The Japanese have done a ton of wacky things they should be ashamed of gadget-wise and otherwise. Now they’re getting into politics to sell phones and the result is bizarre. This commercial for Japan’s EMobile cellular company has a monkey dressed up in a suit, at a podium in front of a crowd.

The crowd is holding signs that read “Change.” At the end, the monkey cries a tear, clearly ashamed as he should be. Bad monkey. Their intentions may or may not have been entirely innocent, but we all know that if this aired in America there would be hell to pay.

Some German scientists with a love of bad horror movies and some time on their hands, have come up with the nerdiest brain-computer interface yet. It’s from the Technical University of Braunschweig.

No placing electrodes on your head with this one. This one is all about wearing a large metal helmet full of sensors, that can detect your brain activity through your hair. They claim that the system is good enough to control an RC car and they’re hoping to use it in wheelchairs and prosthetics. Check out a video below.

I wondered where all the geeks had gone. Now I know. The exhibit started on Saturday at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. Needless to say this event is a geek magnet as they will showcase all kinds of Trek ships, technology, aliens, sets, costumes and props. You’ll be able to sit in a recreation of the original Enterprise bridge, experience motion simulators, and quote lines from all your favorite moments. In other words, it’s kinda like a typical day in the life for some of you, just held somewhere other then your mom’s living room. Chances are some of you won’t even know the event is happening, as you’re too busy arguing about whether Comic con or Dragon con was more kick-ass, but I wanted to mention it.

If you happen to be in Las Vegas this weekend, you might want to check out the 2008 USA Rock Paper Scissors League Championship on June 20 in Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Champion with the best hand skills will win a $50,000 prize and a ticket to compete in Beijing,China during the Summer Olympics, where they will represent the U.S. in the inaugural International Rock Paper Scissors Federation Championship.

I’ve never been entirely clear on the official rules. It always gets tricky with rock against paper. Paper can wrap around a rock and strangle it, but on the other hand, rock can beat paper to a pulp. Check out the video below. It’s strangely mesmerizing.

According to the latest NPD Group report for game sales in May, this is the fourth month in a row that Nintendo has come out on top for the number 1 AND number two spot for console sales. The Nintendo Wii and the handheld Nintendo DS were the two top-selling hardware units for May, 2008.

Nintendo sold over 675,000 Wii consoles in May and almost 453,000 Nintendo DS’s, which would probably explain all the new colors and designs they have been coming out with lately for the DS. Sony’s Playstation 3 followed with a little under 209,000 units sold and Microsoft sold 186,600 Xbox 360 units during the same period.

It’s that time of the week again, which means a look back at the week that was in our network of blogs. It’s been a busy week all around and as usual Poptherapy kept you abreast on all the latest geek news and popculture, while over at Wealthyreader it was all about ways to get wealthy or stay wealthy. Our health blog, Healthyreader focused on ways to stay healthy and enjoy it all. Health, wealth and geekiness is a great combination. Here’s some of what you may have missed.

In what surely has to be a perfect collaboration between McDonalds and Nintendo, McDonalds is making it easier then ever to order food that will have you working twice as hard on the Wii-Fit. hmmm. Then you’ll get hungry again. Let’s see, who makes it easiest to get a disc shaped hunk of grease on a sesame seed bun? And the circle is complete, my friends. McDonald’s will introduce a new system that’s currently testing in Japan.

It’s a payment application that’s downloaded into your phone and when you place your phone over an RFID reader, you can pay instantly or use coupons and the like.

Microsoft released a statement today that said it was “considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo.” Microsoft would not give details, but word is that sources at both companies agree that it involves Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search business as well as their ad business related to text-based ads. I hope Yahoo puts out soon, cuz I’m getting sick of hearing about it.

Google has announced that they will launch Friend Connect, a new service that will allow any site to be turned into a social network. No charge. Basically, Google wants to turn the internet into one huge, universal social profile. Google wanted to tap into the hundreds of millions of users that participate in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

But when you’re Google, you don’t make a competing site and then see what happens, you launch a service that turns the internet itself into one humongous social networking platform which can be used by anyone, with no charge.

According to a report in the NYT, Grand Theft Auto IV reached sales of over $500 million in its first seven days on the market. Take Two Interactive said the game sold approximately 6 million copies worldwide since its launch last Tuesday.

The numbers significantly exceeded expectations of many analysts who expected to see around 5 million copies sold in the first two weeks. Take Two also stated that 3.6 million of those copies were sold the first day of the launch globally for around $310 million in sales. This number even exceeds the numbers we saw for the Halo 3 launch for both first day and first week sales.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer issued a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang over the weekend stating that the company withdrawing its offer to Yahoo. Microsoft had raised its bid to well over the $33 per share, upping it by nearly $5 billion which was still not enough to sway Yahoo board members.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer in the letter.

Cubans have been able to get underground and illegal PCs for a while, but the Cuban government only recently lifted the official ban on them. The first publicly-available machines just went on sale Friday. The QTECH PCs are state-approved are only available at a single store. The crowds had a chance to gawk at some not too cutting edge tech. The towers cost $780 and feature Celeron processors, 512MB of RAM, Windows XP, and come with a CRT display.

And even should they buy one, most Cubans won’t be allowed to have Internet access. Silly Cubans, the net is only for certain “trusted officials” and state journalists. The good news is that with computers now legally available, some expect black market prices on more up-to-date gear down the road.

Much like car manufacturer’s claims about MPG, you aren’t going to get all the hard drive space that’s advertised on your devices, but it’s an issue that may haunt Creative at the moment. A class-action suit was filed against the company regarding the quoted capacity of their hard-drive based media players. It could potentially result in a huge settlement for anybody who bought a device between May 5th 2001 and April 30th 2008. Of course, Creative isn’t admitting any wrong-doing.

The suit alleges that Creative knowingly misled users by promising 7-percent more capacity from their PMPs than was actually even possible, and that they exaggerated the number of songs and the total length of playback in hours. Nothing has hit court yet, but if customers can prove they bought a Creative hard-drive based player in the seven year period, will be eligible for either a 50-percent discount on the price of a new 1GB PMP, or 20-percent off a single item bought from Creative’s US online store.

Wigix is launching its online stock market platform for goods today, going up against the eBay auction model. The Wigix system is based on the bid/ask model used by NASDAQ and the other financial stock markets. Sellers offer any price for their items and buyers can pay the asking price or offer another one if they like. This new online trading model should help to eliminate problems like shilling and sniping.

Some features include: no listing fees, all trades happen immediately, sales data tracking so that users can get accurate market prices. Wigix also has some social networking and community features like blogging, friends lists, sharing, Facebook data access, and inventory tracking. Users can also become category experts and earn a share of their category sales, they can also become SKU owners: any user can add a new item which is not yet registered in the Wigix database, making them the “owner’ of this item’s SKU, they receive a share of all future sales of this specific item. Many people would say that it’s about time and that eBay should have done something like this years ago.

These kinds of displays are developing rapidly and it wont be long at all before we are reading from electronic newspapers “printed” on a foldable display screen, similar to the Philips-LG newspaper above. Recently, media giant Hearst Corp, has been funding a start up called FirstPaper to develop the e-newspaper.

It uses a color display version of E-Ink that is being used in the Sony E-reader. The e-reader uses Linux as its operating system which might enable it hit the commercial market at a price that isn’t through the roof. If they can integrate the wireless capability to download newspapers and let users flip pages at a touch, paper newspapers could soon be history, which is good for the environment. But for now, we’ll just have to wait.