I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!: 08/10/2003

Hmm... hard to get straight info on NIPR.MIL, since about the only sites that talk about it are "paranoid people sites", but I have come to the conclusion that "whomever" visited was probably a bot looking for specific combinations of terrorist-associated words. Well, look, I don't seriously think that there's anything sinister about Google, though I'm sure the military uses Google like everyone else.

Hmm... in regards to the stuff I posted about the Denver International Airport conspiracy theories yesterday, this is probably unrelated, but I noticed I did get a visitor from a military server, NIPR.MIL, and there's no web site configured to that server, so I did a Google search and found more conspiracy wackiness. Oooh.... spooky!!!

A rally (no pun intended) to save Montreal's Grand Prix attracted a somewhat disappointing crowd of only about 200 people. Well, I can say that I would have gone down to show my support, but I didn't hear anything about this until I saw the item on the low-ish turnout on ~~Pulse~~ CFCF News, so I don't think it was that well advertised.

And they showed this one guy with a beard (not unlike the fellow on that animated Sesame Street segment with all the birds living in his beard) and a bike helmet that was pleased by the low turnout because they're supporting keeping eeeevvvviiillllll big tobacco money in this city. My response? "Fuck you, ya tree-hugging hippie!" That is all. (I bet he's all in favour of the killjoy lifestyle Gestapo...)

Okay, so, in her weekly feature, "Shelf Life", for Anime News Network, Bamboo Dong always starts off with an anecdote that usually has nothing to do with Japanese cartoons whatsoever, so, if you don't particularly care what she thinks about this week's new anime DVD releases, at least you have a small little surprise to look forward to. So, in this week's installment, she talks about Denver International Airport, because I think she has to return to college after being at home in Colorado for the summer.

Funny she should talk about DIA, because, for some weird reason I happen to know that's where the conspiracy theorists believe the giant underground city where the New World Order concentration camps for patriotic Americans were built... yes, believe it or not, Denver International Airport is like another Disneyland on par with the Texas Schoolbook Depository and Groom Lake/Area 51 for the tinfoil hat crowd. So, I wrote the following message (as Tenchi):

Shelf Life - Snow Capped Glories (re: DIA)

Regarding the subject of the "off-topic anecdote of the week", Denver International Airport, does Bamboo know that Denver International Airport is a goldmine of weird Masonic symbols for conspiracy theory enthusiasts? I don't endorse any of the ridiculous conspiracy theories on that site, particularly regarding the "underground base", but some of those murals are creepy enough on their own merits.

Actually, that's not the only page with DIA wackiness on it... just plug a search for "Denver International Airport" and "concentration camps" into Google sometime and have hours of wacky fun. Here's another wacky link, for starters.

Hmm... now that I've given you information about the truth about DIA, I hesitate to add that my brother will be travelling from Dorval to DIA on Sunday to return to film school in Aurora, Colorado. Since I'm sure the good old Masonic/Illuminati/Skull & Bones/New World Order/Reptilian conspiracy are the people that really are in charge of the Google search engine, I hope my brother arrives before this entry is cached. Well, if he disappears at the airport, I'll know to go to DIA with a shovel and start digging...

Oh yeah, I was going to mention this on Wednesday, but the column wasn't yet on the National Post website, so I would have mentioned it Thursday, but I forgot.

George Jonas has pretty much the exact same take on the Formula One leaving Montreal because of the tobacco ad ban that echoes my own take on it, last week (well, he didn't have fun encouraging kids to take up smoking, but that's besides the point).

Me, Steve Brandon, last week:

"But now all this has been taken away from me because some pussy activists get their panties in a knot over seeing the word "Marlboro" on the tail-fin of Michael Schumachers vehicle."

He, George Jonas, this week:

"The most rabid anti-tobacco activist doesn't seriously believe that people take up smoking because of the word "Marlboro" painted on the tail fin of a car."

Ah, it would be pretty cool if George Jonas did somehow find my blog on Google and paraphrase what I said, but I don't seriously think he did. I think the absurdity of the premise that "Marlboro" on a tail fin causes young people to take up smoking is patently obvious, so, like with Farnsworth, Zworykin and Baird, two great minds (ha ha) happened to have similar ideas at the same time.

I don't really have anything else to say about the blackout either, other than that my sister in Ottawa got her power back around 2 p.m.. Just... people seemed to have been able to use their computers somehow, since I had the most number of page views since I installed the Site Meter, 86 individual visitors... woo hoo!

Well, all I can say is that the power is still on here in Pincourt, Quebec.

