There aren't a lot of good starters in American League these days, so I'm seeing the dreaded relief pitcher as Cy Young scenario.

NL MVP
Alfonso Soriano, Cubs 40/40 on a team that could win 100 games.
NL Cy Young
Roy Oswalt, Houston Ultimate grinder was pretty lights out in the last half of 2007.

World Series
Arizona over Detroit Coming out of the bullpen, Randy Johnson wins game seven.

Japan is weird part 6721

About six months ago a video of 1500 Filipino prison inmates rehearsing their interpretation of what would be the Broadway version of Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge YouTube hit.

It wouldn't be like Japan to sit tight and allow another Asian nation to dominate 80's musical kitsch without a rebuttal.

In the clip above the karaoke-mad Japanese have recreated the video for the charity single "We Are The World" right down to the last Springsteen grimace. As you can see, modern make up techniques can make an Asian person look vaguely like Cyndia Lauper, Tina Turner or Lionel Richie -- and a lot like Michael Jackson.

Bonus points for the Japaneses for cramming this -- like they do everything else -- into game show format.

Cue the "it's just like with my wife" punchline

Old people having sex is gross. But if you are under 35 don't worry, because experts say by the year 2050 randy seniors will be able to eschew geriatric skin slapping for carnal relations with perfectly proportioned robots. And that is really more creepy than it is gross.

By experts I mean one expert, artificial intelligence guru David Levy, who posits in his new book that by mid-century mankind will be "creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we'll have sex with these robots."

Robot sex won't just be for old people, of course. Levy predicts, in the not so distant future, between 20 and 50 percent of the entire human population will have at least one close encounter of the android kind.

But before there is too much excitement and w00ting it up over in the Battlestar Galactica chat room and on the island of Japan, remember this: Flying cars. Or the lack there of.

Japan is weird part 798,201

In America, reality television usually features super good looking people with perfectly constructed hair who complain of imaginary problems and are often made to eat worms. For their "unscripted" fix, Japanese television audiences seem to prefer watching games of "binocular soccer," which are contested by everyman types in multi-colored horizontally striped jump suits. The match referee is a man in a giant rabbit suit, of course.

I really have little to say about which format is better, or more "realistic", as it were. But it is clear that binocular soccer is extraordinarily difficult. And, I'm sure, if the clip continued we'd learn the losing team was forced to eat worms.

Japan is weird part 1,987,592

The great number of posts I've done on how weird the Japaneses are sometimes gives me pause because I've never been to Japan or had a conversation with a full-blooded Japanese person -- so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge their national weirdness on these pages. I also worry that I could be unnaturally obsessed with Nipponese kookiness and that, perhaps, this obsession says more about me than having air sex contests or engaging in creative farting says about those peculiar Japs.

Then I see this on the website of the International Herald Tribune:
If you want to read the article, here it is. Suffice to say it is all about Japanese men being rexy and wearing girly clothes, while the chicks of Japan wear utilitarian outfits, drink a lot of beer and slap the scrawny men around if that's what it comes to. The article is authored by someone with a Japanese name, so it may even be true.

Thanks to the emailing readers of the IHT, I feel a whole lot better about singling out the Japanese for the unending source of inexplicable oddity that they continue to be.

Japan is weird part 2304

It has always been suspected that the Japanese are, by human standards, highly unusual.

These suspicions have only been confirmed by the sudden ubiquity of video-sharing websites: Now we are all just a click away from witnessing the latest Japanese insanity concerning things such as competitive farting and air sex.

But has this all left us gullible to falling for exaggerations and misinterpretations of Japan's national bizarreness? I can't help thinking that might be the case when I read this article in The New York Times about Japan's new trend in wearable hiding places.

Here is an excerpt:

Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

As if. The simple laws of physics prevent any item of woman's clothing from quickly morphing into a credible looking vending machine. The only chance such a disguise could possibly have of being successful is if the pursuant had poor vision, and the pursued found herself chased into an area containing vending machines that, for some reason, look like sheets painted to look like a vending machine. Given there is barely any street crime in Japan to begin with, this isn't a likely enough scenario for the article to make any sense.

