Created by Mark Elliott, likealocal.cn is an online guide to eating like a local. He uses menu translations, reviews, photos and videos to help foreigners order street food in Shanghai. Where most guidebooks and websites tend to focus on fashionable interior design, fusion foods and prestigious chefs, Mark's site focuses on street eats, cheap eats and snack foods. A foreigner with nog Chinese language-ability can enjoy all the kinds of food the local Chinese population eats, using this site. {news_summary}

Topless Apostles A calendar featuring twelve topless, buffed Mormon missionaries showing us the beauty of God’s Creation. The NYFD may have banned their famous topless fireman calendar this year after their cover star was ‘exposed’ as having a porno past, but, not to worry, here come the Mormons with their shirts off. The calendar may not have been officially sanctioned by the Church of the Latter Day Saints but the evident keenness of the young Mormon missionaries to turn themselves into sex-objects shows how deep the metrosexual desire to be desired has permeated even devoutly religious cultures we might have assumed to be fiercely retrosexual. Sexiness is the new sacredness. Dieux du Stade And then there were the French rugby players again. Oh, boy, do they show off. In the last few years rugby has become nakedly spornographic. Take a look, if you dare, at the Dieux du Stade French rugby Calendar, and accompanying, shrink-wrapped ‘Making Of’ DVD, featuring oiled, naked, shaved, designer tattooed rugger buggers naked in the locker room in poses that are frequently deliberately, provocatively homoerotic in a way that football wouldn’t countenance. Phenomenally popular, the Dieux Du Stade sporno calendars have dramatically increased the popularity and coolness of rugby in France with women (who seem to like the homoerotic teasing) but also with men - gay and straight. Rugby sporno has helped make rugby seem that most modern, most covetted of things. {news_summary}

Solar Bottle is a low-cost container capable of disinfecting water for people consuming microbiologically contaminated raw water; based in the SODIS (Solar Water Disinfection) system. The PET container has a dual face: a transparent face for maximum UV-A rays collection and a alluminium face that absorbs the infrared sunrays augmenting the temperature and improving disinfection. The reduced thickness assists the transportation and the storage. The handle integrates the angular regulation needed to improve sun exposure depending in which latitude of the world the process is executed. Solar Bottle was awarded with the First Prize of the INDEX Award 2007 in the Home category.Thanks to research by Design Labresearcher Giovanna Massoni. What is then 'design'? The image of the local people putting the bottles on the roof in order to get clear and drinkable water thanks to the solar warming up? Or the creation of Alberto & Francisco needing western companies to buy into it and have their idea produced? You can find much more examples of design and innovative cool technology in Jan’s magazine ‘Addict’. Also on www.addictlab.com {news_summary}

Some entrepreneurs are taking an innovative approach to the new challenges of the music business. Leading producers (http://tackhead.com) (who have produced for diverse acts including Madonna, The Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails, Charlie Watts, Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode, and Mos Def) are giving 150 “shareholders” the opportunity to participate in their new album. For 150 Euros, “investors” get advanced copies of the limited-edition album and are credited in the liner notes. Meanwhile, Sellaband.com enables artists to find 5,000 fans to contribute $10 each to fund their records. If the record sells, investors not only get their $10 back, but can actually make a profit. {news_summary}

No Logo São Paulo is free of outdoors. This city of 11 million people has prohibited any visual advertising on the streets. No billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom. We´re living a very odd situation, rediscovering the same old city that we thought knowing so well. One metropolis where making and spending money is the rule, where the market had abuse of the public space offer its residents unimpeded views of their surroundings. A new experience that´s feel like having your home back to you. That simple and that strong. However, we're passioned about advertising, we have fun with it, we're informed by it, we talk about it, it distract us from the chaotic traffic, but everything has a limit. The over 20.000 outdoors, that created a visual pollution in the city, made over 90% of the population approved the law against it. Anti-choice (by Barrie Barton, Australia) At the newly opened Journal Canteen, Rosa Mitchell cooks lunch for you using the recipes she remembers from her childhood in Sicily. The choices are limited to just a couple of meals but the tastes are breathtaking. She only serves one red and one white. Too many options has its detriments; sometimes the choices are so overwhelming you end up choosing nothing. And what about the false economy of choice? You spend $699 on an iPod because it holds 40,000 songs and yet you only ever listen to 10 albums. Or you purchase a $200 music festival ticket because there are 10 bands that you like on the bill… then you find out they are all playing on different stages at the same time. {news_summary}

Hubbuzz is a new way of finding a cool place to live in. Instead of the traditional rental apartment listings which gives you only the hard factors – square footage, rent, number of rooms, etc. – it also gives advice on the soft factors of the neighborhood characteristics, like if it’s ‘eclectic’, ‘trendy’, ‘kid-friendly’, ‘by the beach’, ‘walkable’, among others. Currently, it serves only the USA areas of Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Colorado Springs and Northern Colorado. {news_summary}

