Author: Justin

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “Soundtrack”

“Unfortunately, Hughes’ didnt feel that the music would fit together well when removed from the film and compiled into an album. The songs work really well alongside the highs and lows of the film, but there isnt much of a common thread running between the songs other than the film’s plot. So unlike Hughes’ other successful films, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off never received an official soundtrack release.”
Go get all the songs in mp3 format here.

Despues, despues

When I feel kind of weird and sad, I whisper songs in Spanish to myself. The thing is, I only really know one song in Spanish besides the usual karaoke fare.
Yo s?lo quiero mirar los campos,
yo s?lo quiero cantar mi canto,
pero no quiero cantar solito,
yo quiero un coro de pajaritos.
[Coro:]
Quiero llevar este canto amigo
a qui?n lo pudiera necesitar
Yo quiero tener un mill?n de amigos
y as? m?s fuerte poder cantar.
Yo quiero tener un mill?n de amigos
y as? m?s fuerte poder cantar.
Yo s?lo quiero un viento fuerte,
llevar mi barco con rumbo norte,
y en el trayecto voy a pescar
para dividir luego al arribar.
(Coro)
Yo quiero creer la paz del futuro
quiero tener un hogar seguro.
Quiero a mi hijo pisando firme,
cantando alto, sonriendo libre.
(Coro)
Yo quiero amor siempre en esta vida,
sentir calor de una mano amiga,
quiero a mi hermano sonrisa al viento,
verlo llorar pero de contento.
(Coro)
Venga conmigo a ver los campos
cante conmigo tambi?n mi canto
pero no quiero cantar solito
yo quiero un coro de pajaritos
(Coro)

That is all.

Hardboiled Mexicana

In other news, it appears that Mexican criminales are watching too much Tarantino:
“When the police arrived they took the helmet off the corpse, believing at first that he had died in the crash …he had adhesive tape stuck to his face, a knife wound to his forehead, and showed signs of strangulation.”
Full story here.

I hate cat people

Since rescuing Yoda the kitten last year, I have grown fonder of cats in general. We grew up with many cats as pets and we loved them as part of the family, but I never really liked other peoples cats or strays, of which my neighborhood in rural Japan is absolutely full (there are constantly between ten to fifteen strays on my street lined with only 20 or so houses). Cats, by nature, are selfish and pretty much endearing only to their owners – kind of like sports cars, except they are not especially benefitted by lugubrious waxing (I assume). What I’m trying to get at is that I’m cool with keeping cats as pets, but I can’t stand “cat people.” You know, the kind of people who keep 50 cats in their house and have to be dug out of caked up cat shit, hairballs, etc. by rescue teams after their neighbors complain about the smell for a few years straight. This is a kind of sickness in my book. Cat people were probably dogs in their past life, doing pennance in this one for all their past feline-chasing.
And there’s always a cat person at work, isn’t there? The lady with a cat-themed desk calendar, a closeup of a cat’s face set as her desktop background, who seems to shed cat fur everywhere and, should her boyfriend (another cat person, natch) playfully slap her ass, would most definitely answer with a passionate meow. The thing is, I’m usually indifferent to this kind of shit. Doesn’t faze me – cat people can be annoying, but they are generally nice and easy to please (just compliment the pictures of cats adorning their desk).
Today, however, I ran into a cat person who ruined my relationship with all cat people. The subject of our group conversation was a recent news item, how a driver in Shizuoka swerved to avoid hitting a cat and plowed into a line of nursery school children (story here). Standard reaction to this story, as you would expect, is that the driver is a dumbfuck. Or that maybe it was just his reflexes, reaction that caused it. Or that there were extenuating circumstances, etc., etc., etc.
What I did not expect was to hear was a stupid cat person defending the driver’s actions, as in, “nobody was killed and the cat presumably survived, so it all worked out in the end.” I was floored. I mean, you gotta be fucking kidding, right? Just do the math – 36 nursery school kids vs. one cat! Shit, even reverse that – 36 kittens vs. a single human being – and a normal person would opt to make kitty paste on the sidewalk every single time! No fucking question!
In the ensuing conversation, the cat person started to cry when I said she had no business driving a car. And since the cat person is a girl, her harpy friends all ganged up on me. Hey, I was just trying to drag her into the real world! They said, she is such a nice person, how could you scold her like that. And they called me a cat hater. Get your shit straight, you foul harpies. I am not a cat hater.
I am a cat-person hater. Meow that, bitches.

Amazon Anomaly

Has anyone else ever received extras in their shipment from Amazon? I ordered a couple of music CDs a while back and when they finally came a couple weeks ago in those new soft cardboard shipping sleeves that Amazon (JP) just started using, there were a couple of completely unrelated J-Pop CDs included in it (combined retail value: over 5,000 yen).
Has this ever happened to anyone else? Is god trying to make me like J-Pop?
Another huge Amazon annoyance is that half of the shit I ever order from them never comes through – first comes the e-mail that they are out of stock and the item is on backorder, then comes a message a month later that it is taking longer than expected. Finally, a few months after the initial order I receive a notice that the item is unobtainable and that Amazon is cancelling my order for it, sorry to have made you wait an entire fiscal quarter for the rest of the shit in the order, fuck you very much and have a nice day. I don’t know if this is because my taste in books is fairly obscure (Sphinctral Polyp Rituals of the West Indies) or because Amazon are a bunch of incompetent fucks, but it is irritating as hell.
Damn you, Jeff Bezos!