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 also available. Already it is the most-viewed Finnish film ever made (probably most due to the fact that it's free), without about 3 million downloads so far. I have a feeling that these guys will be getting job offers from effects studios--which may have been the idea in the first place. And I have to wonder what Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5) and the various Trek producers must think of all this....

Hee hee

Apparently, Fox News Channel sent a reporter out to do a special on global warming, and the documentary formed around the idea that global warming actually is happening. The reporter said it thus:

"After months of research and interviews with many experts, I've learned this simple fact: The earth is heating up. And it's happening much faster than ever before. No one can argue with this."

Reportedly, Fox chairman Roger Ailes was "charmed" by the reporter and thus did not smite him nor the documentary. But conservative wonk Chris Horner was aghast, to the point where he uttered this hilarious whopper:

"While it is unfathomable that a reputable news network would air so blatantly a one-sided program regardless of any disclaimer, that the 'fair and balanced' network would put itself in the position of suspending its motto is stupefying."

Yes! Imagine that! Fox News, for the first time in history, is going to air something that is not fair and balanced! Alert the media! Run for the hills! To the Bat Cave, Robin! It's a sign of the Coming of Days, the end of the world!

In all seriousness, this is groundbreaking in that Fox is, apparently for the first time, airing a show in which the right-wing slant does not heavily predominate, and that does seem significant. I wonder what Ailes was smoking when he made that decision.

And Some More Fun in Japan

Okay, a break from the politics for now, and back to a little more fun with the photos. First, some confectionery English from Japan. Again, these photos are from the past, 15 to 20 years old. In the local supermarket in Toyama, the Pastry section read as this:

I didn't want to ask what those little black specks in the crackers were, quite frankly. Then we had the usual assortment of strangely-named cookies:

You'll find in there: Surely Cookies, Assort Cookies, Love Sound Cookies, Marone Sand Type Cookies, Hartly Cookies, Homely Cookies, and Nice Cookies. The only cookies in there I'm not sure are unusual are the Digestive Biscuits, but I don't recall seeing those in the U.S.--maybe it's a British thing. Or it could be more funny English. They tend to be better about that kind of thing nowadays, though we still have Pocky, Crunky and other assorted strangely-named treats.

This child's toy set indicated a different perspective on trends in parenting, I suppose. In the U.S., most parents would specifically avoid anything close to this:

And then finally, from a Toyama gas station, English which was okay, expect for syntax:

And I'll leave it at that tonight.

More Fun in Japan

Just a few more photos from the past of interesting English spotted in Japan. The two main entries have to do with bargain sales in Japan. Here, the shopkeepers thing in terms of how much they take off the normal prices; 10% off, 20% off, and so on. So, naturally, this is the kind of sale they sometimes have:

It seems that "off" is the "big" word. Literally:

I assume they are selling clothes. But I didn't check, just in case. Not that I would have really turned down a chance to see the "Ladies' Big Off" on the first floor, but they were closed.

This last one doesn't really fit into today's category, but serves as a kind of similar coda with last week's "Keep the Left" direction photo. From Kobe, many years ago:

Ice Cream Headache

This is one of those things that many people don't have a name for, and so different people who have a name for it tend to call it different things. I first heard it described as "ice cream headache" on Roseanne, and years later as "brain freeze" in the movie Shallow Hal. A colleague gave the name "chill brains." I asked many Japanese people, and all immediately reported that there was no specific name for it in the Japanese language.

According to doctors, this is caused not by chilled blood in the throat traveling behind the eyes, but rather by the contact of cold substances against the roof of the mouth; nerves there signal for the blood vessels in the head to dilate, causing the headache.

So what do you call it?

You really should read the article by Dr. Hulihan, if for no other reason than to see a professor say things like "It would be of interest to determine whether antimigraine drugs that modulate serotonergic pathways have any effect on ice cream headache."

Question

Simply out of curiosity, why are half of all Chinese-American women named "Michelle," and most of the other half named "Catherine"? Just wondering, having noticed.

Fun in Japan

First, an ad for a gas station in Japan called "ENEOS." Here is an ad for a car-related product which might seem reasonable in Japan, but which has quite obvious negative connotations in America:

To an American, the probably impression is that of a "lemon" car. This ad, however, is intended to express a sulfur-free gas--yellow for the sulfur (presumably), and the green outline and the leaf design to show environmentalism.

Next, from my early travels in Japan in the early 80's, and from an era of much funnier T-shirts and sweaters:

It speaks for itself. Other T-shirt and sweater English from the time: "Retro-Dandy BIP MEN," "Hysteric DOG," and the ever-popular "SLURP! Is that your foot?" One shirt had a bit of English on it, with one part reading "Beat his monkey ass till it ain't no fun." We didn't know at the time that these were Public Enemy lyrics, and so on a Japanese T-shirt they were hilarious.

And then there was this sign in a train station in Aomori which seemed to also be a political statement:

More of this coming very soon.

TempComments

In the next day or so, I will remove the notice I've had up for the past few weeks, in which I note possible problems in the comment system, and offer an out-in-the-open email address for those who have had problems posting comments. Having that email address, tempcomments@blogd.com, right up there like that, has revealed many things to me.

First, no one has had problems making comments, it seems. Three people used the address to send me friendly, complimentary asides, which was nice. But the purpose for which the address was created appears to have been less a need than I thought, so good news there.

Second, I apparently have been the big winner or one of the big winners in no fewer than twenty-one European and one New Zealand lotteries over the past eight days, netting me prizes worth 14,803,903.78 Euros, 11,650,950.00 Dollars, and 850,950.00 Pounds Sterling, along with the chance to win millions more. All I have to do is pay out tens of thousands of dollars for authorization fees, clearance payments, and little odds and ends like that. Amazing the money you can make in eight days just by creating an email account and publishing it on a blog page.

Third, I have discovered a Japanese matchmaking site that has used the temp comments address to inform me twenty-four times that, and I quote, "$B!z%A%c%C%H$G$O$I$s$J%j%/%(%9%H$K$bEz$($^$9!#(BNO.I don't veceive your mail." Nice of them to say so, because I was not aware that they did not veceiving my mail, and that my H$G$O$I$s$J%j was H$K$bEz. Gesundheit. (note: that's supposed to be garbled, it's not an error.)

And finally, I have received urgent and heartfelt greetings from SALIM IBRAHIM, a merchant in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, who has been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer. He has only a few months to live, so he wants to give his significant $25 million fortune to charities in Bulgaria and Pakistan (where else?), but requires me to funnel it through my bank account first, in exchange for which I can keep 20%. He is earnestly joined by Eric Kamara, Dr. Mike Umeh, Kennet Cavender, Kaditi Musa, Mark Edward, Ahmed Yousf, Richard Wilford, Alfred Green, Doris Brown, Pedro H. Gozanlex, Roland Martin, and Mario Wolf, who similarly have one kind of personal crisis or another and need to use my bank account to transfer funds. Most are so urgent that THEY USE NOTHING BUT CAPITAL LETTERS TO ASK FOR MY ASSISTANCE IN TRANSFERRING MONIES. Apparently, my email address was given to them by the Bank of Senegal. So for the next few weeks and months, I will be the conduit os MILLIONS IN US$ MONIES from nations such as Sierra Leone, South Africa, Holland, the U.A.E., Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.

