PICTURE POSTING PARTY: SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE'S "TOKYO GAME SHOW"
I needed a couple of screencaps from one of the best ever
Saturday Night Live sketches, "Japanese Game Show" (a.k.a. "Quiz Kings"), with Mike Myers as a Japanese game show host, Alec Baldwin as one of the contestants, and, Chris Farley as "Larry Templeton", an American tourist in Japan who doesn't speak Japanese and who somehow becomes a contestant on a demented high stakes Japanese game show, where, even though he doesn't speak the language, he is able to answer correctly the first two times (where the answers are "Hachi-ju-hachi" (88) and "Godzilla", where his correct answer means that he doesn't have to cut off his finger, unlike the Japanese contestants played by Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo) before being wired up with electrodes in the bonus round. I don't need to write out a transcript since you can read one
here.
Since I want to post a whole bunch of images directly on the Blogger server in the hopes that they might be fairly popular on Google Image Search the next time that Google Image Search re-updates (which, from the pattern I've observed, will probably happen in mid-October), I made several more screencaps, though Blogger won't let me post all of them. I'm beginning to think that Blogger might have a 1 mb limit per entry for photographs.
The logo in Japanese. It really does say "Quiz Kings" in Katakana.
Mike Myers is the Japanese Game Show host. Seems normal.
Chris Farley is non-Japanese-speaking contestant Larry Templeton.
Chris Farley, as Larry Templeton, asking the other two contestants if they speak English.
Mike Myers and his model assistant, played by Laura Kightlinger, hook up Chris Farley's testicles to electrodes for the bonus round.
To avoid getting his nuts fried, Chris Farley comes up with random syllables for his answer, "kwakisurpeneku". It sounds more like, "kyakisepiniku", not that that's a word that means anything in Japanese.
Unfortunately, Chris Farley's answer is wrong. Mike Myers tells him the correct answer, "kwakiserpepeku" and pulls the switch, shocking Chris Farley's nads.
As a bonus for Mike Myers fans, I also made screencaps of the cameo by Robert Patrick as
Terminator 2: Judgment Day's killer morphing mimetic polyalloy android, the T-1000, in
Wayne's World. Both
T2 and
Wayne's World are on my list of my all-time top eight live-action films.
"Yes, Officer, is something wrong?"
"Have you seen this boy?"
MORE POPULAR IMAGES...
Continuing my project of re-posting images I've posted before which were popular hits to this blog with Google Image Search until Google de-indexed images hosted on Photobucket.
This Hulk Hogan WWF trading card in my sticker album served a dual purpose: it concealed a couple of computer pictures that seemed naughty to my 10-11 year old self in 1985. Hey, did you know computers can show pictures now?
Ah, who didn't love "P.J Fresh Phil" Guerrero and Snit from YTV's
The Zone from the mid-1990's? This was the postcard you got if you sent any artwork in. For Google searches: P.J. Phil Guerrero, Phil and Snit.
Since Google Image Search has been so slow between re-indexes this summer, not doing any re-indexes between mid-May and the end of August (and the one at the end of August only added images from a couple of more weeks of April), my
lovely drawing of Piccadilly Circus in Westminster, London, has never been indexed. And now it never will, since the initial time that I posted the small verson of the image, it was using Photobucket. And I was counting on Google Image Search to advertise my drawing skills (since I do want to be able to sell my drawings eventually). So here it is again.
More to come later.
SERENDIPITY
Weirdly, two members of my immediate family have had coincidental unanticipated changes of plans for Labour Day weekend, both involving airline flights.
On Sunday, my mother probably thought she'd be spending the weekend in Ottawa, because where else would she be? Sadly, on Tuesday, her brother died, so she got a cheap ticket to for a flight to England, which left this evening, to attend his funeral. I think she's been wanting to return to England for a while, but not under these awful circumstances. Still, she'll get to see some people she hasn't seen in several years. And I asked her to get me one can of
Carlsberg Special Brew beer, which is criminally unavailable in Canada (perhaps because they fear that, if it was available in Canada, Canadians who drink it might behave criminally, like the "yobs" who are fuelled by the stuff, but it's really only as strong as
La Fin du Monde, which isn't even the strongest beer that
Unibroue sells).
