The Blog From Another Dimension: The Lighter Side Archives

Jingu Gaien Fireworks

For what may be the last big fireworks show we'll see this year, Sachi and I had an excellent view. The Tokyo Bay fireworks were occluded by some building in the way (the "Jama Towers"), and we just plain missed several others. But Thursday, they had one more show over the sports stadiums over in Jingu Gaien. This one did not have any big, high-altitude bursts that grace the ending of many shows, as it was over land, not water. Still, the location was in our direct line of sight, unobstructed, and relatively close. We got a nice show out of it, sitting on our balcony and eating dinner. Here are a few images:

Like I said, they were low-altitude, so they appeared in front of tall buildings behind them. This last image has a bit of an interesting effect: remember the last scene from the first Die Hard movie where the top of Nakatomi Tower blows up?

Yippee-kiyay!

Fake Steve Jobs' Secret Identity

If you don't believe in Santa Claus and think the Easter Bunny is not real, or if you wanted to know if Harry Potter died or not before you read the last book, then you might want to know the secret identity of Fake Steve Jobs. I didn't mean to know, but those Frigtards at Engadget had to spoil it right at the top of their front page. I won't spoil it for you, but you can follow the link to the New York Times article which revealed him or her. I guess you can spoil it in the comments to this post if you want. But since I haven't read the book yet, don't tell me whether Harry Potter died or not, Bokay?

Operation: Bush

The headline today:

Bush to Undergo Colonoscopy, Hand Power to Cheney

Oh, so many jokes, so little time. Let's see: "It took them six years before Cheney would take his hand out, so someone else could put theirs in."

Add yours in the comments, if you don't mind shooting fish in a barrel.

Hide-a-Pod

Someone with a vicious sense of humor has given a solid kick in the gut to Microsoft, creating a fake website selling brown Zune casings as security disguises for your iPod or iPhone. The idea being, of course, that the thieves who would rip off your iPod or iPhone in an instant would stay miles away from you if they saw you with a brown Zune. So this imaginary entrepreneur bought scads of brown Zunes at dirt-cheap prices, primarily from kids who got them as birthday presents from clueless adults, and converted them into empty casings to hold your Apple device. Presto! No one will bother stealing your music now!

There's a lot more humor in the site which rips the Zune pretty solidly ("We leave the Zune’s wifi circuitry in place, but disconnected. It will then work just about as well with your iPod as it does with a regular Zune."), and when you try to "buy" one, the site says that it's trying to connect to Microsoft's servers... and then you get a growing list of endless error messages.

Wicked.

How Not to Use Speech Recognition

Via Fake Steve Jobs' diary, this is a pretty hilarious YouTube video of someone trying to use Vista's speech recognition to write a PERL script. As FSJ notes, it may or may not be a comic play-up of the perils of using speech-driven software. Frankly, however, I was pretty surprised at how well it seemed to react to most spoken commands; at the same time, it plays up problems that would come from using such a system, such as knowing all the specific commands necessary to navigate the system or perform certain tasks--such as making capital letters, as shown in the video. It also rather amusingly shows how human interaction habits, such as saying "thank you" when a request is fulfilled, can muck up the process. In any case, it's funny to watch. Enjoy.

Sugishima's Revenge

You may recall a while back I explained that the phone number I have had for about four years now was previously held by some pinhead named Sugishima. This self-promoting wonder apparently gave his name and number (now my number) to about a gazillion people, and then when he moved, he didn't tell a single one of them about it. So when I got this number, I got endless calls for this guy, as many as a dozen per week at its worst. I figured it would taper off, but for six months or so, it just went on and on. I guess it never quite reached the threshold where I felt like going through the hassle of changing my phone number and telling everyone of the change. It eventually dropped off to one call a month, close enough to background noise, but still it rankled me every time it happened. Over the past year, the calls for Sugishima got even more rare.

Now, I am about to move, and leave this damned number behind me. But it is almost as if the Curse of Sugishima knows this: in the past week, I have gotten four calls for him, the latest one waking me up early this morning.

I have the sneaking suspicion that on the very last day before they disconnect this phone line, I will get a call. The person on the line will say: "Hi, this is Sugishima. Were there any calls for me?"

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Saw this over at Pharyngula, and it's just too good not to spread around. Enjoy.

Now I Get It

This story just out:

Former U.S. AID director Randall Tobias, who resigned yesterday upon admitting that he frequented a Washington escort service, oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any US-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution "loyalty oath."

I think I understand conservatives now. I mean, just look at it. Newt Gingrich attacks Bill Clinton for having an affair while Newt Gingrich is having an affair. Most of the family-values Republicans have had multiple divorces where they committed adultery. Any number of anti-gay religious leaders, like Ted Haggard, have turned out to be gay. Bush condemns Democrats for delaying soldiers' return home, and the next day his administration extends tours of duty from 12 months to 15 months.

Isn't it obvious? When conservatives say something is bad, when they attack someone for doing something they see as wrong, it's because they are doing it. It's guilt talking. When conservatives do something they see as wrong or immoral, they feel the need to assign that guilt. Unable to take responsibility for what they see as their own shortcomings, they assign the blame and guilt to others.

This makes understanding the public statements of conservatives so much easier. Bush accuses Democrats of losing the war--see, Bush is not stupid, he does realize he's losing the war! Now that makes sense! Giuliani says that if a Democrat becomes president, the country will be more open to terrorist attack--of course! How could Giuliani not see that Republicans have botched the war on terror? And this theory totally explains Bill O'Reilly!

Go ahead, apply this theory to the conservative figure of your choice. If there's no record yet of their having done the wrongs they're complaining about, you know where to dig now!

Not Fed by The People

We keep the older fake stuff in the back.

Sadly, There Is No Prison Sentence for Not Getting It

Tourism officials in England are trying to stir popularity for the Lake District by taking poems by William Wordsworth, changing them and setting them to rap music, and then having it all performed by a guy in a giant squirrel outfit named "MC Nuts."

I swear to god, you could not make this shit up.

According to a tourism official:

Wordsworth's Daffodils poem has remained unchanged for 200 years and to keep it alive for another two more centuries we wanted to engage the YouTube generation who want modern music and amusing video footage on the web.

Hopefully, this will help them connect with poetry, the works of Wordsworth and the stunning landscape of the Lake District which inspired him.

It is more likely that the YouTube generation will connect with the floor as they laugh uncontrollably at the morons who put this together. If you watch the video, you can barely even make out the words due to the overdone reverb effect. (As if that were the biggest problem with the entire concept.)

True, this is getting the Lake District a certain amount of media attention--but it is getting that attention less as a popular tourist destination, and a bit more as a laughingstock. Attempting to fuse classic poetry with rap music and a guy in a squirrel suit? Maybe that made sense after a dozen beers at the local pub, but you would imagine that they would have sobered up enough in the time required to get the thing on video and post it on the web. I mean, seriously, check these guys out for psychedelic drug abuse, or possibly terminal idiocy.

The video ends with the words "Respect Wordsworth" flashed across the screen. A bit too late for that, I'd say.

How Many Can You Name?

Kinuk in Poland linked to a fun little web page game about a month ago: in ten minutes, see how many of the 50 states in the U.S. you can list, or how many of the 192 U.N.-recognized nations you can type. As you can see from the image below, I got all 50 states with 1:12 to go--but in all fairness, (a) I am an American, and (b) this is a game I've done before whenever I'm bored an it occurs to me--maybe I do it once every few years. But this web page offers a much more organized way of playing the game than pen and paper.

The web page is well done; you don't have to capitalize correctly, but you do have to spell exactly (so Massachusetts might waste some time for you). You don't even have to hit a button or type "Enter"; when you complete the name, it's automatically added to the list and the text box is cleared for the next one. You can type the states in any order you like, and they will appear on the page alphabetically.

The 192-nations list is harder, and is not as much a test of memory as it is a typing- and spelling-skills test. With the U.S. game, I got 45 in 5 minutes, and so could take my time with the remaining few. With the U.N. game, I was still typing away when time ran out. Twenty minutes for the U.N. game would be a much better challenge.