Thank goodness that none came from Nigeria, because those guys are total frauds.

Masters of the Domains

From the famed urban-legend-debunking site Snopes.com, come a few unfortunate domain names. All of them took on unintended meanings when they were represented as domain names without spaces between the words. See if you can spot the unfortunate double-entendres from the original organization names:

• PowerGen Italia, an Italian battery company
• Who Represents? a talent agency lookup site
• Experts Exchange, a site for people to discuss programming
• Mole Station Native Nursery, a nursery site from Australia

Any suggestions for other unfortunate domain names?

Tobacco-houdai Movie

Well, this is a brilliant idea. Japan Tobacco is holding a promotional screening of the movie Sin City, and I suppose appropriately in relation to the film's title at least, they are inviting 150 heavy smokers to watch the film while smoking their hearts out. In fact, smoking will be required during the screening. This is apparently in reaction to the recent restrictions against smoking, in a country which is still the most smoker-friendly of the industrialized nations. However, as we have seen with Christians in the U.S., no group feels more persecuted for minor restrictions than the constituency which is the largest, most powerful, and least imposed upon.

But this screening should get awards for sheer lack of common sense for a few key reasons. First of all, smoking is prohibited in movie theaters for reasons other than the lovely aroma the practice produces; theater smoking was among the first to be banned for the very cogent reason that the upward trails of smoke obscure the image on the screen. Now imagine everyone smoking. Wall-to-wall smoke trails, and an ever-increasing smoke cloud gathering directly in the path of the light from the projector. Yeah, that'll look good.

But the second reason is a real kicker: this film will likely be screened in one of those pocket theaters, packed with seats in a small space. Now, smoking rooms get pretty dense with smoke even when you've just got people seated relatively sparsely. But a room which is mostly seating, filled with no one but chain smokers for more than two hours? In a room not designed with ventilation to handle heavy smoking?

Forget whether or not the film will be visible to the viewers. They'll be lucky if anyone in the theater is conscious by the time it ends.

Invention of the Year: TeleCrapper 2000

This guy deserves a Nobel Prize or something. He created a free, slap-together do-it-yourself product that serves a dual purpose: reducing the efficiency of telemarketers while, at the same time, making fools out of them for your sheer delight.

Have you ever received a robotic telemarketer call? The kind carefully designed to fool you into thinking you're having a conversation with someone in your neighborhood, and you don't realize for a while that it's a recording and they're selling something? This guy (whom I found via Engadget) took that idea, juiced it up, and aimed it right back at the telemarketers.

Here's how it works: You start with a pre-recorded conversation with a variety of statements, questions, and generalized utterances. The TeleCrapper 2000 then waits behind your Called ID service with a list of numbers identified as telemarketers. When the phone rings, the Telecrapper 2000 scans the Caller ID against the list. If it's one of them, then the TeleCrapper 2000 picks up after the first ring. It plays the recorded script's first line, then waits for an answer. The TeleCrapper 2000 can detect the silence at the end of a telemarketer's statement, and so it can realistically answer shortly after they finish saying something. The TeleCrapper 2000 then plays the next recorded line, waits for an answer, and so on, and so on. When you hear the conversations it has, it is amazingly realistic, and you can imagine it fooling just about anybody. (Unfortunately, it's more than just the average person can wire together; hopefully, someday someone will sell a ready-made version of it.)

The idea of this, as I mentioned before, is twofold: first, it completely wastes the telemarketers' time by engaging them in a protracted, fake conversation with zero benefit to them. Some of these people go on with the TeleCrapper 2000 for quite some time, even after the TeleCrapper 2000 reaches the point where it runs out of material and just loops the same four or five replies over and over and over again.

The second purpose is that it gives you a great deal of entertainment and sheer joy. You can record, listen to, and share the conversations the telemarketers have with your computer, and laugh yourself silly. The creator of this product, who will surely be rewarded handsomely by God, has put up a dozen or so of these recorded conversations on his web site; scroll down to the very bottom of the page and listen to them. Probably the best of this guy's list is #5, which was turned into a Flash animation on this site. But #9 was a hoot, because the robotic conversation was based on accusing the caller of being "Chris," and the caller was in fact named "Christy" (another called was "Crystal"). #11 was outright hysterical; the robot conversation simulated a confused old man, and trapped the caller into a seemingly endless three minutes of pure, hilarious nonsense.

But that has nothing on the conversation numbered 12, in three parts, where first the caller is fooled for 3 or four minutes, then believes that he's talking to a deranged old man and tries to make fun of him with the office listening, not realizing he's trying to cruelly tease a machine on an endless loop, sounding like a complete fool. Then he calls back and tries again, this time seriously attempting to get the woman of the house before it spins off into absurdity again.

The maker states his desire that many people will do this, and share their own recordings over the Internet. I hope they do.

I tell you, I haven't laughed this hard in years.

Neighborhood Noise

[Note: sounds should open in a new window when clicked. For full effect, play them all in sequence.]

Well, now that the election is over, hopefully now all the noisy political campaign loudspeaker trucks will stop crisscrossing the neighborhood all day long until 8:00 in the evening. But that's little relief, because just as the loudspeaker trucks and vans vanish into the night, the Star-Trek-Phaser-on-Overload insects are startup up. I swear, they sound just like phasers about to blow up, a constant, incredibly loud, piercing high-pitched whistle. And then at sunrise, the other bugs, including the annoying "MEEEE, ME-ME-ME-ME-MEEEEEEE!!" cicadas and the Bone-Chilling-Wail-Eminating bugs, get started for the day. That along with the morning crows and partridges, and the afternoon bulbuls. But that only lasts through the summer. When they stop, it'll be just in time for the Kerosene-sellers to weave through every single parking lot in the neighborhood at 5 kph, with their loudspeaker-enhanced mind-numbing electronic note song: "DO-doo ... do-Do-DOO-Doo-do ... do-Do-DOO-DOO-do-do-DO-do-do-DOO-DOO!!" Now. Repeat that. ONE... HUNDRED... TIMES.

I suppose I can at least thank God that they don't all come at once, all the time. But what I would like to ask is, what happened to that famous Japanese neighborhood "wa" that we heard about? Okay, so we can't control the bugs or the birds, but what's with all the loudspeaker trucks? I want some wa, dammit!

They Know Headlines in Ireland

Via DKos, photo of a TV with Sky News in Ireland. It pretty much says it all.