Meanwhile, my brother in Vancouver, John, found a really great deal on a weekend travel package and was planning on taking a trip for Labour Day weekend, and he didn't inform any of us ahead of time, so he was going to surprise my mother by calling from the city he was going to visit. Unfortunately, the city he had purchased a ticket to travel to this weekend was... New Orleans, Louisiana, which is a little, shall we say,
"under the weather" this week (and for many months to come, if not years). So, rather unsurprisingly, he decided to cancel the ticket. Why he felt the need to cancel the ticket, I'm not sure, since the airline surely was going to refund him anyway for a flight that was unable to be carried out, since Louis Armstrong International Airport (KMSY) won't be taking in any normal civilian airline flights for a long, long time. I guess he just wanted to be safe with the refund. He didn't consider visiting us for Labor Day weekend because, weirdly, it's MUCH cheaper for him to fly to some American cities than it is to fly to Ottawa. I wonder why that is? Lack of
cabotage, maybe?
By the way, since my mother was leaving for England, I got to see
Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (whose
ICAO code is CYOW, and the
IATA code is just plain YOW!). It's a pleasant little airport, with a new terminal just completed in 2003. It reminds me a lot of a
chibi-fied version of Montreal International Dorval... erm, I mean, Montreal International Pierre Elliot Trudeau (CYUL), especially with the relation between the parking garage and the main terminal. The shopping concourse is very compact. It didn't even have a fricking Smithbooks, though it did have, for some weird reason, a small Virgin Records store, even though there aren't any standalone or mall Virgin Records stores to be found anywhere in Ottawa. And the food concessions were just Tim Horton's (donuts), Harvey's (hamburgers), and something called Nate's Rideau Bar & Grill, which featured a prominent photo of Luciano Pavarotti eating at the downtown location. We had hot beverages at Tim's (my mother had coffee, my father had tea, and I had hot chocolate) and waited until my sister showed up, since she was going to be the one to actually see my mother off since my father and I had to leave early because we didn't want our half-labrador dog, Sam, tearing up the furniture as he is wont to do when he is left alone for too long.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (SHAKES FIST)
I don't know if this is just a temporary glitch with the
Google Image Search servers or what, but, within the past couple of hours, it appears that the latest reindex of Google Image Search has come online, and, for whatever reason, images hosted by
Photobucket aren't showing up in Image searches anymore!
This might be insignificant to you, but it's a damn big deal for me. Photobucket was where I put nearly every image I ever put in this blog, at least until early this summer, when Blogger finally made it so you could post images directly to the blog without using that cumbersome "Hello" programme. Subsequently, starting late last year, daily hits to my blog starting doubling, and, with the previous major re-index, which happened in mid-June and included a heckuva lot of images I posted from mid-January to early April, my hits rocketed to an average of over 300 a day, meaning Google Image search by itself was good for at least 250 hits a day. I'm not delusional, I know that every one of those hits was just from someone looking for a picture who had no interest in what I actually wrote, but it's damn great advertising, and, even if just a tiny percentage of those hits notice what I wrote and decide to come back frequently, that's a few more readers than I ever had before. And having 300+ hits a day was a major ego booster, even if it's just the average readership of the school paper in a small high school. I can't go back to 70 hits a day... I'd feel so inadequate.
So, assuming that Photobucket images are gone for good from Google Image Search, I shall repost some of the most popular images I have ever posted directly to Blogger, so that, whenever Google Image Search is reupdated next (usually it takes 2 or 3 months), these images will hopefully reappear.
By far, the most popular image I have ever posted, by a margin of around 5-to-1 over the next image, was this Fark Photoshop of
Scooby Doo characters Velma Dinkley and Daphne Blake's faces superimposed over Shinobu and Mutsumi's heads from the anime series
Love Hina.
Also quite popular was this image from Mihona Fujii's
Gals! manga (the basis for the
Super Gals anime), showing Ran Kotobuki in an afro wig.
Ah, no, the glitch where Blogger stops posting images is happening again. I'll post some more popular ones later.
