| date | URL | japan stuff | other |
| 11.10.99 |
LaPorte Museum features agricultural
oddity "Jim Rodgers, curator of the LaPorte County Historical Museum, holds a hairball that was removed from a cow's stomach." from the South Bend Tribune, March 15, 1999. with photo! electronic bagpipes good thing i can't play any musical instruments, because if i could even just a little bit, i would need to get one of these. i saw a mention of them in the small but charming bagpipe encyclopedia, so i went looking and found them again in the world of bagpipes. here's an electronic bagpipe schematic. here's a place in kentucky where you can buy one--the programmable electronic bagpipe by ross technologies. they have bunch of info, including pictures and wav files. i couldn't get the sound files to work, but anything that looks like a metal detector is gonna sound pretty. | ||
| 11.09.99 |
sweet candy what is it? cute. pink bunnies. cute. that's all i know. the one page that i could understand featured the cross-cultural classic, whack-a-mole. | Canada US (source: CIA World Factbook, 1999) | |
| 11.08.99 |
CAHtoons singaporean mathematician comics. not about singaporean mathematicians, but by one. what could be funnier? the illustration style reminds me of pokey the penguin. and they're formatted on the page so that you can't actually read most of the captions. But make that extra effort to find the hidden punchline. you'll be glad you did. an example: Conference attendee: "Whilst we cut our bonus, the cost prices of robots are going up!" on the same site, you can read a tedious and apparently intentionally incoherent story about prolonged life at sea, starring characters named A, B, C, D, E, and F. surprisingly this was also written by a mathematician. bulgy's diary i sometimes check out bulgy's pita. and today i got all excited because it mentioned a hello kitty waffle iron and toaster which i have actually seen here and they are awesome but expensive. i got excited the first time i saw them in a store, so basically bulgy's pita helped me relive that excitement. anyway, today i also clicked on bulgy's diarlyand diary and this one page keeps cracking me up. actually, it's just the second paragraph. i love the line, "Halloween makes me think of bad costume smells, like mask rubber and greasy makeup." But then the rest of that paragraph is even funnier. I'm tempted to quote the whole thing because it's only a few more sentences, but really you should just go there and see for yourself. dot.jp watch this space. Barbara London is a curator for the Museum of Modern Art. Right now she's traveling around Japan, seeing "media art," visiting "media artists" and keeping an online diary about it. most of the stuff she's planning to check out sounds pretty cool. the ETA for her first dispatch from Japan is november 13th. her diary is really nicely designed as well. oh, it was done by Matt Owens (volumeone) and Warren Corbitt; together they are one9ine. nice. | Little House on the Prairie and Ally McBeal those are the two english-language shows regularly broadcast on tv here. they're broadcast in both english and japanese, so i just have to hit the magic button on the remo-con. of course for ally mcbeal, i usually manage to find the off button first. but one time i was so starved for english language entertainment that i actually watched it. i felt foul afterwards. i put my head in my hands and repeatedly moaned, "my depravity knows no depth". and i wept. it was kind of like the time(s) i craved american food so bad, that i started spooning peanut butter out of the jar--a story for another day. there's also an english language movie on almost every weekend--usually something like Independence Day or Last Action Hero. The magic language-switcher button works for those too. the only other English TV shows are the English lessons that are on late at night. They are so cheesey--almost even sleazy. I don't know where they found the people who do these things. Some of them are obviously done by weird uptight Japanophile guys, like one where the theme song is a terrible rap ("improve your sit-UATION with pronun-CIATION" or something like that. my god it's terrible. i feel bad for people who are learning to speak english from these losers. in one episode, the head dork taught people how to say, "don't go there." ugh. "repeat after me. don't go there. don't even go there. uh-uh, don't go there.") there's another that looks like it was made in the mid-1980s and it's more for business people and also for teaching people how to help foreigners, which is pretty interesting in itself. so, the kinds of things it teaches are like how to answer the question, "where is the Miyako hotel?" A: "It's up the street, and to your left. It's up the street, and to your left. It's up the street, and to your left." (they always repeat three times, but vary the rhythm a little bit.) plus there are kid shows for learning English. anyway, back to Little House on the Prairie. Of course, Little House rules. | columbo you know what i could go for right now? a nice 2-hour long Columbo special. Those criminals always think they're so clever. They's always so smug. But Columbo, he's one step ahead. Always one step ahead. Plus, hey, Peter Falk, y'know? |
| 11.07.99 |
draw with me everyone is invited to collaborate with mark martin, illustrator. he started the drawing, you finish it. some of the people who have already drawn with him have set the bar pretty high. Scott McCloud even contributed. oh man, i just found this one by Ira Gobler. it's about kids and sandwiches and a situation we can all understand whether we have kids or sandwiches or neither. also on markmartin.net, are some pretty funny comics that take a long time to download, like this one, big britches part 1 and part 2. crazy boss 1, 2, and 3 are really good too. gobler's toy catalog holy crap, these are funny. the fu manchu one "has issues" as they say. maybe that's the point. anyway, i say skip it. especially skip the flash movie. but the rest are funny. DAMN FUNNY! | ||
| 11.06.99 |