RAmen

You can't say that scientists don't have a sense of humor. And when it comes to showing up "Intelligent Design" as the pseudoscientific fraud that it is, it does not hurt at all to possess a good sense of humor.

Enter Bobby Henderson of venganza.org, a 24-year-old unemployed graduate in Physics from Oregon. The Kansas School Board made the decision to promote ID to the status of scientific theory on the premise that students should be exposed to multiple theories so they can choose for themselves. In response to this decision, Henderson most logically proposed that his theory should also be taught in Science classes, so that the students can decide for themselves. Same logic as the school board. So he wrote and sent a letter to the Kansas School Board to urge them to include in Science classes the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

According to Henderson's Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), whose noodly refrain is "RAmen!" the FSM created the universe as it is in the recent past, and that when scientists perform radioactive dating tests, the FSM changes the results with His Noodly Appendage for His reasons to make the fossil seem older than the universe really is.

Henderson also points out that there is a direct correlation between the decrease in the number of pirates and global warming, complete with a graph showing the connection. In short, we need a lot more pirates if we want to get rid of global warming. I believe this environmentalist message will resonate with a lot of students, because they tend to think pirates are pretty cool. And, after all, it is another point of view, and the students should be allowed to decide for themselves.

Henderson also adds three reasons why people should convert to FSM-ism:

• Flimsy moral standards.


• Every Friday is a relgious holiday. If your work/school objects to that, demand your religious beliefs are respected and threaten to call the ACLU.


• Our heaven is WAY better. We've got a Stripper Factory AND a Beer Volcano.

Responsible, professional scientists have found themselves unable to refute Mr. Henderson's theory. One points out how String Theory should in fact be called "Noodle Theory," most others make clear that the FSM theory has more credibility than ID, and one Ph.D., a Dr. H. Neville, simply said, "MMMMMmmmmm, spaghetti."

On a more serious note, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett-Mayer explained:

In discussing competing theories, if one is to present ID then it is only fair and logical to teach other theories with commensurate evidence. Based on Mr. Henderson's letter, it is clear that the FSM theory has evidence comparable in weight to ID. As a scientist and professor, it is often difficult to present differing opinions in an unbiased way. However, it is important to the student to be exposed to these ideas to form their own opinions. This comes right out of the handbook of the ID purporters: present the different "theories" and let the listener decide. If those in favor of ID are so convinced, then they should not be concerned that the presentation of the FSM theory would serve to undermine the credibility of ID.

In due observance of the holiness and scientific viability of his theory, Henderson is selling T-shirts and coffee mugs. You might also want to check out the FSM image gallery.

MultiGoogle

In case you didn't want to use Google in Klingon, you can always switch to Swedish Chef.

The Great Pizza Fiasco

I kind of feel silly posting about this, but it is rather interesting how it ended up.

I've used a pizza place in my town called "Pizza-La" primarily because, for some time, it was the only pizza place that would deliver in town. I got used to their toppings, and have used them regularly, even after Pizza Hut came into town less than a year ago.

So I ordered a pizza tonight. I'm a meat-lover (especially the salty/spicy stuff, and yes, I will die an early death), so I ordered a pizza with pepperoni and double bacon (what is called "kari-kari" bacon, more American-style than Japanese, crisp on top of the pizza). I always emphasize the "double" part because sometimes their idea of "double" is indistinguishable from single.

I wait the 30 minutes, and the delivery comes in. From past experience, I know very well to check the pizza before the delivery guy absconds with my money. And sure enough, it was all pepperoni. I point this out to the delivery guy, and he insists that there's double bacon, it's just below the salami. I lift up four or five pieces of salami and there's not only just a tiny amount of bacon underneath, but it's the soggiest sorry-ass bacon you've ever seen.

Here's the part where I feel silly talking about it--sending back a pizza because the toppings aren't jumbo enough for me. Aside from feeling the glutton, I also undoubtedly seem spoiled rotten compared to someone who, say, can barely afford to eat at all. But dammit, if I make an order to a business clear and I'm paying for something, I at least want the minimum that I'm paying for. I refuse to stand down on that, no matter how trivial or silly the order may be.

So I send the guy back, with him telling me they'll fix it and bring me a new one. But within a few minutes I get a call from Pizza-la: they're canceling my order. The guy who took my order insisted that by God, they put double bacon on the pizza. I insist that they didn't. The guy's wording was minimally polite, but his tone was stony and unapologetic. It's 11:00, places are shutting down, and he's sending me to bed without dinner for being a whiny customer. No pizza for me.

So again, called me spoiled, but I'll be damned if I give business to a place that treats customers like that. Which annoys me to no end, because I really did like their bacon topping (can't find it elsewhere in Japan), and Pizza Hut, though their pizzas are good, don't have the toppings I prefer. But I tell this guy, named Takahashi, over the phone, I've been a regular for years but no longer. He accepts that as if to say, too bad, who cares? and the call ends. I order from Pizza Hut, just barely in time (it was after their closing time of 11, but they took the order anyway).

Ten minutes later, the phone rings. It's the guy from Pizza-la. This time he was most definitely apologetic. Sheepish. Low tone of voice. The delivery guy had returned with the pizza. It seems, he said, that the pizza actually didn't have double bacon on it, and they'd like to remake the pizza for me. Didn't even offer to make it free--not that that would have changed my mind, ten free pizzas wouldn't have. I'm screwy that way. A business treats me like that, I refuse to go back, no matter how trivial it may otherwise be. I tell him that.

And the Pizza Hut pizza wasn't so great, either. Which means I probably won't be eating as much pizza, but that's better in the end for me anyway.

Shuttle Repair

Discovery astronaut Stephen K. Robinson tore out a strip of fabric from the bottom of the shuttle Discovery in his repair job the other day.

I can only wonder, after having ripped the fabric out, did he notice some writing on it which read, "Do not remove this tag from the bottom of your space shuttle under penalty of law"?