Which is not to say I think the story was completely cooked up. I'm sure wearable hiding places are gaining popularity in Japan. Just not for personal safety. More likely there is a new craze in Japan in which people dress up like vending machines and simulate sex with each other. Or something else which would crack us up in a short Youtube clip, and allow us to ruminate upon how darn strange the Japanese are.

Japan is weird part 1148

Whether this would be considered a pageant or a sport I couldn't tell you, as my lack of Japanese language skills prove a hindrance to full comprehension.

But the gist is about as universal as can be.

I sometimes wonder if Japanese people find American television as bizarre as American people find Japanese television. Then when I consider that I have just spent three minutes watching contestants display well-choreographed techniques for manipulating the path of their own fart I realize they couldn't possibly.

Idle threat of the week

Most of the panel of judges who decide Idle Threat of the Week were pretty mad about the way the Sopranos ended. A few of them even blamed my television for the sudden black screen. I tried to explain to them existentialism, and impress upon them that The Sopranos has always stressed existence over meaning, and that the ending was in perfect concert with that philosophy. But the panel, which is culled from a cross-section of society, found my explanation unsatisfactory and began throwing things at me.

Although largely angry and distracted, the panel was still able to agree on an idle threat that inspired the same unity as our collective hatred of AJ Soprano. (How much did it suck that a lasting image of AJ, the most pathetic character in the history of moving pictures, is him in a new BMW with a leggy model girlfriend and a budding career in film production?)

Apparently scientists in Japan have created a robot that sort of looks and acts like a three year old child.

During the 20th century humanoid robots, like flying cars, were a linchpin of the promised future. Now, un the 21st century, we have come into the technology that could mainstream life-like androids, yet the appearance of upright, walking, talking robots is still worthy of a press release and wonderment -- just like a step towards the flying car would be.

This may be because an android that looks like a person isn't actually a very good idea. (And flying cars would be neat, until they start crashing into each other, dropping flaming pieces of metal from the sky.)

Really, what's the point of making a robot look human? The human form isn't optimally engineered for work on a assembly line or to clean house or for any of the tasks a robot would be useful for. Meaning humanoid machines would only act to encourage social isolation and sexual deviance. Both perfectly fine traits in small doses and population subsets, but no direction for society as a whole to go in.

Luckily the desire for robots which look like humans doesn't seem to stretch far beyond the island of Japan. And, anyway, those wacky Japanese are always coming up with weird, highly fetishized fads that nobody else understands, and only last until the next incarnation of something Pokemon related is released.

Maybe this is because, like the panel, the rest of the world has considered and rejected the creepy implications of robots walking among us. Or it could be because most just don't care enough to put a lot of resources into android development. Either way, the century old threat of having life-like robot inferiors, which would eventually become our be equals, before reigning as our mechanical overlords, is, in the clarity of the present day, the idle threat of the week for June 4 to 10.

As Paris returns to prison, JSB ponders infinity

I think it's safe to say the three queens of pop culture are Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Since I often cover pop culture on this space, I end up spending a lot time writing about the slutty triumvirate. I don't mind writing about Lindsay -- in fact I find her fascinating. I'm more neutral on Britney. As for Paris, every time I type her name I die a little bit inside.

Maybe that's because Lindsay is a legitimately talented actress, and Britney was a perfectly passable pop singer, while Paris has no discernible talent and, in my opinion, isn't particularly attractive, sexy or less than completely evil.

Anyway, in times like these, you have to write about Paris because she is where it's at. My favorite message board post to any Paris story that is prominently positioned on a mainstream media website is "why are you writing about Paris Hilton WHEN THERE IS A WAR IN IRAQ!!!"

This comment has always made laugh because, due to the virtually unlimited bandwidth of the Internet, it is possible to cover all sorts of stories at once. So scroll down and get your Iraq war fix, dolt.

