Is This Smoking Hot Japanese Model to Blame for the Boeing Dreamliner's Overheating Battery Problem? Yes
As Boeing scrambles to figure out why the lithium-ion batteries in their 787 Dreamliners keep starting fires, the residents of Japan already know exactly who the culprit is.
That's right — who.
It seems Japanese fashion idol Aki Higashihara, AKA Death Blog Lady, has struck again.
According to Know Your Meme, Higashihara's string of "curses" began in 2007, when, as a host of horse-racing news program, she garnered the nickname "Favorite Killer" for damning every horse she predicted would win to miserable failure.
Her infamy followed her around everywhere she went, and was kept alive by a series of subsequent of posts on her "death blog" — a reference to the popular manga/anime Death Note — that appeared to foreshadow calamity.
During the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, athletes mentioned by Higashihara on her blog were found to have performed well below expectations. In January 2010, shortly after Higashihara wrote about eating ginko nuts during a visit to a shrine in Kamakura, a sacred, centuries-old ginko tree at the shrine was uprooted.
In March 2011, shortly after Higashihara asked her readers to conserve electricity in light of the recent earthquake, the Fukusima Daiichi nuclear plant catastrophe took place.
The latest curse talk concerns a photo of a toy Japan Airlines plane Higashihara posted on December 14th (left), accompanied by the caption "my son loves planes."
Nearly one month to the day of the post, Japan Airlines grounded its entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners following a string of malfunctions.
One day later, the FAA announced it was ordering all American Dreamliners grounded as well.
We know that some of you will call this mere coincidence; that a single Japanese woman couldn't possibly possess this kind of power. Take one more good look at the photo above. Notice how one of the wings on the model is attached upside down? That's certainly no condition for a plane to fly in…
Case closed.