I Am No Stranger to the Game

Sean has an interesting reference in his blog to something called "Googlism," a page which accesses Google's database to show what sentences are associated with your name. Enter your name into the search box, and a list of "(your-name) is..." strings are produced. It can be quite hilarious. Here is a list of many of the results that came in for my name, with some of the incomplete and more bizarre ones weeded out:

• luis is old and famous
• luis is my cousin
• luis is a real wanted man
• luis is removing parts from one of our mills in preparation to add parts that he has already setup in a holding jig for the next operation [I get that a lot]
• luis is magic
• luis is working over/weathering his motorcycle for a diorama
• luis is moving across the caribbean's northern leeward islands
• luis is the owner of two pangas that he uses for two different types of fishing
• luis is a social butterfly at heart
• luis is a unique destination in the northern ecuadorian andes
• luis is responsible for the shannon explosives field technical operations group
• luis is different and is always changing
• luis is hard put to find in cuba a wife "who looks to the future" [danged tootin'!]
• luis is an interactive system that was designed for the ministry of the environment
• luis is to emerge from the blackness
• luis is boring
• luis is estimated to be 120 knots from the 3rd through the 5th while it was approaching the leeward
• luis is shamed by his friends into telling the truth
• luis is best known for the 1993 memoir of gang life
• luis is trying to estimate the accuracy of the contents of a documentary on video relevant to his essay topic
• luis is happy to have just weighed in with the biologists at the official weigh station in burton chace park in marina del rey
• luis is now a graduate of john jay college and is currently working towards his master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation at hunter college
• luis is no stranger to the game
• luis is sincere
• luis is a member of a denver metropolitan police department in colorado and is a member of the swat team
• luis is the only other "original" founding member of dlp
• luis is forced to look into julia's past
• luis is a recipient of a career award from the national science foundation
• luis is sure it's those girls
• luis is better known to silvia's mother than he should be
• luis is a multi faceted guide
• luis is available from both houston airports with advance reservations
• luis is definitely a ladies man who harbors resentment towards the upper class [danged tootin'!]
• luis is the president of a small group of workers in ecuador who inspect the quality of bananas supplied by fairtrade farmers

And my favorite:

• luis is al goed geïntegreerd

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that one!

You really have to try this out. Put your name in there, and the most unbelievable stuff will come out, stuff you could never dream up, stuff which will make that tuna fish sandwich you're eating come out your nose.

Google Moon

Google has launched one more map service: the Earth's moon. The map is not quite as comprehensive or detailed as you might want, but it does show where the manned moon landings were, and might get more detailed in the future.

For now, though, try zooming in on one of the sites, incrementally. You'll see a certain amount of increased detail each time you move the zoom slider up one more notch. But the real surprise comes when you get to the highest zoom, when you move the zoom to the very last notch at the top of the scale. Go ahead, give it a try.

Wither Wristwatches?

A bit more than a year back, my last digital wristwatch went kablooie, and I never replaced it. Sometimes, in my classes, if I need to time something, I'll ask around for anyone with a wristwatch. And because of this, I haver noticed that almost none of my students wear watches. This seemed quite odd to me, until I realized that probably it was because they all have digital cell phones now that display the time in large numbers on the LCD screen on the outside of the phone--this serves the same purpose for most people, so why buy and wear a watch anymore?

Of course, the decline in wristwatch wearers might also have something to do with the fact that said watches nowadays tend to be the size of small aircraft carriers. I mean, seriously, when you wear one of those behemoths, can you even get your hand into your pants pocket? Since when did it become trendy to wear something on your wrist that couldn't possibly fit under your cuffs unless you unbutton them? This is the reason I don't wear one any more--I actually went shopping for one when mine broke down, but wasn't able to find one that had the features I wanted (stopwatch, countdown, multiple alarms) without also being bigger than my wrist after playing handball for ten hours straight.

At least my class problems are solved by the iChrono widget, which gives me a handy stopwatch to time my students' PowerPoint presentation projects.

Can't This Guy Stay on a Bike?

Image from The Londonist

Yet again, our fearless leader fall off his bike and go boom. This is, if I am not mistaken, the third time he has taken a bike spill, not including the time he fell off of a Segway (which takes talent). This time, in England for a G8 summit, Bush collided with a police officer, who was immediately shot taken to a hospital.

As usual, the White House press office insists that Bush was going really, really fast and it had been raining. Maybe, but take that with a huge grain of salt: the last time this happened, in Texas, they also claimed it had been raining and the topsoil was loose, but when someone checked the weather, they found out that it had not rained for more than a week.

So we know they lie about the weather to make it sound more dashing and less stupid; we still have no confirmation that Bush was actually riding super fast ("pretty good speed" and "quite a clip" are the terms used). It is not unlikely that in both cases, Bush was going slowly when he crashed. One piece of contributing evidence: if you're really booking along and you collide with someone, you usually get more than just a few scrapes and bruises. Bush's injuries are more consistent with lower-speed falls. So the high-speed thing is possible, but not likely. The whole thing with the press office trying to make Bush seem macho when he falls off his bike is laughable and not just a little pathetic. Simply say he had another spill and don't embellish.

"You know what really makes this embarrassing? The other day the president said the leaders in Iraq are 'ready to take off the training wheels.' That's what he said, 'take off the training wheels.' Then he goes out and falls off his bicycle. And they wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take us seriously." —Jay Leno

As If She'd Ever Even Heard of Tempel 1 Before

You know it had to happen, somewhere. NASA is being sued by an astrologer in Russia for disrupting her work. She claims that she cannot accurately calculate horoscopes anymore since the Deep Impact probe hit the comet Tempel 1.

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday's collision.

Ms. Bai wants NASA to cough up $300 million.

The article goes on to state that "NASA representatives in Moscow were unavailable for comment." Apparently they have not finished laughing yet.

More Than One Way to Skin a Barometer

Want a good, funny, education-oriented story, complete with moral? Read this. Via Cosmic Buddha.

Not a Donut

On June 8, 1977, my 13th birthday, my father announced that the whole family was going out to get donuts. This is something we did from time to time, going to the closest Winchell's Donut shop (they had great donuts, but have long since disappeared). After we'd been driving for a while, I noticed we weren't going to the usual shop, and my father said there was a much better store in San Jose. I wasn't too fast to pick up on the fact that he was spoofing me; in fact, when we came in sight of the Century theaters, I exclaimed that that was where "Star Wars" was playing, and it wasn't until we turned into the parking lot of the theater that I figured out what my birthday present was.

I was one of those kids who was dying to see the movie. At that time, exactly two weeks after its release, it was still only playing in very few theaters, such as the Century in San Jose and the Coronet in San Francisco. Naturally, I was ecstatic to find out I'd be seeing it that day.

After the film ended, we were walking out to the parking lot when my mother, who'd left the group, caught up with us and gave me something: the button you see pictured here. She had seen one of the theater ushers wearing it, and had asked if she could buy one. When the usher said they weren't for sale, my mother started to tell the story about how much her son loved that movie and would die to have a button like that, as only mothers can do. Defenseless, the usher gave up his own button, which my mother then presented to me.

Okay, call me geeky, call me a nerd (I fully expect someone to do that in the comments), but I still have the button and I'm going to quietly wear it tomorrow when I go see Revenge of the Sith. (Which is the first day it is showing in Japan, in a delayed release here.) I've actually never worn it before, not to any subsequent Star Wars movie screenings (though I probably did wear it to school a couple of times 28 years ago). But this being the last film, I figure, why not? (Actually, a search on Google showed several people with the identical pin had the same idea already. So I can't be the geekiest, so what?)

And just in case you were wondering, no, it's not really that valuable as a collectible. Someone on EBay is selling a similar one for $6, though this guy is asking $20 for the one identical to mine. Not that I'd ever part with it--its sentimental value is way too high.