Another problem with the U.N. game is that it is not just unforgiving with spelling (you try spelling "Herzegovina" or "Kyrgyzstan"!) but also with the exact full naming of nations, like the "Democratic Republic of the Congo," "Saint Vincent and the Grenadines" (not, as commonly thought, a 50's singing group), or "Antigua and Barbuda." You lose a lot of time trying to name the more difficult ones (it must be "Bosnia and Herzegovina," not hyphenated, and not given separately), or remembering how their names have changed since you last studied Geography in high school or college.

So I wound up with an unrespectable 78 out of 192. Among the names I left out but shouldn't have were Belgium, Angola, El Salvador, Haiti, Iceland, Kenya, Nepal, Singapore, Turkey, Portugal, and Ireland (though I was typing that last one when I got cut off by the clock). I did get Tuvalu, Djibouti, Mauritania, and Kazakhstan, so I'm not a complete loser. Given 20 minutes, I probably would have gotten more like 120 to 130, I am guessing. Not stellar, but then, I am guessing that it would be a better score than your average American would get. The average international citizen, I'm not so sure.

Since you're not going to get all the 192 nations anyway, it's also a matter of strategy. Had I been more prepared for the exact-spelling and democratic-republic-of-the-one-state-and-the-other stuff, I could have done much better. Focus on the easy-to-spell nations and leave the others off your list. If you're not 100% sure you know how to spell it, then forget it. That should help a lot.

In any case, a fun and educational diversion when you have some free time.

Never Better, Boss

I bought this T-Shirt near Meguro today:

If anyone wants to wear this on a tour of the White House, let me know...

That's Kinky

For a very long time, there's been this travel services company based in the Kinki region of Japan, called Kinki Nippon Tourist. I remember hearing about this organization way back to my early days in college, when my classmates and I would laugh at the name. "Kinki" is one of those Japanese words/names which was homonymous with an unfortunate English word, like the Japanese word for "poor" ("bimbo") or "city" (borrowed from English, but pronounced "shiti"). The name "Kinki Nippon Tourist" was even more unfortunate in terms of the overall image from the whole name--especially since the company provides a lot of services to English-speaking travelers.

So you would think that, even if they decided not to change the name, they would be extra-cautious about making further unfortunate choices in names for themselves. You would think that, but apparently either they just haven't learned the lesson, or are intentionally aiming to make English speakers laugh. Why? Because, as evidenced by the photo below of a train ad from Kinki Nippon Tourist (or from the top left of their web page), they have decided to use the initials from their company's name as their logo.

That's right: they decided to go with "KNT!" as their shorthand name. I mean, really. A company named "Kinki Nippon Tourist" should know better than that.

Or maybe they just never bothered to figure out what all the snickering foreigners were on about.

Do They Count Porn in Trade Deficits?

I am not all that certain about the source, but the claim is quite interesting: that online porn garnered $97 billion in revenue last year. Apparently, the United States is the leading producer, but is not the leading consumer: Asia supposedly accounts for the top three customers--China, South Korea, and Japan--buying $71.3 billion's worth, or 75% of all porn bought online. America comes in a distant fourth, buying a paltry $13.3 billion. "Every second $3,075.64 is spent on pornography, 28,258 Internet users view pornography and 372 Internet users type adult search terms into search engines," and the total revenue from porn is greater than that produced by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined.

I read about this on IMDB's Studio Briefing, but am very dubious of the report. It comes as a press release from a commercial web site that reviews and sells products, and which promotes itself shamelessly in the press release. Undoubtedly they were counting on the outrageous nature of the report to get a lot of free publicity and links into their site (which is why I will not link to them or any site which does so). Ergo, one should treat the "facts" in the report with great suspicion.

In the meantime, maybe I should put that new video camera to good use... $97 billion, eh?

Housing Options for the Dead

This was one of the many fliers unceremoniously crammed into my mailbox. It's an ad for a new condominium that has become available for purchase.

Apparently, you can take it with you!

New Letters

Hm. The Straight Dope can be pretty interesting sometimes. I had no idea that the letter "W" was only 400 years old, or that "I" and "J" as well as "U" and "V" were not distinct letters until only around 300 years ago. I mean, I've seen the chiseled word "MVSEVM" ("moov-zeevum," as Steve Martin pronounced it), but thought that was just stylistic. And I've heard a lot about the letter "J" being an "I" in old names, but thought that it went much farther back than just three centuries.

I still love Dan Aykroyd's "Metric Alphabet," or "Decabet." For people who thought "LMNO" was just one letter anyway. ("Please LMNOpen the door!")

Frack

The one day.

The one day when I am able to sleep in. When I have been getting only four or five hours' sleep for the past week. As if it's not hard enough to stay asleep when they have construction going on in my building's parking lot (why always early on a weekend? It's dead quiet weekday mornings).

But the one day I can sleep all I want... That's when the Jesus freak comes to my door early in the morning and rings the doorbell. Now with all the construction noise that I could have slept through, I have zero chance of getting back to sleep.

That does it. I'm worshipping Xenu from now on. At least his adherents let you get a good night's sleep once in a while.

Jury Duty

One of the bloggers at This Modern World got called in for jury duty, and that reminded me: so did I. That is to say that my father informed me on Skype that I got a notice in the mail telling me that I'd have to show up.

Fine with me, so long as they fork over the airfare.

It's pretty interesting, but I guess that they don't necessarily have a way of telling whether someone on the absentee ballot list is permanently residing overseas or if they're just traveling abroad temporarily.

This is the second time I've been called in for jury duty--and the second time that my location has gotten me out of it. The first time it happened, I was called in to appear just a week or so after my planned move to another county. When I called the courthouse to tell them about this, the person at the other end joked, "Some people will do anything to get out of jury duty!"

Well, this time it's not so close a call--I've been living in Japan for eight years straight (or will have been in two months), so nobody can accuse me of fleeing the country to avoid forty bucks a day.

Quick Vid

Go check out the YouTube video Paul found. It's a hilarious Conan O'Brien piece. Yes, I know, I could embed it here myself. But Paul found it, and you should check out his blog anyway.

Always When You're Not Ready for It

When I left home this morning, I knew it might rain tonight, so I wanted to keep the bulk of my backpack down. So I decided not to take my digital camera with me, figuring that there would not be anything worth photographing, anyway.

Soon after leaving home, traffic on a one-lane avenue was stalled. I was annoyed until I got around the bend in the road and saw what the problem was--and then I wished I had brought my camera. A truck carrying large boxes of toilet paper had lost a case. Ever see a road teepeed? Now I have. At the point of impact, the asphalt was half-carpeted in white. Better yet, it happened just as the road sloped down a hill, so rolls of toilet paper leaving long, white trails behind them streaked the road all the way to the bottom. All this as the truck's two occupants scrambled to pick everything up.

I gotta start bringing my camera with me wherever I go. Or at least get a cheap second camera that'll fit into a pocket.

Addendum: By the way, 1300 days of nonstop blogging today.

Joy of Tech

I agree with TUAW, nobody does it better. A great Vista comic from The Joy of Tech.

Macs in Atlantis

I was kind of surprised to hear this Apple reference in a Sci-Fi TV show, and more surprised that no one on the Mac sites seemed to catch it. It was in an episode of Stargate: Atlantis, in an episode where a civilization's re-emergence was delayed by a computer malfunction:

Herick: Defeat was expected, but the computer was supposed to extract me automatically. In order to restore the others.

McKay: Unfortunately, the computer froze. It was completely locked up. Probably should have used a Mac.

Indeed!

Do You Think That's Really Necessary?

I saw something on the road last night that made me smack myself for not having my digital camera with me. There was some road construction going on, and so they had a setup to warn people at a distance, so they would merge right and not hit the construction area.

Now, you might not think that would be worthy of taking a photo and blogging on it. But this warning display was different. It consisted of a vertical array of electronic lights that easily reached 25 feet in height, and was at least 10 feet across. This was nighttime, so it all stood out like a sore thumb. There were orange lights arrayed across the bottom. Above that was one of those electronic message boards that scrolls messages across from one side to the other. Above that were giant yellow arrow chevrons, animated to point you to the right. Above that were flashing yellow "rollers," the kind seen atop police cars in red and blue (and in Japan, often used outside gas stations). And to top it all off, at the zenith of the sign there were two big bright red circles, divided into pie slices, with the slices turning on and off in a rotating fashion--the one on the left going clockwise, the one on the right going counter-clockwise.

