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And you thought cosplay was bad…
Now that I have your full attention, may I introduce: THE TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME (note: not safe for work, or anywhere else, really) And speaking of blasts from the past, I downloaded three classics from my wasted youth last night: Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Beastmaster. Together with my Hawk the Slayer DVD, I now possess the keys to Greyskull! Gandaaaalf!
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New Search Tool
Is it just me, or is Technorati hosed about 80% of the time? Anyway, I found a new blog search tool that’s proving fairly useful: Clusty the Clustering Engine Yes, I know “Clusty” sounds more like a dingleberry-infested pair of undershorts than a search site, but they’re simply running out of clever names for these things, OK?
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I’m the Corporate Directives Specialist
Go generate your very own bullshit job title for your business cards: LINK
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Shamisen vs. Turntable
This is the coolest video I’ve linked to since Keltech’s Star Wars performance. Background: LiveJam 2005 was a concert produced by NHK that aired on Coming of Age Day (now observed on the second Monday in January every year. Prior to 2000 was Jan. 15.) this year. Without further ado: DJ Kentaro vs. Shinichi “King of Shamisen” Kinoshita If somebody has information on an official CD/DVD release, please drop me a line. (via)
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Conversational Patterns
There’s an old lady who lives a few houses down from us. I usually see her when I return home from work or go out for a walk. In the five years we have known her, she has been known to talk only about one thing, the weather. – “Hot today, isn’t it?” – “Sure is cold.” – “Looks like it’s gonna rain.” – Or some small variation of the above. Even when you try to talk to her, she speaks over you about the weather. Once, I asked when Big Garbage day was, and she replied about the hot spell we were having. So I eventually gave up trying…
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500-Pound Recruit
Continuing in the vein of WWII, have you ever heard the story of Voytek? Check it out: The Iranian soldier-bear of Monte Cassino Longtime readers have often heard of my plans to create a Monkey Army when I move to Thailand. I have thought of conscripting water buffaloes and elephants as well, but I never considered bears. One thing I do know is that any bears who joined my army would not be serving as porters – can you say “6-foot, 500-pound HOPLITE?”
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Target: Sumoto
A colleague just related something that he saw on a documentary last night: During WWII, Sumoto was number 173 on a list of 180 Japanese targets to be carpet bombed by the US. Apparently, they got down to number 66 on the list (probably somewhere in Fukui prefecture) before bombing with conventional munitions was made unnecessary by Fat Man and Little Boy. It took me a while to figure out what could possibly be of military significance on this island (Awajishima) until I remembered that there was a railroad back then (the Nankai “Shima Densha”) which might seem useless since there were no bridges to the mainland yet, but when…
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Bus Otoko
I nominate Napoleon Dynamite as the worst retitled-for-Japan movie of the year. I understand why they didn’t release it in theaters here – I mean, the majority of the humor wouldn’t carry over to Japanese – but “Bus Man” is the most uninspiring name of any film I can think of.
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Sambo Revisited
A few months ago, I wrote a post about the republishing of Little Black Sambo by a Japanese publisher, and my mom left this in the comments: You used to like the pancakes at Sambo’s Restaurant, remember? All that melted “tiger-butter…it used to make me uneasy to look up at the Little Black Sambo sign and wonder how blacks felt… Ingrate that I am, I actually didn’t remember a Sambo’s Restaurant at all, and I forgot to ask my mom about it. Today I happened across a link that explains it: McDonalds, Taco Bell, and the first fast food restaurants There’s one thing though: Is it just me, or is…
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Dream Soup
Sunday, in the early morning hours, I had a dream so very real that I woke up in a cold sweat. I was riding on the Shinkansen from Los Angeles to Mexico (the first sign that this was a dream, which I realized even as I was having it) with my family. The other people on the train were mostly migrant workers, returning to their homes from a hard day in the fields. A few of them played cards on the floor, taking swigs from warm cans of Tecate and a dirty bottle of mezcal. They were kind of loud and obnoxious as drunken card-playing migrant workers on trains tend…