That's not even why it's funny anymore. I think it's safe to say, by any legitimate measure of significance, Paris Hilton is now more important then the Iraq war or the presidential campaign or global warming or anything else the shrill message board ombudsmen whine for more coverage of.

Answer this: Can any of those "important" stories simultaneously shut down the news cycle and make a complete mockery of our criminal justice system -- all the while screaming for their mother like a spoiled five year old deprived of pie? I think not.

Paris is big. Bigger than the geographical Paris. Probably bigger than France. Maybe bigger than Japan. So big it hurts my head to think about it. The same way it hurts when I ponder the universe.

So I've given up. I now just accept Paris for what she is. Something I will never understand. Something that looms above and about us all. And, ultimately, something that gives me comfort.

*Yup, that's the grainy photo currently on the front page of every newspaper website in the world.

** Speaking of that photo, it turns out it was taken by Nick Ut -- the same guy who took the super famous Pulitzer Prize winning naked running napalmed Vietnamese girl photo, almost 35 years ago to the day. As a witness to history, the dude's like Forrest Gump!

Japan is weird part 739

In Japan air sex is the new air guitar. At least that's what the English show Japanorama claims. Since I don't understand Japanese I can't be entirely sure there isn't some sort of tomfoolery going on in the translation.

But I can't really think of any other plausible explanation for the very clear and disturbing visuals presented. And the taunting claim that many of these air sex hobbyists have never had proper intercourse seems to be confirmed, again, by the visuals.

I will put my foot down and vehemently disagree with the Japanese fellow who declares air sex to be the happy medium between not having sex and having sex with an actual woman. No, that happy medium would be the anatomically-correct life-sized silicon sex doll. Which I hear are also quite popular in Japan.

Week seven picks

JACKSONVILLE at Houston (+9.5) The rain may have been helping him get extra movement on his pitches, but those slow curves Wainwright used to close the ninth made me yelp.

CAROLINA at Cincinnati (-3) Yadier's NLCS winning home run immediately catapulted the Molina brothers past the Zendejas brothers on the list of greatest all-time Latino brother trios in sports. Only the Alous stand between the Molinas and the top spot.

NEW ENGLAND at Buffalo (+5.5) In a match-up of sickly-thin, crinkly-faced skippers, I'm taking Detroit in 6.

PHILADELPHIA at Tamp Bay (+5.5) That terrible roughing the passing call that allowed the Bucs to defeat Cincinnati makes up for Chris Simms's spleen.

Detroit at JETS (-3.5) Judging by Putin's comments yesterday, Israel's rapist president has really endeared the Jewish state to Russia. Promoting the exploits of Moshe Katsav would probably score Israel points with most of its traditional enemies.

GREEN BAY at Miami (-5.5) Farve throws far better looking interceptions than Culpepper can even dream of. Now that Culpepper has been benched he can learn the proper way to turn the ball over from the master. After dissecting Farve's technique, expect Culpepper to display a marked improvement in his execution of bad decisions. (If he is ever permitted back on the field.)

SAN DIEGO at Kansas City (+5) The key to winning any match up between Schottenheimer and Edwards is going into the last two minutes behind.

PITTSBURGH at Atlanta (+2.5) On the fantasy front, I picked up Pittsburgh's defense in anticipation of Michael Vick's special kind of magic.

DENVER at Cleveland (+4.5) Did you know Japan is physically larger than Germany? I just learned that this morning. I would have picked Germany. I've also picked almost exclusively road teams giving up points. That has to violate some law of pro football prognosticating or common sense.

ARIZONA at Oakland (+3) Fans of both teams were saddened when this week's dirty bomb threat against The Oakland Coliseum was exposed as a cruel, cruel hoax.

Minnesota at SEATTLE (-6.5) The '06 election is shaping up of as a showdown between the opinion polls and Bush/Rove/Melhman's increasing and increasingly bizarre confidence. Both have pretty good track records for predicting elections, so something has got to give.

