Category: Entertainment

Hi. I em Inga from Sveeden!

Christmas is over, thankfully. Which means December’s theme of our thought experiment on Christmas movies must be over right?

Right?

This in my review of Weihenstephaner Korbinian Double Bock.

The problem with Christmas movies is a lot of people make the mistake of assuming a movie is a Christmas movie simply because it takes place during the Christmas season. Which is how we get articles such as these explaining why Lethal Weapon is a Christmas movie now. There is nothing wrong with watching it in order to celebrate your preferred winter solstice holiday, however I personally don’t think it is a holiday movie. The article’s author seems to focus on red imagery in the background, like fire trucks, clothing, and Rigg’s red ear protection at the shooting range (they aren’t headphones…way to journo there journo-person). All of which seems coincidental if anything. Rigg’s suicidal tendencies and reckless behavior aren’t driven by Christmas either, they’re driven by him being a widower and PTSD from Vietnam. Anybody spending any meaningful time around combat Vets knows they contemplate suicide on any given day, triggered by even the most innocuous of things…Finally, the time of year is not integral to the plot the way it is in Die Hard.

Similar to how Trading Places is not a Christmas movie. I would however argue it is a New Years movie, primarily because New Years is supposed to be a time of self-reflection and new beginnings. Something every character experiences in this film.

In this classic comedy we find Randolph and Mortimer Duke, two multi-millionaire owners of a Philadelphia based commodity exchange, who constantly get into petty squabbles between each other. This one in particular is a Nature vs. Nurture (pardon the shaky cam) argument, where they propose a practical experiment with a small wager. They take one of their employees, Louis Winthorpe (Dan Akroyd) and switch his place in the world by ruining his life. They find a reason to fire him to take away his livelihood, evict him from his Duke brother-owned home, frame him as a petty thief at his gentleman’s club to take away his social circle, and frame him for drug possession which leads to an arrest with the kicker of sending a hooker (Jamie Lee Curtis) to pick him up from jail when his fiancée arrives to bail him out. His life is ruined in short order, and the hooker, Ophelia, is the only person willing to assist him. In exchange, they find Billy Rae Valentine (Eddie Murphy), a street hustler/con-artist whom the Duke’s met previously. They hire him, give him basic instructions on how to do Winthorpe’s job, and give him Winthorpe’s old home. Both men know nothing of the experiment, nor do they know anything other than their own experiences at opposing ends of the social hierarchy.

The result? Valentine makes the Dukes a fair payday with his reasoning for setting the price on pork belly and impresses them with his diligence and eagerness to learn, while Winthorpe attempts to frame Valentine for drug use at the Duke’s Christmas party. Neither man however is truly changed as Winthorpe steals, of all things, a smoked salmon (these are not cheap) from the party, and Valentine pockets a joint from Winthorpe’s stash.

Valentine overhears the Dukes discussing their experiment. Where they effectively ruin one privileged man’s life turning him into a petty criminal, and turn an unprivileged man’s life of destitute into one of prosperity—within a few weeks time. People are essentially products of their environment, and the Duke brothers agree success has little to do with pedigree. The Dukes decide they have little use for either man, plan to eventually fire Valentine, and leave Winthorpe in his personal Hell. They settle their wager of…

…$1.

Valentine informs Winthorpe of the plot, and with the aid of Ophelia and Winthorpe’s old butler they plot revenge on the Dukes. They learn the Dukes are expecting a report on that year’s orange harvest and with that information plan to adjust their investments to corner the market on orange futures ahead of the report’s release. They also learn the report is on a train to New York with the Duke’s associate on New Year’s Eve. They subdue the associate, and replace the real report with a fake one.

Then they go to the New York Stock Exchange with the report in hand and short orange commodity futures ahead of the report’s release. The Dukes on the other hand with the false report took the opposite approach, purchased orange futures with the expectations prices will rise and were ruined in the process. After the market closed, Winthorpe and Valentine make a scene on the trading floor mocking the Dukes by settling a bet they can get rich making two really rich guys poor, in the amount of…

…$1.

::Insert STEVE SMITH joke here. By insert, mean…ah, screw it::

Can this movie be made again? Not without insufferable social commentary at every corner. If somebody makes this again, they have an obvious analogue with the Dukes being the Koch brothers. They have an obvious place to add in soliloquies on privilege, capitalism, Al Franken, race, poverty, feminism, the N-word, butlers, illicit drug use, operas, suicide, manicures, sex workers, black markets, blackface, on-screen nudity, and being raped by a gorilla.