Oh, man, am I glad I bothered to read the Financial Post (which used to be an independent newspaper but now is the business section of the National Post) today. On the back page, an article just for me, originally published in the Financial Times in Britain... FACTS ABOUT THE IKEA CATALOGUE!!!

-130 million IKEA Catalogues are printed annually.

-a stack of every IKEA catalogues published every year would be 1500 km high.

-there are 46 different versions distributed in 36 countries in 28 different languages.

-in Greece, the catalogue is hung in a plastic bag from the door handle, since a lot of houses don't have mailboxes. Same with China, but that's because their mailboxes are too small.

-in Malaysia, the catalogues are wrapped because of the humidity. (I thought they were wrapped everywhere these days...)

-the catalogue contains 3000 different items, 1/3rd of the inventory of most stores.

-50% of IKEA's total advertising budget is spent on the catalogue.

-It takes 18 months to put together each catalogue, so, that means, by the time you receive the 2004 IKEA Catalogue, they've already been working on the 2005 IKEA Catalogue for half-a-year.

-The people in the IKEA Catalogue are all IKEA employees (or their children).

-The photographs within the IKEA Catalogue are mostly taken in Amhult, Sweden, in Europe's biggest still photography studio.

-90% of the material in the IKEA Catalogue is common to every local IKEA Catalogue in the world.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE FOR PUSSIES UPDATE

Yeah, this is amusing... I saw Millenium Actress at FantAsia 2 years ago (and I wrote that review at AnimeNewsNetwork.com), and, though I didn't give away everything, it's kind of a hard movie to spoil, since there aren't any big plot twists like in Perfect Blue, the previous film by Satoshi Kon (who is just as hard-working a director as Hayao Miyazaki, but who gets none of the glory); the film's more about Kon's love of Japanese cinema throughout the ages. Apparently, Dreamworks agrees with me on that point, since they give away the *entire* story in the "The Story" section of the official site with NARY a spoiler warning. Hmm... they aren't kowtowing to the people with no sense of discretion who click on anything and everything to do with a particular movie and then whine if they see something they didn't want to know? I think I like Dreamworks' new Go Fish label for arthouse circuit films more and more.

By the way, unless Brother Bear is significantly better than I expect it to be (and I'm not remotely as excited about it as I was when I first saw pictures from Lilo & Stitch), I think I may just be rooting for an anime film to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars next year, even though it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Finding Nemo will take it all. (I liked Finding Nemo, but it's one of the weaker Pixars... I'll review it a tiny bit whenever I write my big-ass summer movie piece.)

Hey... Montreal area anime fans! We're trying to get one of those Anime Meetup thingamajigs going in this city, but it was cancelled for this month because we got one fewer person than was required to confirm that they were going. Please join and then you could have the pleasure of meeting me in person! (Yes, that should be enough incentive for ya...)

Meh... there was just this commercial on Toronto-based City TV for some sort of contest, and the announcer cheerfully mentioned "Contest open to Canadians outside of Quebec". Fuck that! That is so fucking unfair... I think the Quebec government should piss off and not make Quebec residents ineligible from entering these out-of-province contests just because the contest-holders don't feel like providing contest rules in French. Well, it's a contest held by City TV, a Toronto and Vancouver-based channel which only broadcasts programming in English, so, really, what do I care if "Jean-Guy Unilingue" in Jonqui�re can't understand the contest rules? It's not like he was watching the channel in the first place. Yes, ideally, contest rules would be provided in multiple languages, but I think contests held by English-language TV channels won't be of interest to non-bilingual Francophones, so why should Quebec Anglophones get the shaft? Well, we always do...

FANTASIA DIARY: TAMALA 2010: A PUNK CAT IN SPACE

Well, Fantasia is over for the year, and I saw one last film Sunday night... and it really is bizarre beyond words.

Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space an anime, mostly in black-and-white, with animal characters drawn in a very Tezuka-esque style and mostly simplistic backgrounds, though there are a few elaborately-detailed computer animated sequences showing the Cat Earth version of Tokyo from some weird sort of pedestrian bridge...

