OMF'ingG!
More from Concordia:
The Link actually published
a brilliant satirical piece by Steven Roshenshein spoofing the rhetoric of
Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights through the lens of the Pepsi monopoly on campus (which is no big deal; the university gets a bit of money for doing practically nothing, and Coke drinkers on campus (or, at least the Sir George Williams campus) can literally just cross the street (Bishop) to get to stores selling Coke). I like
this comment on the piece best ;-). Plus, any satirical piece that causes Arafat-istan lover
Hanthala to
almost lose his breakfast has got to be doing something right.
By the way, right wing or "moderate" Concordia students, if you want to get your political opinions published, believe it or not,
The Link will be a lot more open to your submissions than
The Concordian will be... well, from purely subjective personal experience, I find the atmosphere at
The Link to be a lot more open to submissions and a lot less "cliquey" than that at
The Concordian. Though, admittedly, I'm only just now going back to Concordia after two years away, so things may have changed with the new editorial teams at both papers.
DALTON "TAKE THE HIGH (TAX) ROAD" McGUINTY UPDATE
Hmm... is Dalton McGuinty
"an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet"? I can believe a lot of things, but I can't quite believe that. Why? Because, if I remember my bestiary of 1980s NBC-TV aliens, the aliens which ate cats were
furry and from the planet Melmac. The
reptilian NBC aliens ate rats and other small, furry creatures. Ernie Eves should get his staff to review their knowledge of NBC aliens, but, still, Ontarians, VOTE FOR EVES!
EDIT: Just to get a few Google hits, I'll write a few words related to the text above: ALF GORDON SHUMWAY RHONDA WILLY TANNER MAX WRIGHT CRACK ENQUIRER V VISITORS VICTORY DONOVAN DIANA SAMANTHA WILLY ROBERT ENGLUND.
CSU WATCH (plus stuff about my own situation at Concordia)
First of all, not really anything to do with the Concordia Student Union, but my registration nightmare is finally over. I got the letter of readmission on academic probation on Monday (only a week after classes started), saw an Academic Advisor on Tuesday who recommended courses (in difficult to decipher handwriting) and unflagged me so I could register, but, when I tried registering on Wednesday, every fricking thing was full, so I went down on Thursday to see if they could still put me in classes that were officially full but the woman who could do that was out on Thursday so I had to go back today, and, finally, she waivered me into a bunch of Political Science classes... I don't actually remember what they all were, since I was registering based more on having a schedule that pleases me over content... one was about Chinese Politics, because a girl I like is Chinese, and one was about Sexuality and Politics, because I'm a sucker... er, I mean, "glutton" for punishment, "sexuality" being, in all likelihood, a codeword for the gay political agenda. Fortunately, I completely avoided morning classes, though, since I only live in Pincourt now and don't have my apartment downtown anymore and I don't drive, 8:45 a.m. classes are completely out of the question, but I really do feel at my peak in the late afternoon and evenings. My only complaint is that I couldn't manage to get a class on Fridays. I like having a three day weekend, but I prefer it if the extra day is Monday, not Friday, since Sunday nights don't feel so depressing if you don't have to go anywhere the next day, and, also, if I'm downtown on Friday afternoons anyhow, I can catch one of the new movies.
Anyhow, I picked up the 2003/2004 Concordia Student Union Handbook, which was finally in the CSU offices today, and it's a fairly boring, plain vanilla student handbook with useful information for new and returning students, plus information about clubs and sporting teams and stores and restaurants, and a normal looking calendar with normal holidays listed ("Canada Day" instead of the "Anti-Canada" day of past handbooks... they'd get bonus points with me if they listed "Canada Day" as "Dominion Day" to acknowledge the sovereign reign of Her Majesty, but I guess I can't have it all). Nothing to write home (and, in this case, "home" means "a long article in the
National Post", the kickassingest newspaper of all) about, and that's the bloody point, isn't it, not to be controversial, so, new CSU Executive, you passed your first test with flying colours!
Of course, it's not been 100% purified; there's still twenty pages of political content from the usual suspects, but with only a fraction of the pages and without the provocative graphics of past CSU Handbooks, which I nicknamed "The Communist Agenda" without much exaggeration. They're mostly not even articles, just plugs for certain activist groups. (Maybe next year, we can get an article from student "free market" (I don't like the word "capitalist"; it's actually a Marxist term) supporters and perhaps a pro-life group.) The only real holdover from the bad old days of the "Communist Students' Union" Evil Empire are two articles from Comrade Yves Engler, one about the eeeeeeeevvvviiillll drug companies and one about the "free" tuition (not free for taxpayers) pipe-dream. Of course, one fun thing about having articles from Comrade Engler is that you can get out your scissors and pretend you're Rector Frederick Lowy and "expel" Comrade Engler from your copy of the handbook the way
Rector Lowy expelled Comrade Engler from the university. (Personal message to Comrade Engler, next time you do a vanity search: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah! And I love that picture of you in the article.)
In the health section, there's a refreshing lack of abortion advocacy for a change, though there is one article about tampon alternatives that alludes to the exaggerated toxic shock syndrome scare but doesn't give enough information about that for me to Fisk and debunk... just information about "The Keeper", Sea Sponges, and reusable menstrual pads. If women want to use that and it doesn't stink up the joint like Blood Sisters' Menstrual Blood artwork, fine, but the chicks I've asked about that seem to prefer the tampon-alternative-alternative, tampons; clean, disposable and lots of fun to insert!