Yeah…about that last part. The funniest parts of this movie are on the train on New Years Eve, and is almost entirely humor playing on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Not to mention a man being raped by a gorilla. I refuse to speculate on how they can update this movie, because I refuse to give idiots stupid ideas.

They don’t need my help.

This beer is not Swedish, but we all knew that. It is a Doppelbock which is a dark German lager. It is rather nice and made in the manner which we all expect from people that are not Swedish. This is a family friendly site, so I am afraid this is the best I can do.

Happy New Year. Weihenstephaner Korbinian Double Bock: 3.8/5

December 28, 2019
It’s That Time of the Month

First of all, thanks to all who tried the challenge. Whether you spent hours and hours trying to improve your sketching or simply made a few attempts, I’m sure we’d all love to see what you got. Post in the comments.

I watched about 20 YouTube sketching tutorials and tried to follow what they were saying. But, I didn’t know what they were saying. Blending stump? Cast vs occlusion shadow? Values? Contour shading? I went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole trying to figure stuff out. I was Alice if she had nuts and hit them on every protruding root.
Can you really learn how to be good at sketching in a month? Not when the extent of your artistic talent is drawing dicks on your older sister’s Brownie troupe group photo. I did learn some things that couldn’t possibly be useful in any other aspect of life:

1. There are shadows everywhere. There are shadows inside shadows and the shapes they make are just as real as the objects and light creating them.

2. Contrast is how you make things pop. If you don’t go bold in order to find the edges of possibility, you won’t be able to create subtleties.

3. Sometimes you gotta draw a line no matter how shaky your hand is and live with it. The next time you’ll be more careful with your construction lines.

4. Relax. Stress can cause of spaz hand. It may take a while to discover a method to relax that works for you. Keep trying because eventually you’ll be able to slip into that frame of mind easily.

5. People have interesting faces. If you think a person is ugly, try drawing his or her face. You’ll find at least one point that is intriguing if not beautiful.

My final work sketches. Not going to quit my day job.

Pics links: https://m.imgur.com/a/Cee8cYW

Music link just because I love it: youtube.com/watch?v=CbI79e5iZKs

December 26, 2019
The Cult of Traditional Publishing, Part 1: The math don’t lie

I didn’t actually do the math.

I didn’t have the numbers for one side of the colon. But based on the proliferation of newsgroups, online critique groups, publishing forums in 2008, and the number of such denizens all trying to get published, I could guess. And it was huge.

Then there was me. 1 : x⁶²¹⁴

Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will.

Maybe it’s just me, but I see a lot of green in that cover.

I was 15 when I first found out how to go about querying and creating proposals. I even did that a couple of times for Reader’s Digest. I was rejected. It hurt, not because I was rejected, but because I was running out of time. A favorite author’s bio said she was 18 when she first published a book, which she wrote “on a whim”. If I hadn’t done it by 18, well … (Narrator: That was a lie. She was 25.)

I was eating Harlequin Presents romances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I knew the formula. I knew the most popular tropes. I had plenty of ideas. I didn’t have such words in my vocabulary as “formula” and “trope.” It was a gut feeling, the natural rhythm of the way a good story is paced.

You can blame her for my May-December fetish.

I never did get a Harlequin Presents romance written. By the time I could actually write a book, I liked Harlequin Superromances better and I trained myself to write within that word count (90,000 to 120,000). It felt more complete than the 55,000 words of Presents. Well, of course it would. It was double.

So here’s what happened:

In 1989, I wrote my under-the-bed novel. The apprentice novel. The horrible one. The one you never want to see the light of day. It’s still out there floating around, I think.

In 1990, I wrote my next novel. It was marginally better.

In 1991, I wrote my third. It was good. I sent it to a publisher that had launched the careers of a bunch of NYT bestsellers. I got The Call. You know, the one where the editor calls you and congratulates you. Then … nothing. The publisher went out of business. Why? The parent company had bought it for a tax write-off and it made money. So bye bye Kismet. Yes, that was the publisher’s name. Kismet.

If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

In 1993, I wrote my fourth. It was really good. I sent it to Harlequin and got The Call. Sorta. The editor said, “I love this book. However, I bought one fairly similar last month that is not as good as yours, but I can’t break that contract and I can’t sell this to my editorial board. Send me something else. NAO.” I gave a brief rundown of book #3 and she passed.

That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.

So I got an agent with book 4. That relationship ended in disaster after she read book 2 and told me to get a therapist. (Narrator: That book was revamped a few times, published, and remains the fan favorite.)