Washington at INDIANAPOLIS (+9) Yesterday, Kim Jong-il apologized to Beijing for his fake nuclear test. Isn't it time for Dan Snyder to apologize to Washington for his fake football team?

Giants at DALLAS (-3) I couldn't help but thinking when University of Miami President Donna Shalala kept telling the press she wouldn't throw any of the Hurricane players "under the bus" in the aftermath of their ugly brawl with FIU, it wasn't because she had compassion for the student-athletes. She just didn't want anyone to think she was reacting like T.O would.

Japan hates pregnant Britney

That's a pregnant Britney Spears on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. I didn't recognize her either. A blown-up version of this cover is causing controversy in Japan, and has been banned from Tokyo's subway system because it is "too stimulating for young people."

Yes, the same Tokyo subway system where, as one of the payoffs for suffering through the dreary life of a Salaryman, middle-aged Japanese men get to grope as many schoolgirls as they can reach during their long, crowded rides to and from work.

So it isn't really young people the Japanese transit authority needs to worry about over-stimulating. Furthermore, this isn't Hit-Me-Baby-One-More-Time-jailbait Britney we're talking about here. Instead it is the I-gave-up-my-singing career-to-have-two-children-by-age-25 Britney being represented.

Who knew a country with a dangerously low 1.4 fertility rate would purport to find young motherhood so stimulating?

Really shouldn't Japan, of all places, be trying to represent pregnancy as glamorous?

In fact, the traditional-sex-shunning Japanese should be doing anything they can to promote to their young people the idea that pregnancy can be just as stimulating as slipping your hand down the skirt of the random girl in front of you.

Even if they did, I doubt many young Japanese women would start emulating Britney and become baby-making machines.

But it's never too late for them to start learning Mandarin.

Fun with Mrs. Smith

Known for adopting Third-World babies, Angelina Jolie was adopted by an entire Third-World nation when it came time to birth the spawn she created with fellow, First-World actor Brad Pitt.

Maybe "adopted" isn't quite the right world. More like "rented." And by "rented" I mean it was Pitt and Jolie renting the otherwise sovereign nation of Namibia for around 350,000 US dollars.

Not a bad deal at all, considering the country formerly known as South-West Africa threw in control of its air-space and a Prime Minister who took a personal interest in expelling all journalists who dared disturb the Brangelina.

As if to make sure everyone knows whose Tinseltown star still shines brightest, Tom Cruise countered by threatening to rent Tokyo, Japan.

Tokyo has seven times as many people and many, many more tall, sparkly buildings than the African nation of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt.

Cruise's Tokyo rental would ostensibly be for some sort of all-time movie action sequence, but I suspect the real motive may lie in a mass ceremony involving electrical shocks, placenta soup and Xenu (and karaoke and schoolgirl panties.)

I kid the Scientologists (and the Japanese,) but I'll give them this; right after Cruise mentioned renting a city, some group called Mercer Human Resource Consulting came out with a handy list of the costliest cities in the world.

I've analyzed their picks in case anyone else who wants to rent a costly metropolitan area to impress friends, colleagues and a skeptical public is reading jsb.

Moscow: You think you are paying for the real thing, but end up with an obvious counterfeit.

Seoul: If the World Cup has taught me anything, it's there is really no such thing as a "typical looking" Swede or Ghanaian or Ecuadoran. In fact, the citizens of modern nations come in different shapes, sizes, shades and colors. Except for South Koreans. They all look exactly the same. Might as well just rent a block or two.

Hong Kong: Why would you rent what England gave away for free?

London: Its population has been fleeing to far-off cities such as Boston, Toronto, Sydney and Johannesburg for centuries now. Rent one of them. They're cheaper and newer.

Tokyo: You never want to be somewhere Tom Cruise has already been. (Ironically, this is not something Katie Holmes's next boyfriend will have to worry about.)

Oslo: They had the Olympics there once ... maybe? It's real dark in the winter ... bright in summer? Actually I have nothing. Avoid it just for that.