I mean, talk about overdoing it.

But that's not even the funny part. Here we had this gigantic sign, visible from a mile away, flashing and moving and gyrating all to hell, almost blinding you with its brilliant warning. And at the bottom of the sign, invisible until you got fairly close, was the ubiquitous guy whose job it was to wave a little red baton back and forth.

I laughed so hard I almost had to pull over.

Former State of the Union

Bush is scheduled to give his penultimate state of the union speech a little more than a week from now. As a preview, I thought you might like this speech of his from a previous year. The speech is abridged in hindsight to reveal his actual meaning as revealed by his actions since the speech.

Quantum Junction

Saw this photo floating around the Internet and loved it. Don't know its original source--can't even make out the web site imprint at the top, even if that were the originating site. But whoever made it had a great scientific sense of humor.

This comes in a close second as the funniest quantum physics joke I've heard of. Number one, of course, is from Futurama, where Professor Farnsworth's horse comes in second in a "quantum finish"; Farnsworth exclaims, "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!" (sound file via Got Futurama.)

Future Watch

Wanting to check out a story recently, I went to CNN's transcript page, and found a preview of news from 4,200 years in the future (date circled in red). Man, that Michael Richards is going to hang around for a long time--and after more than four millennia, you'd think that he'd learn not to rant anymore.

King & Tall No Longer

I got a pleasant surprise when I went in to get measured for new slacks today: I lost more inches than I had thought. I used to have to get 100 cm trousers, and though they have been fairly loose for some time now, I thought I would only go down to 97's. But when I got measured at the store, I was told to try some 94's--which meant I had to go down two floors, as their oversized department (97 cm and higher, in Japan) didn't have any. I was even worried that the 94's would be too tight, but they weren't. Huh. Go figure.

Uncyclopedia

If you like Wikipedia, you might want to check out its twin, Uncyclopedia. It is a parody of Wiki, and can be pretty entertaining if you happen upon the right article. Naturally, as WikiComedy, its efficacy is much spottier than Wikipedia, and some entries look like they were written by a ten-year-old (and probably were). A few excerpts from better entries:

Japan (lit. land of wind and ghosts) is the nation that is on the other side of the world, if you live in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. If you live in China, it's quite close. If you live in Japan, just look out of the window. If you live in Japan and do not have a window, you can make a small one by poking your finger through a wall.

God (born Herschel Godstein) is that cool dude wearing white robes and a long beard that you most possibly meet when you die (although it has been unconfirmed because life on heaven is so beautiful everybody who dies doesn't want to write back). He can be mean sometimes, like in the Bible, but he's a chill guy most part of his time. He was elected to be our god for the 2006th year running this year, barely beating the Egyptian sun god Ra, Omnipotent Odin, and the Almighty Zeus (still recovering from alcoholism).

Sir Isaac Newton was born Iszaak Nűton in 1621 as a fully formed super-human genius, quoting mathematical formulas and measuring his own velocity as he exited his mother's womb. Seriously. You think you're pretty smart because you managed to open that bag of chips without spilling it all over? Isaac Newton was, like, a kabazillion times smarter, though admittedly, he was no Einstein. Nűton was expelled from Hungary to England in his youth for having an overly pronounceable name, and spent his entire life in Engerland to discover the formula "Black Man" + "Basketball" = "White Girl."

Though sometimes, shades of truth break in while still performing as satire:

Hell is a place made up by the Roman Catholic Church during the 1400s. A fictional place invented to punish beyond death, with exemption for those who obeyed the RCC's every whim. Before, control was difficult, the most you could threaten being death, which generally occured at or before puberty anyway.

There are also dubious claims that Jerry Springer is the president of Djibouti, dogs are not as stupid as they look, and Ronald Reagan was named after an airport in Washington D.C. As I mentioned, there is a strong crap-to-quality ratio, but if you're willing to wade through the bad stuff, there is entertainment to be found.

Not Something You Hear Everyday

"Giant squid are a major source of food for sperm whales." [Source]

Oh.

Now That Takes Patience

Not to mention talent. Via Cosmic Buddha, here's a YouTube posting of a video made by two guys who went crazy with stop-motion animation of themselves. Some of the stuff in this video is pretty mind-blowing, making you wonder how the hell they achieved all of that.

My guess: they used a standard video camera, and simply pulled individual frames out of the sequence, and made a "stop-motion" animation from those selected frames.

Translation Fun

My sister in law, in describing an Amazon.co.jp order on her blog, posted about automatic web page translation software and the shaky job it does. That reminded me of something I discovered a while ago; I posted this as a comment to her blog, but thought it was blog-worthy in and of itself.

Here's a fun game: open the Mac translation widget (or, equivalently, go to any translation web site), and type in an English sentence to be translated into Japanese. Then reverse the translation (a single-button action in the Mac widget). Then reverse again, and again, and again. Sometimes the translation gets stuck and won't change, but usually it will change into something new and more and more bizarre each time.

I tried it with this sentence:

"The heater in my apartment room works wonderfully in getting the place nice and toasty."

After one round, it became:

"The heater of my apartment room the place is splendid, toasty works splendidly by the fact that you obtain."

Next time around:

"The heater of my apartment room the place element clear forcing and toasty job does nicely with the fact which you obtain."

Then:

"The heater of my apartment room does clear forcing and toasty job of the element of fact and the place where you obtain securely."

Then:

"The heater of my apartment room fact and removes forcing of the element of the place where you obtain securely and toasty job."

Several iterations later:

"You force the element of the place where you obtain securely because of the heater of fact of my apartment room toasty job which it removes."

You get the idea. Fun for the family!

Canary Obligations

This is weird. I have a blog entry from December 2003 where I put up some photos of my dad's canaries. I made no claims about canary expertise, and made it clear that they were not my canaries. And yet, since then, I have been getting comments from people--most from people with Arabic-sounding names--asking for canary stuff, as if I were a canary go-to guy or something. The comments include:

I WANT FHOTO CANARY FOR BREEDING AND AECHIVES ALBOM
THANK U.   ["Masoud"]

visit [my] site and write me a letter showing me where the canaries live.    ["Meshari"]

Please send me picture and article Kingstroat and Backsrtoat breedings, thank'c (Indonesia)   ["Anjar Siswanto"]

My canary is sick. I'm to give him 3cc of liquid antibiotic two times a day. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks! G   ["Georgianna"]

In the comments, I replied to these, saying that I know nothing about canaries, they are not mine, I don't have regular access to them and so on. But the weird comments keep on coming. Just a few minutes ago, another came in from "Rashid":

hi please send me photo by canary
thanks you.

All part of the risks of blogging on random stuff.

How to Scare the Crap out of Aliens

In a publicity move (it's working, people like me are talking about it), KFC has created an image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert near Area 51; the image is big enough, they claim, to be visible from space:

The KFC Corp. on Tuesday launched a rebranding campaign with an 87,500 square-foot image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert which the company says makes Kentucky Fried Chicken the world's first brand visible from space.

"If there are extraterrestrials in outer space, KFC wants to become their restaurant of choice," KFC President Gregg Dedrick said in a statement.

Har! That's funny! Do you feel like getting some lard-saturated poultry for dinner now?

So as not to be a total shill for a Pepsi subsidiary, a guy once told me that Colonel Sanders was a pederast.

I also am told that the above is a publicity stunt pulled off by General Zorg's Cydonian Fried Thoats.

Mmmm... thoats.

Mutations Can Be Fun

How could you not love fainting goats?

Call me insensitive, call me cruel to animals... but the sight of these goats flipping on their backs with all four feet straight up in the air like some cartoon, I just love it. The goats are no worse for wear; it can happen to them even if they are excited by a call to eat, and they recover after a few seconds, getting back up no worse for wear.

The mutation in the goats causes them to have an exaggerated startle reflex which stiffens all their legs when they get excited. The older, more experienced goats learn to simply brace themselves upright, while the younger goats topple sideways or upside down, all four legs woodenly splayed. This causes the bizarre-looking reaction where a herd of goats, being startled by an opening umbrella or the like, begin to bolt for a split second--then all goats, as if on cue, simultaneously freeze, half of them standing, half of them toppling.