Tamala is a "punk cat" on Cat Earth, living in Gonnosukezaka in Meguro-ku in Tokyo, but Cat Tokyo, on an Earth wherein one corporation, Catty & Co., controls 98% of the economy, though KFC appears to be around too, since there are several shots of a giant Colonel Sanders (last seen in Project A-Ko) walking stiffly, towering above the tallest buildings. One day, she takes off for Orion, but her "mother" doesn't want her to travel there, so a ghost pirate ship appears (presumably an illusion, created by using some candles, a mirror, and two squirrels), fires a meteor at her ship, and she crash lands on Planet Q. She hitches a ride with a Porsche-driving cat called Michelangelo (whom she can't stop calling "Moimoi" even though he hates it) who takes her back to the city in which he lives, called Hate, which is crime-ridden and patrolled by a rogue cop dog called Kentauros, a sadistic weirdo who keeps a mouse called Penelope in a cage (the official Tamala 2010 website says that, although she looks innocent, she's actually a mean mouse). There's also this giant statue of a Beret-wearing "Prince of Happiness", with eyes made from sapphires, which a swallow is always trying to steal, making the statue wince. (Something about the statue looks oddly familiar, like it's a reference to a French cartoon or book, but I can't quite place it.) And, umm... Tamala and Michelangelo go to the museum to look at exhibits of extinct species (including, for some reason, the identical twins from the famous Diane Arbus photo, who appear several times in this movie), bowling, and kicking kids that are being too cute. One day, Tamala and Michelangelo go on a picnic, followed by Kentauros, who attacks them... Michelangelo escapes, but Tamala gets decapitated and seems to be dead.

Then the movie gets impossibly weird... too weird for me to remember everything that happens upon just one viewing, in fact. There's something about a robot cat that is transmitted into kids' dreams, Kentauros gets defeated somehow, and, for some reason, the "Prince of Happiness" statue comes down... and a zombie cat who may be Professor Nominos, a university professor who had been studying Tamala and Catty & Co., shows up at Michelangelo's house, and explains everything.

I had been prepared to give Tamala 2010 just 2� stars out of 5, because most of Zombie Nominos's explanations for what was going on had little to do with anything we'd seen in the movie, and movies shouldn't really end with characters giving the background of what is happening in the world. Like, for example, we learn that the Catty & Co. corporation is actually a front for an ancient religion called Minerva which figured out back in the Cat Middle Ages that they could gain great power by controlling all communications. And Tamala had actually been born on Orion nearly a century and a half prior (Tamala mentions some memories about a mysterious fire), and she had been used by Catty & Co. since 1869 to help popularize their products, and, by extension, Minerva. And Tamala undergoes a constant cycle of death and rebirth, keeping her eternally 1 year old. (She's back alive by the end of the movie.) Most of these would be incredible plot twists, except, since Minerva wasn't really mentioned prior to Nominos's 10 minute speech at the end of the film, it's more like a plot device that just shows up out of the blue. HOWEVER, the site mentions that this is only the first film in a trilogy, so I guess it's acceptable for them not to give this expository information until the end of the film, since it's setting up the next two films. The next one shall be set on Orion.

So, I think I can give it ***�/*****... visually, it's certainly one of the more interesting things I've seen in a long time, though sometimes it's so weird that it's just pretentious. However, it made a tiny bit more sense after I read the character descriptions on the official site (which has some English articles). Let's just say that it was interesting enough that I would definitely pay once to see the sequel should they show it at FantAsia next year. (Unfortunately, this film has yet to be licensed by a North American anime distributor...)

As much as I do love listening to Rush Limbaugh, and as much as I'd love to think that we'd get along famously should I ever spend an afternoon playing golf and drinking a beer or two together, the fact does remain that he's a 53 year old man, and, naturally, he's out of touch with youth culture. He flat-out plain doesn't understand bloggers. Not that he necessarily *needs* to understand bloggers; blogs will never be any threat to his dominance of the American airwaves, and, if he ever did a blog, it would be a huge step *down* for him in terms of influence. Just, in this one particular case, I wish he had kept his mouth shut... one thing he doesn't seem to realize, and which wasn't discussed in the David Hill piece, is that, while there are bloggers of absolutely every political stripe, the most prominent of the political blogs have at least a somewhat right-ish slant which generally favours the Republicans (however reluctantly in the cases of blogs like Little Green Footballs, which moved rightward in the face of terrorist attacks in the United States and Israel), and I don't see any form of communication which appeals to a younger audience than does talk radio that brings people to the GOP as being a "bad" thing. I get the idea that National Review does understand the potential benefit to the Republicans from bloggers much better than does Rush; that's why they have The Corner (not to mention David Frum's Diary), and that's why they made the youthful Jonah Goldberg the online "Editor-at-Large", since his writings littered with evidence of his own pop culture awareness has amassed him a loyal following with "South Park Republicans", who might have difficulty relating to older conservative commentators.

Anyhow, like I said, Rush doesn't need to understand bloggers, but he should refrain from criticizing the blogging phenomenon on the whole (rather than specific bloggers) since he risks alienating many young Republicans for whom it is the primary tool for communicating their political beliefs to other potentially like-minded individuals who may be somewhat turned off by the old stodgy stereotypes of Republican voters and party members they get through much of the media.