DRAWING #3, UPDATE #3...
Meh... because I've been a bit preoccupied by real world events over the past couple of days, especially today (well, Tuesday), I wasn't in much of a writing mood. What can I say about the
near total devastation of places like Biloxi, Gulfport, Mobile, and especially New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? I know New Orleans was playing with fate just by virtue of its geographic location and sub-sea-level altitude, but, still, I never thought I'd see a whole major North American city almost entirely flooded like Atlantis. I never thought any North American city would be effectively wiped off the face of the Earth in my lifetime short of being vaporized by a nuclear explosion. Obviously, a decade from now, there will still be a New Orleans, but like postwar Tokyo, it will have to be almost completely rebuilt.
On a bit of a more callous note, I certainly hope that no one died when sections of the Interstate 10 causeway over Lake Pontchartrain collapsed, however, looking at those pictures with a bridge with two parallel roads with sections missing, I would be lying if I denied that the absolute first thing I thought of was the bridge level of Data East's classic Nintendo Entertainment System game,
Breakthru (parodied once on
Futurama).
Also, in sad news, the relative I mentioned yesterday succumbed to complications from an infection that started as a simple eye infection but spread through his body rapidly due to him having almost no immune system left due to leukemia. He slipped into a coma late last week and never woke up. It's one of those deaths that wasn't much of a surprise where we're more happy that he was able to cheat the grim reaper for so long as, when he was first diagnosed several years ago, his doctor originally only gave him a few months left to live, and, even though plans for a bone marrow transplant fell through when the donor changed his mind, he was still able to live a fairly active life right up through the end. I wasn't crying about his death because, unfortunately, I'm someone who grew up an ocean apart from my Britain relatives and only saw them once every few years and, while I got on with him very well the times I saw him, I can't honestly say I knew him that well. But his death still leaves me melancholy.
Anyway, instead of writing, I drew, and here's the final "in progress" preview of my Covent Garden drawing, based on
this photo.
Again, not much to say.
While the way I'm drawing the people looks fairly simple, they're a lot more damn complicated to draw than they appear, since I have to get them lined up with each other exactly right, otherwise they won't look like they're sitting in rows of tables, and the people sitting across from each other at each table won't look like they're looking at each other and having conversations and stuff. And, most of the people in the restaurant were too far from the camera for me to get much detail from their faces, but too close to the camera for me to leave them as blank-faced monsters. I'm actually pretty satisfied with the faces I've put on some of these people as you can still make out their basic expressions. But their faces aren't going to be too pretty because my Prismacolor pencils are pretty precise, but not precise enough for me to put too much detail on faces that small.
Actually, that's about everything I wanted to say. Can't think of anything else to add, at least based on this portion of the drawing.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON TWO SUPER FRIENDS EPISODES I WATCHED THE OTHER NIGHT.
Let's see if I can make fun of
Super Friends without mentioning:
a: the Wonder Twins,
b: Aquaman,
or
c: the transition bit with the three shooting stars that they'll only play once a minute if you're lucky (but, usually, at least twice a minute).
Since jokes about those were old twenty years ago.
Though I don't think that either Aquaman or the Wonder Twins were actually on these episodes.
These are just actual episode-specific thoughts I had while watching the episodes, and YTV plays them at something like 2 a.m. on Saturday night, when my brain is operating only at half-speed. I'm not trying to hit any comedy home-runs out of the LOL ballpark.
If you must know, the episodes I watched were "Mr. Mxyzptlk and the Magic Lamp" and "Mask of Mystery", from the 1984 batch of episodes,
Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show (which was, incidentally, the final season in the series to be called
Super Friends, with the following year's episodes being called
The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians).
- In one of the episodes I watched, you have one of my all-time favourite lame expository devices in superhero cartoons: museum security guards who casually remark to no one in particular about how valuable a jewel, a mysterious artifact, or a piece of art that they're there to guard is, and then, once they've said how valuable it is, they just walk away, because, evidently, their job is not to guard said item, it's just to remind each other how valuable said item is.