Not to make light out of rape and other forms of un-imagined sexual assault, but, yes, there is an article about sexual assault where every other line contains a statistic, and, I find, ten out of ten articles about sexual assault, or at least those written by representatives of "womens' crisis centres" tend to use
inflated statistics. Studies show it! And part of the article talks about the "three types of men" (or, should I say, "MEN!" in a whiny, nasal voice?):
1) Those who rape.
2) Those who do not rape, but do nothing to prevent it.
3) Those who do not rape and work actively to prevent it.
Now, one of my friends has been raped, and, if I could go back in time and put a bullet through the head of the guy that did that to her, I would... but... see... the thing is... rapes tend to occur in private or secluded areas, and... well... I'm never there when they happen, so what am I supposed to do about it? And I don't go around drinking beer with my buddies, saying, "Well, I'm not into raping women, but, hey, whatever floats your boat!" So, while I obviously oppose rape in all forms, except when rapists get raped in jail (don't have any problem with that), since I've never been in any situation where I could prevent a rape from occuring, and, since I loathe the sort of symbolic activities these people probably want me to participate in which accomplish nothing in the real world but make me feel good about myself since I showed people I'm opposed to rape by walking in the street with a candle and a banner and a white ribbon, sorry, I don't accept your fucking guilt. Rapes are the acts of deranged individuals... the men that don't rape are not complicit in the acts of the few individuals that do rape unless they could have prevented a specific rape but didn't or they know someone they know is a rapist but fail to take action or withhold information to protect him from prosecution.
But I'm scraping here to be offended... really, this is the straightest student agenda I've seen since my high school days and should at least help a tiny bit in restoring Concordia's tarnished image. Well done!
Hmm... I can only listen for a few minutes so I'll listen to it archived on "Rush 24/7" later, but I wonder if Rush Limbaugh will comment on the sudden passing of
Three's Company and
8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter star
John Ritter from an undiagnosed heart problem. While Limbaugh and Ritter didn't agree on much politically, Limbaugh did guest star on the only episode most people remember of the long-forgotten early 90s political sit-com from Linda Bloodsworth-Thomason,
Hearts Afire, starring Ritter and Markie Post (the show so forgotten by me that I thought Rush guest-starred on an episode of
Evening Shade until I looked it up just now) and I think they got along fine.
Very sad news about Ritter's death anyhow... it's also sad that Johnny Cash died, but we've all known he was about to go for a while. Dying after a lengthy illness is sad, but not shocking like dying while shooting an episode of your successful sit-com is. I might write more about this later, but I really gotta be going.
YOKOHAMA MONTREAL KAIDASHI KIKOU (Montreal Shopping Log)
Though I was already planning on seeing an academic advisor on Tuesday, just to find out what was going on with me in terms of being readmitted into Concordia University, since, at the point I called, I still hadn't received any confirmation one way or the other, while the letter of readmittance (for academic probation) cleared a lot up, I still needed him to explain which classes to take and to clear me on the computer so I could "late register".
So I went downtown on the 211 bus around noonish... playing
Golden Sun: The Lost Age on the Gameboy Advance, though I'm at a point (before the ship enters Lemuria) where I'm not too sure what to do next (I have downloaded a walkthrough from
Game FAQs, but it's on my harddrive and not readily available when I'm on the bus, and it's too long to print) so I was just walking around, gaining Experience Points for my characters to "level" them.
I had a bag of old textbooks in tow to see if the Concordia bookstore would buy them back. The girl in front of me in the line had no luck whatsoever when the guy passed each book through the scanner... they were all previous editions than the ones the professors are now using. I had pretty much the same deal with the books I brought, but I hit the jackpot with with an Algebra book. (In a misguided attempt to become a more "well-rounded student", I had taken a Calculus class in the Winter 2000 semester and an Advanced Algebra class in Winter 2001, but all I got were two big Fat F grades and, if I remember correctly, around $150 Canadian poorer for each textbook.) I got about $57 back, which was more than I was expecting for it. I knew I shouldn't have tried selling the Canadian Media Studies book I had from 1998, since it's out of date. You may remember that one of my truths of life is that all Media Studies classes, at least in Canada, are taught by radical leftist professors to mainly left-ish students, so, if you're a right-wing student like I am, don't take Media Studies classes unless you absolutely have to for your degree or if you're good at articulating your own views verbally in debates and are not easily intimidated like I am. Well, anyhow, the Media Studies textbooks, of course, tend to have the same overall viewpoints as the professors, so, in the old version of the textbook I have, the root of all evil in Canada is Conrad Black, the ex-owner of the Southam Newspaper chain as well as the publisher of the
Daily Telegraph in London and the Jerusalem
Post. But he revoked his Canadian citizenship a few years back so he could join the House of Lords in Britain. So, now the root of all evil in the current edition must be Izzy Asper, owner of the CanWest/Global media empire which bought up the Southam papers after Black quit, as well as
a reasonable supporter of the rights of Jews and the Israeli state an eeeeevvvvviiiiiiiiilllllllll Zionist. But I digress...
Then I went to see the Academic advisor, in one of those smaller buildings across Bishop street from the Montreal Museum of Modern Art that were originally, quite obviously, row houses, and they still have the narrow hallways like houses do. So I had to wait in line to see him, since it's "drop in" and you can't make appointments, and I had to really scrunch against the wall to let people through. And something in the building was exasperating my allergies, so I had to really "slime" the one tissue I had in my back pocket... blah. Anyhow, I saw the Academic Advisor, who is a nice enough guy with a slight western-sounding accent who reminded me, of all people, of Buck Strickland, owner of the propane store chain in
King of the Hill for some reason. Well, you're already bored with the details I'm giving, so I won't bore you with any details about what he suggested, just that I have to take some classes, and, if I want to switch to Teaching English as a Second Language, so I can work in Asia for a few years, I have to do it in January. Then he cleared me so I could register. (But I tried registering in the classes he suggested and they're all full, so I have to see him again.)
