News You Can Bruise

This is one of a block of British sitcoms that the San Mateo (?) public television station likes to show on Sundays. I really don't see what is great about the majority of British sitcoms shown on public television (eg. "As Time Goes By", which as far as I can tell doesn't even have any jokes in it) but this one is wonderful. It has a wide variety of types of humor, it's extremely plot-arc-driven, and it has a view of human nature that holds up well over the years. I recommend it.

I'm cleaning out my inbox today, or at least right now. If you can't wait years for the best or most bizarre Japanese TV programs to be mentioned in or ported to the Western media, the Internet is a boon (but what is the next boon on the Internet?). English language newspapers in Japan have summaries of the upcoming season (Link from Sumana). The best show mentioned in that article is an anti-quiz show, in which panelists are told documented facts and asked to register how surprised they are by each fact. The great thing is that each fact itself sounds like the premise for a Japanese TV show. I am not sure where the competition comes into play; maybe the panelists are also the sources of the facts.

This is not mentioned in the article (I saw it in the New York Times), but there is also a cool-looking documentary show on Japanese television called "Project X", which has episode titles like "Battle For The Soul Of HONDA" and which talks about the engineers and managers who brought prosperity to postwar Japan and who now, presumably, sit around in karaoke bars watching "Project X". It looks like you could see Project X with English subtitles if you live in LA. It took me a while to find those links, because there are 2.1 jillion things in the universe called "Project X" and restricting the search to Japan doesn't help much.

What have I been doing in the absence of Internet access at home? I wish I could say I've been working on something amazing that you'll see once broadband is restored, but apart from a new song and Belgium pictures that's not true. I've been working out, cooking (exciting new Iron Chef-esque recipe coming soon!), playing Zangband, all sorts of unproductive stuff. I thought it would be boring, like this entry, but it's not really.

A link to keep you at bay: Muji Online, a company that sells stylish things made of recycled materials shaped into the wrong dimensions. At a Muji store in London I got a notebook for Sumana from a two-story Muji store, and the notebook paper was about two inches by six inches. It looked like Sir Humphrey Appleby's margin-shaped notebook paper from the Yes, Minister book. In fact, it looked like the Muji store itself, which was two stories high and about ten foot by thirty.

Many of my ideas come to me in little moments of delusion in which I envision the world as other than it is (this is the real-life analogue of this). It is sort of like a game where you fish in a little pond and sometimes you get a fish and sometimes something comical like a boot. The big fish get turned into ideas like Downhill. The boots get turned into tasty NYCB entries, The Gold Rush-style.

Here is a boot. Consider the encoding UTF-8. Now instead of an encoding, visualize it as a Japanese TV show, "Ultra Terra Force-8", with spaceship battles and dumb-looking aliens.

That's it. It just sits there, like a sleeping alligator, planning to live off Google royalties (a hit for "japanese tv" here, a hit for "'gold rush' boot" there) for the rest of its life, not contributing a bit to the intellectual quality of this website. Well, out with it, I say! It has no place on my glamorous weblog! Now, if I could only work this electronic doohickey... there, "Publish". That should do it.

On the bus to work, nauseated but not tired. The fact that on my last night in Belgium it was completely impossible to sleep nipped my returning jet lag in the bud, I hope. The Belgians are a festive people, delighting in musical concerts, fireworks displays, honking their horns at each other for no reason, and on-road off-road racing, all right outside my hotel room.

The last deserves some explanation. There are people who have big dirt bikes which they race down the twisting streets of Brussels. They avoid condemnation from the superstitious natives, who believe them to be the characters from Power Rangers Ninja Storm.

The other day I had an idea so exquisitely horrible that I knew it was only a matter of time before it was realized. The basic premise is that you put wireless Internet access inside coffins. You put a thermometer, a video camera (with a light; I don't know how you power the light, or the other stuff for that matter), etc. in the coffin, and give it an IP address (Kevin suggested also including a gas spectrometer). Add a little Silent Radio inside the coffin, and survivors can virtually visit the grave every Memorial Day without actually having to get in the car and go to the cemetery.

We joked about it, Kevin and I, but joking about it doesn't make the problem go away. Today whilst browsing Clifford Pickover's new blog (man, it just gets worse, don't it?) I saw a link to this New York Times story (and again!) about Internet-connected videocameras in coffins. I haven't read the article due to the whole requires-registration thing, but the angle seems to be shock value, whereas I think guilt is the big potential money-maker here. The ancient art of Google-fu (and, I suppose, the even more ancient art of looking at the URL), reveals the article to be about a Dutch made-for-TV movie, so for now at least the idea remains safely in the realm of scathing social commentary made-for-TV movies.

On Chinese TV last night there was a fairly funny show called "Jacky Go Go Go". Sandwiched between juvenile short skits about the eponymous Jacky being in the hospital was an extended game Jacky and some acquaintances played in which they were divided into two teams of two, and each team had to run around some Taiwanese metropolis (Taipei?), finding and eating various foodstuffs. Hilarity ensued, apparently. An interesting fact is that one member of one of the teams looked rather like Joe Mahoney (his hair was even dyed the same color). Also, the show had a cool videogame-like animation that was used to reintroduce the show when coming back from commercials.

Extrapolated sample dialogue: the Joe Mahoney-looking guy and his friend have stumbled into a Hooters bar (!), looking for fried potato skins or some such.

Joe Mahoney-looking guy: I think this is a topless bar.
Other guy: Oh, I see. [begins to take his shirt off].

I suspect it's a lot funnier when you don't know the language, because you think of the sort of joke you would set to the action on the screen, which is quite often funnier than the actual joke. This happened to me with having watched "Dude, Where's My Car?" in Russian; the things I thought were brilliant sight gags (like the fridge and cupboard full of pudding cups) were given dumb bad-comedy explanations in the dialogue.