PEOPLE BORN ON OCTOBER 2nd KICK ASS!
I didn't really feel like doing a birthday countdown this year, since the biography was (and is) in lieu of a countdown, but I wasn't aware of another famous member of the "October 2
nd Club" last year.
In one day, J-Pop singer
Ayumi Hamasaki will turn 26. (
Official English site; fansites:
Divine AYU,
Ayumi-Hamasaki.org.)
I honestly don't know much about her music, other than that she sang one of the closing themes for
Inu Yasha, but the singer is very popular with
kogals, those teenage girls in Japan who rebel against conformity by making fashionable the tackiest clothing, hairstyles, and accessories possible (if you still don't understand the general concept of kogals, please watch this
helpful Flash animation on the subject, which shall make everything clear).
So, if Ayumi Hamasaki is popular with Kogals, that means that she's regularly mentioned in
Mihona Fujii's GALS! manga, which I love, as I do the anime version,
Super GALS! (
Chou GALS! Kotobuki Ran), my favourite anime series from the past decade or so
1.
Mihona Fujii has characters talk about Ayumi Hamasaki quite often, though I don't think they had the freedom to name drop like that so much in the cartoon, where they even had to change the name of the
Shibuya 109 fashion building to "Shibuya 10Q" and HMV to HWV for legal reasons. (Though, as I noted in
my review of Super GALS! volume 4, they didn't seem to care so much about getting into trouble for using the covers of albums from the West, like
King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, which is front and centre in one shot.)
So happy birthday to a singer who I admire indirectly because of a comic and cartoon I like.
Here's the index for my birthday countdown from last year.
GGroucho Marx (who would be 114 tomorrow)
Avery Brooks (Commander Benjamin Sisko, later Captain Sisko, from
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; he's turning 56 tomorrow)
Lisa Simpson (I'm not sure if I saw this at snpp.com, but somewhere I saw that Lisa's official birthday is October 1
st, not October 2
nd.)
Lorraine Bracco (Dr. Jennifer Melfi from
The Sopranos; she's turning 50 tomorrow.)
Lene Nyström (formerly of the Danish band Aqua, now a solo artist; she's turning 31 tomorrow)
Kelly Ripa (actress and
Live with Regis and Kelly co-host; she's turning 34 tomorrow)
Rex Reed (film critic; he's turning 66 tomorrow)
Annie Leibovitz (photographer; she's turning 55 tomorrow)
Don McLean ("American Pie" singer; he's turning 59 tomorrow)
Mike Rutherford (musician and singer from Genesis and Mike and the Mechanics; he's turning 54 tomorrow)
and the King of People Born on October 2
nd:
Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. Sting (singer, formerly of the Police, now a solo artist and rain forest activist; he's turning 53 tomorrow).
Also, October 2nd is the birthday of O.J. defense lawyer
Johnnie Cochran, who's turning 67, fashion designer
Donna Karan, who's turning 56, singer
Tiffany (Darwisch), who's turning 33, and actor
Simon Gregson, who was born the same day as me, October 2
nd, 1974, in the same country, who's turning 30. He plays bartender Steve McDonald on the famous British soap (which
Tommy Schnurmacher likes),
Coronation Street, and, coincidentally, my real name is Steve (Stephen) and I like McDonald's a lot. And my sister, Alison, and Uncle Peter. And
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts premiered on October 2
nd, 1950, Rod Serling's
The Twilight Zone premiered on October 2
nd, 1959, as did
Alfred Hitchcock Presents four years prior, and, on October 2
nd, 1535, explorer Jacques Cartier landed on the island of Hochelaga, later renamed Ville Marie, and, later still, Montréal.
I'm happy that it's my birthday tomorrow, but, as you can imagine, I'm a little melancholy that the sun has literally set on my twenties, which, in some ways, was an incredibe decade of my life, for reasons I will get to eventually, though it's ending with a whimper. At least I still have a decade to go before I'm middle-aged.
1 Gah! When will AnimeNewsNetwork.com put the link to the review I wrote of volume 5 on their front page? It's still in their stack of potential reviews, which means they haven't rejected it outright, but it's not official until they link to it.
STUFF, DEBATE, MS PAINT, & PROCRASTINATION!
I know that "30 Days, 30 Years, 30 Boring Stories" didn't quite live up to the first part of its name, but the original plan was just to write a short paragraph, and, as it turns out, what I
really wanted to write was a novel-length biography and that takes a lot of time and energy. To be honest, I'm impressed that I got the first 15 years of my life covered in a month, and I'm half-done with my 16th year. But, yeah, I've been procrastinating the past couple of days, especially since I came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to finish this project in September.
I'm feeling better than I was at the end of last month, but I am still a bit melancholy about a couple of personal issues I can't really discuss here at this point in time, plus about turning thirty, and, most of all, moving out of the house I've lived in for over 23 years.
Things are happening very fast in that aspect: a couple of families came around to look at our house on Friday night, and then, on Saturday, one of the families from the previous night came around again, and we had to do the thing with the dogs again while the family visited, taking them to a vacant lot in the industrial park in the north side of Baie d'Urfé, next to the Hydro Quebec substation and the railroad tracks, and we tied them both to a utility pole and they ran around like madmen for a few minutes. After we returned them home, I found out that the Re/Max real estate agent, who had already left by the time I go there, was Justin M. from my grade at Edgewater and Macdonald. He also came around on Monday to present the offer from the family, but I couldn't see him as I was babysitting the dogs in my parents' room. Plus, I'd be a little embarrassed as I haven't really talked to him in at least twelve years and he seems to be rather successful with his life while I just have a bunch of vague ambitions and my life is currently... stalled. I hate moving, but at least I will be able to get a job in Ottawa.