New York: It would have been my pick, until I heard it had been named the world's politest city. Nobody respects a polite city. Suck on that, Bloomberg.

As you can see, I cannot recommend renting a city at all. Instead I advise going the route of Brad and Angelina and renting a whole impoverished nation. You can do so for less than the cost of three bedroom house in one of America's better suburbs.

For those in the market, might I suggest Toga or Somoa? Or, for the adventurous, The Gaza Strip.

Of course, the moral of the story is being a huge, bat-shit insane celebrity is a world of fun.

Isn't that always the moral?

Different points of Q

The big news this morning was the death of Iraq's al-Qaidi leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqaqawi. (Who doesn't look half bad for a man slayed by 500 pound bomb.)

President Bush called it "a severe blow to al-Qaida" and "a significant victory in the war on terror. "

The Iraqi chapter of al-Qaida, issued this statement, "We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

I just received a birth announcement that read almost exactly the same way. For every season...

Whether this will improve the situation in Iraq remains to be seen -- although killing a terrorist leader is usually preferable to not killing a terrorist leader. But, as I write this, I realize before we make any significant progress in our relations with the Muslim world we need to reach some kind of consensus on the letter Q.

I was taught that a "Q" was to be followed by a "U.".* But so far, in this short post, I have an "Iraqi," an "Al Qaidi," and a "Zarqawi" -- lot's of Q's and not an U in sight.

I'm not sure what we should do about this. I'm not going as far as to support further military action, but accommodating their language like this is obviously not doing anyone any good.

Come to think of it, I would like to see Americans and American news organizations start referring to the people who live in Iraq as "Iraqus" and the terrorist organization that attacked us on 9/11 as "Al Quidi."

It's not like we still call Germany "Deutschland " and Japan "Nippon." If we did, we'd probably still be getting our troops blown up in the streets of Berlin and Tokyo.

Just a modest proposal from a modest blogger, who wants to do his part for the war on terror.


*For you scrabble players out there, there are 21 English words where the q isn't followed with a u. They are: qat, qaid, qats, qoph, faqir, qaids, qanat, quphs, tranq, faqirs, qanats, qindar, qintar, qwerty, sheqel, tranqs, qindars, qwertys, qindarka, and sheqalim. Never heard of any of them? Me neither. Frankly, a lot of them sound made up.

Demography is destiny

In today's Washington Post Robert Samuelson addresses collapsing birthrates in Western Europe, Russia and Japan. All have birthrates well below the level of replacement, and should begin shedding population in the next decade or so.

Samuelson attributes this to the usual suspects of urbanization, improved health care(more babies survive,) contraception, and more women in the workplace and college.

He also points out the birthrate in the United States is right at the level of replacement and hypothesizes this is because of greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values in America when compared to our Western counterparts.

(Some, but not the bulk of the discrepancy between birthrates in the US and the rest of the advanced world can be attributed to the birthrates of recent immigrants to the US.)

To expand upon Samuelson's article, here are the Total Fertility Rates* in the developed vs. the developing world. Link.

------------------------------------------ '90 '00 '10 '25
World ------------------------------------3.4 2.8 2.5 2.3
Less developed countries---------------- 4.7 3.1 2.7 2.4
More developed countries--------------- 1.9 1.6 1.7 1.7
(2.1 equals the level of replacement)

It's plain to see declining birthrates are not just an issue in the developed world. In fact, TFR's are declining much more precipitously in less developed countries.

Also of note is the world's lowest TFRs are in Eastern Europe.

And of course there is China, where it's hard to believe the one child per couple policy, when combined with a preference for male children, won't result in a dangerously unbalanced gender ratio.

What does this all mean?

Nobody knows for sure. As Samuelson points out, these declines were never anticipated and the ramification have yet to be fully explored.

I'll start with the obvious -- as birth rates decline and life expectancy increases the population ages. The fewer workers per retiree, the more pressure there is to stretch dollars allotted for health care and social security. The United States and its relatively favorable birth rate is still facing a crisis on this front. The rest of the developed world is due to be absolutely slammed by state obligation to the elderly.