In 1993, I started writing my pirate novel. I knew what I wanted to do. I also knew I didn’t have the chops to do it, so I fiddled with it for years.

If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

In 1993, I wrote book 5. It also got me The Call. An editor at Harlequin called me up on a Saturday morning and said, “I want to read the rest of this book. Overnight it.” She called me Tuesday evening and said, “I love this book—except the ending.” Me, having been trained to be a good, dutiful, well-behaved author, said, “I’ll rewrite it!” She sighed and said, “No, that would ruin the book. It has the ending it needs. I just can’t sell it.”

If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

In 1995, I was a senior in college in the creative writing program. My professor was the faculty supervisor of the uni’s lit rag. After my first assignment, he told me I had an A in the class and I could just skip the rest of the semester because he couldn’t teach me anything. But he would count it a personal favor if I stayed and did the assignments because he loved my work. That class was 8:00 a.m. after I’d spent the night working a graveyard shift at a gas station. You better believe I went to class.

I wrote a story. He was disappointed in me for giving it a “romance novel ending,” but otherwise he loved it. My senior advisor for my capstone project happened to be a Latin teacher (no idea why) who was absolutely fascinated by my creative process. She said, “I don’t care what you do, just tell me why and how you do it.” Okay, so I expanded on my story that had caught my attention.

It so happened that I was in Shakespeare 480 class or whatever really high number and we were studying Hamlet. I decided that somehow my religious allegory for the atonement (with a romance-novel ending) and Hamlet should go together like bread and butter. It didn’t. I couldn’t make that plot work.

Oh, bullshit. Good generals know when to retreat.

If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

So I was bored at my graveyard job and in class and wrote book 6. That one got me a literary agent who loved it, but could not sell it, either.

If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

Let us stop a moment and draw the obvious conclusion.

It was about now I started messing with making my own galleys of book 6. I was never going to self-publish, oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Only bad writers self-published. It was the kiss of death. Even if you really were good, a publisher would never publish someone who had published himself. Still … that galley looked awfully pretty. I hesitantly called up a printer as if I were calling up a gigolo to take my virginity for me, knowing I was going to go to hell for it when I died, and said,

“Yeah, um … how … much … would this cost?”

“Twenty grand.”

“Bye.”

So even my attempt at committing the ultimate sin was unavailable to me.

I gave up. I had enough near-misses to let me know I wasn’t a bad writer, but clearly not good enough and I obviously didn’t know how to hit the Harlequin bullseye after all.

No, I didn’t give up trying to get published. I gave up writing altogether.

Fast forward to 2004. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had a baby. I’ve gotten a work-at-home profession as a medical transcriptionist and was doing okay. I’ve got no creative outlet. I refuse to write and only occasionally fiddled with my pirate novel, and once in a while, I tried to make that Hamlet-atonement plot that wouldn’t work, work.

I wasn’t entirely stupid. I still had them on floppies.

My husband had read one of my books and liked it. He had urged me to query it again. I had. I had gotten swiftly and roundly rejected. Apparently, it hadn’t stood the test of time. In anger, I had burned all my manuscripts in the barbecue grill.

I’ve still got no creative outlet except … counted cross stitch. I love it. (Narrator: Loved. She killed that by making it into a business.) There were lots of things I wanted to stitch, so I learned how to convert them into patterns. I then went online and found out people who were “superstars” in the cross stitch pattern world had started out doing their own and just pitched them to shops and then got picked up by distributors. Self-publishing your patterns was the mark of a professional. So I did that. Turns out, what I like and what a lot of other people like aren’t the same, and the few who did like my patterns weren’t enough to pay the bills.

All those bubbles in my head…

That fizzled after a few years of tinkering with it. I was okay with that. I’d had another baby. I was working my ass off at medical transcription because I had moved into a house that we should never have bought and had started having expensive problems. (Narrator: Two weeks after moving in, the back patio sliding door fell out. Just … fell out. That was a very cold winter.)

Fast forward to 2007.

One night, after having invoiced my contractor for my medical transcription work (it was a lot of money), I was very depressed. Not even my newly-doubled-dose of antidepressants was helping. (Narrator: Sometimes you don’t have depression. Sometimes your life just sucks.) As one gets older, one should be making more money for less effort. Otherwise, you’re not life-ing right. I sent my bill and sat there in the dark and looked at my computer. I opened up book 6 and I read my own work for the first time in years.

