On our last journey to the land of wacky and awesome innovations we spotted the Shinkansen Bullet Chopsticks. And now we want to get them imported to our store so to help us eating our sushis, tempuras, sashimi, and all those Japanese delicacies FAST! We expect to see them making their debut states side with various models from the original 0 Series to the latest 500 Series in March 2012.

Chinatown Fair in NYC used to serve as an East Coast mecca for fighting game fans as one of the last independently-owned video arcades in the country. It closed earlier this year, but through the work of two filmmakers the spirit of the scene lives on. Mark Hayes’ short film Chinatown Fair collects crowd-sourced footage and interviews with people intimately involved in the scene to paint a picture of this much-loved meeting place. And released a while ago, but recently made available on iTunes, documentary maker Calvin Theobald’s The King of Chinatown focuses on young Justin Wong’s rise to dominance in the fighting game community.

I remember looking across the street at Mr. Chow’s restaurant from my local watering hole all the time, back when my office was near Tribeca and I’d pop over for an after-work drink. The place always looked so old – not in the sense of being rundown, but like it was a place out of time, colored by its past. My reaction to it was probably influenced by the fact that the only image I had in my head of Mr. Chow’s in New York was out of Basquiat – if I had ever wandered in, I would have half-expected to see Warhol himself, still surrounded by a cadre of the city’s art, film and fashion power elite.

Watching this Nowness clip featuring Mr. Chow himself brings it all back to Earth – in it, we see a man dedicated to the details, emphasizing that each detail should be a universe as he walks us through his kitchens, his workshops devoted to Chinese cuisine – a humble man unimpressed by celebrity, with a sharp sense of humor. This is why Mr. Chow’s restaurants remain as they are: not only monuments to their own history, but living, breathing institutions.

Enjoy this lovely look back through Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, created from animated posters designed by Martin Woutisseth and set to a lilting score composed by Romain Trouillet. Do you have a favorite? I liked the way HAL’s red eye ominously comes into the picture in the design for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is a little bit of everything we love: now up on the GQ site, a tale of one man’s journey through the wild, urban jungle that is Tokyo all while in the company of one hell of a fun, random trio — Aziz Ansari of Parks and Recreation, David Chang of the Momofuku empire and Mr. LCD/DFA himself, James Murphy. Take a moment and enjoy the unexpected adventure (involving karaoke dens, bottles of Zima, gnarly ramen and round-eyes) that was somehow all spawned from just one, desperate tweet.

It’s getting harder to ignore the voices of Occupy Wall Street as their numbers grow, but it can be too easy to get caught in the growing number of complex issues and lose focus of what it’s all about, too. This video, spotted on The Fox Is Black, which screened as part of the Zero Film Festival boils the movement down to its essence by presenting it as a game of Pong. Reductive, sure, but it’s an effective way to remind us that many small voices with little power do still stand a chance against the major financial powers running our world.

A brief sidestep from our usual topics, but I just love Nom Wah Tea Parlor. It’s an easy go-to when I want dim sum without all the great big banquet hall fanfare and yesterday’s feature in Eater is filled with interesting tidbits about the long-standing institution’s checkered past (and I’m not just referring to those comforting red-and-white tablecloths). Turns out that Doyers, the little corner of Chinatown where Nom Wah opened and remains to this day, used to be a hotbed for Chinatown gang violence in the early 1900s – so much so that, in 1994, law enforcement officials named it the bloodiest street intersection in the United States.

Through it all, though, Nom Wah remained, making it arguably the oldest standing restaurant in Chinatown. In my opinion, it’s also one of the best, particularly after its gentle restoration last year by the original owner’s nephew, who lovingly kept its worn-in, classic charm intact while making small  changes to bring it into a new generation – creating Facebook and Twitter pages, for example. Click over to read the entire Eater feature, and don’t miss the charming Nom Wah images from the 1960s drawn by NY Mag founder and graphic design legend Milton Glaser.