In the less developed world the burden of caring for the elderly falls more on the family than the state. This leaves them even less prepared to deal with a birthrate decline. Although I would expect third world life expectancy to stabilize, if not shrink, decreasing the burden.

It had been argued in the past that the third world would catch up to the first world through "people power." Now this seem highly unlikely. If anything the gap between have and have nots widens.

Eastern Europe and Russia will be the big losers. If current trends continue their populations will shrink so quickly it's hard to believe any of these countries can remain politically stable -- let alone flourish in their new capitalist incarnation.

Western Europe faces a rocky road. But they shouldn't be ruled out. As Eastern Europe crumbles one could anticipate an even larger scale migration from Eastern to Western Europe. Since Western Europe has no history of open immigration it wouldn't be difficult for them to institute a policy which cherry picks the best and the brightest from Eastern Europe.

Following that logic, we could see increased immigration from Western Europe to North America as talented young people stripped of the remnants of their national identity through an influx of immigrants and a decline in native birthrates decide, in absence of this tie, it would beneficial to decamp to a place with less tax and more opportunity.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where xenophobic Japan gets out of their population rut through immigration, but Japan has been an isolated and highly organized society since the beginning. Therefore, I wouldn't bet against Japan maintaining, if not improving, their current standard of living indefinitely.

The decline in birth rate in the Arab world (75 percent in the last 30 years) should be seen as a positive development. The Middle East is a highly volatile region that produces and subsists upon a solitary commodity (oil.) Since it doesn't require a large number of people to harness oil, I can't see any downside to a stabilization or decline in Arab population.

China and India are the wild cards in this equation. These two country are still all potential, so it's difficult to project how they would react to a sudden decline in population if and when they do reach the heights some predict. But, as I mentioned before, the gender gap China is creating is unsettling. It's hard to believe it won't be severely damaging to Chinese society in the long run

As for the US, we are in better shape than most, but still face an aging population and an inadequate social security system. On the bright side, many of the current concerns over immigration will alleviate as the birthrate in Mexico (150 percent in last 30 years) continues to decline. A stabilized rate of immigration from the south with an (potential) influx of highly educated young immigrants from Europe (and Asia) would allow the United States to continue to grow slowly, without the risk that immigrants from one particular region of the world overwhelm our national character.

Of course this is all wild speculation.

Something I am fairly sure of is TFR's will have a big say in the fate of all nations and should be paid close attention.

*Total Fertility Rates are the number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and bear children at each age in accordance with prevailing age-specific fertility rates. (2.1 equals the level of replacement.)

Damned Statistics

A recent survey of 12-34 year olds found only 25 percent could identify all four broadcast network stations.

The survey became the most emailed Advertising Age article of the day, and garnered a spot on the zeitgeisty Drudge Report.

The implication being this information should be of grave concern to the broadcast and advertising industries -- if not the nation as a whole.

I contend it's nothing to worry about.

Ever since they started surveying these type of things, we've been bombarded with statistics showing the youth of America struggle to identify things awake they should be able to recite in their sleep.

As a child in the 80's I remember a lot of numerically backed talk of how the typical American student could barely name any of the fifty states -- let alone other countries. This was in stark contrast to the geography whiz's they were creating over in the Soviet Union and Japan.

We all know how that story ended.

The Soviet Union collapsed, unleashing such monstrosities as Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan and Tajikistan on unsuspecting geography students the world over. In Japan the bubble burst unleashing ... Flooding ..? A rash of low-quality anima ..? I really don't know.

But I do know this -- All of my contemporaries who couldn't find the United States on a map if they were spotted the Northern and Western hemispheres had no trouble finding Mexico when Spring Break and Cancun beckoned. Nor did the countries of Europe pose much of a challenge when they decided to take time off and bum around the old world.

So cheer up ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. As long as you provide quality programming the youth of America will find you.