According to the breeders, the goats cannot startle each other--they mate, butt heads, and do general roughhousing just fine.

Asteroid Impact: Averted

Got the from FG, who got it elsewhere. It's a spoof on a computer animation released in Japan, showing what would happen if a large asteroid hit the earth in a rather devastating way. The original video is somewhat devastating to watch, but the spoof showing how to avert the disaster is hilarious. Enjoy.

Somebody Noticed

About a year and a half ago, I blogged on a new Sapporo Beer product called "Slims," which bore the motto, "The new type of tasty draft brew. More flavor, with fewer less calories."

Well, somebody noticed the error, apparently. The new can now reads:

It is true, the brew is no longer new. Also, it seems, with not as much flavor.

You see this kind of thing all over Japan, of course. Sometimes it's really good (like the "off sale" signs, or the misspelled "in" sign I saw), but more often it takes the form of very mildly off-kilter English, like with these items:

Not especially funny, but certainly strange enough to remind you that you're in a country where English is not the native language.

And then there are some errors that you have to look at carefully to see, like with this bite-sized cheese snack:

From camels, perhaps?

And then, there's the just plain goofy names they think up, like for this chocolate snack:

And yes, I know that on this package of Hello Kitty Macaroni, that Kitty is supposed to be giving the thumbs-up. However, from the first time I saw it, it really, really looked to me like she was giving everyone the finger.

Food for thought.

Arrr

Alas, I doubt that my Japanese students would have understood had I tried it with them.

Willie Nelson Arrested for Drug Use

The news headline tonight, Willie Nelson Cited for Drug Possession.

The police figured this out just now?

Stewart and Colbert

If you didn't see the Emmys, or you just missed John Stewart and Stephen Colbert presenting the award for Best Reality/Competition Show, then watch it here at Crooks & Liars. It's excellent.

By the way, via Oxford's... Pablum: noun (also pabulum): bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment, etc.; pap.

I know it was clear in context, but still.

Don't Download This Song

It had to happen, of course. "Weird Al" Yankovic has produced a song, complete with animated video, that parodies the whole RIAA anti-piracy battle, titled "Don't Download This Song." Of course, in true Weird Al style, the song is downloadable from the page, in MP3 format. Not being too hip on major releases (or pop music in general), I don't know if the song is an original by Yankovic or if it's a parody of someone else's, though it does seem to smack a little bit of one of those "We Are the World" kind of songs.

Yankovic hits on the RIAA and their legal tactics in these lyrics: "You don't want to mess with the R-I-Double-A; They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R; It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a 7-year-old girl; They'll treat you like the evil, hard-bitten criminal scum you are!" He later makes fun of the relative minor infraction of downloading versus the huge amount of money artists make, though in truth, that should be targeted against the fact that downloads hit not the artists (who make more money from tours), but the even more ludicrously rich recording labels, who are themselves parasitic on the artists.

I love the ending, especially each line's after-shout, as the song fades out:

Don't download this song (No, no no no no, no no noooo!)
You'll burn in hell before too long (And you deserve it!)
And buy the CD (Just buy it!)
Like you know that you should (You cheap bastard!)
Oh, don't download this song!

I won't ruin the rest of the song for you, it's pretty good. Just listen--and do download that song! And remember Tommy!

All Too True

For Real Mac Evangelists

If you don't know the Mac, you might not get this. Nod to TUAW.

You Gotta Love a Living Language

Verbing proper nouns, via Google News:

Why They Won't Ask the Hard Questions

Here's a YouTube post of a segment from The Colbert Report, where Colbert takes the morning news shows to task. Two such shows had bits on Colbert making politicians look bad, and they both asked the question, why would politicians be so stupid as to go on to a show that would ask them questions that could make them look bad?

GOOD MORNING AMERICA'S JAKE TAPPER: But with the reputation-damaging risk associated with an appearance on The Colbert Report, why do politicians keep going on the show?

TODAY SHOW'S MATT LAUER: And yet they keep on coming!
CO-HOST: Why? Why?
LAUER: They think they're being hip, I don't know.

Underlying that question is a dark truth about journalism today: no one on television, radio, or in the print media is willing to ask hard questions to politicians for fear of the politicians avoiding them. They are unwilling to ask questions that might stump the politicians or make them look bad, and when the politician is obviously lying or is avoiding answering a question, they let them get away with it. It also shows up the unwillingness of most politicians to face the public in a setting where their hypocrisy or ignorance could be revealed.

Watching Colbert's segment with the "news" people saying what they said makes this fact evident; they are clearly stumped as to why any politician would appear when the interviewer is not some emasculated softball-thrower. Although Colbert did not mention this aspect of it specifically, the subtext is frighteningly--and comically--clear. And you gotta admit, it's huge fun to see Colbert get Robert Wexler to say, "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do!" and to see Colbert absolutely destroy Lynn Westmoreland by pointing out that he was pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in the House and Senate--and then asking him to name the Ten Commandments. Westmoreland could only get out three.

Maybe part of the reason the politicians agree to go on the show is that they think they'll be treated with kid gloves, like with most interviewers. Now, Wexler seems to be pretty hip here--he knew what was going on and easily could have refused or sidestepped Colbert's request--other politicians have done so. But Westmoreland appears to have had no clue as to what he was getting himself into. And that's probably why most people, not just politicians, agree to appear in segments on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show: because they simply don't know what they're in for. The shows are popular, but not so popular (especially with certain segments of the population) that a lot of people who agree to appear don't know what they're agreeing to. That these people tend to be un-hip and often clueless just makes it funnier.

Evaluating the Veracity of a Source

All researchers, students as well as professional scholars, need to assess the quality of any work scrupulously before using and citing it. ... Not all sources are equally reliable or of equal quality. In reading and evaluating potential sources, you should not assume that something is truthful or trustworthy just because it appears in print or is on the Internet.

--MLA Handbook, 1.6.1

I teach this to my students, and try to follow it myself, of course. Whenever possible, I cite reliable and non-biased information sources. When I have no other choice, I will cite a biased source if the information given is otherwise verifiable, else I note the bias of the source inline. Once, I almost published a blog post on Michael Jackson commenting that Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory totally creeped him out, before I realized that the source I was relying on was a satire site. So I can almost understand the reason why this guy made such a stupid mistake:

Here are some quotes from a pro-abortion person, Miss Caroline Weber, who wrote an article at The Onion online magazine.

Okay, see his problem already? Now, maybe this guy is just not all that cool, so he doesn't recognize the most popular satire web site on the Internet. You might think that he himself is doing satire, but a close read of the blog entry and the site in general show that this guy is not running a satire site, and the post takes the Onion article completely seriously.

As I said, I almost fell for that Michael Jackson story, but I think I had better excuses. First of all, the story I almost fell for was listed in Google News, and did not at that time bear the "satire" label it was supposed to. Second, criticizing Johnny Depp in that role would be exactly the kind of stupid thing you'd expect a nutball like Michael Jackson to do. And third, I started writing the post based on the headline and first paragraph--often written to appear legitimate so as to make the creeping takeoff funnier--and realized it was satire as I read on. This anti-abortion fellow has no such excuse. After all, even if he didn't recognize The Onion as a satire rag in the first place, you'd think he'd catch on when he hit sentences like this one:

I've got an abortion to plan, and I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!

But nope, he didn't get it. In fact, he put that quote up at the top of his post as evidence that pro-choice advocates love abortion.

Of course, maybe this guy actually is doing satire. Maybe he wrote this blog for an entire year as if he were really an ardent pro-lifer just to set up for this one post. Maybe.

Or maybe this is simply indicative of how clueless right-to-lifers can be, and how their devotion to faith above all else severely atrophies their sense of reason. Maybe.

Nevertheless, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy, in a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sense. He's now getting hammered with derisive comments, and so far has not commented back or made any note of his error. I think that not so many people saw it until just now--the post had 52 comments when I first saw it about an hour ago, and now it's up to 67; he probably hasn't had the chance to see any of it yet. I halfway expect he'll simply take down the post when he checks his blog next time and sees all the comments. In that eventuality, I've archived the post, just in case.

