BRIDGET AND SONIC, SITTING IN A TREE...
Ooh,
Sega has been
bought out by Japanese gaming and gambling giant Sammy a.k.a.
Arc System Works.
"Japanese gambling giants Sammy have finally bought Sega, following months of rumours that they would do so. Sammy, already Sega's top shareholder, will merge the two companies in a deal worth $1.4 billion.
An attempted merger between the two gaming outfits failed last year following disagreements about management style and the merger bid was scrapped in May 2003. However, Sammy subsequently bought a 22% share in Sega in December and Sammy chief executive Hajime Satomi was named new Sega chairman in February."
All I can say is that, as a die-hard Sega fan going all of the way back to the Sega Master System days, I'm pleased as punch to be in the same pool as
Bridget from Guilty Gear XX. (Hmm... does Bridget wear a bikini top, and what's that poking into my leg? :blushes:)
HAPPY 29th BIRTHDAY!
Hmm... two of my friends from Macdonald High School, Class of 1992, are having their 29th birthdays today, so I watched
Sailor Moon (S) episodes 101,
"Usagi in Tears! Glass Shoes for her Birthday", and 102,
"The Pure Heart Stolen! Usagi's Biggest Crisis" in their honour. That's the two-episode story wherein Kaorinite encases Tuxedo Mask in glass and brings him to Tokyo Tower, and Kaorinite steals Usagi's brooch, so Minako (Sailor Venus) has to pose as Sailor Moon to trick Kaorinite into giving Usagi her brooch back so she can transform into the real Sailor Moon. (It's also the story when Haruka/Sailor Uranus and Michiru/Sailor Neptune discover that Usagi is Sailor Moon, and that, although her heart crystal glows brightly because she has a pure heart, it's not the "talisman". And they actually help her win this time.) Just my dorky little way of commemorating their birthdays.
Happy 29th birthday, Laura Bridger! I know you've had a melancholy past couple of years, but I hope things get better for you from here on in. By the way, did I see you in Sainte Anne's the other week just after when I was walking from the 211 bus terminus to the place where my mother picks me up? (I had just seen
Kill Bill vol. 2 in case you were curious what I was doing.) I thought you were in Scotland, but I guess you might have been visiting Montreal.
Happy 29th birthday, Jamie Smith! As a flight attendant, I guess you're happy that
Air Canada has been saved from bankruptcy for the time being. Yeah, I guess that is a pretty good birthday present for you... assuming you haven't been laid off already. :( Still doing one-man shows? Since that one thing you did at the Monument National a couple of years back, which I missed, I've been looking, but I haven't seen anything you've been in, though, if I remember correctly, you're in Vancouver (which is where my brother, John, lives now). Well, I hope for the best for you as well. :)
I know it's not that much fun staring 30 and the end of "youth" in the face, as I have been doing for almost the past 8 months, though I think both of you are more "mature" than I am, so you'll be okay.
(Fun fact: Laura is originally from Canada, but she moved to Scotland several years back, while Jamie is originally from Scotland, but moved to Canada when he was a small child.)
James Smith, Jamie McNiven Smith, James McNiven Smith, just to cover all the possible "vanity search" possibilities.
PERSONAL NOTES AND OTHER CRAP
ITEM! The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias claims that a lot of warbloggers have been quiet, as of late, and she attributes it to those of us who support the war being "on the wrong side of history". She claims that
Katie Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic (which I know for being the blog which broke the all-important
Cardcaptors "tarot card" promotion at Taco Bell story) deiced to pack it in, not noting that Ms. Shaidle was only in the process of changing residences (moving, for those of you in Rio Linda) and would resume after a short break. I haven't been blogging much about the war myself, but I'm not a professional writer and I gave up on trying to make this a completely topical blog in the spring of 2003, though I still write about issues if I feel compelled to. All of us, if we take breaks, usually do so for some personal reasons. In my own case, a couple of weeks back, I was a bit troubled by some especially strong gay feelings I got after looking at some naughty pictures of
Bridget, from Guilty Gear XX (an arcade game) though they seem to have died down now. Anyhow, just for Antonia Zerbisias, I think I shall write my thoughts on the current Middle East situation with my usual impartiality, and hopefully she'll mention me next time she does a column on blogs.
ITEM! Nick is home from Toronto and John is home from Vancouver for the week, and John brought home his Gamecube, so I've been playing
Animal Crossing a bit for the past two days. So pointless yet addicting, especially writing letters to characters in the game.