It was like somebody else had written it, and it was good. Like, really good. I went to bed even more depressed and discouraged and asking, “Why did I give up on myself?”

I woke up the next morning with the solution to my now-decade-old plot problem and I got to writing.

The rollercoaster car had left the station.

December 19, 2019
Nobody Wants a Charlie in the Box

It’s the time of year again, when all those old holiday movies start showing up in the streaming service, or if you are a boomer, on TV. Sadly, most of these movies can be argued are products of their time.

Or are they?

For the month of December I asked for assistance from TPTB to put together a coherent string of random thoughts, take a few bong hits postulate which of the classic Christmas movies can actually be made today.

This is my review of Campanology Brewing Chocolate Babka Stout

Today, we look at Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. This stop motion animated classic begins with the narrator, a snowman voiced by Burl Ives, tells us a story of the most famous reindeer of all. He takes us to the beginning of the story where Santa’s reindeer, Donner, meets his son Rudolph…who has a red nose. You could even say it glows; you could say that because it does in fact glow. It blinds everyone that looks into it directly, making it rather dangerous. Donner believes this is a problem and decides to put a cap over Rudolph’s nose to prevent others from ostracizing Rudolph, making it more likely they invite him to join in their reindeer games.

Later we meet Hermey the elf. Hermey is one of Santa’s elves, but does not like to make toys. He want’s to be a dentist. This proves to be an issue with his supervisor, who naturally wants him to do his job, which does not involve being a dentist.

In later scenes Rudolph’s nose cap falls off while playing reindeer games in an effort to impress a doe named Clarice, subjecting him to ridicule from his peers. They simply laughed, called him names, and would no longer invite him to participate in any reindeer games. Hermey on the other hand gets into a verbal altercation with his supervisor and is given the ultimatum to finish his job, or be fired. After a brief musical number, Hermey quits.

Rudolph and Hermey meet each other during a dispute involving the property rights of a nearby snowbank, decide to put aside their differences, and be “independent together”. They set out into the world, unsure of what to make of themselves and meet Yukon Cornelius, a gold/silver prospector. Eventually, they find themselves on the Island of Misfit Toys, where they meet other misfits like themselves. They are allowed by King Moonracer, the local monarch to stay a short while, but he states his kingdom is for misfit toys, not people.

Following a plot device that convinces Rudolph to go home, the story concludes with the defeat of the Abominable Snowman through Hermie’s crude ability to pull its teeth, and Yukon wrestling the bumble. Due to blizzard conditions making flight difficult and dangerous, Rudolph finds his glowing red nose to be a useful asset as a result. In spite of being a little bit different, all three characters are accepted by Santa, and others at the north pole for their gallantry.

Could this movie be made today? Absolutely, but not without a few small changes.

Silver. Gold. Dick. I’m in search for it all!

Among other things, it has been argued the entire movie is an allegory about gay acceptance. Rudolph being slightly different is judged by his father, who attempts to butch him up because he is “protecting” his son as a worried father is wont to do. In reality, Donner being one of Santa’s original eight reindeer and therefore high in north pole society, is only protecting his own standing out of embarrassment. Hermey is blatantly obvious. Not only is he the only elf in the story with hair, it is magnificent. He speaks with an effeminate voice and aspires to work on people’s teeth. That in itself isn’t gay but it is an odd thing for an elf to want to do. Finally, Yukon is the classic bear with his performative masculinity, that they meet to guide their path forward to first accepting themselves. The suspension of disbelief is low by the standard of today’s audience, who are well acquainted with the hero’s journey archetype.

Where it would likely be changed is in the narrator–not only is Burl Ives dead, he was a white male. He will be replaced with Morgan Freeman. The opening scene where Santa is body-shamed by his wife will be reversed, by Santa body shaming his wife with the gift of a Peleton bike. Santa and the north pole culture will need reinforcement of strict gender norms, and an oppressive culture in order for this storyline to work. This time around, he cannot be an amiable fellow traveler in the story. The Island of Misfit Toys unfortunately will have to be made into a delusional society that believes they are being oppressed by the world, thus will all be evangelical Christian misfits. King Moonracer will be the same in order to reinforce this delusion, because apparently nothing says misfit like a flying lion (when that’s actually freaking awesome). He will still decide to temporarily take in Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon because it is the Christian thing to do but knows three gays will not find acceptance on his island.

Either Rudolph or Hermey will need to be trans. The easier of the two will likely be Hermey because Santa has a “girl” elf uniform. Yukon is still a bear, There will be a Clarice, but she will merely be a “ally” rather than a love interest.