Anyhow, the bag I had brought the textbooks in was beginning to split, so I determined that the next course of action was to get me a locker... but the university had changed a bit since I was last a student there, and there is security at the place where the copy centre where you could also buy lockers. I asked at the Information desk, and they told me I had to buy lockers online now. So I hurried upstairs to go to the Mac Lab on the ninth floor. On the way, I stopped off at the Concordia Student Union office to see if I could get me a handbook, which hopefully wouldn't be a pure far, far leftist handbook full of hundreds of pages of leftist propaganda and nothing of actual interest to most students like, you know, a list of clubs or sporting activities or local hangouts, especially like the infamous
"Uprising" handbook from 2001, though the handbook from 2000 was pretty much as bad, with several pages glorifying guilty, guilty,
guilty cop-killer
Mumia Abu-Jamal for example. I was curious to see if they still have October 12th listed as "anti-Columbus Day", probably put in there by one of the "Anti-Colonialism Working Group" wackos. Hmm... I should find some way to visibly celebrate Columbus Day this year. But... alas... this year's student handbooks still hadn't been printed, so I have to wait until next week. I went upstairs to the Mac Lab... but... those computers needed a User Name and a password, and my s_brando username didn't seem to work on these. And their mouses really suck... the balls are so dirty (I need the ultimate mouse ball cleanser... spit from AnimeNewsNetwork.com's
Bamboo Dong) and the rollers inside had so much lint. Almost like they had never been cleaned.
On the way down, I picked up a copy of the
Concordian and the
Link. Comrade Yves Engler, former
Communist Students' Union Concordia Student Union (during the bad old days) Vice-President of
Propaganda Communications, had a wonderful (
for me to poop on) screed against capitalism in the
Link which I simply must Fisk at some point this week, but not tonight. Also, on the way down, walking from the escalator from teh third floor, through the atrium to get to the escalator to the lobby, I passed a shrill-voiced representative of
Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. Oh, yes, of course, it just happened to be the one year anniversary of the day the SPHR fascist thugs (and their CSU allies) rioted and successfully prevented
the free speech and free assembly rights of all Hillel members and other people who had come to hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak. So, of course, they were showing a video of Palestinian students smashing shit up, and, of course, their motives were as pure as the driven snow and it was the fault of the police and Hillel and security and the Concordia administration and the Zionist media and everyone else but the Palestinian students... well, maybe the problem was that the police, security and administration failed to anticipate that the SPHR supporters would get violent as they are prone to do. Of course, I was there for a while that day and I saw who the aggressors were (hint... they're the ones with the hair-scarf thingies whose name is on the tip of my tongue but I don't feel like looking it up right now).
So... I crossed the street to the library building, and they had a few laptops set up so you can register... but... even there, it took me at least 20 minutes just to get to the page I wanted to get to in order to register for a locker because the system was so congested, and, when I finally got there, I found out I couldn't get a locker because I hadn't been able to register for classes yet! I had enough at Concordia for the day, so I walked east along Sainte Catherine's.
Ooh... they had
Read Or Die, this anime I sort of was interested in seeing, for just $25 at HMV. I decided to look around at Metro Video below the Paramount Cinema and at DVD Passion in the Centre Eaton to see if I could get a better price, but they didn't have it, so I went back to HMV and bought it fairly "blind", though what I knew about it interested me.
Then I went to the Paramount cinema to see
Freddy vs. Jason, which I had been wanting to see for a while but never quite got around to seeing it. But I had to wait half-an-hour so I sat around on the chairs in the back of the second floor at the Paramount, looking at the insert from
Read Or Die, which has all sorts of actual book titles and catalogue information for chapter titles. They had the big coin-vending machine tower of candies where you put in a $2 coin and put the candies in bags, so, after trying several options that wouldn't turn, I settled for some Peanut M&M's, but... meh, it's a rip-off... you only get about the same amount of Peanut M&M's that you'd get in a normal packet, which costs less than $1. I don't think I'll do that again.
Should I get back to doing reviews of every movie I see? Well, if I don't do one for
Freddy vs. Jason, let's just say it was pretty much everything I was expecting, though I had read all the main spoilers already. I was a bit pleased to see it fit into the
Nightmare on Elm Street continuity better than I had thought... I've only seen bits n' pieces of the
Friday the 13th continuity, so I really don't know how well it fits in to that continuity (presumably it takes place before
Jason X). At the risk of sounding gay, it did have one of my favourite movie hunks besides Luke Wilson,
Lochlyn Munro (from CBC's
Northwood), whom I know I would so totally be into if I was a chick and he wasn't married. Also... nice to see that Springwood has a branch of the Bank of Montreal, apparently (it was filmed in Toronto and British Columbia). Eh, maybe I'll give more comments at some other time, but I give it ***�/*****.
Afterwards, I wasn't quite ready for dinner, so I walked west to get a beer from the convenience store near Guy-Concordia Metro station (the entrance on Sainte-Mathieu) and a small bottle of vodka from the SAQ at the Faubourg Sainte-Catherine. Afterwards, I took the Metro back to McGill station and checked the McDonald's at Central Station, but there wasn't anything special on the menu I felt like trying, so I decided to go over to Wendy's on Peel, partially because I had written an
entry on the X-Entertainment.com blog page for responding to an article Matt Caracappa wrote about
the Wendy's 99-cent "Super Value Menu" wherein I mentioned that I liked Wendy's overall but the last two times I had eaten a spicy-chicken burger, it was rather stale, but then a whole bunch of other people wrote about their Wendy's horror stories making Wendy's out to be this really dirty place that does all sorts of stuff you don't want to know about to their food, so I felt bad for making even a tiny complaint about Wendy's because the Peel Wendy's is pretty much as clean as all the downtown McDonald's locations and much cleaner than the downtown locations of two other burger chains I won't name here. So, I had a Spicy Chicken, and, while it's not as good as the KFC Zinger, which they don't sell around here anymore, it was much better than the previous two I had tried.
