Friday, February 27, 2004
Wrong bear
I looked again at that Flash animation on the Yukigassen website. It's not a panda. It's some other kind of bear.
This is the species known, in more scientific terms, as the Cartoon-Style Bear. I'm certain, actually, that a panda wouldn't be able to throw that kind of curve ball. Curve snowball. Whatever.
The things a Japanese wife just won't tolerate these days....
From the Wall Street Journal again yesterday--the Japanese snowball sporting league. It's a big deal. A real big deal. They practice. They wear helmets. They have regulation snowball sizes that need to be correct to the hundreth of a millimeter. They play for a(n) (inter)national title. In fact, the whole big tournament is labelled as "international," as if there is many--or any--other countries willing to invest the money to send a team to a big snowball fight.
The rules sound like a mix between dodgeball and capture the flag. There are tons of teams, including 30-some for women. And apparently, the sport is demanding on the athletic male's social schedule. This is the best part of Sebastian Moffett's article in the Journal: "All Skyward teammates, who range in age between 21 and 33, are single. 'Everyone who gets married gives up snowball fighting' because the big time commitment, says Mr. Miyashita. 'Japanese wives won't put up with it.'"
Imagine. A wife that doesn't brook her husband's awkward and obsessive snowball fight practice schedule. He'd find much more understanding women in the United States, I'm sure.
Check out the homepage for the Yukigassen league. When you get to the main page, check out the photo gallery--it's the fourth button from the top. But first you'll be treated to an introductory Flash animation of a Panda throwing a snowball. And keep in mind, this is not a manifestation of the animated animal fetish I mentioned yesterday. This is Japanese.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Strange animal music videos
Well, I've spent enough time bouncing around on Rather Good to at least notice, if not completely decode, Joel Veitch's love for mutant singing animals, and songs that involve them. The whole monkey thing with Elvis--find it yourself--is proof enough of a demented obsession taken to its pointedly disturbing extremes--though I'm not going to deny that it is funny. And the website is filled with loads of other, less offensive dancing, singing animals--or, in the case of the Pavarotti bit, animals being sung to or about.
I think, however, that Veitch's obsession is only indicative of a broader trend that lays somewhere else in the matrix of Dante's new digital hell--setting animals to music. I need only refer you to the now-ancient phenomenon of Hampsters dancing. Seems now the venerable hampsters have won their own little interactive world complete with a thumping remix of the original theme, and you have to navigate through a series of menus these days to even get to the evil thing that started off two whole genres of internet vice: the broader category of general things that dance, and the more specific topic at hand, animals set to music.
Now there's this whole thing about badgers, which I heard about on Elizabeth Lane Lawley's blog. I looked up the whole badger phenomenon on Blogdex, and it seems like this badger deal ran through the blogs a couple months ago, but on Blogdex it's referenced at a few different websites. Seems like the badgers, not unlike their rodent cousins, have become big enough for their own webpage now, too.
The Vietch phenomenon, dancing rodents, and now badgers and snakes--I suppose that's enough to triangulate the dancing animal theory. See you in hell, badgers.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Unhealthy Buggers
Well, one of our computers got hit with the Netsky virus. It only takes a second, and bam, you're in trouble. I'm going right now to see if I can work on getting that bugger quarantined and eliminated. Infected 400 some files in only seconds. It's amazing how those things work, and I wonder what the world would be like if only a fraction of the people who have the technological wizardry to come up with things like this would focus their time on doing something healthy and helpful with their skills.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
80's continued
Torill had a small link at the bottom of today's post which described what kind of coffee she was.
The link came from Quizilla, and it seems like they have a quiz for everyone, to tell you what kind of coffee you are and what kind of shoe you are and how old your inner child is and what kind of SEX you enjoy. I filled out the quiz on Care Bears. Seems like I'm the hopeless intellectual Care Bear.
Nihilist Bear
Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
I must admit a particular weakness for these kind of quizzes. It's a vice, one for which I am sure Dante would devise a particular circle of a new digital hell. I have a worry that soon I'll be able to tell you at what age my nihilistic inner bear child learned to love mochas and the Kama Sutra before meeting a particularly nasty dramatic death of its choosing. All courtesy of Quizilla.
Thanks for nothing, Quizilla.
Your new breakthrough artists
I didn't get much farther than Yahoo! after posting this last bit on The Darkness to learn that they're now breakthrough artists who should have their own promo page with clips and interviews.
Now don't get me wrong; my love for the band should be apparent. But sometimes, when a band hits it big, I get a little sad. I felt the same way when I heard three of the songs from Damien Rice's debut O on the radio. It's the feeling of something you cherish being given to everyone, even most likely people who can't appreciate it for what it is, like when you find out everyone knows of something you had loved keeping a secret.
This has a lot to do with feeling that my roots as a music lover are in the independent scene. Goes to show, I suppose, that the independent music scene is both a marketing style and a way of life, or a mindset. I buy good music, but what's to say I'm less deserving of criticism for turning my nose up at popular music than is the teenager is who never gets his ears out of the Top 40?
Humor in Rock 'N Roll
I am what I would call a shrewd consumer. I have very strict limits for how much I'll spend on both new and used cds, dvds, and video games. I think a lot of it is knowing how much something is worth to you, how much you can expect to find it for, and how long you're willing to wait to look for it.