Honorable mentions:

Little Drummer Boy. This cannot be made again today. The drummer boy is an ass to everyone he meets in Israel. It takes the near death of his friend, a literal ass, for him to have a very literal “come to Jesus” moment. It is far too religious for nearly anyone to redo, and thus will be reserved for channels that cater to such audiences in it’s present form.

Frosty the Snowman. This cannot be made again. Apparently, we can’t handle a commercial where a man gives his wife an exercise bike for Christmas. **SPOILER ALERT** The snowman DIES at the end, nobody can handle that anymore.

Babka being a type of (((pastry))) that I have not tried but is available at a deli I frequently purchase bagels, might suggest this bear a Kosher certification, but I did not find one. This beer is otherwise fantastic. It is 10% ABV and pours like chocolate syrup…because it more or less is. They put down making a beer float with a scoop of vanilla ice cream as a serving suggestion. Quite frankly they do something like Samuel Smith’s Double Chocolate Stout, and went over the top with it, and priced it for the average Trader Joe’s shopper ($5). Which, isn’t all that bad. Campanology Brewing Chocolate Babka Stout 4.0/5

December 7, 2019
It’s the easy one! : An Acrostic

I know that I said I was going to go back to crosswords because a lot of you are Acrostic-ally challenged but I had already started this one. To help I tried to make it very very easy and did make it short. I probably should have posted this one first to ease you neophytes into the wonderful world of acrostics but hindsight and all that. Once again to make it libertarian oriented I chose a quote that touches on some common glibish themes, I expect you all to discuss this in the comments. I mean it this time, last time I was disappoint in all of you. Anyway…Entertainment only…no gambling…have fun…we’re all counting on you…across all obstacles…Epstein’s not dead…

Solution

Single Page Printable PDF

Old Blind Person Double Page PDF 1 2

Music to solve acrostics to

December 4, 2019
As Seen on TV: Exo-Squad

Exo-Squad was an American animated series that aired from 1993 to 1994. It, like the previously discussed Captain Power, was a show directed at children but did not pull any punches about the horrors of war.

I’ll let the opening monologue speak for itself as to the plot of the show:

J.T. Marsh (VO): It was a golden age for all mankind. Using the incredible exoskeletons called E-frames, we had successfully terraformed Venus and Mars, and were now poised to move on to the Outer Planets. Suddenly, it all ended. We were pressed into a nightmarish war on a scale previously unimagined. We were attacked by our own creations, the Neosapiens, a race of artificially created humans. Led by Phaeton, they had seized control of Venus, Earth, and Mars. This is Lt. J.T. Marsh, member of the Exofleet, leader of a small band of E-frame pilots dedicated to freeing humanity from Neosapien rule. We are… the Exosquad.

That’s right, this show not only delved into the subject of war, but also slavery and genetic engineering. The Neosapiens were genetically engineered to be slave labor on Mars and to survive under conditions human workers couldn’t. Fifty years prior to when the show takes place, the Neosapiens revolted. Humans were able to quell this slave uprising with the use of a new military weapon, the Exo-Frame, robotic mech suits that not only increased the wearer’s strength, but also allowed for the use of heavy artillery by individual soldiers. The two leaders of the slave revolt, Phaeton and Marsala, negotiated a surrender. Over the next 50 years, after public backlash from the terrors of that war, Neosapiens were freed from bondage, given citizenship and came to govern Mars for themselves.

And of course, even though these 50 years were years of peace, the military kept expanding to the point where at the beginning of the show the Exo-Frames are much improved and integrated into an entire space fleet. Which now is looking for an enemy to fight, so they mobilize against the Space Pirates (One of the weakest things in the show, I mean Space Pirates? That’s pretty lame.) who are clans descended from convicts sentenced to manual labor on the outer worlds (Pluto and I think they have another one they’ve discovered). It is at this time that Phaeton chooses to seek his revenge (Neosapiens being a heartier breed live longer, dumb scientists) and bring about a new order controlled by his genetically superior elite.

Now, this is just the prologue, the show’s plot proper hasn’t even begun at this point, but you can already see this wasn’t a ‘bad guy attacks, doesn’t land one shot then retreats to fight again’ type of cartoon show. And, this audience being who you are, I’m sure the heavy handed allusions of the story haven’t been lost on you. Yes, this was a show for children. Yes, it was made to sell toys. But it was also a story where main characters died in battle, families were sent to concentration camps, a complicit media helped a dictator hide the atrocities and in the end the actions taken by the good guys weren’t always in the right and neither were the villains always in the wrong.