Afterwards, I went to Windsor Terminus (now officially called Lucien L'Allier Station) and played some more
Golden Sun: The Lost Age for half-an-hour before getting the train home.
Well... fuck... I wrote a lot about my day yesterday. Did you try reading it all? I don't blame you if you skipped some or most of this; I wrote it mainly for me... I don't think I'll be quite this detailed in future installments of
YOKOHAMA MONTREAL KAIDASHI KIKOU, I just felt I had an interesting day, at least for me... I'll tell you what I think of
Read Or Die once I finish watching it.
Not that I'm forgetting the two year anniversary of that horrible day either. I still think about it all the time and have many books and a couple of DVDs about it, and, as regular readers of this blog know, I am very pro-American, I am very pro-Bush, I am very pro-"War on Terror" (not an easy fight but one that can't be lost), and I passionately support rebuilding the World Trade Center, preferably
replicas of the original Twin Towers, not that Libeskind 80-storey "Freedom Tower" with a useless, ornamental spire which is the architectural equivalent of stretching out your foreskin to claim that your penis is a foot long and the Libeskind "Death Pit".
But, really, I don't have anything long and well-thought out, and even if I could go on for paragraphs, it would be the same sincere-but-maudlin stuff you find in a million other places. We all remember how we felt that day, and I don't have any fancy stories that would differ much from other people's stories (I watched TV and read stuff on the Internet all day; not too compelling). Just... please never forget. That's all I can say about that.
Before I forget, today (September 10th where I am... I set the blog time to "Greenwich Mean Time" because I like aviation, though the "Zulu Time" purists will probably point out to me that GMT uses a 24 hour clock, not a.m. and p.m.) marks a painful personal anniversary; it's the one year anniversary of the day I got my wisdom teeth extracted.
Now, see, I had known that my wisdom teeth were "impacted" for several years, but I never did anything about it. Big mistake. In the summer of 2002, I started getting intense headaches and couldn't quite figure out why, until the pain in my teeth increased sharply, and I had to see a dentist... who took an x-ray, revealing that my wisdom teeth were growing horizontally, right into the teeth next too them, with one of my back molars actually having part of the wall worn through.
So, on September 10th, 2002, very early in the morning, I went to see the dental surgeon in Pointe Claire (I had seen him for a consultation the week before, but that wasn't important enough to devote a paragraph to). Bleh... the roots of my wisdom teeth had grown so twisted that they took nearly 4 hours to remove. And the worst part of all was that, for some reason, no matter how many times he stabbed my jaw with anesthetic, the final one of the 4 wisdom teeth wouldn't go completely numb, so I was like the masochist character Arthur Denton, played brilliantly by Bill Murray in the 1986 musical remake of
Little Shop of Horrors directed by Frank Oz... well, the pain was tolerable, but I still felt a lot. And one of the teeth couldn't be completely extracted, so I still have pieces of the root.
Then they put stitches and in my mouth and I had to sit down for an hour, then we drove home with me bleeding quite profusely from my mouth, having to bite down on Kleenex and paper towels. It died down after I had been home for an hour, but I was taking painkillers that pretty much put me out of commission for a week, though I did see
One Hour Photo on Saturday, 4 days after, and I think I was back in classes by the Monday, though I had my stitches removed the day after.
Just a warning to any teenagers reading this... if your wisdom teeth are in any way "imapcted" and you think you can put off getting them removed for years and years, you'll save yourself a lot of pain if you don't wait until your late 20s to have them removed. Trust me on this.
What's the deal with the television spots with
Dalton McGuinty exhorting Ontario voters to "Choose the High Road"? Yeah... more like "Choose the High Tax Road"! (Yes, I was awake all last night thinking that one up, thanks for asking.)
So, the Ontario Conservatives want to cut corporate taxes further? Well, that's a "good" thing for jobs and a "good" thing for consumers. It lowers prices and encourages investment. Ooh... but Dalton's using the scary word "corporate" to try and scare over some of the idiotarians that might otherwise vote NDP? Fuck that... I wouldn't want their votes anyhow if I were running. The corporations aren't stealing money from Ontario by wanting tax cuts, they just want the government to
steal "redistribute" less of the money which the corporations rightfully earned in the first place.
Of course, I think Ernie Eves would be better served by looking back at the "Common Sense" agenda which his predecessor Mike Harris won on and then improving on it by introducing even more tax cuts for both corporations and indivudals and privatizing everything, but, still, I endorse
Ernie Eves to be re-elected Ontario Premier... even though I'm sure my brother Nick will be voting for Dalton McGuinty... or is my brother still officially a Quebec resident? I'm not sure, actually.
It's not like I knew her or even knew who she was until the tragic events of early Monday morning, but, still, it is quite heartening for me to see that so many people seem to care about Jaclyn Linetsky and Vadim Schneider, the young actors who were killed
when their driver likely fell asleep and hit a tractor trailer while on their way for another day of filming of the television series
15/Love in Sainte Cesaire.
I can honestly say that I mentioned it because it saddens me, not for the Google traffic because I had no idea that this many people would be interested in reading what I thought about it.