Tip of the hat to Pharyngula, who got it from someone else.

Update: Well, the guy came back to his site, and responded. The response shows he's even more clueless than ever. He still seems to think that the Onion article was real; he put the word "satire" in quotes to emphasize that he doesn't quite believe it, and continues to address the Onion's "author" by name, assuming it is a real person voicing a real view. He then goes on to claim he's the one who's smart here, saying the joke's on everyone else, because he meets "women like her in the field all the time."

He then relays a conversation where he recounts a "woman" in the "field" who approved of infanticide, according to his (apparently photographically recalled) retelling of the conversation. One can take his portrayal with as large a grain of salt as one wishes; I have heard this claim by many, many pro-lifers. They will tell you that they have met a large number of women at protests who approve of strangling newborn babies and so forth. Strange that I've talked to a lot of people on the pro-choice side and I've never met anyone even close to that, nor have I met anyone who has met anyone like that--apparently they are invisible to everyone except right-to-lifers. Not that such crazies don't exist, but frankly, I doubt that this guy really met someone like that, or that the conversation--if it even took place--went anything like what he wrote. Also, to (a) claim that such a person would be in any way representative of the pro-choice movement, or (b) to claim that this excuses his inability to recognize clear satire, is, shall we say, pro-stupid.

Just for Fun

Something I cooked up in Photoshop.

Big Daddy

A bit more than a decade ago, I was walking from class to the student union on the SFSU campus when someone handed me a booklet, maybe two inches tall by four inches wide. Curious as to what it was, I took it and checked it out. I still have it today. Not because I think it's an exceptionally good booklet, but because I think it is an exceptionally bad one. The booklet, in comic form, was titled "Big Daddy?" and featured on its cover a gorilla chomping on a banana. Inside, a fat, balding, elitist liberal professor teaches a class full of brainwashed students about evolution. One student stands up and challenges the teacher, eventually "proving" evolution wrong and converting the students and the teacher to Christianity.

Here are a few pages from the cartoon booklet, as reprinted in 2002 (the illustrations and text are the same; some web-based footnotes have been added):

Notice how almost all the students are ethnic--Black, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic--or are women--and the Christian looks like he could have come straight from the Hitler Youth. The "argument" that the teacher uses to "prove" evolution, as well as other materials attributed to modern science, are little more than creationist straw men. The blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian boy winds up by stating that since gluons are "a made-up dream," God therefore must be the force holding protons together in the nucleus of atoms, citing Colossians 1:17 as proof. Take that, Darwin!

It seemed obvious to me that this guy is a rather standard creationist drumbeater, and the illustrations in this particular booklet have rather uncomfortable racial overtones. The author is Jack T. Chick, a Baptist evangelical who writes these cartoon "tracts" and other fundie publications for a living. He's the kind of guy who abhors being so politically correct as to give respect to other religions, and seems to take particular umbrage against Islam and Catholicism (which he accuses of, among other things, grand conspiracies such as starting the Civil War, creating the Ku Klux Klan, inventing Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Unitarianism, Christian Science, and other religious groups, and assassinating Lincoln).

He also pulls some funny stuff, like disproving Islam by pointing out "scientific errors in the Qur'an," where he shows up Islam by pointing to a scripture that claimed that the sun set in a "spring of murky water," and that this came from the Islamic belief that the world was flat. This, of course, is in contrast to little things like Noah putting one pair of each of the million or so species of animals on earth (not counting fish) onto a 450-foot ark, or how Christians believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. Or how about when Mark says that "the stars of heaven shall fall"? In several places in the New Testament, stars are referred to as things that can fall to Earth. And so on.

But enough ragging on this guy; it's like shooting fish in a barrel. The thing is, this guy is not atypical of creationists. Every once in a while I come across the tract in my belongings and get a good chuckle out of it.

More to the Point, What Was the Viagra For?

Turns out that it's "unethical and illegal" in Florida for a doctor to make a prescription out to themselves and then hand them off to a patient. Limbaugh got two doctors to do this for him, so his lawyer claims.

People are also pointing out that Rush, a divorced, hardcore conservative, presumably with strong beliefs against extra-marital sex, was detained upon returning from the Dominican Republic, well-known for its illicit sex trade (including human trafficking), with Viagra. So he's not married, there's no girlfriend going with him, and he needs Viagra in a country with a vibrant sex trade. Hmmm... From the AP:

Limbaugh joked about the search on his radio show Tuesday, saying Customs officials didn't believe him when he said he got the pills at the Clinton Library and he was told they were blue M&Ms. He later added, chuckling: "I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it."

I wonder why he can't. This Rush caller, however, had a clue, slipping in a comment on the sex trade in the Dominican Republic, which Rush carefully ignored.

Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh... the top figures in conservative punditry.

Futurama Will Be Back!

It is now official, Comedy Central has commissioned Fox Entertainment to produce 13 new episodes of Futurama! The series is scheduled to come back sometime in 2008. Naturally, I'd love to see it back earlier and with more episodes per season (what is up with that baloney, anyway? 13 episodes? Hey, Cable TV, grow a pair, willya?), but any new Futurama is going to be good Futurama. All the original cast and crew have signed on to return.

Not to say they didn't see it coming: when the last episode of Futurama aired, the opening subtitle gag read: "See You on Some Other Channel."

And so it will be.

By the way: if you want a little fix now, see this Futurama-animated commercial for "An Inconvenient Truth," voiced by Billy West, John DiMaggio, and Al Gore ("Yes, I play a streetwise pimp with a hybrid pimpmobile").

Now, That's a Cat!

Last Sunday, a New Jersey tabby, and a highly territorial one, spotted an intruder in his yard. So, hissing and spitting, Jack the cat treed the intruder. Usually, you hear about dogs treeing cats. Well, this cat treed a bear. Twice. The cat's owners had to call the cat inside in order to let the poor bear escape. But not before a neighbor photographed the spectacle.

Colbert College

Some quotes by Stephen Colbert giving the commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. on Saturday:

But I guess the question is, why have a two-time commencement loser like me speak to you today?  Well, one of the reasons they already mentioned...I recovered from that slow start. And I was recently named by Time magazine one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World! Yeah! Give it up for me! Basic cable...THE WORLD! I guess I have more fans in Sub-Saharan Africa than I thought. I’m right here on the cover between Katie Couric and Bono. That’s my little picture—a sexy little sandwich between those two.

But if you do the math, there are 100 Most Influential People in the World. There are 6.5 billion people in the world. That means that today I am here representing 65 million people. That’s as big as some countries. What country has about 65 million people? Iran? Iran has 65 million people. So, for all intents and purposes, I’m here representing Iran today. Don’t shoot. ...

Also globalization, e-mail, cell phones interconnect our nations like never before. It is possible for even the most insulated American to have friends from all over the world. For instance, I recently received an e-mail asking me to help a deposed Nigerian prince who is looking for a business partner to recuperate his fortune. Thanks to the flexibility of global banking, a Swiss bank account is ready and waiting for my share of his money. I know, because I just e-mailed him my Social Security number. ...

And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spanish, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.

So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me. ...

I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat.

Videos of Colbert are available on YouTube.

Namibia, Birthplace of the Stars

In the southern African country of Namibia, where Jolie & Pitt had their celebrity baby, a newspaper went out on the street to collect citizen reactions to the event. It could just as well have been in The Onion:

BEATHA NATHANIEL, Systems Analyst "I think it's really great that they're marketing our country. I'm sure other actors would like to have their babies here as well."	KADIRI MUSA, Merchant "I guess they read the report about how the U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than Namibia's."	ISAAC PETRUS, Senior Account Executive "They should go in the Guinness Book of Records for being the first Hollywood couple to have a baby in Namibia."

Believe it or not, only one of those quotes is made up. I got the name and occupation for the fake one from a Nigerian scam email I got sent.

Five Years

There's a news report making the rounds about a team of researchers who claim that they will be able to produce an "invisibility cloak," or a "cloaking device," depending on whether you like Harry Potter or Star Trek more. The idea is that a "metamaterial" ("self-referential material"? Material that refers to itself?) will take light from one side of an object and bring it around to the other, as if it passed through the object. Thus, the cloaked object would be invisible--and not just to the eye. Light beyond the visible range as well as sound could also be warped to hide something.

