PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!
It's been
3 months since the last one, so it was about time for another installment of "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" on NBC's
Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Conan O'Brien: ...just look at the fury coming off of that guy. Well, yeah-heh-heh-heh-heh. Pure hate.
Pierre says he knows how America feels and he's ready to articulate our anger for us, so here he is once again in a little segment we like to call "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage"
Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE
Conan O'Brien: Hello there, Pierre are you comfortable and angry?
Pierre Bernard Jr.: Comfortable and furious, Conan.
Conan O'Brien: Then go ahead, old chum, and speak for America.
Pierre Bernard Jr.: Okay, here goes.
As I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of Japanese anime, which I think is far better produced and more provocative than American animation. Well, a few weeks ago, at an event dedicated to Japanese anime, I was lucky enough to encounter seven young women known collectively as the "Babes of Anime". These beautiful ladies do voice-over work for several anime series including Trinity Blood about the Catholic church battling vampires and Bubblegum Crisis, which features sexy futuristic policewomen taking on monsters that ordinary law enforcement can't handle.
I'm particularly attracted to officers Sylia Stingray and Nene Romanova who often appear unannounced in my dreams, so you can imagine how excited I was to meet the gorgeous women who provide the voices for these characters, and, if that weren't thrilling enough, I then found out that there's a channel called the Anime Network that runs anime 24 hours a day. That meant I could hear these ladies' voices continuously every day while staring at my large collectible "Babes of Anime" poster, which is so hot it could melt paint off the wall.
Unfortunately, I was then shocked to learn that no East Coast cable provider provides the Anime Network. The Cartoon Network is available here, but they've been cutting back drastically on the number of anime programs in favor of live-action alternatives, and the best they can offer animation-wise is the talking butt detective show, Assy McGee.
Bottom line, America? East coast cable companies should carry the Anime Network 24 hours a day so I can always hear the angelic voices of Sylia Stingray and Nene.
Conan O'Brien: Thank you, thank you, Pierre. I'm sure there's at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly how you feel.
Pierre Bernard Jr.: Keep the faith, Amigos.
Conan O'Brien: Alright.
Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!
Conan O'Brien: We'll take a break. When we come back, Mary Lynn Rajskub is here. Stick around!
Ah, the Anime Network... I know ADV Films breaks even round about on the Video on Demand service, but I still wonder why ADV hasn't yet pulled the plug on the 24-hour linear feed, considering the pitiful distribution they've gotten for it. My suspicions from
three years ago that they're bleeding money out the wahoo on it still haven't changed, though maybe they're keeping the linear channel afloat for now with the money that they don't seem to be spending on LAEM (the Live-action
Evangelion movie, a.k.a. "investor money toilet").
Hey, Pierre, if your going to agitate for a 24-hour anime channel on east coast cable providers, don't bother with the Anime Network. A better use of your time would be trying to get
YTV's upcoming anime channel shown in the United States, since I suspect YTV's channel will be the only anime channel broadcast in North America to be profitable in the long-term as YTV is not beholden to showing the anime of any one distributor, while ADV's and Funimation's anime channels eat each other alive south of the border, and YTV is run by actual cable people who can better attract the revenue sources they need to keep the channel afloat.
I also enjoyed seeing Pierre Bernard show up in a cameo appearance in a Hannigan the Salesman sketch on Thursday night, where Hannigan asked Conan if he wanted a Playstation 3, only to say that he didn't have a Playstation 3, but he did have a "Gay Haitian Lee" (Pierre Bernard in a vest and short running shorts). "He's all the rage in a Port-Au-Prince whorehouse."
Also, speaking of anime characters showing up in dreams, a couple of nights ago, I had a weird... well, not a whole dream, but a vignette within a dream where I was at McDonald's, and the lovely
Keiko Kitagawa, who played Rei Hino/Sailor Mars in the live-action
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, was in her Sailor Mars costume, serving me, only she could barely speak English, and she didn't even know how to operate the Coca-Cola dispenser, so I had to
demonstrate to her the proper usage of a Coke dispenser. That's all I remember. Nothing dirty happened, though there's been a disturbing lack of sex on the whole in my dreams over the past couple of months, while, every night lately, I seem to dream that I'm back at university and am forgetting to do assignments and I forget my schedule and only show up in classes sporadically. I do have plenty of real-world experience with both not doing assignments and skipping the same class repeatedly, but I haven't seen the inside of a university classroom for three years, so I don't understand what's causing me to have these dreams now. (Not that I never want to go back, especially now that I'm not nearly as depressed as I was and wouldn't start slacking off again.)
EDIT (5:30 p.m.): I haven't found any video of last night's Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage segment yet, but here's
a short interview with Pierre Bernard talking about the New York Comic Con and how excited he is that's he's going to be sitting in a recliner, being "serviced" by the ADV voice actresses.
EDIT II (April 18th) Hey, Pierre, I noticed that you've visited this blog a couple of times over the past few hours, so may I recommend you an anime that I think you'd love?