SUNDRY MESSAGE BOARD STUFF
Just various things I wrote, mostly about anime, though there will be one thing about the
Simpsons... skip this post if that sort of thing doesn't interest you. By the way, though, I couldn't say this before, because it's the sort of feeling I had to keep private in case one of my siblings would see this and tell my parents, but one of the prime reasons I haven't felt like writing about anything of substance as of late was because I was actually very worried that I wouldn't be accepted back into Concordia University... and... um... not getting the letter of readmittance until Monday (the week after classes started!!!) greatly contributed to my own worries. But, anyhow, now I'm back in, and all's right with *my* world, so that's some of my immediate worries taken away... for now, at least.
My thoughts regarding the opening theme sequence for the new Tenchi Muyo OVA series as seen
here (note that OVA = Original Video Animation = Animation produced to be sold direct-to-video in Japan):
Regarding the new opening theme sequence, also on that site... the instrumental tune isn't as strong as the original instrumental Tenchi Muyo theme, in my opinion, of course, but I did notice that the "fast" and "slow" bits seemed to have been timed to correspond pretty much exactly with the "fast" and the "slow" bits of the original theme, and it ends with a "flourish" too. Part of me does wish they'd just go with the original opening theme music with new animation, maybe "sexed up" a little so that you'd have to buy a new soundtrack album regardless, but I guess that would be weird to go back considering they didn't use the original theme for the second OVA either. (Well, "Boku wa Motto Pioneer" is a decent song... if you're in the right mood.) Parts of the opening animation seem to be still pictures and I'm afraid I did find that a little "cheesy", though, to be fair, it may look better on a television screen, and they may have been using still pictures to fill in spots where the animation wasn't quite finished. I do like the "transparent negative" nude pictures of both Ryoko and Ayeka, though... I swear that I can almost make out certain things on Ayeka.
The opening does seem to hint that Tenchi's dead mother will somehow have some bearing on the plot... not really a spoiler, since that fact's been up on their site for a while (and reported in a line or two on every English language news site I've seen), and I don't know how she comes into the plot. It may be more brief flashbacks for all I know. I guess, since her name's "Kiyone", that's the final nail in the coffin for any prospect of my favourite Tenchi character, the Galaxy Police Detective First Class Kiyone, appearing "officially" in the OVA continuity. (The events seen in the Mihoshi Special never actually happened, according to the disclaimer on the back of the LD, and Manatsu no Eve/Daughter of Darkness was a mix n' match continuity with elements of both the OVA and TV series.) Well, I have quite the uniform fetish, so I like Kiyone best. (Mihoshi reminds me far too much of my ditzy Grade 9 English teacher.) But I'm really just Steve Brandon, not the "real" Tenchi, so my choice in Tenchi women is fairly irrelevant (though I wish it wasn't).
About the "new" anime stereotype you get from well-meaning reporters that bugs the shit out of me:Quite frankly, I find the new stereotype you get in mainstream newspaper articles about anime written post-Spirited Away Oscar win, making anime fandom out to be some sort of sophisticated, highbrow, intellectual hobby, far more annoying than I ever found the old "robots, girls with big eyes and bigger boobs, & guns" stereotype to be.
Sure, some people only like the more "artsy" and "deep" stuff, and I'm not knocking them if that's what they like, but when the newspaper writers make broad generalizations about why people get into anime, lately, they either seem to downplay the equally valid reason that some people are into anime because it's entertaining and fun, or they just ignore it entirely, and, somehow, the articles they write suck all the fun out of anime and make it seem downright pretentious.
So, as my own tiny little way of combatting the newer stereotype, in my sig in the RottenTomatoes.com forum (where I'm Kiyone), I added a quote from a mini-review I did somewhere on that board (their search function sucks) of Project A-ko, still one of my favourite anime films: "This movie is proof that not all anime films are insightful, haunting, poetic, elegaic, or philisophical with deep subtexts on the nature of existence, asking what makes us human. Some anime films are about schoolgirls with powers and big robots and spaceships and panties and wacky mayhem."
My thoughts regarding the upcoming Simpsons episode wherein they go to England:I'm dreading the "Simpsons go to England" episode... considering they've made the fact that J.K. Rowling and Tony Blair will be playing themselves the prime attraction. There are a handful of exceptions, but, 90% of the time, if a celebrity is playing themselves and not a character on The Simpsons, it's a minute or two of unfunny craptitude that is completely extraneous to the rest of the episode.
Random Celebrity: "(Smiling) I'm playing myself on The Simpsons to show that, no, I don't take myself too seriously! (mutters) Or so my agent/publicist/Prime Minister's Office would have the plebians believe."
I'd also bet money that they'll have a scene with the Queen doing something "normal" that you wouldn't expect the Queen to be doing. Ha ha. I think it would be funnier if Homer or Bart does something to insult her, so she goes, "Off with their heads!" and then Tony Blair says, "But, your Majesty, you can't do that anymore." and so she goes, "Who died and made you Queen? Certainly not me!" Then they both start laughing and turn into Reptilian aliens, to toss a bone at both the "David Icke conspiracy theory" crowd and the "People who like to laugh at people whom believe David Icke's conspiracy theories" crowd.
Now, if they had a scene at Trafalgar Square where the Simpsons get someone to try and take their picture in front of Nelson's Column (and Nelson looks like Nelson Muntz) and then get covered by a million pigeons and Homer says something like "If you stand still long enough, they'll fly away"... and then they cut to the Simpsons arriving at their hotel and Homer's and everyone is still brushing pigeons from their clothes... that would be funny, but The Simpsons is so far sunk that, if they do a Trafalgar Square pigeon joke, it will almost certainly involve poop.