This Is Where It Gets Creepy

See the pretty girl giving the demonstration at the World Expo in Aichi? At first, seeing what looked like a little camera behind her, I thought she was wearing gloves as part of some motion-sensor demonstration. It was only when I read the small print that I found out what I never would have guessed: that's not a girl. It's an android. Specifically, it's the Repliee Q1, developed by Osaka University. As the unit's co-creator points out, when androids get to looking that human, it gets a little creepy.

When you visit the project's home page, the photos there are higher-definition and the android no longer looks as perfectly human as it does in the Expo photo. But well worth watching are the three MPG videos of the android talking, moving, and reacting to someone touching it. Here it's a mixture of the thing looking less human than you thought but at the same time also looking more human than you might have expected.

One thing it suggests: androids indistinguishable from humans are a little less far off in the future than you may have thought. They're not coming soon, but we're farther along the road than I'd have thought.

A Diet Lite Beer

	Sapporo came out with a new lite beer recently, and it is superior over others not because it has fewer calories, and not because it has less calories, but rather...

I just hate the ones with fewer more calories.

And you'd think that a company like Sapporo could spend a few bucks to have a translator check out their newest slogan....

Now Your Dog Takes You for a Walk

An interesting invention here. Do you have a dog, but don't like having to exert so much energy walking the pooch every day, struggling to hold him back? This device takes care of that: strap Fido into the harness, and let him pull you along while you steer.

A movie showing the device in action is also available on the product's site.

This may not be in line with what most canine lovers may accept as doggie-friendly, but it's better than some ideas I've seen before, like one guy I saw "walking" his dog from his car, holding the leash out the window. The makers of this "urban mushing" device claim that it actually gives "identity and pride for your dog," though somehow I'm not fully sure that this is what the dogs are thinking.

If you want to spread the workload of dragging your fat ass around, there's a model of the Dog-Powered Scooter which allows for two dogs. Though frankly, I might not want to be on that scooter when Spot and Rover lay their eyes on Fluffy the Cat and decide to go for it.

Kung-Fu Fighting Sparrows

The feeder that I put out my dining room window has mostly attracted just sparrows; I was hoping for more than just them, but so far only pigeons and an Oriental Turtledove (a slightly better-looking pigeon) have shown up aside from them. But the sparrows are now regular visitors to the feeder, sometimes as many as ten of them out there at the same time. Which means that they tend to get a bit aggressive with each other about who gets access to one of the three feeding holes. Which led to this photo:

It's taken at high speed, 1/1000 of a second (those little buggers flit around real fast), and the action that happened to reveal itself in that split second just looked so similar to a bird martial-arts scene that I had to put it up.

Google Gulp

Google had a bit of fun on April 1st, "introducing" a new line of on-line beverages called "Google Gulp (BETA)™" with technology that might be available in a couple hundred years or so. Be sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom titled "Google Gulp and Your Privacy," it's pretty funny.

There's also their not-so-serious sketch of how Google's storage space will continue to grow after their fully-serious bump up to 2GB (2052 MB, actually) of mail storage space. With that much space, so long as you have a fast enough internet connection, Google is looking more and more like an extra storage location rather than an email service--including software (only for Windows now) for storing photos in an organized way within your account.

And hey, I've only got 50 GMail invites left, so if you want one, better act fast!!!

Montgomery Burns' Blog And Black Hole Fireballs

It's going on at Talking Points Memo. I like to read TPM, but Josh Marshall can, at times, go almost too deeply into a subject. If you need any and all information on the Social Security situation, that's the place to go for single-minded coverage. But even then, it's one of the better political blogs to read.

But now, apparently, Josh is off to get married, and so he has a guest blogger. When I saw the name, I thought, "hey, that's the same name as that other guy. Whaddaya know." But then I realized, from the intro at the top which I'd missed before, that it was him--Harry Shearer, cast member of The Simpsons and into a few hundred other things, is guest blogging on TPM. Subjects include his being called to jury duty with Christina Applegate for the Robert Blake trial.

Ehhhhhhhhxcellent.

Oh, and by the way, they now think that they're creating black holes in labs, which quickly explode in fireballs 300 times hotter than the sun. The black holes explode, that is, and not the labs. Well, not yet, anyway. And I'm not kidding. And they reassure us that the experiment "is not thought to pose a threat." Oh, well, so long as your that certain.

Oldie but a Goodie

I found this while rummaging through old files. It's a 3:16-long sound file, one I got from somewhere years and years ago. Essentially, it is a spoof on Star Trek (the original series), in which some enterprising sound editor spliced together bits and pieces of dialog and sound effects from several episodes of the show to make it appear that Kirk, Spock and Scotty are having a torrid homosexual affair. Keep in mind that though the dialog is straight from the show, the newly-crafted context makes it rather X-rated in tone. Nevertheless, it is quite hilarious, especially if you are familiar with the old show.

The download here is in WAV form, and should be playable with most audio apps; the file size is just above 2MB. Not for the young or weak of heart.

Ah, If Only It Were So

In a saner reality, perhaps.

From the RNC Dictionary

9/11 (noun phrase): a catchall reason to justify any Republican failing, support any Republican agenda, or excuse any Republican crime or malfeasance. See Get Out of Jail Free Card.

abortion (abomination): see partial-birth abortion or baby-killing.

accountability (noun): claiming responsibility while blaming others and accepting no punishment or penalty of any sort. See responsibility.

affirmative action (noun phrase): stealing jobs or university seats from deserving white males and giving them to shiftless, lazy minorities. See special rights.

alternative fuel source (compound noun): oil drilling in new locations, especially protected wildlife areas.

around the corner (prepositional phrase): "never going to happen."

arrogant (adjective): see humble.

bipartisan (adjective): what Republicans are by default, especially when suppressing Democrats and ramming through a one-sided Republican agenda.

cognitive dissonance (noun phrase): a way of life.

constitutional amendment (noun phrase): veto power over the judicial branch when asserting unconstitutional conservative agendas.

darwin (proper noun): a godless heathen whose theories are an abomination except when applied to social and fiscal issues.

evil (noun): not conservative. See traitor.

fundamentalism (noun): see base.

grassroots (adjective): see astroturf.

homeland security (compound noun): an excellent vehicle for forwarding a conservative political agenda while stripping away constitutional rights disliked by the right wing. Otherwise meaningless.

homosexuality ( abomination ): a choice made by godless deviants so they can become child molesters and recruit everyone else into homosexuality.

humble (adjective): see arrogant.

indictment (noun): see DeLay, Tom, and denial strategies. Otherwise, a political tool to be used against Democrats.

legislating from the bench (gerund phrase): whenever a judge or justice interprets the law to your disliking.

lesbian (noun): acceptable in some video entertainment; otherwise: a woman who refuses to go out on a date with a Republican male.

