FRIDAY IS FUN-DAY!

Well, not so much fun for the Nagano hotel employee who was killed by a bear while picking wild greens for the hotel's kitchen. But the rest of Japan is in a jovial mood, and no one is more jovial than Prime Minister Koizumi who spends meetings talking about blowing up condoms like balloons, talking about the Russian Prime Minister's wife and how not having sex has made Koizumi a powerful PM, and telling members of the Diet that he likes to spank the monkey on a regular basis.

Perhaps it was in this spirit of fun that one fellow popped by the offices of Bollywood director Mahesh Bhatt, asked if Mahesh was in, got told no, went outside and fired a few shots in the air before zipping away on his motorcycle. This could have been an extortion attempt, or it could be a really stupid hitman sending a really poor message after Bhatt's legal clash with a suspected mafia gangboss earlier this year who sued Bhatt over basing his movie GANGSTER on his life. The case wound up being dropped.

And Danwei may have solved the mystery of why THE DA VINCI CODE was yanked from Chinese theaters where it was happily steaming along to being the number one foreign movie of all time. Could it be that it was pulled to make way for the Chinese version of the DA VINCI CODE...THE TANG BOHU CODE???!??!?