Bart operating the Tower Bridge and snarling up traffic in the capital might be funny, if they play it right...
A looonnnnggggg post outlining my reasons why the beast course of action, if your favourite anime series (re: Saint Seiya, but also Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon) gets marked to be on North American children's TV but they decide to also release a subtitled, intact version for the purists, why you should just ignore the TV dub and buy the sub (also why complaining is futile). I've been arguing with this guy in Europe for about the past week about why John Oppliger's stance on TV edits for North American TV is fairly futile and why just ignoring it is the pragmatic course of action. I think this is me at my most lucid. Also, the post starts off referring to another post about how the first 40 episodes of
Saint Seiya aren't nearly as good as what comes after:
I think the point is that, if people don't care about the first 40 episodes, then, no, they won't likely become fans of the series, since 40 episodes is an awful lot of episodes to sit through and not have much of interest happen... well... that describes Star Trek: Voyager prior to Seven of Nine joining the crew to a T, but I digress. I'm presuming that some compelling things happen before the Gold Knights or whatever they're called show up. Sure, the series might improve after episode 40. And the thing about DiC licensing the first 40 episodes only is that they almost certainly have the "options" for the rest of the series should their version of Knights of the Zodiac prove popular, but, should it flop, they won't have spent nearly as much on the TV rights and dubbing as they would have if they had licensed and dubbed it all.
The "straw man" argument here is that it's unreasonable to expect anime fans to purchase a longer series on DVD. Umm... no, there never was an obligation for Japanese licensors and American licensees to provide intact versions of series to people on television free of charge if they can't afford to buy them. If someone is exposed to enough of a series, either through television broadcasts of an edited version or renting it or watching it at a friends' house or just from reading about it, that they know they want the series but they can't afford to buy it... well... sucks to be them, but that's life. Like the Rolling Stones said, you can't always get what you want. I want a Ferrari F-50, but that's not in the cards right now, is it?
If Germany and Italy and Poland and Spain (not France... I know for a fact they edit anime for content in France) show versions of anime that pay respect to the artistic integrity of the original version, well, good for Germany and Italy and Poland and Spain. The United States is different, and, I'm afraid, for the most part, anime has to be edited at least a little for television broadcasts, even on cable, and, if a series is to be aimed at the lucrative kiddy TV market, also localized. So, while, in Germany and Italy and Poland and Spain, there may be no need for stratification of anime fans into purist and non-purist groups, it's an accurate description of the situation with anime fandom in North America, that some fans do care to watch the shows as close as possible to the way they were seen in Japan (whether subtitled or faithfully dubbed), while there is a larger, generally younger, market that, quite frankly, isn't concerned with the changes made to the versions of anime shows that they watch off television, either because they don't know of the changes or simply because they don't care. I, myself, prefer to watch anime subtitled and intact and generally do not watch anime on television, not caring much for the changes made to shows I like, but the existence of alternate, dumbed down kiddy TV versions of the shows I like really doesn't bother me. I just choose to ignore them and buy the subs, or, when I can't afford it, ignore them and NOT buy the subs.
Basically, North American anime fans can accept the situation I outlined above as just being the way, for better or for worse, that the world works, as I do, or they can decry any and all changes made to any anime, even something like Pok�mon, in the name of "artistic integrity", as John does. I happen to think the position of opposing any changes made to anime, especially for the kiddy TV market, on the principle of "artistic integrity" looks good and honourable on paper, but is a completely unrealistic position to hold, at least if you don't accept right off the bat that your opposition to the practice of TV edits isn't going to accomplish anything.
For John's stance on TV edits to be feasible in the real world, the anime purist niche would have to accomplish at least one of these three things:
1) Change American society, government, and broadcast standards, so that there would not be any more need to edit anime for TV.
2) Get the Japanese licensors to care about the artistic integrity of the shows they sell to American distributors and get them not to care about the big profits to be made in the lucrative American kiddy TV market by selling the TV rights to the sort of distributors that would make heavy edits and localizations in order for the shows to fly on kiddy TV.
3) Get the American kiddy TV outlets to care about the artistic integrity of the programs they import by keeping everything that might be controversial to some parents intact in the show, and getting the sponsors of these shows not to listen to any complaints from said angry parents, even though the TV outlets might lose ratings and the sponsors might lose business.
Not quite as impossible as turning down the heat from the sun to stop global warming, but getting there.
So, given this situation, when the licensors and the licensees do try to appease the purist niche by releasing alternate subtitled (and faithfully dubbed), intact versions on DVD of the anime they show in heavily edited, localized form on kiddy TV, that it's an acceptable, pragmatic compromise. Yes, it does mean that, by buying the DVDs, you continue to support the practice of having two levels of release, the intact version for the purists and the altered version for the non-purists, but, since the existence of the heavily-modified versions of the shows for the non-purists doesn't bother me, I think that practice is perfectly acceptable. If I don't watch the localized kiddy TV dub version, it won't bother me. I could let it bother me, but all I'd get for my concern would be an ulcer since I wouldn't change anything.
And, finally, in the specific case of Knights of the Zodiac & Saint Seiya, and, I think this also applies to Cardcaptors & Cardcaptor Sakura, if the kiddy TV distribution companies hadn't bought the rights to the shows from the Japanese licensors in the first place, I don't think we would have gotten the subtitled, intact Region 1 releases on DVD either, since, generally, the longer the series and the higher the amount of merchandise, toys and games related to said series in Japan, the higher the price is that the licensor asks for the rights. As kids' TV series in Japan (more sophisticated and violent than most kids' TV series in North America, certainly, but still kids' TV series), the market for uncut, subtitled Saint Seiya and Cardcaptor Sakura might not be large enough to warrant ADV and Pioneer paying full price for the rights, however, since DiC and Nelvana, who have more money to spend, got the TV rights to do their own localized versions of the two shows, they were able to sublicense the rights to the subtitled versions out to ADV and Pioneer for a fraction of the Japanese licensor's asking price.
