The Ratings

As all of you should be aware of, The Brunching Shuttlecocks have a feature called The Ratings. Basically, they take a subject (breakfast cereals, chess pieces, aspects of sushi restaurants, etc.) and write a paragraph about each entry followed by a letter grade. Far be it from me to create my own kind of column, I've done my own sets of ratings. Please enjoy.

Seven Samurai | Precipitation | Trigonometric functions

Aspects ouf Canada

Candy – Sweet love of Moe and everything holy!! Canadian Candy!! the Eat-Mores, the Smarties, the Coffee Crisps, the chocolate, the Rum Chewy type things!!!! Every time I go up to the Great Seasonally White North I always stash up on candy.  Has anyone ever noticed that Canadian Chocolate tastes less like sugar and more like actual chocolate? Good call Saving the Dutch Royalty during WW2 for the chocolate connections. A

Oreos – I don’t know if any of you are aware of this, but Canada has different Oreos than the States. India’s the only other country I’ve bought the cookies in and they have em too.  One word to Nabisco: SELL THE DURN THINGS HERE!! Maybe they spiked the filling with morphine, but I don’t care. A+

French writing on everything – Nice.  Kinda like a French 1 text book picture.  One problem, with the packaging in French on one side and the English on the other, there’s no place to guide Toucan Sam through the jungle maze to his wild berry Fruit Loops.  I want mind numbing cereal box backs! B+

Hockey – You’ve got to respect athletes who can pass a puck through their legs to teammates who then picks up a slab of rubber with a flat stick and needles it through the 1/3rd of a square foot that the goalie leaves open all while on skates.  Plus they’re second only to baseball in fights.  I mean, the refs just stand there! One thing, they’ve gotta adapt that 4 on 4 scheme. It seems every time a guy takes the puck, there are already 3 guys back there to defend him.  We want more break aways. A-

Money – Colorful.  Neat.  Nice touch putting wildlife scenes on the reverse. Only one problem, as England switched to the decimal system, they abandoned the absolute coolest unit of money in the history of mankind: The Shilling. Use it in a sentence. “It costs five dollars, 13 shillings.” See!  Just change it from the penny to the shilling and all will be right with the world.  Plus, you wouldn’t look like you were copying the US. B

Beer – Underage. Wouldn’t know.

The Seven Samurai

Kambei Shimada (the leader) – I put his basic character in parenthesis because the names are just so hard to remember, and I take Japanese.  Anyway, this guy is defiantly cool.  So collected in battle, so meticulous in planning. A leader of men.  He’s even got the best quote in the movie: “A good fort needs a gap. The enemy must be lured in so we can attack them. If we only defend, we lose the war.”  How can you not like a guy who says that? One thing about him that troubles me is his final plan to defeat the bandits.  The final day he decides to let all the remaining outlaws into the town. Why? He seemed to be doing a fine job picking them off one by one.  Maybe it was for dramatic effect.  B+

Katsushiro Okamoto ( the kid) – The most developed character in the story, he also has the most subplots involving him.  His determination to become a samurai, his unwillingness to kill, his revere of Kyuzo, his romantic interest with Shino, the farmers daughter, who he mistakenly thinks is a boy at first.  What’s with movies and the ease at which people mistake other people for a different gender?  I could just imagine all the wacky sit-com situations we’d be in if it were like that in real life, resulting in more cross-dressings than are normal. And I’m all for that. B

Shichiroji (the right hand man) – Sinchiroji always had the best reason to join the party.  I love that whole “Join your long time comrade for one last battle” thing.  The only thing that troubles me about him is his overwhelmingly unremarkable introduction.  Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention when I watched his part, but it seemed like the guys were talking about all the samurai they saw that day and at the end of the conversation Kambei says something to the effect of,  “Oh yeah, I saw my friend that I thought was dead and hadn’t seen for years show up. He joined.” Huh? B

Gorobei (the other guy) – The most insignificant samurai in the movie, this guy was the first to join and didn’t do much after that.  When you read reviews of the film he’s always shown as the guy who decides to join because he is intreaged by Kambei’s generosity and kindness for the village, but isn’t that the reason they all joined?  Anyway he’s killed by a gun, right before the last battle. Come to think of it, all the samurai die from being shot.  Hmmm. C-

Katsushiro (the insane one) – This guy had the difficult task of being both the films lead character and comic relief, something not easy to do.  This guy just doesn’t just chew up scenery, he eats it with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti.  Some people might say that the Mifune is overacting. I once heard someone say that it’s really the character who’s overacting. I couldn’t agree more. When reading about this movie though, I learned something interesting.  In the original concept of the film, he wasn’t even in the story!  It’s like if Shakespeare was halfway through Hamlet and said, “You know what’d be really cool, is if Hamlet’s uncle killed his father.” A-

