Month: October 2021

Yoko Kanno, who scored the original anime, isn’t the only one returning to Cowboy Bebop. The entire, original voice cast is, too, and will be dubbing the live-action Netflix show’s Japanese language track.

That’s right, not just some of the original Japanese language cast, but the entire Japanese language cast. This is the first time the full cast has been reunited in two decades—since the 2001 theatrical feature Cowboy Bebop: The Movie and since the original anime TV series ended in 1998.

According to Netflix Japan, the following voice actors will be returning to do the Japanese language dub: Koichi Yamadera as Spike, Taiten Kusunoki as Jet Black, Megumi Hayashibara as Faye, Norio Wakamoto as Vicious, Gara Takashima as Julia, Tsutomu Tareki as Punch, Miki Nagasawa as Judy, Takaya Hashi as Teddy Bomber, Masako Isobe as Mao, and Kenyu Horiuchi as Gren. Romi Park will also dub Shin, while Hikaru Midorikawa will dub Lin.

It sure is impressive Netflix got the whole gang back together. Well done.

The live-action adaptation of Shinichiro Watanabe’s space noir about a group of bounty hunters stars John Cho as Spike Spiegel, Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, and Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black. Will the live-action Cowboy Bebop be any good? Who knows! We’ll find out next month. But Netflix’s record with live-action anime adaptations has been spotty. For example, its live-action Death Note was not well received. Surely, lessons have been learned, and future live-action adaptations will be better, no? Maybe!

It’s good that Netflix got the original cast together (a hopeful sign!), and if you know Japanese, it might be fun to skip the subtitles and turn on the Japanese language option. And if the show does suck, you can just close your eyes and listen along.

Cowboy Bebop beings streaming on Netflix starting November 19.

We keep hearing, and reporting, that the era of the personal flying machine … flying car … air taxi … call it what you will … is right around the corner, with backing from big players like automakers or aircraft companies. In some imaginings, you’d be a passenger while these electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft are flown by a cabbie/pilot. In others, you’d be dead weight (wait, let’s not say dead) being ferried aboard an autonomous drone. But weight and technology being limiting factors here, the job of flying just might come down to you. So maybe you’ve wondered: Could you do it?

We first told you about a Silicon Valley eVTOL enterprise known as Opener back in 2018. And true to the always-just-a-year-away nature of the flying car game, at that time it expected to begin sales of its BlackFly aircraft in 2019, for the price of an SUV. Well, it’s 2021, and though there’s not yet a BlackFly parked in your garage, the one-seater is FAA-certified, and it has been test-flown more than 4,300 times for over 35,000 miles — racking up a stockpile of YouTube videos in the process.

The company now says 25 BlackFly aircraft will be sold this fall.

The craft is meant to be amphibious, landing on water or grass, and its name is derived from the flight characteristics of, well, a black fly, along with the color of its carbon-fiber fuselage. The key to its technology is its Leading Edge Asynchronous Propeller Technology (LEAPTech), a system of eight redundant propellers developed on the NASA Ames X-Plane program. The system allows each of the propellers to turn at different speeds, meaning the plane can hover, turn on a dime or do just about anything a fixed-wing aircraft normally can’t.

And here’s a fun fact: You don’t need a pilot’s license to fly a BlackFly. (You do need to complete Opener’s operator training, however.)

Another fun fact, getting back to the could-you-do-it question: The company won’t let you make a test flight. But here’s the next best thing: watching somebody else with no experience give it a try. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent John Blackstone recently went through BlackFly simulator training, and then company founder Marcus Leng put him in the pilot seat. Check it out in the video above.

Though the landing looks dicey, there was no harm done — Blackstone got BlackFly up and back down again. So maybe the rest of us could do the same?

Martinez had never organized a social media campaign and doesn’t consider herself social media savvy. But after ARG won the $100,000 grant, she was running focus groups, coordinating an advisory group of cancer organizations, building a team of co-investigators and partnering with the ARG communications specialist. “The young women made it very clear they did not want to be told what to do,” Martinez says of the focus groups. “’Drink less for your breasts’ felt more like a helpful suggestion.”

Planning for the social media campaign began just as the pandemic forced a national shutdown. As the pandemic dragged on, alcohol consumption rose, especially among women. Days of heavy drinking among women, defined as four or more drinks within a couple of hours, rose by 41 percent, according to a survey by the RAND Corporation. (The study compared a baseline survey of 1,540 adults conducted in the spring of 2019 with their responses during a follow-up in the spring of 2020.)

But pushing back against alcohol consumption isn’t simple. As the US found during a disastrous prohibition period from 1920 to 1933, opposing alcohol is not popular. When Sharima Rasanayagam, chief scientist for Breast Cancer Prevention Partners in San Francisco, gives talks about environmental causes of breast cancer, her audience is rapt—until she mentions alcohol. “People like to drink and they don’t like to hear that,” she says. She tells them that quantity matters: “At the very least, drink less.”

It’s a message she delivers with care, to avoid giving women a reason for self-blame if they develop breast cancer and wonder “Why me?” Cases of breast cancer can’t be tied to alcohol alone, because many factors, including genetics and environmental exposures, contribute to the disease, she explains in a YouTube video linked to the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners website. But Rasanayagam notes that risks add up—and alcohol is one that women can reduce. Fewer drinks, whether over time or in one day, mean less exposure to acetaldehyde and potentially less effect on estrogen. “It’s been shown that the less you drink, the lower your risk,” she says. (Breast Cancer Prevention Partners is an advisor to the Drink Less for Your Breasts campaign.)

It’s a nuanced message but, in its own way, a bold one, as framed in a social media campaign, says David Jernigan, an alcohol policy expert at Boston University, who has been working in the field for 35 years. “What Priscilla is doing in California is groundbreaking,” he says.

Jernigan asserts that the harm from alcohol—which also includes drunk driving and an association with violence—warrants a large-scale response similar to anti-tobacco efforts. He notes that in Estonia, a campaign urging “Let’s drink less by half!” actually lowered per capita consumption by 28 percent. (Estonia’s alcohol policy also included restrictions on advertising, more enforcement of driving-under-the-influence laws, higher taxes, and a focus on treatment.)

The World Health Organization is also developing a global action plan; the current draft sets a goal of reducing per capita consumption by 20 percent by 2030 (with 2010 consumption levels as the baseline). It urges nations to develop and enforce “high-impact policy options,” such as higher alcohol taxes, restrictions on advertising, and emphasizes awareness of health risks.

Jernigan calls that effort a good step that doesn’t go far enough. He favors the development of an international treaty on alcohol, similar to the “Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” the first such negotiated through the World Health Organization. It has been signed by 168 countries that committed to taking steps to restrict tobacco advertising, raise cigarette taxes, and prevent youth smoking.