Needless to say, I am taking this report with a grain of salt so big that nothing could cloak it. First of all, stories like this surface in the press every few months or so. Researchers somewhere claim that they're working on something amazing, and they're not too far from success in developing it. Usually it's a clean, cheap, and plentiful new power source, but almost as often it's some amazing gadget based on a startling new principle. The thing is, you always see news stories about these claims that they're on the brink of getting the thing... but you never hear of them again, there's never a report that they actually did it. See, that's the gold standard I'm waiting for: show me the money. Show me an actual cloaking device, and I'll be amazed. Tell me one is in the offing, just you wait, and I'll interpret that as another Brooklyn Bridge deal. Especially when you use words like "metamaterial."

But the real tell was in the details of the story:

He added that a cloaking material might not take long to develop, assuming there is sufficient research.

"If there is adequate funding, I'd have thought it would take in the order of five years," he said.

"Five years." Those are the magic words. (Not to mention "in the order of.") You see, I once heard an engineer say that when a project is vaporware and the team has no idea whatsoever when the thing will be finished, if even at all, any question about when the project will be finished will be answered: "It's five years away." Somehow five years is the magic amount of time. Some engineer apparently figured that five years was just close enough to sound promising, but just far enough away to allow for something to intervene by the time the deadline came up. Or people would just forget by then. I mean, really, if these "cloaking device" guys come up with nothing in five years, will you actually remember and say aloud, "Hey! Where's that cloaking device we were promised?"

Of course, the second tell was when he said the words "adequate funding." That's kind of a giveaway. Actually, it turns out that another team claimed that they were working on a cloaking device a few months ago. All this sounds like perpetual researchers vying for money from gullible people (like Dilbert's "Vijay, the World's Most Desperate Venture Capitalist"). Like this second team is trying to one-up the first team: "No we're working on a cloaking device! Really! Give us the money!" It brings to mind that scene from The Life of Brian where Brian is up on his cross with other condemned people, and when a clemency order comes along for "Brian," and he doesn't respond, others chime in: "I'm Brian, and so is my wife!"

Not My Lucky Week for Rain

You've probably experienced this at least once: the weather is fine, if cloudy, all day long, but the moment you walk out the door, rain begins to fall. You know, the experience where you wonder if your front door is positioned over some ancient Indian rainmaking temple or something.

Well, twice this week I've had that experience. Almost three times, but the third time it started raining about two minutes after I walked out the door, so that doesn't count. The other two times, rain started right on cue; I watched as the dry ground started getting peppered with raindrops. Twice in one week is enough to start you to think about laws of probability and so forth.

And then today, I got unlucky again in one way, and lucky in another. I decided to go out to Costco. All day long it's been sunny. Only as I walk out the door do clouds begin to dim the direct sunshine, but still, most of the sky is clear, and it's quite bright out. I get on my scooter and head off. Two minutes out, I notice the wall of dark clouds off in the distance, in addition to the overcast above. I figure that I have enough time to get to Costco (a 15-minute drive) before it starts to rain; on the way back, I can wear my rain suit, which I proudly remembered I had decided to bring along, just in case.

Three minutes out, and it begins to rain. A light sprinkle. Damn, I think. Okay, the Costco trip can wait for tomorrow. I turn around and head back. Turns out that was a very wise move. The rain gets heavier, then heavier still. Not quite so bad at first that I feel I have to pull over and suit up--I am just a few minutes out, and besides, there's no shelter to change under, anyway.

But in the few minutes it took to get home, I got soaked. So badly that it even got through my leather jacket in spots. Just before I turned around, half the sky was clear. As I pulled into my apartment complex three minutes later, the whole sky was grey and it was pouring.

Good thing I decided to turn around. But, boy, does my timing suck this week.

It's Hard Enough To Hold a Fox

This has to be one of the funniest sentences I've come across in a while. From an "urban legend" in the Darwin Awards web site:

"It's hard enough to hold a living fox, let alone insert an airline up its rectum, I should imagine."

That "I should imagine" bit is a good addition, lest we suspect what his hobby might be.

Open Bar

I found this image on the web, and tried to track down its origins, but couldn't find them. Nevertheless, it's one of the funniest images I've seen for a while. Not to mention, it acts as a great tribute to the sculptor, to be able to fool an expert on such things.

The Sincerity of Republicans on the Environment

Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert held a press conference at a gas station in Washington D.C. today. He drove up in one of two hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. At the conference, he spoke about energy policy and showed off two clean-fuel vehicles, making a big deal about them. Hastert got back into one of the vehicles, and drove off. Suspicious of the direction Hastert drove off in, reporters followed him--and caught him switching vehicles, getting out of the hydrogen car and getting into a gas-guzzling SUV, so he could drive the few blocks back to the Capitol Building.

...And Sometimes They Miss

This week's South Park was a fairly big disappointment, save for a few small segments where Cartman eats and craps fake treasure. There has been some talk about the show's right-wing tilt, but the past few weeks have shown it up pretty starkly. In the recent two-parter about showing Muhammad, the show skewered everyone, from terrorists to people afraid of terrorism, network executives, The Simpsons, Family Guy, reporters, car chases--hell, they criticized Comedy Central for not allowing them to show a cartoon of Muhammad, and even ripped on themselves for being too preachy at times. But in the hour-long episode which made fun of just about anything and everything, only one character with more than a few lines was kept reasonable: George Bush. What the hell? Probably the easiest person to make fun of, and they make him the only sane, stable, and unfunny character in the show. (Were they trying to be ironic?) Well, actually, they also didn't make fun of manatees, but then, who could?

Now contrast to the show two weeks later, where Al Gore is shown as some lame, bizarre, psycho loser warning everyone of "Man-Bear-Pig," and acting like some deranged kid who thinks he's a superhero but is really screwing up. I kept waiting for the whole thing to have a point, a punch line, or a funny line, but it never did. If Man-Bear-Pig showed up when everyone thought it was imaginary and it was a take on global warming, I could see that. Or something, even if it totally trashed Gore, to make there be a reason for it, even if that reason was just to be funny. I can laugh at liberals as much as the next guy, but this was not witty or comical, even in a stupid way; it was just... weird. Like they put that in there not because they had something to laugh at, but instead just because they hated Gore's guts. It was less like a regular South Park episode, and more like they got drunk and started to rant, thinking they were being funny when everybody just stares uncomfortably.

The show (and Parker and Stone's movies) take on liberal celebrities often, as well as liberal causes, sometimes with a vicious slant. And usually, it's done in a funny way. And while they do take on some conservative elements (big businesses, rednecks, right-to-lifers), they have rarely, if ever, skewered a right-wing politician or celebrity. The closest I can think of is Mel Gibson, who's not so much political as religious (he's never identified himself politically, and though he does have some conservative views, he also opposed the Iraq War and even praised Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11).

Apparently Trey Parker is a Libertarian, and Stone is the one who steers the show against the left; he has said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." It shows. Strangely, Parker categorizes both of them as centrists, "pretty middle-ground guys," and Stone claims they take on "both sides."

Don't take me wrong--I love the show, no less when they rip on liberals, and you can't take it seriously politically, or any other way, for that matter. The show where the people with butts where their faces should be turned out to be Ben Affleck's parents, that was hilarious. But what I presume to be Stone's utter contempt for liberalism does more than just tilt the show right, it sometimes comes out just bizarrely hateful without much to be funny about.

Neat

Here's a cool story about how a whale apparently "thanked" a group of rescuers by playing with them after they freed her from a dangerous entanglement.

Sam the Man

This is so Samuel L. Jackson:

New Line's Snakes on a Plane, due to open on Aug. 18, has already produced an avid cult, "the first cult following created entirely by a movie's title," according to Canada's Maclean's magazine. According to the magazine, an uproar among the cultists ensued when studio executives decided to change the title to Pacific Air Flight 121. Even star Samuel L. Jackson joined in the ruckus, saying, according to Maclean's: "We're totally changing that back. That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title." The magazine said that in the end, not only did the producers restore the original name but that they "recently returned to Vancouver to film new scenes with profanity and gore, bringing the final product closer to the kind of garish B movie its name suggests." [Bold emphasis mine]

I love that guy. He was totally outright about being way excited to act with Yoda, and about wanting a purple lightsaber. And most big-name actors would have a problem with being suddenly eaten by a mutant shark halfway through a film. Not this dude. (In fact, his characters have been killed in 13 different movies.) You just don't get better than Sam.