ITEM! The other Saturday, I went to see
Mission: Implausible (formerly
Spy Another Day), this year's "Way Off Broadway" musical comedy show performed by
the Becket Players, once again pushing the bounds of "Fair use", though it's all for
good causes. It was just a bunch of nonsense involving spies and campy villains and a plot to use beavers to destroy Canada's maple syrup industry. There are a lot of Canadian references thrown in for good measure, and some references completely incomprehensible to anyone outside of Montreal's West Island, like the Twist & Crème ice cream parlour in Pierrefonds (which was seen in the "so bad it's bad" cheapie horror flick
Zombie Nightmare starring Jon Mikl Thor, Adam West, and a rather young Tia Carrere). However, even though I called the play "just a bunch of nonsense", it's supposed to be that way, so it's fine. This year's play was written by Natalie Darbyson, which is a close friend of my sisters and who stayed with us in Britain one time we went on vacation there. Natalie herself played some sort of airbrained interm, and I think there was definitely something
Sakura-esque about the frilly pink dress she was wearing.
ITEM! Just an observation... nearly everytime I've gone to Blockbuster lately, they've been watching
Kill Bill on the screens rather than the 15-minute loop of trailers they're supposed to show. But, if any Blockbuster executives are reading this, the caveat is that I pretty much only ever go to Blockbuster after 11:30 p.m., since I like the exercise and the mostly quiet streets, so it's hours after any kid would inadvertently see it.
ITEM! Ooh, wow!
Andy Kaufman has returned 20 years later (as promised) and he has a blog! I guess he wasn't "goofing on Elvis", as R.E.M. claimed! He doesn't mention in his F.A.Q. what he thought of Milos Foreman's biopic
Man in the Moon wherein he was played by Jim Carrey.
NBC ISN'T THE "RUE DE PUSSIES" AFTER ALL!
Oh my god! NBC is reairing the episode of
Late Night with Conan O'Brien with the hilarious
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in Quebec City bit that ticked off many people unaware of the general concept of the Triumph bits. ("Are you separatist? Maybe you should try separating yourself from donuts first.") However, Moses Znaimer's CHUM group of stations, including The New RO in Ottawa, which I was watching, surrendered to the critics like France surrendered to the Nazis and cut to commercials for the rerun immediately after the monologue, but, fortunately, I have a big antenna, so I just turned to WPTZ-5, the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh NY, and re-watched the best damn satire of Quebecers (or is that "Quebecqueers"?) I had seen in a long time and laughed and laughed, and my brothers Nick and John, home from Toronto and Vancouver for the week, saw it for the first time and laughed along with me.
I expounded at length on the worthless hand-wringing by the humourless Canadian politicos and much of the chattering class back in February (
on this page and
this page), but, just last week, I gave a concise version of my thoughts on the matter
here.
"Oh my god, yes, but I don't think they'll ever show the "Triumph in Quebec City" bit again because Quebec separatists enjoy feeling "humiliated" since it's currently the only card they can play with the general Quebec public to advance the absurd idea that the province of Quebec would be better off as a (banana) republic outside Canada, and, as such, they have a chronic inability to put an *intentionally* uninformed rubber dog puppet in the proper perspective; meanwhile, in the Montreal English-language press, most commentators had to toe the politically correct line that "what Triumph did was wrong" since they think us Anglophone Quebecers shouldn't rock the boat by admitting the Triumph bit was fricking hilarious."
You can download the entire clip, in Windows Media Video format,
here. (Thank you,
Matty G.)
(From
The Daily Telegraph.)
"Michael Moore, the maverick director from Michigan, finally unveiled his inflammatory anti-war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 to sustained applause at the Cannes film festival yesterday.
The audience chortled at the depiction of the Bush administration as cowboys riding into Iraq to the theme tune from the television show Bonanza. Tony Blair is portrayed as their Stetson-wearing sidekick, bowlegged and clad in full Western gear with six-guns at his hip, jumping up and down like a puppet."
As I had anticipated, the mostly French audience at Cannes fell for
Michael Moore's
"Boo-hoo-hoo! Disney and the Bush Family Evil Empire are trying to censor me!" publicity scam hook, line, and sinker. I think the lengthy applause says a lot more about the audience than it says about the quality of Moore's "faux-umentary".
But, really, what do you expect from a country which makes
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the guilty, guilty, guilty cop-killer,
a honorary citizen of Paris?
Thanks heavens for
the "Merde in France" blog and
Sabine Herold's
Liberté Chérie which shows there's still a little sanity left in the country.
