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March/April/May
2003
MXC
May 22
Back in those bygone days as a
Freshman in Pou'land, my Japanese teacher brought in a
tape of a show he recorded when he lived there. It
was called Takeshi's Castle, or Takeshi Jyo if you want
to keep it completely untranslated, and it won the
coveted Johnny Award for Exemplarity Merit in the Field
of Being the Funniest Thing Ever. Basically it
involved people competing in various, pointless games
that served no purpose other than to injure the
contestants. Players ran headfirst into wooden
doors, hit their heads on rolling logs, and navigated
booby trapped stepping stones all for the viewer's
amusement.
This particular episode was
noteworthy in the fact that instead the normal routine
where regular civilians did this in a futile effort to
capture Takeshi's castle, it was a special where Takeshi
had to reclaim his castle with the aid of low-tier
Japanese comedians dressed as cartoon characters,
folklore creatures, and Godzilla enemies. You
haven't laughed until you see a man in a rubber
totem-pole suit try to navigate a hanging bridge while
being pelted with volleyballs launched from a
high-powered cannon.
I thought the show fell into the
"Never, ever coming to America in a million
years" category, so I felt fortunate I had been
able to watch the show. Imagine my surprise then
when I was flipping through channels and saw an episode
playing on TNN, now entitled Most Extreme Elimination
Challenge. My first reaction was elation, until I
had a chance to soak in some of the commentary. It
seems the folks at TNN, instead of, y'know, actually
translating the show, decided to dub whatever the heck
they wanted to over the moving mouths of the announcers
and contestants. Now, this format might actually
work; the show's appeal is in its physical comedy, and
the show's ripe for the MST3K treatment. The
problem is that the script for the show walked the line
between annoying and offensive. A mute button is a
prerequisite for anyone who wishes to watch the
show. Funny things are said during the course of
the program, but for the most part its thinly veiled and
trite innuendo.
I appreciate the effort to bring
the show to America, but a screenwriting team that has
graduated from junior high would be nice.
3, 2, 1, Let's
Jam
May 15
I finally got my seven Cowboy
Bebop soundtracks by the Seatbelts in the mail today. That's
a total of seven CDs made up of music from a television
program which I have never seen. Not
once. I did catch the first eight minutes of one
episode, but I hardly consider that watching a show. I've seen more of the Martin Short Show if
you want an idea of how little this program I have been
exposed too.
Hopefully this lack of connection
with the music's source material will distance me from
the show to the point where I don't have to defend
myself against the charge that I'm buying the music
based solely on blind loyalty to the show. I'd
accuse others of the notion myself. The Otaku Hive
Mind has convinced itself that "Nobuo Uematsu's
stuff is, like, sooooo much better than anything Mozart
ever did man." Not to take anything away from
Mr. Uematsu, the fact is I don't have the musical
understanding to comparatively judge the two, but the
fact is most of their admiration is based on the game
instead of the music itself.
In any case, the music rocks to
the point where you'll have to wear seatbelts in order
to maintain in an upright position. I guess this means I can start
watching the show with impunity now. Wee.
Razor
May 12
Razor scooters, in my
neighborhood at least, seem less of a mode of
transportation than a means of communication. Most
of the time, the kids seem to just stand there on their
scooters chatting. My theory is that the scooters
offer some sort of common ground and a sort of pretence
for talking. Simply standing there speaking isn't
an acceptable method to pass the time, so scooters are
used as a excuse to do so. They also act as a
podium of some sort and offer an effective distraction
for the normally idle hands of the kids. Body
language is also indirectly benefited by the exaggerated
reaction of the scooter to the ordinary twitches and fidgeting
that occur when speaking.
Or maybe I'm thinking too hard
about it.
Spam
May 6
I've noticed my spam e-mails have
been far more upfront with the services they provide as
of late. Usually they would hide their animal porn
advertisements behind cryptic titles like "About
your last message" or "Only you Johnny."
Now they're very frank concerning the wares they peddle.
I have no idea what the
significance or relevance behind this is, but it's
notable none the less.
Mental
Health Status
April 22
Boo-yeah! Who's your daddy of
stable mental health?
None
of that
April 22
Attention internet citizens!
There are no sprite sheets here. No Zelda sprite sheets,
no Metroid sprite sheets, no Yu-Gi-Oh sprite sheets, and
no Capcom vs. SNK sprite sheets. If you are
looking for sprite sheets, you will not find them
here. There's ten or so monochrome Dan sprites, so
feel free to look at them, but that's it. I
appreciate your traffic, but I don't want to mislead
you. Thank you.