Heihachi (happy one) –This character had the most room for development, but seemed to lack it more than others.  He was supposed to be the cheerful one, doesn’t do anything that would confirm that, and then is the first one to die.  Extra points go to him for being the one who made the flag, which turns into one of the movies cooler symbols. C+

Kyuzo (master swordsman) – Oh yeah, this guy is defiantly with it.  The master swordsman.  The only guy we get to see in hand to hand combat. The guy so dedicated to his art, he trains outside in the rain as the others have a good time.  They guy who keeps the secret of Katsushiro’s love, even though he’s only known this guy for a week.  The guy who raids the bandit’s camp solo, steals a gun, kills two of them, then returns without the slightest hint of pride, and sleeps to prepare for tomorrow.  Plus he’s got the poofy samurai pants.  Gotta love the poofy pants. A+

Precipitation

Snow – Snow is the product of a case study on children conducted by mother nature.  No one could build a more perfect children’s toy.  Seriously, what doesn’t snow do that a kid could want? You can throw it, you can build forts out of it, you can slide on it, you can ram it down the parka of your little sister, you can build an army of white, mindless minions out of it, you can even eat it!  To top it all off, the stuff closes school.  Let’s see your Pokémon cards do that.  If it glowed in the dark the stuff would be boxed and sold. A

Freezing Rain – The one good thing about it is that it turns shrubs into contemporary statues, but that’s about it.  Although it also has the power to halt school, it makes staying home boring.  It actually prevemts you from going skiing and sledding.  And if you want to leave the house prepare to look like a 1920s silent physical comedy.  It took me 20 minutes to traverse the distance to my friends house during and ice storm, and he lives three houses away!  Plus you’ve got the dose your car in warm water if you don’t want to rip off a door while trying to open it. Lame. C-

Hail – When you first find out it’s hailing you think it’s pretty nice until you realize you have to go indoors or risk being subjected to natural BB gun fire. Apparently, the stuff we’re used to isn’t nearly as bad as the stuff they get down in some countries like Venezuela (or another South American Nation, I forget which one exactly).  There it can come down in pellets the size of baseballs.  While this could be amusing (“Look Sally, Spot’s house got demolished) you have to wonder about the damage that can be caused by these things. It seems that the largest ever was about the size of a Volleyball. I’d give you ten to one odds it landed directly on a car. B-

Sleet – Is anyone quite sure what sleet is?  Go ahead give me a definition.  As far as I’m concerned it’s halfway between freezing rain and rain.  Of all the things they could give a name to, they give it to halfway between freezing and regular rain.  If they really wanted to be helpful, they would have given a name to that stuff in between snow and rain.  That way we could know exactly what to expect when you go up to go skiing. C

Rain – Rain is the most worn natural phenomenon on earth. How many movies, religions, books ect. have used rain in it’s imagery?  Not that I blame them, rain’s very dramatic.  I always want to go outside in the rain in just a simple jacket, then old my arms to the side and look up, like Robin Williams on that poster for Jakob the Liar. But that’s just me of course. A-

Sine (opposite over hypotenuse) – Over-rated in my opinion.  Sine is like the arrogant leader of the Trigonometric functions.  You really get over how big Sine is supposed to be until you realize he’s Y on the unit circle, and who wants to solve for Y? Still, he gets the job done. B-

Cosine (adjacent over hypotenuse) – Cosine always plays second fiddle to Sine, but It’s my favorite out of all of them.  Cosine is the peacemaker of trigonometric functions, joining together its adjacent side with the sometimes aloof hypotenuse to form a perfect, harmonious angle. A

Tangent (opposite over adjacent) – Tangent prefers to forgo the oppressive hypotenuse and rally the common sides to form somewhat of a common function, a “People’s function” so to speak. Plus with the Pythagorean Theorem, who needs those other functions with their fancy hypotenuse? You hear that hypotenuse? We don’t need you! A-

Cosecant (hypotenuse over opposite) – In a odd twist of fate, sine’s reciprocal now carries about the curse of the dreaded prefix “co-”, forming some kind of Bizzaro world scenario.  Depressed, Cosecant goes off on a drinking spree and wakes up in Fort Lauderdale wearing someone else’s cloths. At least that’s how I imagine it. C+

Secant (hypotenuse over adjacent) – Feh. Cosine’s reciprocal gets all big on himself since he’s the head of the pack for the reciprocal functions. They all sell out sooner or later. C

Cotangent (adjacent over opposite) – It’s tangent upside down. Sure, Cosecant and Secant are just Cosine and Sine flipped upside down, but at least they had that whole reversal of fortunes thing.  So Cotangent is stuck at the bottom rung of the function ladder and with good reason. D