Amusing article in The Onion: "Rise In Teen Sexual Activity Comes As Surprise To Area Teen". Though it's a completely fake article, of course, it does sum up pretty much how I felt in high school.

Here's what I said about it in the RottenTomatoes.com forum:

"Well, those studies are B.S. anyhow... at least the ones based on written forms students fill out. I did at least one of those in high school and lied out my ass, saying I was having all sorts of sex with guys and gals when I wasn't. So, really, I wouldn't take an article about such a study appearing in a real newspaper any more seriously than I would one appearing in The Onion."

Yeah, hear about the horseshit study examining the "conservative mind", linking Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan to Hitler and Mussolini? Well, George F. Will says all you really need to know about that study.

"But there is no comparable academic industry devoted to studying the psychological underpinnings of liberalism. Liberals, you see, embrace liberalism for an obvious and uncomplicated reason - liberalism is self-evidently true. But conservatives embrace conservatism for reasons that must be excavated from their inner turmoils, many of them pitiable or disreputable."

"I'M AS HAPPY AS A LITTLE GIRL!"

I wonder if I'm the only one who noticed this?

In Tuesday's National Post, there's a humour piece by Siri Agrell taking all of the oddball candidates in the California governor recall election and finding a corresponding Canadian celebrity for the Liberal leadership race.

For Arnold Schwarzenegger, she suggests "Dieter, Former Saturday Night Live bodybuilder played by blockbuster Canadian actor Mike Myers."

Fine and dandy, but, for anyone who doesn't know, "Dieter" is no bodybuilder. Dieter is the pretentious German art film fan who hosts Sprockets and is quite the "girly man". The bodybulder characters were Hans & Franz, played by Americans Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey.

Now why do I feel bad about pointing it out?

Oh, just to mark my dorkiness, I forgot to commemorate my successful flight in an Air Canada 747-400 from EGLL to CYUL in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002. It's not actually my first flight from Heathrow to Dorval, which I've flown many times, but it was the first successful landing I had with the difficulty set to "maximum" for everything. I tried it once before a couple of weeks back, but I crashed on final approach to Runway 6R, and a crash in MSFS2002 for me is quite agonizing, because, when I fly trans-Atlantic routes, I fly in REAL TIME, because I don't get a sense of accomplishment if I speed things up, so ever crash is 6� hours of my life wasted.

I hope Microsoft improves the Air Traffic Control in the next version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, MSFS2004, so that they actually tell me when to climb and descend and give me other directions. Also, I hope the flight planner is improved so that, if I plan an IFR to IFR flight from Heathrow to Dorval, I'm not routed via North Africa (umm... the normal route is over England, Wales, Ireland, south of Greenland, over Newfoundland and Labrador and then Quebec...)!

I was in a silly mood on the RottenTomatoes.com forum the other day regarding the imminent release of Freddy vs. Jason.

First, I wrote this post:

"[SPOILERS-A-PLENTY]

You think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Jason's killed Freddy, but Freddy comes back from the dead somehow, and then you think Freddy's killed Jason, but Jason comes back from the dead somehow...

I forget what happened next.

Hope I didn't ruin it for anyone."

Then I wrote another possible ending:

"No, no, that last post of mine was just a joke, here's the real ending:

You think they're both dead, but they aren't and then both Freddy and Jason come back to life, and they're about to kill the remaining Springwood teenagers at the Crystal Lake camp, but then they notice that the Springwood teens are using drugs, so Freddy, Jason and the clean kids team-up with G.I. Joe and Cobra to fight the real evil-doers, drug dealers.

Remember, winners don't use drugs! Just say no! Now you know, and knowing's half the battle!"

MAPS? MAPS ARE FOR PUSSIES!

On Monday, my youngest brother, John, returned from film school in Aurora, Colorado for a week, and he brought his PlayStation2 with him. One of the games he's brought with him is The Getaway, which is a game obviously inspired by the Grand Theft Auto series, except, instead of fake cities, it's set in London... 40 square miles of it mapped out almost street-for-street, storefront-by-storefront. Some people decry "product placement" in games, but, damn, I love it... real stores add so much to the realism! I'm surprised so many companies let Sony and Team Soho let their logos be used in the games considering how violent it is.