medicaid (noun): a wasteful welfare program. If an American doesn't make enough money, he and his family don't deserve to live in health; see social darwinism.

moderate (adjective): regarding Democrats: a non-existent, mythical being (they are all extremists, especially when running for office); regarding Republicans: see traitor.

most liberal (superlative adjective): any Democrat who runs for president.

nation-building (gerund): what Democrats do when they involve themselves in any foreign affairs; null meaning when applied to conservatives (see liberating).

osama bin laden (proper noun): who?

partial-birth abortion (compound noun): a rare procedure which is used in extreme circumstances to save the life of a mother or when the mother's health is in jeopardy and the fetus is non-viable. the most revolting form of abortion that could be found so as to be misrepresented as abortion in general.

pledge of allegiance (noun phrase): an excellent device to be used when real issues present embarrassing dilemmas.

pro-life (adjective): a philosophy that applies only to those who have not yet been born. After birth, social darwinism applies.

racist (adjective): any Democrats who dares to challenge an extremist conservative judicial bench appointment where the candidate is a minority. Also see affirmative action.

responsibility (noun): something to be avoided at all costs while appearing to embrace it.

science (noun): a field dedicated to proving correct the current conservative agenda. Otherwise, see witchcraft.

second amendment (holy script): the only sacrosanct part of the bill of rights (applies to second half of amendment only).

separation of church and state (noun phrase): see unification of Protestant Christianity and state.

social security (noun phrase): a type of welfare which should be ended as soon as is feasible while appearing to champion, reform and save it so as to garner the valuable senior citizen vote. Unneeded as anyone who is worth their salt will be wealthy enough to take care of themselves upon retirement. In the meantime, a good source of money to steal from. See social darwinism.

special rights/privileges/preferences (noun phrase): whenever a minority or non-heterosexual-male gender group is given the same rights, liberties or protections enjoyed by straight white males.

ten commandments, the (noun phrase): when publicly displayed, a catchall solution to any social problem; also a good wedge to open the door to unification of church and state. See indoctrination.

tolerance (noun): allowing Democrats to vote (or at least to think they are voting)

uniter (noun): someone who divides.

values (noun): what, by definition, conservatives have and liberals do not have. Otherwise, a vague catchall term to add apparent moral strength to any conservative idea.

voter fraud (compound noun): when someone votes for the Democratic candidate, particularly a minority voter.

women's rights (noun phrase): see special rights.

2nd Quarter: Green Bay 10, Washington 0

For three-quarters of a century, the final home game played by the Washington Redskins before the election has, without fail, predicted who would win the election. If the Redskins win, the incumbent wins. If they lose, he loses.

In the second quarter, Green Bay leads. I'd love to stay up and follow this one, but I gotta get some sleep.

Mission Accomplished?

This photo has cropped up already:

And maybe we should check the video closely to see if he's got a bulge in the back of his robes...

They Told Us We Were Shooting a Greenpeace Commercial!

This web site via Josh Marshall. Very amusing, if the target of the site is anything but.

One More Endorsement

A funny little video, kind of a 527 campaign commercial, from a group calling themselves "George the Menace," claiming to have been spurred on by the Swift Boast liars. The video is self-explanatory, available in Quicktime and Real Media. I don't know how professional these people are, but they did a very slick job in the one special effect in the video--it looks quite realistic, and all the more wry. It would be even funnier if you didn't believe it to be all too true, generally speaking.

Kerry's "Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals"

Read by Kerry on "Late Night with David Letterman."

10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents.

9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form.

8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton.

7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair.

6. Attorney General (John) Ashcroft gets to write off the entire U.S. Constitution.

5. Texas Rangers can take a business loss for trading Sammy Sosa.

4. Eliminate all income taxes; just ask Teresa (Heinz Kerry) to cover the whole damn thing.

3. Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.

2. Hundred-dollar penalty if you pronounce it "nuclear" instead of "nucular."

1. George W. Bush gets a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.

Partisan Toons

And thank goodness for them, a little comic relief is what we need at this point. Bizarro has often come up with some good ones, and this weekend was no exception:

Meanwhile, Garry Trudeau focused on Bush's staged, sycophantic town-hall meetings last week:

Sometimes You Know It's Just Got to Be a Scam

A few years ago, I bought a good leather jacket while on a business trip to Wisconsin. The jacket was cheap, but seemed of good quality--and that has borne out to be true. Good material, rugged, warm, comfortable, and (not that I know anything about fashion) it looked good, at least to me.

At the end of last Spring, I found the one part of the jacket that reflected its price. On the zipper, there is a small, flat metal tab on the fastening mechanism that you pull up and down to open or close the zipper. You know, the little metal flap that you hold between your thumb and forefinger while zipping. That thing broke, snapped in the middle, making it impossible to pull the fastener up or down.

Not a problem, I thought. It's, what, a simple piece of metal, gotta cost five cents tops to produce. I examined the remaining stump, and with a little twisting, it came right off. Replacing it should be a cinch--get a new metal tab, twist it a bit to snap it on, and Bob's your uncle. So I went to this large sewing and clothing supply store in Shinjuku I know of, figuring they must have a small rack of these things. Would cost a dollar at most, including a significant markup for the store.

I go in, wait for a salesperson to be free, and asked about it. Go to the sixth floor, she told me. I went to the elevator, which had left the first floor just before I had gotten to it, stopping at every floor on the way up, and on the way down. Sensing one of those frustrating series of piddling annoyances, I speculated that I would be told on the sixth (and top) floor that what I need is actually on the first floor. That happens often enough.

I get to the sixth floor, but don't see the right materials. So I wait to talk to someone, and am redirected again--twice. When I finally reach someone who deals with these things, she looks at the broken fastener tab with doubt, then goes to the back of the store for a few minutes. When she comes back out, she's carrying zippers and fasteners. "It's not YKK, is it?" she observes. YKK is a Japanese company which makes something like 90% of all the zippers in the world. I know because I visited their factory once years and years ago, I forget even why.

The salesperson meticulously compares the zippers that she brought out with mine, attempting to divine their size, mumbling in apparently distress about this non-YKK zipper I've got. I try to tell her, I don't need the fastening mechanism, it's not broken. I just need a new tab. See? Simple little thing. You must have some. She tried to explain that they don't sell them. Why not, I wondered--it must be the most breakable part of most zippers, it's simple, it should be cheap. (Though maybe that's why they don't carry them.)

She got that face that shopkeepers get in Japan when you ask for something they don't have, and they don't want to disappoint you, yet they know they have little other choice. Here we go, I thought. She's gonna send me to the first floor for something.

She outdid my expectations. "I can't tell if the size is right," she told me. "You'll have to go to the repair corner. Go down to the first floor, go across the street, and up to the fifth floor." Great. She found a way to make me go even farther--no doubt to be redirected back again.