Gunbuster! (
Aim for the Top), the 6-episode OVA (direct-to-video) series from GAINAX (
Neon Genesis Evangelion) featuring character designs from Haruhiko Mikimoto (character designer of the original
Macross/
Robotech series). I consider
Gunbuster to be the pinnacle of that late-1980s sci-fi anime "look", with much nicer animation than most other non-theatrical anime of the same era. It's basically a story about girls fighting alien invaders in giant robots, but, at its core is a surprisingly poignant story about interpersonal relationships that get severely disrupted from the side effects of Einstein's theory of relativity, where the girls travelling through space faster than the speed of light age only months while the people they leave behind on Earth age years.
But it's not all dead serious...
Gunbuster has the best "teenage girls take a communal bath together in space" fanservice scene this side of
Plastic Little, The Adventures of Captain Tita, as well a lot of superfluous "bouncing" in those tight gym-suit style space uniforms.
The box set is a little pricey for just six episodes ($60 U.S. MSRP, though I paid less than $60 Canadian for it), but Bandai Visual/Honneamise gave it a really nice Japanese Region 2 DVD set-style presentation (and is one of the few overpriced anime sets they're putting out that is honestly worth the price).
Labels: Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage
BIG PERSONAL NEWS AND NEPEAN CRIME FILES...
It happened kind of fast, but I am now gainfully employed. Part-time, for now, pushing around carts in the parking lot of a local supermarket on weekday afternoons, which is about as specific as I'll ever get because I'm not one of those dumbasses that's going to endanger his prospects of staying employed by talking too much about his job during his off hours. I doubt, once I'm working, that I'll even talk about the job at all since it's not really the sort of job where there is all that much to talk about. Unless I have a random celebrity encounter or even just a random Ferrari encounter. I've seen a couple of Ferraris on the streets of Nepean... their owners gotta shop sometimes.
Obviously, it's not the sort of job most 32-year old men have, but, in my particular case, I wasted much of my adulthood so far being depressed and my severe shyness and inability to sell myself and aversion to eye contact never got me past the job interview until now. I don't want to be too dependent on pharmaceuticals, but Citalopram really had helped me a lot over the past year to diminish the depression (also, thanks to seriously taking up photography as a hobby over the past year, I'm simply getting out of the house a lot more than I used to), and the job-finding counselors for people with severe emotional issues that I am seeing helped me get a foot in the door at this store.
I think I have the right attitude about the job; I really don't care about the social status of this particular job compared to my same-aged peers (one of the advantages of not socializing much is that I don't get those kinds of inferiority complexes). I merely see it as the first rung on the ladder, a rung I probably should have climbed 16 years ago, but a rung I still need to climb in order to get anywhere important.
I think I'll improve my work ethic by watching all of the episodes of
King of the Hill where Bobby gets a job and Hank doesn't like the lessons Bobby is learning, and the episodes when something happens to Hank's boss, Buck Strickland, leaving Strickland Propane under (temporary) new management that rubs Hank Hill the wrong way to the point that Hank thinks of changing careers, and the episodes wherein Dale Gribble decides to take oddball side jobs in addition to operating "Dale's Dead Bug" extermination.
Now to the Nepean crime files. (Insert
Dragnet theme, otherwise known as "the
Mathnet theme.)
My two big dogs are loud and
like to bark. Usually, it's annoying, but, occasionally, it's justified. Sam, the black labrador-mix dog, started barking yesterday afternoon, which caught the attention of my father (who just happened to be taking a week off of work). My father looked outside and saw some random asshole, somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21, who was certainly not the mailman looking inside our mailbox. What was he after? Yesterday was the day that eligible people in our neighbourhood happened to receive their sales tax rebate cheques ($58 Canadian each), and Mr. Petty Larceny already had several of these cheques in his hand and would have helped himself to my own and my parents GST/PST rebate cheques had he not been spooked by the aural assault of my dogs and the visual shock of seeing someone actually home. I was home too, but I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Internet in the basement and probably wouldn't have gotten upstairs in time had no one else been upstairs. My father called the Ottawa Police. I don't think they've caught the guy yet but I'd imagine they'd have spread the word around to local banks to be on the lookout for somebody attempting to deposit multiple GST rebate cheques into the same account.
Also on the subject of local crime, one of the nicer cars in the neighbourhood is a gold Eagle Talon, which is really the early 1990s version of the Mitsubishi Eclipse released in the United States under Chrysler's now-defunct Eagle banner. On Easter Monday, I spotted this car from the bus, but, at some point over the past couple of days, it had gotten a presumably unwanted new paint job:
Ouch. If you love your car as much as I think this car's owner does, that's gotta be paintful to see.
I wonder if there's some kind of jilted ex-lover thing going on here, or whether it was just some random ne'er-do-well with a can of silver spraypaint, a desire to deface a thing of beauty, and an imagination so shallow that "Fuck you!" is the most creative sentiment of which he can conceive.
BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS, WHATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU?
I've finally got some pictures of an Ottawa police car that has eluded my camera lens for the best part of a year.
While the vast, vast majority of the Ottawa Police Service's marked patrol car fleet is composed of
Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor cars (in fact, I can't honestly say I remember seeing even a single marked Ottawa Police Chevy Impala in the two-and-a-half years that I've been living in Ontario), in 2006, Ottawa added a few Dodge Chargers to the fleet.
I first saw one of these bad boys responding to some kind of accident on Carling way back last July, but my mother's Ricoh Caplio camera, which I was using for digital pictures at the time, was still recovering from the unfortunate soaking it received when I got caught in a torrential downpour walking the 50 metres or so to my house from the bus stop on Meadowlands after arriving back in Nepean from Canada Day activities downtown.
I've seen several more Ottawa Police Dodge Chargers on the streets over the past few weeks, but they were moving and I just seemed to never have my camera ready at the exact moment they passed by, so I was elated to see this one parked right outside the doors near Toys R' Us in the St. Laurent Centre, on a median so I could get nice photos of it from all angles.
Look at that "stare". The Dodge Charger is the most "badass"-looking police car this side of those Lamborghini Gallardos that police forces in some European cities have. However, it's not quite as "badass" as some police forces; according to Wikipedia,
the Dodge Chargers that the Ottawa Police Service uses aren't the ones with the
Police Package 340hp V8 Hemi engine, they just have the base V6 engine, so they're less muscled than the
V8-powered Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors.
But they look cool.
CROWNVIC.NET BOARD VISITORS: I wouldn't exactly say that the Dodge Charger police cars are "elusive".
Other people at
Flickr have photographed them, I just had a 9 month bad luck streak that finally ended Monday, though now I have a new target... a Gatineau/Hull Police Dodge Charger.
Please
check out my Flickr Police Car album... there are lots of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors (Ottawa, RCMP, OPP, Montreal, and Military Police) in there.
Speaking of digital photography, I was in Ottawa East partially because I wanted to feed my brother's cat (since my brother was spending Easter weekend in Toronto), but also because I wanted to get the cheapest possible SD memory card for my camera to tide me over until I figure out what I can do, if anything, to get a replacement for the 2.0 GB PNY Technologies SD memory card that died over the weekend (it's long past the store warranty, but I'm not sure about the manufacturer's warranty because I still need to find the fricking package).
I checked the
Zellers website and found that there was one Zellers store in the Ottawa area that I had yet to visit, and it was just a block or so north of the St. Laurent Centre, so I'm not sure how it had eluded my Zellers-finding sixth sense until now. Unfortunately, the cheapest SD memory cards they had were 512 MB and were a good $10 Canadian more than I was willing to spend right now. And they didn't have any Hot Wheels or Maisto Ferrari model cars that I don't already have.
But I struck gold next door at
Radio Shack "The Source by Circuit City", where I got the last clearance Centrios 256 MB memory card for just $18 Canadian (plus tax), $7 below my $25 Canadian (plus tax) cheapness threshold. I know 250 MB isn't much, but it means I can get 222 pictures at a time (not including the 30 pictures in my camera's internal memory), so fans of my photos of boring things in the Ottawa metropolitan area don't need to fret, the photos will go on. Even with as many pictures as I take, I think the only time I've even gotten close to taking 250 pictures at once was at the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow last month.
Also, at the Source by Circuit City, there was a middle-aged guy, who I think was Italian or Greek, testing Karaoke speakers, and he actually wanted the no-longer-Radio-Shack store clerk to turn up the sound on the televisions just to make sure that the Karaoke noise drowns everything else out. I just thought it was a funny enough random request to mention here.
DEATH OF A MEMORY CARD.
The second PNY Technologies 2.0 GB SD memory card I've had since getting my Kodak EasyShare C643 Zoom digital camera died on me yesterday.
It died in the same way as the first one, which I had for only 2 weeks before replacing: I took about 5 or 6 pictures in a row, and, when I tried looking at the pictures, the camera said "File format not recognized", which happens sometimes when it auto-trashes a picture, so I turned the camera off and when I turned it on again, I got the digital camera equivalent of the "Blue Screen of Death", asking me to format the card, which does nothing to revive it.
The first time, it could just have been a dud card, but, since it happened twice, I'm a little concerned that it might not be a problem with the card but rather the camera.
And these things are $60 to $70 Canadian, and I'm not all that sure that it's still covered by warranty (and, even if it is, I'm not sure if I still have the receipt).
By the way, yes, that is indeed supposed to be the version of the Grim Reaper from the Cartoon Network show,
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I originally considered using Momo, the cute grim reaper-equivalent girl from the anime
Shinigami no Ballad, but her character design is much too complex for me to draw her properly in MS Paint (I mean, I'm sure I could do it, but I didn't want to spend all of Easter working on a single picture).