My thoughts on two anime shows which premiered on YTV last Friday:To be perfectly honest, I don't think they played "I Ran" (the Flock of Seagulls version) on Montreal radio stations all that much in the 1980s because I don't remember it at all from the 1980s (and I'll be 29 in less than 4 weeks); I really only know it as a song they play in TV commercials (like the aformentioned Diet Pepsi one as well as the commercial for GTA: Vice City) when they want to have an 80s vibe. And, also to be perfectly honest, I didn't know that song was called "I Ran" until I saw Knights of the Zodiac last night... I wasn't too thrilled, but that has more to do with the fact that it's Saint Seiya (which I saw a couple of bits and pieces of at my anime club) than the fact it's been heavily edited for kiddy TV (*coughcoughignoreitandbuythesubs*).
Inu Yasha looks to be the sort of show I'd watch if I were home and remembered it was on and there was nothing else I wanted to see on at the same time, but I don't think I'd exactly go out of my way to watch it every week and never miss an episode, though, admittedly, it's difficult to miss an episode, since YTV airs them twice on Fridays (well, the repeat showings are technically really early Saturday mornings), and I get both the East coast and West coast transmissions of YTV on my ExpressVu dish.
Oh, and my dear friend Yuri posted a
thread wondering about the exact nature of Tomoyo's feelings for Sakura in Cardcaptor Sakura. I'm not going to cut-and-paste anything, I'll just say that, while some fans would peg her as a lesbian, I think it's just harmless "idol worship", perfectly normal for girls in the Freudian "latency" stage of development. The evidence from the manga presented on some sites is far from conclusive. What they'll get me to admit is this:
1) Do Tomoyo and Sakura have affection for each other?
Yes, very much so.
2) Does Tomoyo feel a lot more strongly about Sakura than Sakura feels about Tomoyo?
Probably... "idol worship" is rarely 2-sided.
3) Is Tomoyo a lesbian?
I think she's too young, and, besides, I think Tomoyo has deep affection for Sakura, but it is simply a mistake to sexualize any sort of same sex affection. And girl friends are physically closer to each other in Asia.
4) But her mother, Sonomi Daidouji, is a lesbian, and had the exact same sort of strong feelings for Nadeshiko, Sakura's dead mother! Like mother, like daughter, right?
No, I only got that impression when I first read it and only had the shallowest of understanding of the characters. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that Sonomi was (or is) just immature, stuck at the idol worship stage while other girls have long passed to other things. Do I, as a "constructionist" on the origin of homosexuality issue, belive that Tomoyo's feelings, left unchecked, could lead her to pursue only same sex romantic and/or sexual relationships? Possibly; who's to say? If you want to believe she's on the road to lesbianism, that's fine... nothing in the manga really contradicts it, but I think it's more innocent than that.
5) But, but, people are born gay or lesbian with no fluidity over the course of their lives!
The scientific jury's still out on that one, make no mistake, and I don't think there will ever be a consensus. But, I think "gay" and "lesbian" and "bi" are just artifical labels anyhow. And I think that the level of fluidity and malleability of sexuality is different from person to person.
Anyhow, time for bed, and, when I next write something here, I'll be a full-fledged Concordia student once again...
COOL SEARCH REQUESTS
"Libeskind's Freedom Tower sucks"
You're damn right it does... please see
the Team Twin Towers site if you're not familiar with it already. If you want built on the World Trade Center site what I suspect you want built, or, rather, rebuilt, trust me buddy, you're not alone there.
Hmm... I finally got my letter of reacceptance into Concordia University's PASS programme today... I think I'll write them a thank-you letter.
September 8th, 2003
Concordia University
Faculty of Arts and Science
7141 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, Quebec,
Canada.
H4B 1R6
Dear sirs:
This letter is to confirm my receipt of the letter you sent me confirming my readmittance to your university. Thank you for readmitting me, and, while I am always at least a tiny bit depressed, I am nowhere near as gloomy as I was in the autumn of 2000 and the winter and early spring of 2001, even despite the events that have transpired in the world and locally over the past two years.
However, in the future, when sending out letters confirming one's readmittance into the university for the fall, please take note that it is usually a fair bit more useful if one receives said readmittance letter the week before classes start, and not the fricking week after classes start.
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Stephen Brandon
7X XXXXXXX Road,
Pincourt, Quebec,
Canada.
J7V XXX
(514) 453-XXXX
s_brando@students.concordia.ca
Well, I think I still have a day or so left to
late register, though I still have to speak to an Academic Advisor before they can deflag my name on the computer. At least, now that I'm back, I can get on to the dental plan and get that tooth I had the root canal on that is now a 3-sided facade fixed and recrowned. Also, I guess I'll start going to the
Concordia Otaku anime club; their showings used to be mainly Saturday afternoons, unlike the old anime club I attended at Universit� de Montr�al, which was Saturday evenings, but now it goes all of the way until 10 p.m., and, to be perfectly honest, with the exceptions of
Narutaru/
Shadow Star, which I'm downloading fan-subbed, and
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou/
Yokohama Shopping Log/
Quiet Country Caf�, the two new episodes of which I bought "raw" on expensive Region 2 DVDs from Japan (though I downloaded some fansubs of it later for use as "reference copies"), and the thingies I saw at FantAsia, I really haven't seen much at all of anime done in the past 2 or 3 years, so I'm kind of out of touch there.
