Can’t read your own shirt, huh?
One really popular pastime for native English speakers, when visiting Japan, is to gawk at and make fun of all the t-shirts with bizarre, fractured, or profane English prominently featured.
This, then, would be turnabout.
My wife has gotten rather hooked on the TV program “Bones”, which features a weekly dose of blood, gore, and oozing dead people. It is, however, a network program, so it’s very careful with the language the characters use; it tends to stay firmly in the PG realm.
Anyway, we don’t actually WATCH weekly programming, as a rule, but we’ve bought the first two seasons on DVD and we’ve been watching them.
The other night, we’re watching this program, and after a family-friendly 40 minutes of the main characters trying to track down the killers of a guy who was found mostly dissolved in a bathtub full of …I want to say acid, but I think it was actually a strong base. Lye’s a base, right? “Acid” sounds cooler… anyway, after the main story is resolved, Angel Booth and Temperence are talking in her office, and I notice that Angel Booth’s shirt is written in Japanese, and then I have to pause the episode and go back to make sure that it says what I thought it said.
”ファック ザ 世界”
“Fuck the world”
I’m going to guess that nobody on-crew could read the shirt they put on him, and just figured “Hey, Japanese looks cool, we’ll go with this one.”
Nostalgia hits hard
Our local Fred Meyers had a DVD sale, a few months back, where they took a bunch of movies they’d overstocked on and put them all out at $5.00 each.
This is how we came to own Ghost Rider on DVD, which we’d missed on the weekend it was in theaters. We finally got around to watching it Friday, and, well, uh, it had good effects and was well worth the $5.00.
I’d put it a little below “Daredevil” when it comes to Marvel movies.
Anyway, when it was over, it reminded me that, even though I wasn’t really a Marvel fan in my childhood, I’d had at least one comic with Ghost Rider in it, and so I went to see if I could figure out what it was. I knew it’d had him and Iceman and Angel in it.
It turned out that it was an issue of “The Champions”, a Marvel series from the 70s that featured the superheroic exploits of Ghost Rider, Hercules, The Black Widow, and yes, Iceman and Angel.
It also wasn’t too hard to find the series to read. Turns out that I’d had issue 14, which had been the first half of a two-part story, so I got to read issue 15 for the first time and find out how The Champions beat The Swarm. The Swarm being, let me get this straight, a Nazi who’d escaped prosecution at the end of WWII and moved to South America, where he was studying killer bees and wound up melding with a hive of super-intelligent killer bees and becoming a supervillain.
OK, so it wasn’t exactly a Great Work of Literature, but what the heck.
Then I made the mistake of saying to myself, hey, I have the whole series here, let’s read it from the start.
Don’t do this. It hurt me, people, it Hurt Me Bad. The Swarm turned out to be the sole redeeming factor of the entire series, and I honestly don’t know whether that’s because those issues were actually any better than the rest or if the nostalgia factor is just kicking in and helping me ignore the pain.
I’m kind of tempted now to seek out the Defenders, possibly the only super hero group with a weirder line-up (”Silver Surfer! The Hulk! Dr. Strange! The Sub-Mariner!”) and see how it compares.
That’s a kind of masochism there, it is.
Weekends, well spent:
Oregon weather continues to be bloody pathetic for spring. It is, however, perfect sit-inside-and-veg weather, so I took it as a sign that I should do so.
Watched a little anime - “Spice and Wolf” and “Clannad”, watched some classic movies - “The Big Sleep”, “African Queen”, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Lawrence of Arabia”, and played through the Agrabah, Monstro, and Atlantica worlds in Kingdom Hearts.
Spice and Wolf is another in the genre of “normal guy has his world invaded by a supernatural girl” shows. Horo is an awful lot like Hazuki-with-a-tail, at least from watching the first episode. It was interesting enough that I’ll check out the next couple of episodes, anyway.
I watched the first two episodes of Clannad and liked it. No surprise there, I haven’t yet been disappointed with a Kyoani production.
Shocked and depressed, yes, but not disappointed. Hopefully this won’t have an Air-esque ending.
Loved The African Queen. Liked bits of Lawrence of Arabia. Was quite disappointed by Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Liked The Big Sleep, but not as much as I expected to. These aren’t necessarily movies you watch for their own merits, though, you have to watch them because they’re part of the collective culture and seeing them helps you appreciate everything that has derived inspiration from them, if nothing else.
Oh, and Kingdom Hearts, while not the most manly game ever created, continues to entertain. The Ursula fight in Atlantica was a bloody pain in the arse, though. I had a terrible time getting the underwater positioning right throughout the level, so having to navigate in 3 dimensions while under the other stress factors inherent in a boss fight wasn’t fun.
All in all, a good way to cap off Spring Break.
Hope your weekend went as well. 
Dear Director of “Sunshine”
The point, two-thirds of the way through your movie, where you said to yourself:
“Boy, these people don’t have enough odds stacked against them and I really can’t think of any interesting ways to kill them off any more. Let’s just turn it into a slasher flick.”
…yeah, that was the point where you should have gotten a second opinion.
Creepy actor coincidences.
I saw “The Sum of All Fears” shortly after it came out on DVD, which was some while before I started watching “Alias”.
I’m also not very good at keeping track of actors, so I didn’t realize there was any overlap in the casts.
I watched the movie again recently.
Having Arvin Sloane as a presidential adviser was a very creepy thing, especially as he’s supposed to be the Voice of Reason in the oval office. Made watching the movie a very different experience; I kept expecting him to betray the main characters at any moment.