- Is it just me, or, does token ethnic superhero El Dorado, when he talks, sound exactly like "Dad" on The Brak Show, even though El Dorado is Mexican while I think "Dad" is supposed to be an exiled Cuban, like Desi Arnaz?
- Yeah, admit it, you've always wondered too whether or not Apache Chief, instead of making his whole body grow much larger, could also selectively make certain of his body parts grow larger. And, by "certain of his body parts", I mean "his penis".
- Uhh... Lex Luthor has a hidden camera in a young teenaged boy's bedroom?
Am I the only one who finds that a little creepy?
- Okay, the kid knows where to go as "Captain Mystery" to fight crime because he accidentally hacked into the supercomputer at the Hall of Justice with his (unbranded, but easily recognizable) Apple II computer and watched their full-screen video. I don't have a problem with the Super Friends being able to communicate with various governments using two-way video in 1984. I assume they have some sort of closed-circuit television set-up wired up. But how kid a kid hack into an analogue full-screen television signal using a primitive modem (the sort where you put the phone's receiver on top of the modem) with a bandwith of like 100 bytes a second? And, even if the kid had a magic modem with a then-unheard of cable connection, how would a Apple II computer, which had 64 Kb of RAM at the most, be able to process a video signal? Home computers wouldn't be able to handle full-screen video for at least another dozen years or so!
That's all I could think of.
But, in
Super Friends defence, screw Christian Bale. The
Super Friends Batman is still the definitive Batman as far as I'm concerned!
COMBAT DES CLIPS
Hmm... not that I watch music video channels much anymore in either official language, with the last music video I'm all that wild about being for Royksopp's "Remind Me" (and that was from 2002), but, flicking through the channels on my programme guide-less analogue cable, I somehow came across the beginning of the first episode of
Musique Plus's revived music video battle show,
Le Combat des Clips, except the host, who most certainly was not Claude Rajotte, was going on like it was the first episode ever. Uh... no, it's not, that show was on when I was a teenager over a decade ago. It could just be that he meant that it's the first episode of the new show, slightly rechristened as
L'Ultime Combat des Clips, with the differences from the old show being that it's daily instead of weekly, and, instead of dialing a phone number to vote for the videos, you vote on the website or by using that cell phone text message nonsense.
I was hoping that the one holdover from the old, Claude Rajotte-hosted version that
I remember, would be that, in each episode, the reigning champion video would be...
...Bon Jovi's "Bed of Roses", since, in the pre-Backstreet Boys era, to paraphrase
"Phantom Limb" from
The Venture Bros., French-Canadian teenaged girls of the early 1990s took to the re-invented softer-edged ballad version of Bon Jovi like "cancer to a prostate". "Bed of Roses" won
Combat des Clips week after week for at least a year, and that is no exaggeration. It could easily have been a year-and-a-half. So, I think, for old times' sake, the reigning champion of the first episode should have been "Bed of Roses".
Instead of "Bed of Roses", though, the two videos in the battle were Green Day's interminable, and über-Idiotarian, "Wake Me Up when September Ends" (god, lord knows, I can take long videos, at least when "long videos" is defined as "Guns N' Roses' 'November Rain'", but... eh... wake me up when "Wake Me Up when September Ends" ends) and something called "Gasolina" by someone called Daddy Yankee. Being someone who sees far more
"good news" than "bad news" coming out of Iraq, blissfully ignoring the mainstream media's Sheehanized obsession at reliving their hippy youths protesting Vietnam, and also being someone who thinks that the only good song title that begins with "Wake Me Up" ends with "Before you Go Go", I voted against "Wake Me Up when September Ends", and will do so again every evening until its rightful defeat. That is, unless, the competition is something equally politically idiotic and naive like Loco Locass (the group which seem to be the 2005 incarnation of that "French B" guy who sang that "Do You Remember When We Were French?" song back when I was a teenager), in which case I'll just find a way to electronically write in a vote for Abba's "Super Trouper" video somehow.
In other news, I probably won't mention this again, regardless of what happens (as my parents don't care for me giving too much information about my relatives in this blog and also because I'm not one for public grief), but a member of our extended family is gravely ill, so you can pray for that person if that's what you do.
