Though it is a dangerous road to travel -- we speak of alerting readers to cute new ninja-themed merchandise -- it's hard to resist these ninja salt and pepper shakers from Patina Stores ($17). If these dainty ceramics don't suit you, perhaps you prefer Patina's manly Dashboard Ninja figures ($9) featured in the April 2009 WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) magazine.

Get your much-scarred fingers ready for the shuriken throwing championship to be held in September and October in Iga (Mie Prefecture), Japan.

Participants will wear ninja costumes and engage in a test of shuriken-throwing skill and style in the contest, being organized by the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum... The museum is hoping that the championship will raise the status of shuriken-throwing as a martial art and promote it as a sport.
Before throwing a shuriken, participants must make a "figure nine" shape with their fingers, calling on the protection of the Buddha and Shinto deities. The competitors will each get six shuriken and throw five -- leaving one in reserve just as ninja of old -- at a target 30 centimeters in diameter five meters away for women and six for men. Points will be awarded to the competitors not just for accuracy, but also for the beauty of their movements and personal throwing style.

This past week (June 8-12,2009), Ninjalistics, your top-quality provider of corporate assassination and espionage services, offered intriguing and provocative new content:

• Monday: The Ninja News story this week, "Infowar means casualties," may have prompted speculation through its seeming irrelevance to Ninjalistics. After all, what could be our connection to a secret meeting of food packaging executives seeking new ways to foist a possibly toxic chemical on consumers who are becoming far too aware of it? All will become clear soon!
• Wednesday: In our weekly webcomic, The Ninja Agenda, Team 19 grappled with the implications of outsourcing ninja assassination to Bangalore. (This followed on last week's revelation that Ninjalistics might soon outsource their duties.)
• Free Form Friday: Our latest free Ninjagraphic is the Deep Trigger Specification form. Every employer finds it necessary from time to time to subject workers to post-hypnotic conditioning. But you may not be aware of recent Department of Labor regulations that require you to notify the conditioned employee of the visual stimulus you've chosen to activate his or her post-hypnotic conditioning. This colorful (well, mostly red) form lists the most commonly chosen stimuli, including the aurora borealis, Saturn's moon Enceladus, Newtonian fractals, and, of course, Steve Jobs.
  (You can view this form, and all our forms, at the free document-sharing site Scribd.com.)

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