So off I went, and sure enough, the elevator down had just left the floor, and was stopping at, well, you know. I walked down the stairs, crossed the street, and got to the elevator just as it had taken off from the first floor. Sometimes you can't catch a break.

When I got to the fifth floor, naturally I got redirected after waiting yet again, and found the right person. "It's not a YKK zipper, is it? she mused. "No," I replied, "but I don't need the zipper, I just need that little tab. Surely you must have one."

"No," she said, "you can't replace that part." This is where my BS sensors started going off. It's a small piece of metal. The operative part is a simple straight bar divided in the middle to allow the piece to be worked into place on assembly. If it's not available, it must be by choice, not because of a mechanical impossibility. It would be child's play to replace, you don't need to be an engineer to figure that out.

Further, she opined that my zipper, being of the non-YKK variety, was probably not going to work with any of their fasteners. "We'll have to take out the whole zipper and replace it with a new one." I asked her the cost, and it approached the cost of the original jacket. This is most definitely not right, I knew it.

At that point, I was hit with an inspiration. "Wait, I bet I could use a key ring in there. Just thread it through and use that. It wouldn't be very stylish--or maybe it would be, I don't know--but I bet it would work."

She shook her head sagely, telling me with absolute confidence that it would never work. There's a locking mechanism in the fastener, she told me; "if the pulling tab isn't just right, the fastener will lock up. It'll never work." Still, I wasn't about to leave my jacket there for a week or two while they massively overcharged me for unnecessary work--well, not without looking into things first--so I left.

On my way out (the elevator was there for once), I grumbled to myself that the whole thing was ridiculous, I should have been able to snap on an extra part in ten seconds and walked away. Once on the street, I decided to trust my instincts. I fished out my keys, found a key ring which was about the right size and thickness, and rearranged the keys to free up the ring. I then threaded it through the hole in the fastener on the jacket's zipper.

It works perfectly.

I felt kind of foolish for not thinking of it way earlier, and for not trusting my instincts immediately. After all, sometimes you know it's just gotta be a scam.

Where's That Darn Heart O' Mine?

Just thought you might enjoy this AP Photo. Even the little girl knows generally where her heart is located. One can easily imagine what Bush might be thinking. "I can't belive I ate that whole pizza all by myself." Or maybe, "Damn those pretzels! If they don't choke me, they give me indigestion!"

Anyone care to suggest other captions?

Rave Reviews

One thing visitors quickly learn about in China is the existence of pirated DVDs. For a dollar and under, you can get DVDs of new or old movies; I mentioned this a few days ago.

What I didn't mention is how they seem to slap together the cover art, especially for newer movies. It looks legit, but if you read carefully, sometimes the writing is strange, or even not connected to the DVD's movie at all.

Today I saw one that was hilarious, for a movie called "Laws of Attraction." Obviously they lifted a review of the film and put it on the back of the DVD cover. But they also obviously could not understand what the review said. See for yourself:

Sometimes He Lets the Truth Slip

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful - and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people - and neither do we."

--George W. Bush, during a signing ceremony for a defense bill, Aug. 5, 2004

Update: Thanks to Mark at VuDeja for pointing me to this audio file of Bush's statement (now hosted here).

More Engrish

If you haven't been to Engrish.com, you should go there--an on-line collection of all sorts of funny English spotted and photographed in Japan. Not that I don't see a whole bunch myself. I remember back in Toyama in the mid-80's, I found a hairdressing salon that sported the name "Hair Salon Bow-Wow." I kid you not. I already posted about a parking lot sign that somehow misspelled a common two-letter word, the only word on the sign, and about a shop that was unclear on the concept of how sales are "on."

Yesterday, I was going to the travel agency to pay off the last of my plane ticket to China, and in the entrance of the building there was an ad on two panels of a glass wall to the business there. First you see:

And then:

And so:

I still have some other funny-English photos from the past. I'll try to post some soon.

Empire Rising

David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a very amusing series on The Rise (and hopeful Fall) of Dubbia the Incoherent, entitled "Empire Rising." It's pretty funny, and well worth looking at.

You can see the series on the Seattle P-I web site: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV... so far.

Thanks to my dad for pointing this one out!

And while you're at it, go and look at Jib Jab's funny and bipartisan flash animation featuring Bush and Kerry singing an altered version of "This Land is Your Land." Look for the hilarious Howard Dean bit--but the whole thing is hilarious.

Hilarious Daily Show Bit

Saw it on the Daily Show Global Edition on CNN, it's priceless. Samantha Bee takes a look at Michael Wilson, the right-wing rip-off Moore-basher who's making the film "Michael Moore Hates America."

The video, titled "I Dislike Mike," is available along with lots of other video pieces (Real Player required) on the Daily Show site.

Wilson comes across looking like a complete doofus (which is probably not too far off the mark), and Moore makes a few really funny cameos with Bee.

You really have to see this, and it'd probably be a lot of fun to look around the site (especially for those of you based here in Japan, who don't get to see the show except for the boiled-down weekly edition).

Robot Bartender Joke

Here's a good Robot Bartender joke as told by Lauren Shannon on the DAJ mailing list:

A popular bar had a new robotic bartender installed. A fellow came in for a drink and the robot asked him, 'What's your IQ?'

The man replied, '150.'

So the robot proceeded to make conversation about Quantum physics, string
theory, atomic chemistry, and so on. The man listened intently and thought, 'This is really cool.'

The man decided to test the robot. He walked out the bar, turned around, and
came back in for another drink. Again, the robot asked him, 'What's your
IQ?'

The man responded, '100.' So the robot started talking about football,
baseball, and so on. The man thought to himself, 'Wow, this is amazing.'

The man went out and came back in a third time. As before, the robot asked
him, 'What's your IQ?' The man replied, '50.'

The robot then said, 'So, you gonna vote for Bush again?"

Wow!

According to PolkOnline.com ("Your guide to Polk County, Florida"), Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be coming to that area this Friday, after not being included in the original release. The site reports that F-9/11 grossed $24 million up to Monday, and no wonder--according to the site,

"'Fahrenheit 9/11' was released to approximately 868,000 theaters last week; however, this week only 19,000 are carrying the film, according to reports received from Dickinson Inc., Lakeland Square 10 Cinema's parent company."

Nearly a million theaters got the film! I didn't even know there were that many theaters! So Lakeland Square 10 Cinemas in Polk County must have been the only one not showing the film! Taking that number, on can figure that's about one theater for every 350 Americans, and it means that the per-screen gross up to Monday was just $27 per theater. What a let-down; no wonder 849,000 theaters dropped the movie by this week so only 19,000 are carrying it still.

Sorry About That

From members of the DAJ mailing list: A small American company selling shirts in France gave this French-language washing instructions on the label at the back of the neck:

LAVER A LA MAIN A L'EAU TIEDE
SAVON DOUX
ETENDRE POUR SECHER
NE PAS SECHER A LA MACHINE
NE PAS REPASSER
NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE
NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT.
NOUS N‘AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI.