Test for Thinking

According to Snopes.com, this image is being circulated as a a photo of "sunset at the North Pole with the moon at its closest point."

A little thought, using facts that pretty much everyone should know, should quickly provide you with two reasons why this photo could not possibly be real. The idea here is how uncritically we tend to accept information, without comparing the information we receive against what we know to be true. Because we don't filter new information against known facts, we tend to accept rather obvious untruths as real.

See the two points that immediately came to me below the fold...

1. Everyone should know that a solar eclipse--like the one happening today in Africa and Western Asia--happens because the apparent size of the sun and the moon are roughly the same. Even if the moon changes apparent size "at its closest point," the difference shown here between the discs of the sun and moon are so great that it could not possibly be real--unless you live on one of Jupiter's moons...

2. The moon goes around the Earth close to the equator--it does not circle pole to pole, which would be necessary to produce this image from the North Pole.

Anyone see anything I missed?

The Return of Chef

As I figured, South Park's Stone and Parker are not going to let Isaac Hayes' quitting the show to go without a thorough lampooning. A new episode, to premiere Wednesday, will have Chef exhibiting "strange behavior" and the kids will try to "save" Chef from damaging the town.

While they are keeping mum on how they will give Chef a voice, there are only three options that I can see: first, bring in a replacement actor (which I doubt); second, have Chef be mute (possible); or third--which I believe will happen--use their stock of Chef's utterances from the past nine years to build "new" dialog. This would help explain the description of Chef's behavior as "strange," and could have him say almost anything they want, if they match it the right way with new dialog.

Whatever they decide to do, it should be fun.

Not What You Want to Watch

I was on the CBS News web site and this headline caught my eye--a rather unfortunate choice of wording for the video link. I'm pretty sure that they don't show actual torture...

Microsoft Redesigns iPod Packaging

Not really, thank goodness. But someone did a great job of illustrating the differences in style between Apple and Microsoft, in this 2 1/2-minute animation of what the iPod's packaging would look like if the marketing people at Microsoft were in charge of the project. A great little video, and perfectly chosen music to boot.

Not Reporting Hurting People Is Apparently a Fad

It turns out that Cheney was not the only one who injured someone and then held back reporting on it. Last July, when in Scotland for a G8 Summit, Bush lost control of his bike (for what, the 4th time?) while attempting to wave at constables on the road, and crashed smack into one of the policemen. The unreported part concerns the injury to the constable--originally reported as a "very minor" injury, it turns out that Bush broke the man's ankle, putting him on crutches and out of work for three months. Having just suffered nothing worse than a broken toe and lived on crutches for three months myself, I can tell you that's it's not "very minor." In Scotland, a normal citizen would probably have been charged with "careless driving" and possibly even assault on a police officer.

Now that the news is out, I suppose we can expect the Scottish constable to hold a press conference where he will formally apologize to president Bush for all the anguish he's caused him.

On the Spot

A great faux-commercial for Dick Cheney by David Letterman, via Crooks & Liars. Though comedic, it could not be more on the spot than it is. Perfect.

Sugishimaaaaa!

You know that scene from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan where Kirk, in outrage at Khan for abandoning him on a lifeless asteroid, looks up into the camera and shouts, "Khaaaaan!!!"? It's practically become part of the cultural vernacular, with Jon Stewart and others picking up on it. Well, I kind of feel like I have my own Khan, on a much more trivial and whiny scale.

You know how it is when you get a new phone number assigned and the number you get is someone else's that has been out of service for maybe three months? You'd expect to get a few people calling it now and then, but most should have figured it out in those first three months.

Apparently, the guy who had my number before me--Sugishima, how well I have come to know that name--gave that number to several thousand people, or so it would seem, and notified not one of them that he changed his number. For the first six months I had the number, I was getting more than one call a day on average, and even now I get a call for him once every month or so. And it has been more than five years since I got this number.

Yeah, I know. I should have switched the number early on. But a combination of procrastination and wishful thinking made me never get around to it. So I still find myself occasionally setting aside what I'm doing and answering the phone, each time going to effort that this idiot Sugishima sloughed off on the next unlucky schmoe who got his number. It's time like this that I have to remind myself that retribution is unhealthy and immoral, because the thought of getting a thousand people to call his new number asking for my name day and night is so appealing. Kind of like the people who run around the neighborhood blasting noise from their loudspeaker trucks--as is happening this very moment outside my window--when you'd love to get your own loudspeaker truck, follow these people to their homes, and then sit outside all day blasting the latest Hip-hop hits into their windows when they're trying to enjoy a quiet evening at home.

Why is everything fun so wrong?

Funny Bit

Check out this "unfair edit" from Letterman on Cheney (Flash video). Hilarious.

Internal Clock

For what must have been the third time this week, I sprang up awake, thinking I had outslept my clock alarms and it was late for me to go to work--and then one minute later, my first alarm of the morning goes off.

So I have an accurate internal clock in my brain, and it's precise enough to wake me up at an exact time. So why can't it let me know that it's waking me up on time instead of making me think I'm late?

Seasonal Blankets

This is the kind of thing I really dislike when I come up against it: seasonal sales that don't last the season. Recently, I've been having cold feet. No, it's not that I'm ditching something out of fear, I literally have cold feet at night. So I figured that I'd do the logical thing: go buy an electric blanket.

So I went to the local store to buy one--only to be told that I couldn't. The store was out, and was not getting any more in. Why not order more, I asked the shopkeeper, only to be told that the manufacturer had shut down for the season. I guess I just don't understand the logic of that, because it sounds real dumb to me. After all, it was the first day of February, and there were at least a few more cold months in store. How could they be out? The shop guy explained that it was a colder winter than usual, but that still didn't sound right to me. I mean, how long does it take to produce an electric blanket? From raw materials to shipped product, does it really take two months? I would guess more like a matter of days, if the factory was geared up right. So why would a factory shut down before they knew whether they had produced enough, or too much for that matter? However, I'd run into this kind of thing before. I ride a scooter in to work, and the wind chill can get fierce. So I go to the store to buy long johns. It's December. And they're sold out. Wha??

Besides which, I just don't like being told that I can't do something. A week before, I'd decided to start eating apples. I'd have liked a peeler/corer/slicer, the kind sold commonly in the U.S., but I'd settle for just a peeler. Now, in Japan, everyone peels their apples. I don't know if it's just a preference (almost all fruit here is eaten without skin in Japan, including grapes, by the way) or if it's because of stronger pesticides used here, but I didn't want to chance it, so I want to eat my apples sans peel. Problem is, most Japanese people peel their apples with a knife. For me, that's simply too laborious and slow. Not worth it. So I assumed that since Americans eat apples with skins more often and apple peelers are not too hard to find, then in Japan, where everyone eats apples peeled, apple peelers must be a dime a dozen. Not so, apparently. I had told a Japanese friend that I wanted to buy an apple peeler, and they said that they simply don't exist here, that someone they knew had looked and couldn't find one. But since I don't like being told I can't do something, I went and looked anyway. And I found one. Just one, mind you, at the one store most likely to carry that kind of thing (Tokyu Hands). But I was stubborn, and I got what I wanted.

So when the guy at my local store said I couldn't get an electric blanket, I was stubborn then, too. So I went to another larger store, a department store in a nearby town. They didn't have them. So I went to a more specific big store, an electronics store (the kind I'd been told was most likely to have electric blankets). They didn't have them. I asked if they could order one. Nope, they said. All out. No one has them. The factory shut down for the season.

Again, this just seems dumb to me. How can an industry simply shut down and have its product off the shelves for months in peak season when people out there want to buy them? So I went to the big, big stores, the electronic superstores in Shinjuku, and the second store I went to had a few.

So now I have toasty feet. Mmmmmm. It works great, too. But it still makes me wonder what these people are thinking. It's not like a shop running out of umbrellas when a big storm hits--we're talking about weeks and months of lead time to get more product out.