After Justin came around the first time, on Saturday, I saw
Shaun of the Dead, which in no way was a disappointment, and may be the first film this year that I'll see twice. I'm not going to say one way or the other whether or not I'll write a review of it, but it definitely deserves at least
****½/*****, and it could possibly be about the first
*****/***** film I've seen since that wonderful day in December 2002 when I saw both
About Schmidt and
Catch Me If You Can in the same afternoon. Unless there's another five-star movie that just isn't coming to mind right now.
A real estate agent, not Justin, came around on Thursday evening for my parents to sign a bunch of papers, so I had to babysit the dogs in my parents' room again, but this did give me a chance to
watch soon-to-be-former-presidential candidate John F. Kerry and President George W. Bush (the W stands for "Whoop-ass") debate the usual same old, same old. I don't have anything too profound to say about it; it was basically "their" talking points vs. our talking points and I don't think there was a clear winner. Obviously, Kerry is the better orator of the two, I don't deny that, but he comes across like a stiff university professor, only slightly more lifelike than Al Gore (both have been called "Lurch" while they campaigned), with a much-too-idealistic "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony/I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company" policy for dealing with the Islamofascists and Middle East tyrants (while, at the same time, tossing bones to the
Fahrenheit 9/11 fanboys), while Bush is more down-to-Earth and homely and a political "realist", and I think he held his own quite nicely against the relentless assault from the candidate and the stacked questions from the liberal moderator, Jim Lehrer. Yes, Bush was defensive, but that's the disadvantage of being the incumbent. Bush should do nicely in the town-hall-style debate next week, since that's more his niche.
Taking a little break from my biography, what have I been doing?
I've joined the ranks of the
proud creators of MS Paint movie fanart, submitting two such pieces (pieces of something) to
this thread at RottenTomatoes.com.
The first one is based on the Tobe Hooper cheese classic,
Lifeforce.
My first idea was to do the scene with the almost-zombieified Prime Minister calling his secretary to come and see him in private and then sucking the lifeforce out of her and infecting her with the space vampire zombie infestation, but you don't actually see that, you just see flashes of blue light behind a map. I could have done a naked Mathilda May, but I don't want to be kicked out of the RottenTomatoes.com forums for violating their terms of service. So I chose to represent a scene of the devestation in London and Westminster, and what I drew is a stream of lifeforce, represented by blue light, streaming out of Chancery Lane station (I think the shining points are human souls), and they pass by a London Transport double-decker bus which explodes. (You can see a couple of screencaps of the actual scene
here). I chose that shot, which displays two London Transport logos, because I am such a fan of the
London Underground subway system, but I suppose it may also be a tribute to my great-uncle
Eric Rimmington, who has painted London Underground scenes many times, though that didn't occur to me as I was drawing this.
Keeping with a zombie theme, though from a purist zombie film, here's my tribute to George Romero's original
Dawn of the Dead.
I chose this shot because I wanted a shot of zombies banging against the glass which includes at least one of the stars of the film and a logo, and the shot where Roger DeMarco (Scott Reiniger) is about to pull out his gun to shoot that one zombie that he and Peter Washington (Ken Foree) had to pull into JC Penney's department store in order to be able to close the door was about the only shot I could find that fulfilled all three criteria. Goddamn, the zombies took me forever to draw, I left several of them out, yet they still look like crap. Well, maybe like "Attack of the Clipart Zombies", or maybe, for a couple of the better drawn ones, "Attack of the Flight Safety Card Zombies". Fairly obvously, I spent the bulk of the time drawing Roger, and shading is a bitch in MS Paint, where I can't use layers, overlays, transparancies, selective colour, gradations, blending, or opacity levels with my brushes that I'm used to with Photoshop. I had to work out all of the midtones manually, but, yes, I have taken various art classes over the years, so the basic idea of shading is the same no matter what medium you're doing the picture in: you look for the shapes and negative shapes within an expanse of colour. I did such a good job with the shading, in other people's opinions at least, that people just assume I drew over a photo of Scott Reiniger, but, nope, this was all by eye, looking at a paused image from the film on the TV screen. I didn't draw over anything, nor did I cut and paste anything from anywhere else. Even the JC Penney logo was done by eye, though it's one of those simplistic logos from the 1960s, so that wasn't too difficult. (I screwed up in that I made the "C" lower-case, when it should be a capital "C", but never mind.)
Of course, that picture probably defeats the purpose of doing a quick and primitive picture that portrays the gist of a shot in the most simplistic way possible. But I like it. And it's also a nice tribute to Scott Reiniger, who, as you may recall, was also the actor-turned-confidence trainer who recently discovered that
he is Afghan royalty because of some treaty one of his ancestors signed.
To change the subject, one little thing has been bothering me. While I shall probably remain one of the few Canadian "dittoheads" out there, am I the only person a little bothered that
Rush Limnaugh has told us, on several different occasions lately, most recently in regards to
Votergasm.com's sex-for-votes campaign, that he enjoys sex? I'm sure he does, and I'm happy that he's dating that CNN infobabe, but that's really more information than I actually need to know. (Yes, I am reading in between the lines a little as to why he feels a need to tell us this.) Bottom line, America: Rush Limbaugh should stop dropping hints about his sex life.