See here for the translation. The company says that it actually was an in-joke referring to the company president, but I don't really think so....

Note: Mark had it a while ago... I knew I'd seen it somewhere!

Zapping Freepers

Go ahead and check this out--go down to the 9th post. It's on the Free Republic forums site, a watering hole for rabid ultraconservatives, where on of their posters stole bandwidth by posting an image hosted on my site. This is the third time I get to zap people by altering the image on my own site, and that I get to make these right-wingnuts look foolish is icing on the cake.

Don't know how long this one will stay up--Freepers will likely see it immediately and get the guy to revise the post, if the admins don't get it. So hurry up and see!

Note: I just checked the other two sites I zapped before, and after weeks of having these altered images up on their sites--despite comments to the posts and recent activity on the sites--they haven't changed things yet.

Also, I just archived the Freeper page, so if they change it I will post the archived version here on this site.

Cheney: "Go F--- Yourself"

During a Senate "class photo" event, Vice President Dick "Major Asshole" Cheney had a heated exchange with Democratic Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, and when Leahy complained that Cheney had once publicly accused him of being a bad Catholic, Cheney just retorted, "Go fuck yourself."

But hey, it might not be so bad. According to reports, Cheney may have said only "Fuck off."

This from the party of family values, uniting not dividing, and bringing "honor and dignity" back to the White House.

Seven of Nine Vaporizes Republican Senate Candidate

It's like something you would find in fiction or in tabloids, but apparently it's legit. Republican Jack Ryan (no relation to the Tom Clancy character) is now running for a Senate seat to replace retiring Republican Senator Fitzgerald. But he might not win the close race. Why? Testimony from Ryan's 2000 divorce from actress Jeri Ryan (of Star Trek: Voyager) has surfaced.

Apparently, this God-fearing, family value Republican is, well, to put it lightly, something of a deviant. Jeri Ryan's testimony, as acquired by "several Chicago media organizations" under a lawsuit for the public interest, reads in part:

"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said in the court document, adding that her husband "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused."

She said on arriving at the third club, in Paris, "people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. [He] became very upset with me and said it was not a 'turn on' for me to cry."

Jeri Ryan is now releasing statements praising Jack Ryan, but does not in any way contradict or deny her court testimony. And Ryan, naturally, is denying everything.

Still, it does not look good for Ryan, and is quite a bit of fun for the rest of us. Not just for the titillating parts, but amusement at yet more hypocrisy from the right wing, preaching family values and yet being devoid of any values of their own.

Update: The irony thickens. Here's a web site Ryan hosts which is all about the Defense of Marriage Act. In fact, it is titled "Jack Ryan on the Defense of Marriage Act." In which, he claims, "As an elected leader, my interest will be in promoting laws and educating people about the fundamental importance of the traditional family unit as the nucleus of our society." Forcing your wife to perform public sex acts at sex clubs and S&M orgies, I can only imagine, being an integral part of "the nucleus of our society."

Pentareagan

It is now being reported: "An amendment proposed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would change the name of the Pentagon to "The Ronald Reagan Defense Building."

This is the Senate Majority Leader, for crying out loud.

What next? Rename the White House to the Reagan House? Capitol Hill to Reagan Hill? That's not too far off from renaming the Pentagon.

Even Freepers, in their ultraconservative go-crazy discussion forums, are starting to say "Whoa, Nelly!":

"OK, no, I'm sorry. Let's not go nuts here, people."

"I agree- the Republican Party is dangerously close to outdoing the Paul Wellstone crowd."

"this is nuts. and it shows how shallow the 'leaders' of our party in the Senate are. somebody from the white house better call this idiot, fast."

"Why not just rename the whole country. United States is uninspired and characterless for a name of a country. Name it Reagania."

When the far-right-wingers start saying the GOP is going too far, it just might be time for them to call it quits.

Put Reagan's Name/Face on (insert your own noun here)!

There are currently several efforts underway by conservatives to put Reagan on the $10 bill (though they would be just as happy with the $20 or dime), one in Congress and another by appealing to the Bush administration. Already Reagan's name has been plastered over the National Airport in Washington, D.C., and has been put on a mountain (Mount Reagan), a naval vessel (the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan), in addition to "54 highways, schools, post offices and other memorials to Reagan around the country."

Thus begins the completely expected rush to slap Reagan's name on just about everything in sight. Apotheosis indeed. Nancy Reagan, gratefully and gracefully, has opposed such movements, but conservatives, wishing to immortalize their political icon and make sure everyone reveres him, ignore the request (possibly figuring she's just saying such things for the sake of image).

But fortunately there is more than just public opposition, Democrats in Congress are opposing as well. Normally cowed by Republican attempts to pass their agenda under unrelated popular and/or patriotic themes, Democrats have a way around that--by voicing their support for Alexander Hamilton and Franklin Roosevelt. Republicans want to overcome this by compromising as issuing half Reagan dimes and half Roosevelt dimes.

As an alternative, I might suggest putting Reagan's face on infants' bibs (in honor of his "trickle-down" economics), using his name in the title of the next Star Wars film (double purpose, for the 'Star Wars' program and for the use of the "evil empire," which is portrayed as being created in the next Star Wars flick), or on food stamps, in recognition of how many people he forced into poverty and so have to use them--although I am certain he tried to cut the issuance of such 'welfare' to people who needed them. But then, Republicans have never really been bothered by contradictions such as these.

(Update: I just noted something: this is post number 666!!! I didn't notice until after I'd posted, but I find it incredibly appropriate--especially considering that when the Reagans moved back to California after leaving the WHite House, their house number was 666--and Nancy insisted it be changed before they took residence. Funny how that number keeps popping up with him....)

The Big Four-Zero

Funny, I don't feel any different. But then, I never did put much stock in age milestones. Transitions are far more gradual than that, and don't usually fall in step with odometer changes.

Talk About Balls...

A student in England is suing his university... because they did not catch him at plagiarism early enough.

No, I'm not making that up. Apparently, he did it quite often, and was never caught. But Kent University started using new software to catch plagiarists, and finally detected it. "I hold my hands up," the student, Michael Gunn, said. "I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem."

But, he adds, they never caught him before now. He paid tuition all that time--and they never nabbed him until just before the end of his studies. "If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough. But all my essays were handed back with good marks and no one spotted it."

As a university professor, I have to give this student an "A+" for brazen gall, and an "F" for honesty and taking responsibility. What does this young man think will happen for the rest of his life? "Yes, I embezzled millions of pounds from the company for many years," I imagine him telling the police decades on. "But they never caught me until just before my retirement, so I'm suing them. Someone should have warned me that embezzling was illegal."

This rates right up there with Steve Martin's classic "I forgot" defense.