This is just one of those situations where you can't be sure if there's actually a good reason for something or if they really are just being dumb.

I vote for dumb, though.

Olbermann Strikes Back

Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC's "Countdown" segment to the day's "Worst Person in the World," designated Bill O'Reilly to receive the honor. Crooks & Liars has the video segment, which is hilarious. Take a look.

Hamster Movies

I recently remembered a few old home movies I'd made with iMovie, featuring my first hamster, Pika. (After all, the subtitle of the blog mentions hamsters, so I've gotta live up to that.) My second hamster, Mocha, has been featured on this site for a while now, in a short called "The Great Chicken Struggle," where she valiantly tries to get a chicken leg-and-thigh bone, bigger than she is, into her cage.

The Pika movies date back to before my blog, so they never got in here before. The first one is called "Pika Has Lunch," and features her doing what hamsters do as only they can do: stuffing their cheek pouches full of food. At the time, I had Pika on the dining room table and had given her a good supply of sunflower seeds. Sure enough, she stuffed her mouth full of them. But then she did something I hadn't seen before (or since)--she disgorged them, right after having stuffed them in. Then she calmly looked at them, and then at me, as if to say, "Get a load of that!" After a minute or so, she seemed to change her mind again and restuffed her mouth full of the seeds. Then she spat them all out again a few minutes after that. I think it was on her fourth time doing this that I got around to getting the camera out, and filmed her doing it at least two more times. I forget if she stopped herself or if I stopped her. In any case, if you've never seen a hamster with her head twice the size of her body spitting out her weight in sunflower seeds to a game show theme, click the image and check out this movie!

Another film I found is titled "The Tissue Caper," and is just Pika climbing out of her cage, going to a box of Kleenex, pulling a few out of the box and stuffing her cheeks with them, then going back to her cage and unloading there. But she looks pretty cute at the Kleenex box, seemingly eating tissues to a bluegrass version of "Turkey in the Straw." Of course, she would do this with anything that could be used as bedding. I have a curtain behind where her cage was that got all chewed up when I put the cage too close and she was able to get at it. Anyway, the film can be seen by clicking on this image:

I had a third movie which featured Pika rolling around in her hamster ball to the tune of "Speed Racer," but I couldn't locate it. An old hard drive died, and it may have been there, but I also likely backed it up on a CD or DVD--it's simply an issue of searching through my very large collection of discs to figure out which one it's on. If and when I find it, I'll post that also.

The above movies, by the way, are in QuickTime H.264 format, so you'll need the latest version of QuickTime to run them (free download). They weigh in at about 10 MB each, so this is not for dial-up, unless you're very patient. If they don't play properly when you click them (different browsers act differently), then just right-click and download the link target to your disk. If you have a recent version of QuickTime, they should play then. Let me know via comments how it works!

Siamese Renality

I'd forgotten about this. A few years back, when I got an ultrasound during a medical checkup, the technician told me something I had not known about myself. I have conjoined kidneys.

Yep. That's right. They're joined at the... er, kidney, I guess. One big one instead of two little ones. Actually, they are, apparently, elongated and joined at the lower end, to make a kind of a "V" shape. Most bizarre thing I'd ever heard about my insides. I mean, I had never even heard of conjoined kidneys before. In fact, I'd never heard of conjoined anything in terms of one person's internal organs. But there they were, on the ultrasound, looking like... well, okay, I was looking right at them and had no idea what I was looking at. But I took the guy's word.

The tech said he didn't know exactly how common, or uncommon, that was, but if he had to guess, he said it was maybe one in every ten thousand people. I don't know, though--that sounds awfully high. Think about it--that's more than half a million people on Earth with conjoined kidneys. One would think that with that many people that way, you'd hear about it a bit more often. A Google search comes up with little about conjoined kidneys--mostly pages that mention them indirectly, or pages no longer up for viewing--and one butt-ugly rendition of a pair, though not as elegantly vee-shaped as my own. Certainly not enough hits to make one think that one could fill up all of Milwaukee with people like me. Besides, if I'm going to have any conjoined organs, I want to be more unique than just one in every ten thousand.

Fortunately, the condition doesn't mean anything, not that the doctor could come up with. Apparently people with one big 'ol kidney doin' the work of two never even know it--I certainly didn't, before the sonogram tech (who was checking for something else) mentioned it to me in a kind of by-the-way fashion. I won't bore you with how normal the, uh, renal output is, just take my word for it.

I'm not freaked or depressed by it or anything. I mean, think about everything you have two of and what it would be like if they were conjoined.

It could be worse.

Scary Christmas!

Okay, this guy might be the new Pope, but there's no denying it: he looks evil. In fact, he looks like a cross between Dick Cheney and Darth Sidious, dressed as Santa.

I mean, can you imagine being a six-year old kid and seeing that mug coming at you? It'd be enough to give any child nightmares.

"Come to the dark side, and we will rule the world together! Heh-heh-heh haaa!"

Seriously. How could they let this guy out? Was there no one to take a look at him before he went before the cameras, and say, "you know, I don't think so."

Photo by Canadian Press.

Time Flies

This is a nothing-post; I just saw a cute sig line and had to post it:

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

Huge Fans?

I found this image on a Hubble site; it shows the center of the M51 galaxy, the image being hundreds of light years across:

According to NASA:

The "X" is due to absorption by dust and marks the exact position of a black hole which may have a mass equivalent to one-million stars like the sun. The darkest bar may be an edge-on dust ring which is 100 light-years in diameter. ... The second bar of the "X" could be a second disk seen edge on, or possibly rotating gas and dust in MS1 intersecting with the jets and ionization cones.

Me, I think they're huge fans of The X-Files and are trying to tell us something; see one version of The X-Files' logo below, and compare:

The Truth Is Waaaaay Out There.

Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning

This is one massively bizarre movie. If you're into Star Trek and Babylon 5, you gotta watch it. If not, you'll probably be bored and confused. Either way, if you watch it, you'll be very impressed. Not by the film's chances of getting an Academy Award for writing or acting, but for the unbelievable effort and skill put into this thing.

Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is a fan-made film spoof of Star Trek and Babylon 5. Created by a team of five amateur filmmakers in Finland over the course of seven years, it's no run-of-the-mill video. Running one hour and forty-three minutes, it's a pretty major production with, quite frankly, stunning visual effects--the kind you'd expect in a Hollywood film. These guys went all-out in making perfect recreations of dozens of ships from their favorite sci-fi TV shows, having it out in major space battles. Anyone familiar with Trek or B5 will instantly recognize that even the smallest details are in order here.

The plot and acting, while also impressive for a fan-made film, are a bit odd, though maybe that's a cultural thing. The film is in Finnish, available with English subtitles. It follows the adventures of Captain Pirk, from a Star-Trek-like future, who becomes stranded in the present day after his ship crashes on a mission to the past. Pirk, Dwarf and Info (spoofs of Kirk, Worf and Data) get tired of trying to blend in without changing history, and when the timeline changes anyway, Pirk decides to take over the Earth and become Emperor. Using his crashed ship's technology and a Russia wanting to bring back the Soviet Union, they build a giant starship (the Enterprise from the latest movies) and conquer the planet. They then build a fleet of ships, discover a "maggot hole," and travel to an alternate universe based upon Babylon 5. Whereupon we get space battles and so on.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this film. The conquering of Earth is played out artistically well in the fashion of an old Soviet-era propaganda film, for example. If you look carefully, you can spot several in-jokes, some based on the sci-fi series, and others on general popular culture (look for the McDonald's take-off in the Babel 13 space station, for example). But the best laughs come in the last half of the film, so if it's not funny at the start, hang on and it'll get better. The acting is fair, pretty good considering the amateur production. The plot is strange and wanders a bit at times, but is serviceable. The costumes look amateurish. There are lots of umlauts. But as I mentioned, it's the special effects that'll catch your attention on this one. The sets are either existing 21st-century sets, or are virtual sets--again, impressively done. The effects are so professional-looking, in fact, that they look out of place with the acting and costumes, as if they stole the FX from real Star Trek films.

The movie is a free download from the makers' web site, starwreck.com, using either BitTorrent or a direct download from mirror sites. You can even order the film on a DVD. The trailer is