This is a place in Chengdu, China, that truly floored me with its beauty, its excitement, its buzz -- and that it was only a few years old, not the hundreds I had thought. It’s an Experience Leisure/Shopping place that is not Disneyfied at all, but that has been given authentic, local Chinese roots. There are places where tourists are invited to flock (Tourist Saloon) but only Chinese people visit. If it is now a tourist trap, it's only because it first became a resident trap. {news_summary}

Although soul music icon Amy Winehouse chants no, no, no... recent fashion publications have been setting their shootings in rehab centers. Amy and her songs and her misbehaviour are big in Brazil, but people talked a lot about "Vogue" Italia showing the most important models of the now locked inside clinics, shaving their heads and looking for the horizon. "Harper's Bazzar" did something similar with Chloe Sevigny, simulating paparazzi situations with the actress working up on her cleansing. {news_summary}

Last Exit to Nowhere, an online T-shirt store recently introduced a line of T-shirts with brands that are inspired and pay homage to some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th century fiction movies. Think of the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining or HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey {news_summary}

Bikes in Paris Originally there were ‘only’ 10,000 but the quantity had to be doubled soon because everyone seemed to be thrilled by the new public transport in Paris. Since july the 15th there are 20,000 bicycles available to be rented in several parking points around town. It is required to have a personal card (29 euros/year) to get one and every rental is payed through a totally automized and very user friendly system. In order to encourage people to leave the bicycle always at a parking place where another user can get it, the first half an hour is free. 50,000 personal cards have been sold during the first month already. Green Roofs We all know that a a terrace in Manhattan is a status symbol (by the way, the latest trend is planting grasses: so wild!) but little is known about the green roofs, or the transformation of the ‘technical roofs’. Infact New York City buildings do not have pretty roofs of red tiles but flat areas covered by tar where air conditioning machines or water tanks are placed. So much tar is responsible for the Urban Heat Island Effect and turning ‘technical roof into a ‘green roof’ by covering it up with a carpet of low maintenance plants creates a microclimate. Two manuals on how to create a green roof will be available soon, they have been written by landscape architect superstar Signe Nielsen, yes the one that designed the terrace of Woody Allen, Richard Gere and many other celebrities. {news_summary}

AddArt is a Firefox extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database, as you can see on the picture above: left is before and right is after using the AddArt-plugin. There are prototype versions of the plugin, collaborative relationships with the developer of AdBlockPlus, and plans for further development. Addblockers are very popular, because they help you to get rid of those annoying adds. {news_summary}

Conversation is of all times, including the coffeehouses' heydays in the 17th and 18th century in London and Paris. However, do not underestimate Melbourne today! On any given Friday night you’ll find pods of conversation in some pretty unusual places; Bobby’s Cuts is a tragically cool men’s clothing store selling middle-range skinny black jeans, stripy shirts, hoodies and some masculine ephemera like shaving kits. It’s an epicentre for Melbourne’s ‘young men’ - the new breed of hipsters with a rougher tougher manly edge. On Friday nights, instead of going to the pub as they used to do six months ago, you’ll find a clique of about 10 guys and girls sitting out the front of the street on milk crates having good conversation. {news_summary}

Elevate Film Festival (http://elevatefilmfestival.com) is out to encourage filmmakers to make socially relevant films. It’s free to the public, but participating filmmakers will be given selected screenplays and have 48 hours to make their films. Pangea Day (http://www.pangeaday.org/) is an international videoconference cum film festival. Participants in eight global cities, plus viewers joining online, mobile and on television are inspired to create a better future. {news_summary}

What happens when Graffiti meets technology? That is the main question of the website Graffiti research lab. They have been around for several years and copied everywhere, but they are still ahead of the pack. With modern technology like lasers, beamers, laptops and ambient lightning, they create a whole new art form. {news_summary}

Erwin Wurm, born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, has been involved in a game with Q and A to investigate the definition of sculpture. “One minute sculpture” is the one of the core concepts of the artists. He has worked in Taipei, asking one girl in the car trying to put two mushrooms in her nose and in another city asked a man to put two oranges on the chest or a banana between the legs. His art often treats elementary as well as banal life needs and actions, as can be expressed in physical deformations. The sculptures are dubbed 'one minute' because of their precarious nature, as they will most likely collapse within that time-span. Fleetingness, humorous and alterability are also the theme in Wurm’s artistic work. A white fat house can tell his story to the audience, even the “House Attack”, a 9x5x5 m large family house is elevated from the fishing rods and stands upside down in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. {news_summary}