Being behind the times… not a bad thing.
…because, I tell you, if I’d purchased and played Halo 2 back in 2004, I’d have been fuming for 3 years about that “ending.”
That’s a little harsh, I guess. I’ve seen and read a lot worse cliffhangers, and some of them won’t ever be resolved. Beyond Good & Evil comes to mind. The Architect of Sleep comes to mind as well, but that’s pretty obscure. I’ve run in to a surprisingly large number of people who read it and remember it, though.
As it is, I only have a couple of weeks until the game with the real ending comes out. So I guess I’ll be picking that up early on.
The week of the 25th has a few other things happening… Heroes season 2 starts, and I’ll be recording it since NBC had their little snit and yanked it off iTunes… Legion of Super-Heroes season 2 starts as well, and I think Stargate Atlantis season 4.
Oh, right, and I have classes starting on the 24th. That will put a bit of a damper on the whole week-long orgy of fanboy delights. Still, I have my classes scheduled, I have my student loans figured out… things are all coming together for, I guess, my Sophomore year? It feels weird calling it that since I didn’t take full time classes last year. Let’s call it my Freshman+ year.
So - 13 credit hours, a full time job, the new TV season and videogames. No problem.
I’m so dead.
High Definition Sick Days.
Somehow I picked up a flu, and it’s had me out of work for two days.
I actually managed to make it in yesterday, and lasted about an hour before going to my boss and letting him know I was heading home.
Then I slept for 7 hours straight, got up, went to my friend’s send-off, came home, slept, felt cruddy again this morning, called in, slept a couple of hours and got up.
When I’m sick I tend to try things I really shouldn’t, but that seem like such a good idea. Today’s bright idea was, well, I have this EyeTV thing hooked up to our Mac mini, and that’s an ATSC tuner, and I have this old powered antenna sitting around that’s not really an ATSC antenna but what the hell.
After a little fiddling, I managed to get 19 digital broadcast channels. Nobody is more surprised than me. There’s still some dropout issues, to be sure, and a better antenna might help with those, but I’ve set the Mac to try to record a couple of programs off-air and on Saturday I’ll get to see what Legion of Super-Heroes looks like.
At this point, I’m wondering why - between the stuff I can get off digital broadcast, the programs I buy from iTunes and the rapidly increasing number of TV-on-DVD box sets - why I’m even getting Cable TV and contemplating telling Comcast to stuff everything but our internet service.
A weekend with Harry (no spoilers)
I didn’t really catch the “Harry Potter” bug early on. We didn’t buy any of the books until the third one was out, then I read those and found out that there were going to be seven in total, so I didn’t read the fourth book when it came out as I didn’t want to be left with a cliffhanger.
Then, the movies started coming out, and we went to see those. I still haven’t read the fourth book, but I’ve seen the movie now, at any rate.
Then, with Deathly Hallows coming out… well, I felt the need to catch up. So, last weekend while the rest of the nation was off seeing Order of the Phoenix in theaters, I was reading that book and Half-Blood Prince.
Fortunately, I’d managed not to have Half-Blood Prince spoiled for me.
Then, like the pathetic fanboy I am, I trooped over to the local grocer’s and bought Deathly Hallows at their midnight launch event. I will confess I wore headphones just in case someone wanted to go loudly talking about spoilerish things, as I understand the whole damn book got leaked to the net early.
Then I stayed up until a godawful hour of the morning reading it.
Then we went to see Order of the Phoenix that evening.
It is difficult to imagine my reactions to both being any more different. I thought the book was a great way to conclude the story and a proper send-off for the characters, while the movie was a very weak collection of fairly disconnected scenes from the book and left out far too much.
The one-on-one duel at the end did, however, rock. And Luna was pretty cool. I’ll give it those points.
Looking forward to hearing the office chatter on Monday. More to the point, how many people are willing to admit they did more or less the same thing.
Translator’s Nightmare?
I watched the 2005 movie “Linda, Linda, Linda” tonight.
It’s Ouendan’s fault, by the way.
I got hooked on the Blue Hearts song in the game so I looked it up on stage6 to see if there was a video, wound up bumping into the movie trailer instead, watched that, decided I needed to see if anyone had translated it, went to google and found that it was licensed for the US… and several months later, it’s been released and I’ve seen it.
Lots of fun, very slow paced in parts but definitely worth seeing. Nice mix of a buddy movie, a nostalgic high school movie, and a band movie.
Anyone watching this who can’t tell when the speech switches to Korean, which it does a couple of times during the movie, is going to miss part of the experience. The subtitles don’t mention it when it occurs, and you wind up not really “getting” a couple of the funnier bits.
That said, I have no clue how they COULD have made it work so I will cut them slack.
I’m not really a person that follows actresses, well, except for a quite understandable fixation on Drew Barrymore, but when I saw on the back of this that Maeda Aki had also been the heroine in Battle Royale I went looking to imdb and found that somehow, without trying, I’d wound up owning five of her movies. One of those weird coincidences…
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 2/52
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 Spoiler-free advice:
Sit through the end credits. There’s a bit after them.
I mention this only because at last night’s showing, which was a full theater, almost everyone walked out as soon as the credits started - I think there were only six people left to see the “real” ending - and, unlike the after-credits bits for the first two movies, it was actually part of the story instead of just a quick gag.
So, you’ve been warned.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