The OFFICIAL Maureen McCormick Home Page (Marcia from The Brady Bunch) this site made me think that whenever Maureen McCormick introduces herself, it probably goes like this: MM: I'm Maureen McCormick. PERSON: Oh. MM: I was Marcia on the Brady Bunch. PERSON: Oh. (this is probably followed by PERSON saying "marcia marcia marcia" or some other Brady Bunch catchphrase. then Maureen maybe laughs politely, but inside she's thinking, "i swear i am going to disembowel the next one of these losers who says 'marcia marcia marcia'." i'm almost 100% certain that she thinks of disemboweling, specifically.) she has a country album. The official Barry Williams site (Greg Brady) there's an ask Barry section: "Do you have a question you have always wanted to ask Barry Williams?" no. he also has a new album, The Return of Johnny Bravo. it's Chris Knight (Peter Brady) month on Brady World. all of them have their Brady names after their real names. it must be very strange to be best known as a fictional character from 30 years ago. he doesn't have a new album. he's the vice president of sales/marketing at a mac software company. he wants to know if you're on a mac or a pc. hey, shouldn't you have a good idea of the mac-to-pc ratio out there, mr. vp of sales/marketing? you can ask him questions too. Florence Henderson's official home on the web this gets my vote for all-around best official ex-Brady family member site. definitely check out the ask flo section because it has tons of totally insane stuff that people have been asking her. the first one is so great: "...I am looking for a very kind and professional massage therapist who claimed to have you as one of his clients. His name is David, a very nice Asian man about 5'9", who did a great job on my back, since I was involved in a pretty painful car accident. He used to work at the Sands Casino and Resort Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J...." or how about: "Has any Brady member been in Puerto Rico (maybe vacations) with no one knowing it?" and "My question is - Do you remember me? I am the nutty koo-koo guy that followed you into the bathroom...." and she answers them all. she's such a sport. i'm impressed. way to go, flo! Robbie Rist (Cousin Oliver) wait! good lord, florence henderson you'd better give back that best brady site award. Cousin Oliver is the winner hands down! Who would have guessed? Cousin Oliver! he's in a band (which is sort of goth surf glam, it looks like) called Spooky Pie. oh, dear Cousin Oliver, you have exceeded all of our wildest expectations. you're the greatest. i take back anything bad i ever said about you. i am now a big big fan. more spooky pie pictures. Robbie Rist is the drummer. spooky pie mp3s are here. i didn't listen to any of them yet. Beck's Sexx Laws video this made my day. probably you've seen it. probably mtv is overplaying it already. anyway, of course it's funny as hell. a bunch (maybe all?) of his videos are here. and they're plenty entertaining. go nuts. i suggest you go nuts. they're available in the much-reviled RealVideo format as well as Windows Media Player. bleh. |
| music video channels of the world. also i somehow end up writing about recovering from food poisoning in a Thai hotel room. 'pointless rambling' would sum this up. yep. here's where i break my self-imposed misterpants no-mtv-bashing rule. finding fault with mtv is way too easy. plus it's such an 80s pastime. and i only see mtv maybe once or twice a year. originally i had this in parentheses under the Sexx Laws entry, but then decided to move it over here because it was such an enormous digression. Maybe you should just skip down to the paragraph where i talk about throwing up in Thailand. it's the one that starts, "A year or so ago,...". does mtv even play videos anymore? i forget. well i guess there's M2 now, which is kind of like mtv saying, "we ruined the first one so badly that we can't even fix it. so, we'll try again with this one." and i guess there's always muchmusic which is better than mtv except for the whole Bryan Adams problem. in Japan, there's mtv-japan, which i don't have. and southeast asia has mtv-asia which is unapologetically pan-asian, like it switches every couple hours from Filipino to Thai to Vietnamese to Indonesian, etc. and during the Vietnamese chunk, for instance, pretty much every video is in Vietnamese and the veejaying is done in Vietnamese as well. That's what I mean about unapologetic--when it's Vietnamese, it's all Vietnamese with no subtitles or anything. Also, since I'm on a listing video channels kick, there's Channel V, the Rupert Murdoch Star TV thing out of India that most of Asia that has cable can watch (though not Japan, I don't think). A year or so ago, I was in a Bangkok hotel, recovering from food poisoning for a couple days. the first day i couldn't get out of bed at all except to sort of crawl to the bathroom to throw up. the second day i had enough energy to watch tv and that was about it. and the whole time the only things on tv were Channel V and kickboxing, which i'm not big on kickboxing to begin with, and in my state, just the thought of watching it literally made my stomach churn. so i ended up watching like 8 hours of Channel V. at first it wasn't terrible, but prolonged exposure made it super irritating, mostly because of the veejays but also because nothing that happened ever lasted more than a few minutes. it was kind of like spending a whole day listening to a rap radio station where there's constantly a "party at the partyin pad. woooooo!" and the party never stops but at the same time it never really gets started either. know what i'm sayin? like you know that the women in the studio don't actually start yelling "wooo!" until the mic is on. that would be insane if they're in that place for a whole day constantly yelling "wooo!" Anyway, on Channel V, the Indian videos were interesting. They featured elaborate group dance numbers, just like Indian movies. |
| 11.05.99 |
"Sell your kidney..." from the Yomiuri Shinbun: Police arrested a loan collector for using "threatening expressions" such as "Sell your kidney and you will get about 3 million yen." and "You can sell your eyeball for about 1 million yen." He got the idea from a comic book. creep LA international 1999 great redsmoke page. cracks me up. go there. | the courteous skateboarder i was walking in Osaka. And there were some teenage boys skateboarding on the sidewalk. As I walked past them, one of the skateboarders and I sort of ended up on trajectories heading straight toward each other. He stopped, got off his skateboard and apologized to me. | |
| 11.04.99 |
dividebyzero.org net art. i don't know if it's fair to call this 'somewhat inaccessible.' maybe it's better to say 'challenging' and 'techy'. a lot of it seemed to require vrml, which i can never be bothered with. i do really like that they've got a pac-man ghost (Blinky?) and stuff from Mr. Do up there. No one else ever references Mr. Do in their art and I'm sick of it. also it crashed my netscape. MIT's sassy 404 [from Chisato] | ||