By the way, I'm aware that the proper Wayne's World quote, according to the real subtitles on the DVD, is "Fishnet!", not "Fished in!", but, prior to buying the DVD, I always heard it as "Fished in!" and think it makes more sense.
MAN, OH MAN, I HATES DA EBONICS IN DA MOVIE TITLIN'! IT BOTHER ME!
Spike Lee's latest movie,
She Hate Me, opens in North America on July 23rd. It's about a guy who gets fired from some sort of high tech firm for whistle-blowing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he goes into the business of providing sperm to lesbians, including his ex-girlfriend, at $10 000 a pop, while his former employers try to frame him.
I don't have any opinion of the film itself but something about the title bothers me, so, in July, I think I'm going to round up a
lynch mob posse and we'll go around from (English-language) cinema to cinema and make certain adjustments to the poster.
(N.B.: This is not the actual poster; there doesn't appear to be one available for download yet, so I had to make do with the only vertical picture I could find for this film and use crappy Photoshop fonts.)
Yes, I'll add an "s" to "hate" to conjugate it properly with the third person singular tense. (Alternately, I could add a "does" before the "hate"; "She does hate me." would also be grammatically correct.) And, for good measure, I'll also change the pretentious "A Spike Lee Joint" to the normal "A Spike Lee Film".
Sorry, the use of so-called
"Ebonics" in movie titles bothers me and, frankly, only serves to perpetuate the stereotype of the "dumb Black". And, as
Walter Williams points out, Ebonics isn't as "Black" as some activists make it out to be.
"According to David H. Fischer's book, Albion Seed, in 1773, Philip Fithian, from New Jersey, went to Richmond Virginia to teach at Nomini Hall. In his journal, he told how Northerners said, "I am," "You are," "She isn't," and "I haven't," whereas Virginians, "even if high rank", preferred to say "I be," "You be," "She ain't and "I hain't." The Virginian dialect, Fithian discovered, even had its own vocabulary: afeared for afraid, cater-cornered for crooked, chomp for chew, disremember for forget, and a host of similar substitutions.
Virginians tended to add syllables to words and embellish vowels such as: ha-alf for half, puriddy for pretty and wah-a-tah-mill-i-an for watermelon. They also had a way of softening consonants: sebem for seven, chimbly for chimney, mo for more and wid for with.
These Virginia speech patterns were not invented in America. They were derived from a family of regional dialects spoken throughout the south and west of England during the 17th century in the counties such as Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Wiltshire, Oxford and Gloucester. By the late eighteenth century, these words had all but disappeared from polite usage. Fischer says, "In the twentieth century, words like dis or dat were rarely heard in any part of rural England, but they persisted among poor whites and blacks in the American South.""
EDIT: By the way, for anyone without a sarcasm detector, I was kidding about the grammatical lynch mob and the vandalism. Yeesh...
AND THE TERRORISTS WHO BOMBED THE UNITED TALMUD TORAH SCHOOL ARE (ALLEGEDLY, UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY)...
Hmm... Yesterday,
police arrested five people in connection to the
firebombing of the United Talmud Torah school in the Montreal borough of Saint Laurent in April, however, they were keeping mum about the names of the suspects, however, we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the ethnicity of the terrorist perpetrators and they could still have been white supremacists for all we knew, as some radio commentators told us. Well, white supremacists who are overly concerned about the Palestinian "cause" somehow, since a note was pinned to the door, saying the attack was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
But now, for whatever reason,
the names can be revealed.
"Simon Zogheib and Sleiman Elmerhebi, both 18, are charged with arson and conspiracy. The mother of one of the accused, Rouba Fahd Elmerhebi, 36, is charged with being an accessory after the fact."
Ah, the "non-entities", as
Little Green Footballs called them because of the coyness over not mentioning the names of the suspects are, in fact, of some sort of Arab origin? Shocked, I am, shocked. (Insert picture of Troy McClure looking fake-shocked on "I Can't Believe They Invented It", slapping his face with his mouth gaping open.) I don't think they're Palestinian though. "Elmerhebi" isn't a very common name at all, according to a few searches I did, but "Zogheib" seems to be a Lebanese name.
Some "white supremacists", eh? (Though, for the record, when I heard about the firebombings, my first thoughts were of
the MLNQ, le Mouvement de Libération Nationale du Québec (The Movement for the National Liberation of Quebec), the weedy band of separatist thugs who are followers of the
murderer Raymond Villeneuve, since I'm sure that "Jews = the evil English" in their troglodyte worldview. It was a step above their total failure firebombings with the Sprite bottles full of gasoline, but it's still the same rough M.O.)