I have to say, I'm not really into the violent sort of driving games they have now... or, at least, the Grand Theft Auto games are good for some visceral fun for a few bloody minutes, but, for me, after 5-10 minutes, they get real boring. I just like the driving, not the killing. Fortunately for me, John finished all of the levels in the game and unlocked the "free driving" mode, and so, for much of the past two days, I've been driving around London. And, Jesus, I've been to London many times, and this *is* London. It's not the first game to let you drive freely around London; Midtown Madness 2 had London and San Francisco, but that game just had an arcade-game-like London with only a few main streets represented and mostly generic buildings with a few landmarks. Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast (and its successor, Project Gotham Racing on the X-Box) had a much more accurate London with many of the real stores and all of the Piccadilly Circus advertising signs except for Carlsberg, but that one had courses, not "open racing", so you couldn't drive around the city freely (until you finish the game, in which case there is an option to drive around the streets represented in the game, but without traffic). But the London in this game is just marvellous... One of the criticisms of this game is that there is no "in-game map", and, I suppose, if you're actually interested in playing the missions, that could be a problem, but, for the "open driving" mode, I actually liked that I had to find my AZ Map of London to help me navigate.

I decided to look for one of my favourite places in all of London, and one of the lesser-known tourist attractions, the London Transport Museum, next to the Jubilee Hall of Covent Garden... I had to drive around a little bit to get my bearings... from Oxford Street, I turned right at the intersection with the big green skyscraper onto Charing Cross Road (the street in London with all of the big bookstores), went south past Shaftesbury Avenue, turned left onto Long Acre, then, took the fork south that is Garrick Street, followed it as it became King Street, and I got very, very excited when I saw the pavement turn into the brick pedestrian street of The Piazza and saw the Jubilee Hall and the big Doc Marten store, just like in a photograph I took of Covent Garden. I turned the corner, and, not only was there the London Transport Museum (though without markings identifying it as such, but it's the building), there was the Tutton's Brasserie next door, just like in another photo I took.

Another jaunt took me to Saint Pancras station, and, sure enough, not only does that appear in the game, O'Neill's Irish Pub across Euston Road appears just where it is in real life, in another photo I took.

It's almost scary how real games have become when my brothers and I were looking for individual McDonald's, Pizza Hut and KFC Restaurants that we've eaten at in real life, *and we actually found them*!!!

Well, if anyone from Team Soho reads this, as far as representing London goes, you've done an outstanding job, and I can only hope that you've taken the model of London you've created here and use it in other games, like one of my dream games... a game, like Crazy Taxi,only more realistic, that lets you be a London Cabbie, facing realistic traffic. Hmm... maybe there will be a version of the the game in the future that will let you drive out all of the way to Heathrow and the M25 "ring road"? Well, doing the suburbs would probably be too much of an undertaking that very few people that live outside of London would appreciate, but I can dream...

Hmm... I'm getting this weird message whenever I try "publishing" something:

"There were errors:
550 Could not open: No space left on device on file:archives/2003_08_10_kiyone_archive.html"

Although it's actually "publishing" everything I write, so I guess it's just a glitch.

LINKS ABOUT THE IKEA CATALOGUE

Yes, it's time for another installment in my ongoing crusade to be the first website mentioned whenever someone does a Google search for "IKEA Catalogue", so, continuing with the theme of religious tangents about IKEA, we have an article called "The Cult of IKEA" by Tom Hartman, that makes note of the Zen-like design, furniture placement and colour evident in the photography within the IKEA Catalogue, among other things.

"HELLO, I'M PAMELA ANDERSON. I'M A PICTURE OF PAMELA ANDERSON. I'M DEMI MOORE. I'M CAMERON DIAZ AND DEMI MOORE TOGETHER WITH PAMELA ANDERSON."

Hmm... lately, for the Sunday Doonesbury strips, Garry Trudeau has been mostly whining about the popularity of Fox News. (The only whining about Fox News you'll ever hear from me is about how we can't get it in Canada, heh heh.) But today's Sunday strip is actually about something different for a bloody change, blogging. Not that I'd ever resort to writing "Hi, I'm nude Shu Qi photos, and I'm Shu Qi naked." for Google hits, heh heh.

Ah, don't have much to say today... It is Pincourt "Fireman's Day", the annual town celebration, so I was awakened by the sound of firetrucks and other emergency vehicles from various Montreal-area communities going up Island boulevard (a.k.a. "Boul. de L'�le"... but it was "Island" up until around 1990). The sirens even made it into my dream, right at the end, except, for some reason, I couldn't see the vehicles because a train was passing by... well, my house was in my dream, but, outside, instead of Monfort road and Dumas, the short road connecting Island to Monfort, there was an open area in a forest with a single train track running through, blocking my view of Island. (Trains appear in my dreams a lot.) After the train passed, there was a long automobile transporter truck with 100 cars or so on it... That's all I remember.

Also, happy 38th Birthday, Singapore.

Now, enjoy some photos of the actresses in the the new live-action Sailor Moon series.

I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Friday, August 15, 2003

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Sunday, August 10, 2003

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