What I do have is a picture of
this guy. His name's Leontii
Pajitnov. He's
Russian.
Story
time
April 7
One time, an oncologist at a firm
was being blamed for not doing his work.
Co-workers would find x-rays and file reports lying
around that were supposed to have been turned in days
ago. Unfinished paper work would be found on his
desk that was dated from last week. The employee's
behavior was discussed during lunch hour, but no one
wanted to tell the management. Finally, a woman
who worked there e-mailed the firm's manager and
reported the discrepancy.
Two days later, the woman was
called into the manager's office. Upon entering
the room, she found the fifty year old man sitting at
his desk intently staring at his blank wall.
Sitting herself down across the desk from him, she
waited for him to speak. For three minutes, the
man stared at an indefinite spot on his wall. The
look on his face suggested he had forgotten what he was
about to say and was about to continue on with his train
of thought. After the long 180 seconds, he looked
at the woman and -- without taking his eyes off her -- reached
into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a
single pink jelly bean. Placing the bean in front
of the woman, he turned back to his spot on the wall and
began to speak:
"A few years ago, before you
started working here, we had a guy who we swore was
stealing x-rays. Every time he turned in a folder
there were always one or two missing. We never
caught him, and we never said a word about it.
Then one day when walking out to my car I saw him
dumping three charts into the trash can around the back
of the building. We caught him red handed, but he
still denied it. When we decided to fire him he
said, 'You can fire me, but you'll never know what
really happened to the man whose x-rays I threw
away.' With those words, he turned around and left
the office."
"A couple months after that,
this guy was inducted into a mental hospital. Two
years later they let him out, and he walked strait to
this office and into the x-ray room. He took three
charts, and walked outside with the entire staff
following. He then placed those three pictures in
the dumpster, then walked away without a word. And
that was the last anyone ever heard of him."
"What I'm trying to
say," the man said, turning his eyes back to the
woman, "Is that you can't save 'em all. Now
get the hell out of my office."
The woman stood up, took the
jelly bean, and walked out the door. She didn't
eat the jelly bean.
A
new thing
March 17
Toastyfrog
has been making me feel inadequate lately. That could be
applicable most of the time, since his personal web page
gets 500 times as many hits as I do, just as I could
always feel inadequate about Penny
Arcade's readership. No, it's that his site
has a spiffy new comments system which is sure to be the
envy of people who don't get off their lazy butts and
download the program he's making them with. I did
download said program, but it kept asking me to find my
perl file, which I thought was a rather personal
question.
So, from now on, I'm going to be
using my Livejournal
account to offer a feedback thread for each
post. A new Livejournal entry will be made each
time I post something here, which will merely contain a
link to oLT. Maybe this will only prove how few
readers I have, but no one said I ever made decisions
based on how rational they were.
I'm
Smart
March 15
Is it just me, or does everyone
seem to think that the police are morons for not
realizing that the random girl walking down the street
with her entire face concealed is actually the girl
that's been missing for nine months? I mean, I
know I'd certainly be able to pinpoint any one of
America's missing children at 200 yards.
Actual
7th grade bus exchange
March 7
|
Kid
behind me: Hey buddy, it looks like you
could use some Pert Plus.
Me: I believe you mean Head and
Shoulders. That's the dandruff one.
Pert Plus is the two-in-one shampoo.
Kid: Yeah, you should get...some
of...that. |
I have no idea why I remember
this. I've had better comebacks. And the dandruff
problem is gone, thank you very much.
Caribou
March 4
You know what I like about the
universe? It's supposedly infinite. That means
that, for the most part, everything's game. If
it's an infinite universe, then there's always the chance
of something happening. It will most likely never
happen on Earth, but somewhere out there there's most
likely at least one example of something impossible
happening.
In an infinite universe, there's
a good chance that sometime in the far flung history of
the universe, somewhere in the vast reaches of space, a
random assortment of atoms in some floating gaseous
nebula randomly bonded with each other and formed
(entirely by chance) a fully grown male caribou.
The caribou promptly died of asphyxiation a few seconds
later, but for a moment, life was spontaneously created
merely by the random flights of protons that occur each
second.
It gives me great pleasure to
look up into the sky at night and see millions of stars,
galaxies, and planets accompanied by the floating corpse
of a fully grown male caribou.
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