Okay, I have to admit... though I don't exactly watch it too much, I loathe
Caillou, the Quebec-produced cartoon from CINAR about the whiny bald-headed kid that absolutely reeks of having been written by a committee of psychologists and early-childhood educators (yes, I'm aware it's based on a book series). The stories are insipid, even by "cartoons for two year olds" standards. I am absolutely serious when I say that, even if I had kids, I'd sooner watch a 24 hour marathon of
Barney interspersed with the barely-animated
Curious George shorts they played weekday mornings on the CBC in the mid-80s than I would watch a single episode of that pablum. I hate the obvious digital colours on that show, and I hate how the picture fades to white around the edges, like the entire show is some sort of dream sequence. I hate even seeing the merchandise from that show, especially considering that I'm in Montreal, ground zero for
Caillou merchandising. Regular readers of this blog (like there are any, ha ha) will know that I like all sorts of cartoons, including cute kids cartoons... I'm not one of those anime fans that needs a certain quotient of blood and gore, none of the Japanese cartoons I like have much in the way of carnage, but, if I ever saw an episode of
Caillou where his big fat head explodes, I'd be a very happy man.
Still, as an animation fan, I have tonnes of respect for voice actors and actresses, and this is absolutely horrible:
R.I.P. JACLYN LINETSKY
Jaclyn Linetsky was a young actress whose roles included the English-language voice of Caillou in the episodes which were produced from 2000 to 2002. She had currently been shooting a live-action series for older children called
15/Love in St. Cesaire in the Eastern Townships (called "Estrie" in French), the area of Quebec with some pockets of English-speaking communities south of the Saint-Lawrence river to the east of Montreal and north of Vermont. Early this morning,
the minivan she was riding in to get to the set crashed into a tractor-trailer and she was killed, along with Vadim Schneider, another actor on the show. My mother speculates that the driver may have just fallen asleep, since Highway 10, the "Eastern Townships Autoroute", is long and boring and it was very early in the morning. They were both 17.
And now for something completely different...
This is a very interesting thread, in the Anime Nation forum, about Polish movie posters, especially those for American films. There are several online galleries related to Polish movie posters, like
this one,
this one, and
this one (select "Polish" for "Poster Nationality", and "U.S." for "Film Nationality").
The Polish posters seem to be a lot more creative than their American counterparts for the same movie, frequently with garish-looking, intentionally ugly drawings that, often, only have a vague resemblance to anything in the actual film. Some of them seem more interested in evoking a positive image of America than describing what's in the film. You really do feel a sense of despair from life under Communism, the most evil political system in the world, in these posters.
I admit I don't know why that is that the Polish movie posters for American films are so creative, but, my educated guess is, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, while American movies did get shown in Poland, except for a period in the 1960s when they were banned, the actual American studios themselves were kept at arms length from whomever was distributing the films within Poland, so the American movie posters and other promotional materials were extremely hard to come by, so they had to develop new posters from scratch. I guess, even though these posters are intended to promote films, it is one of the few ways Polish artists were relatively free to express themselves under Communism, so I can sense a subtext in a lot of these, even if I can't quite codify what exactly the subtext is. If you look at the dates of the films, you'll notice that the number of creative posters declined sharply around 1990, coincidentally when they scrapped Communism... or, perhaps, not so coincidentally. Now that the American movie studios could have a lot more direct control over how their films are distributed in Poland, from the few examples of more recent posters I've seen on these sites, they usually seem to just use the same "floating heads" poster designs that they use in the United States, with the Polish title in the same font as on the American posters. It's a pity, but I'm not decrying the American studios' completely valid motive to reduce the costs of distribution by not commissioning completely original posters for each foreign markets, nor would I ever remotely suggest that Poles getting rid of the Commuinists was a "bad" thing. It's just one of those tiny but interesting things that was a product of the Cold War that disappeared when the era was over.
Would you believe that this is the poster for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Well, I guess that the artist was told that the film was about aliens and wasn't given any other information. Of course, if you've seen the film, one of my favourite films of all time, you'll remember that you don't actually see the aliens until right at the end, and they look like the big eyed, thin, "greys" you see as the most common image of aliens you get in pop culture today (well, while I'm certainly not a non-believer when it comes to whether the Earth has been "visited", though I honestly believe the visitors are human time-travellers from the distant future, I think
CEot3rdK was an important influence on any bogus memories of "abductions" ellicited under hypnosis). And, unlike what the poster suggests, it's not a comedy, despite a couple of scenes done for laughs at the Nealy house towards the beginning. Though the actual movie poster used in the United States, of a darkened road leading towards the Devil's Tower mountain, would be completely meaningless to Poles...
This one I like, the familiar
Peanuts characters, drawn in a way that is, at the same time, recognizable, but very disturbing. Though the page says it's from
A Boy Named Charlie Brown, it's almost certainly from my favourite
Peanuts film,
Race for your Life, Charlie Brown, the one wherein the kids all go to camp and enter a river race.
Hmm... something else weird. I got 4 hits from 4 different servers in the Czech Republic in the span of 10 minutes. I guess Czechs really like my blog... though I don't have any Czech-specific content. As far as I can remember, I only talked about Prague once, in regards to the bulk of
Shanghai Knights having been filmed there, with Prague doubling as Victorian-era London. From what I understand, though, it's a lovely city I'd love to visit, and my friend from high school, Laura Bridger, worked there for a couple of months about 5 or 6 years ago.