So I've been very badly wanting a copy of the new cd by The Darkness's new cd, Permission to Land, which has been almost universally acclaimed as an unabashedly great piece of a seriously good, and not so seriously hilarious, butt-rockin' great time. When I saw it two days ago for $9.99 new I had to buy it immediately.
I've loved listening to the disc, and it reminds me of Electric Six's debut last year, Fire. Fire is not quite so acclaimed as Permission to Land, but it's still a really phenomenal record. Both albums combine a throwback sound with buckets of cocky attitude--Electric Six puts disco and funk spunk in a blender with rock panache, while The Darkness unabashedly update 80's arena rock and metal. Both albums are downright funny to listen to. And both albums rock your pants off.
I love that the bands are so funny. There's something great about a band that can live so fully on the best parts of old rock cliches, and yet still see the humor in their influences. It takes a lot of guts to pull off the swagger, though, and quite a bit of talent; somehow bands like these have to rise above the sum of their parts, which they wear so obviously on their sleeves (album sleeves, perhaps specifically). It's healthy to be able to laugh at who we were back when hair metal and disco were so popular, and yet still acknowledge that there was a lot of kickin' music that came out of it all.
It's strange to think that the excess of these music eras could be itching at our collective subconscious, desiring so badly to be expressed that bands like The Darkness could formulate a surprise takeover of the music scene. But if it's going to happen, I'd like it to happen this way, with our tongues in our cheeks, and with a full and conscious enjoyment of the utterly ridiculous cultural heritage we established in the last few decades of the 20th century.
It still might be in my best interest to resist buying those hot Thundercats boxers.
Thaw
No more than 48 hours ago our lawn was covered by gigantic snow mountains. The curbs all over Council Bluffs and Omaha were packed to the bursting with snow they had nowhere else to put when they plowed the streets. The parking lot where I typically park my car during the week was a free-for-all; parking spaces were more left to one's imagination, and their normal rows were replaced by haphazard creations that started with the first person to put the car there, and progressed car by car as cars parked next to cars that approximately seemed to be in some kind of order.
Now everything's melting. I noticed it for the first time, really, today when I was driving and made a turn I make almost every day. This time I didn't have to swing my turn wider to avoid the gigantic glacier in the middle of the road. Now I can see places I haven't seen for weeks--around street corners, curbs, storefronts, and my lawn. With the warmer weather, a small creek developed on the brick street by our garage, and it flowed steadily during the days, when the sun was out. I also noticed that such small creeks were turning up everywhere, and with them, potholes. Massive, cavernous potholes that would make a splashy explosion when someone would hit them, from all the melting runoff flowing into them. The sun was shining, warm enough to make it all melt; there wasn't a cloud in the blue sky, and still it was wet everywhere.
The icy glaciers and mountains are mostly gone now, and the road crews have filled up just about all the potholes. I know because I memorize where they are so I don't drive over them, and as I drove home I noticed many of them had been patched. The fantastic spontaneous creeks have also dried up, and now everything looks brown and dirty, not white and dirty.
I'm finding myself with a peculiar mix of expectations. It's strange to think I'll soon have forgotten everything was covered in snow. Even so, I know we're not already out of the woods. Those potholes aren't all filled, and when I do still hit one I am reminded to still expect some other big, cataclysmic snowstorm before Spring; it is only February, after all. I'm also remembering how, just last year, I was living in St. Paul, and how we still had the same snow on the ground in February that we got in October. Winter was a much more permanent companion of the landscape there; here, at least so far, it seems like it comes to bother things for a while, and then runs off like a bad dream.
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Our little Chinese corner of the Midwest,
or, Back in China Again
Today my girlfriend and I drove north on I-29 to Sioux City. It's a drive of about 90 miles from where I live, and along much of the way the Loess Hills of western Iowa are our traveling companions to the east of the highway. I live beneath the Loess Hills in Iowa, and the viaduct I drive over to get to I-80 is, just like that stretch of I-29 north to Sioux City, a part of the "Loess Hills Scenic Highway." So though I'm new to the area, the sight of those silty hills is becoming an important part of my sense of the place's identity.
And that's just as it should be. Really, I thought at first that the Loess Hills were just, well, hills, the same sort of bluffs that are features of many towns that run next to rivers. Honestly, they're quite obviously just big, open-faced, dirt cliffs. Sure, they're distinctive, but they didn't initially strike me as spectacular. But I've learned otherwise. The Loess Hills of Western Iowa are one-of-a-kind in North America, or even in the entire Western hemisphere. Their only geographic equivalents on our planet are to be found in the Shaanxi province of China. The government's handouton the area is much more informative than I could hope to be, so check it out for the official geologist's analysis. It's good to spend time with geologists, because they, like physicists, see places and things we thought we knew differently than we could imagine, like they hold its very secret stories.
The government handout is right in saying that we don't typically think of Iowa as having much topographical variation. So it's no surprise that I didn't think that I lived in the shadow of a geological formation unique to our continent. But how ignorant we are to think of so much of the geography we see, especially in the Midwest, to be without a rich and interesting history. As I'm learning from books like Dakota by Kathleen Norris living in a place like the Great Plains affects you deeply. Most people who drive through here and think it's "boring" have no idea they're driving across the bed of what used to be an ancient inland sea. Not that knowing that makes the drive less flat, but it's good every once in a while to remember that not everything is exactly as it seems.
Angel at Back to Guangzhou (to which several of us have been back already) should only know that she is, in a way, so close to a land feature that has its twin so close to her hometown. You just never know where you'll find the most spectacular gems.
