Archive for August, 2008
Through the magic of the internet, I ended up browsing CDs & DVDs from some Korean import shop tonight. (Initially I was trying to find out about this one indie gaming site, but whatever…) Anyway, I started checking out their selection and I’ve come across a bunch of totally befuddling English song titles on some of these discs. Here’s a few:
- Attack of the Gas Station
- Kick the Moon
- My Wife is Gangster
- Give Me Bob
- Scully Doesn’t Know
- Celebration for the Salad
- Rub Luv Mode
- Fatting Cat Girl
- Mommy I Concrete with My Dad
- She’s Jail, I’m Prisoner
- Christmas Filled With Alcohol
- Midnight Cremator
- City of Sigh
- I lost my umbrella for the first time
And the list goes on… The first 3 are either chapter titles or songs from the soundtrack to “Libera Me” (a 2000 Korean fire fighting crime thriller) and the rest are from various albums around the site. In fairness, each page does state “Korean song names are roughly translated into English” but even allowing that, I really have to wonder what some of these bands are on about. Anyway, do check it out yourself.
The thing about being sick is that it gives you an opportunity to do things that normally wouldn’t occur to your healthy self. Things like sitting around drinking Chai with honey and watching reruns of That 70′s Show at 7:30PM. And the thing about watching That 70′s Show at 7:30PM is that you get a chance to see the kind of TV commercials that are on during 70′s Show reruns at 7:30PM. Among these:
- JC Penney – “The Breakfast Club” – Ok, I can accept the fact that JC Penney wants to sell “The 80′s” to a bunch of kids who were born in the 90′s. That’s just business. And they even did a halfway decent job of getting the period details right in terms of the cars they’re driving and everything. So then *why* is there a girl wearing a Nirvana shirt halfway through the damn thing. It’s like a microcosmic version of writing comic strips about cavemen living with dinosaurs.
- M&Ms – “The Addams Family” – Am I the only one who is creeped out by all these celebrity look-alike M&Ms with no noses? Apparently not.
- Twix – “Blogger Girl” – A dumb guy at a party is being accosted by a girl who won’t stop talking about politics. When she finally does stop for a moment he asks if she wants to go back to his place. She’s shocked, but he recovers (after a momentary Twix-version) by explaining that he just wanted to go back and “blog about injustice” together. She loves blogging! So it’s cool. (Interestingly, I’m pretty sure they cut the guy’s line about how “it’s the mainstream media’a fault” from the version I saw on the air.)
- Beaches Resorts – “Island in the Sun” – It’s a commercial about spending a week at an all-inclusive Carribean resort with a soundtrack by Weezer! Well, it’s not really by Weezer. Apparently the wussiest song Weezer ever wrote was still much too ballsy for Beaches and so they got one of their soft-rock cover bands to take a swing at it. I think they may have changed the lyrics even, but honestly I never really paid any attention to the lyrics to “Island in the Sun” in the first place, so I can’t be sure. (Researching this on YouTube has revealed that there is also a “Fast Edit” version of this commercial in which they’ve perverted the original song in the opposite direction. In the world of photography, I think that would be referred to as crap-bracketing.)
And this isn’t even entering into the laxative & erectile dysfunction commercials! Anyway, The Daily Show is on now. Urge to kill… fading…
Excerpt from “What’s Expected of Us” by Ted Chiang:
By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button…
Full-text available here.
Towards the end of this humorous Strong Bad video you can see my torso & wrist in a few shots. It’s not me speaking though. Ah, the wonders of technology!
I was looking up an address to resolve some shipping questions at work and it turned out to be in Northern Ireland. Then I got distracted by Google Maps & found the following nearby towns, which are all fairly amusing to me:
Just checking out the embed functionality on the new Telltale Videos site…
Once in awhile I’ll come across a bit of text on the internet that just nails it. This is one of those bits:
Nails what, you ask? Well let me indulge in a couple of self-links for context’s sake:
- “Everything Came Through Punk” (Parts One, Two & Two-point-five)
- “Let’s Tear the Fucking House Apart”
So my point with those posts I think, was basically that the economics of broadcast media sort of put a damper on a lot of self-expression that might have otherwise taken place in the 20th century. All the singing and dancing and poetry and prose and playacting and rhetoric that had been intimately intertwined with most people’s day-to-day lives for centuries just got commoditized and outsourced to a large degree in the past 100 years, and much like financial capital during the same period, accumulated in the hands of a select few. In parallel with this, technology drastically decreased the amount of time that people needed to spend feeding and clothing themselves. These two trends dovetailed nicely (from certain perspectives) in that mass media was able to fill a gap in people’s lives that might otherwise have been occupied with wine, women, song and (gasp!) political unrest. Now I don’t know about you, but if I had to put a number on it, I’d probably rank things like this:
- Song
- Wine
- Women
- Political Unrest
- Mass Media
So I’m looking forward to the next 50 or so years. Here’s to governments overthrown, dancing in the streets and copyrights being violated.