Because of the shows willingness to take on heavy issues, it’s serialized story and the art style, Exo-Squad has been dubbed “The American Anime” by those who remember it. But why do so few remember it? It was a fun show with badass toys, why was it not a global success? Well, Exo-Squad was a syndicated TV show, meaning any TV station that payed could show it. This was a big money maker in the 80s with successes such as GI Joe, He-Man and Transformers. But the landscape was changing just as Exo-Squad was debuting. Networks were focusing on producing their own cartoon shows to get a greater profit share. This was the time-frame that brought us Fox Kids where the likes of X-Men and Spider-Man were featured, ABC and CBS as well had their own in house offerings. Local markets were running out of places to put syndicated programming, which led to the show airing early in the morning. I remember when my local network moved it to 5:30 am! Now you know I don’t sleep, but that was early to wake up just catch a cartoon (but I usually did anyway). And it wouldn’t even stay in that time-slot, it would move around. It’s hard to build an audience when they don’t know where to find the show.

So, alas Exo-Squad only ran for two seasons. It is fondly remembered by those who did catch it, and thankfully they were able complete this story arc. Season one was released on DVD in 2009 after a bunch of nerds (raises hand) signed an online petition. But apparently not enough people bought it as season 2 has never seen a release, but it has shown up on Netflix and Hulu, and some ~~great people~~ criminals were ~~nice~~ evil enough to record it from there, so digital copies are floating around if you’re ~~interested~~ a ~~Space~~ Pirate. If you want to know more about the history of the show, Toy Galaxy made a good episode on it.

The show had a big impact on me. When I saw Avitar the only thing I liked about it was that it showed that technology had advanced enough in CGI that they could make a live action Exo-Squad movie. (And me being photoshop literate here is how I imagine it. I can see it all in my head, someone just give me the money! Can we KickStart this?! C’mon man! I’m really jonesin’ here! Just a taste, just a little taste! That’s all I want! I’ll suck yer dick for a movie, C’mon!!)

November 1, 2019
Learn Japanese Through Anime Titles – ご注文はうさぎですか？- Is the Order a Rabbit?

Image source: Wikipedia Image

Once again let’s summarize the premise:

Cocoa Hoto enters the cafe Rabbit House, assuming there are rabbits to be cuddled. What Cocoa actually finds is her high school boarding house, staffed by the owner’s daughter, Chino Kafū, a small, precocious, and somewhat shy girl with an angora rabbit on her head. She quickly befriends Chino with the full intention of becoming like her older sister, much to Chino’s annoyance. From there she will experience her new life and befriend many others, including the military-influenced, yet feminine Rize Tedeza, the playful Chiya Ujimatsu who goes at her own pace, and the impoverished Syaro Kirima who commands an air of nobility and admiration despite her background. Slowly, through slices of life, often comedic, Cocoa becomes irreplaceable in her new friends’ lives, with Chino at the forefront.

Source: Wikipedia

This anime isn’t as awful as the summary makes it appear. It’s a standard slice of life comedy with around six or so characters who simply make small talk and do funny and cute things. It is by no means high art, but a fun way to spend 20 minutes an episode if you like anime. Nothing to recommend for a non-anime person to watch, however.

Japanese: ご注文はうさぎですか？

Romanized: Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka?

English Title: Is the Order a Rabbit?

ご – go – this is an honorific. This is essentially untranslatable in English, but if you have to get point across you can use “honorable”. The reason it’s used here is that when you are asked for your food order at a restaurant, even in the most casual of places, the staff will almost always use “go” in front of the word for your order which is…

注文 – chuumon – order or request.

は – ha – (pronounce “wa”) – grammar particle used to denote the topic of the sentence.

うさぎ – usagi – rabbit. Normally animal names are written in katakana – ウサギ – and I’m not sure why the hiragana is used here. The word rabbit is quite common so that may be part of the reason. Female names are also frequently written in hiragana as as it it tends to be viewed as “cuter” so that could also be part of the reasoning here. The story is about a cafe full of cute girls.

です – copula. More below on this. In this particular case it is translated as “is”.

か？- ka – another grammar particle that changes a declarative statement into a question. Technically the question mark, borrowed from the west, is unnecessary, but frequently used.

A literal translation would be “as for your (honorable) order, it’s a rabbit?” The actual English title is very close to the Japanese.

When I first started learning Japanese I had little interest in linguistics. However, I’ve always had an interest in English grammar. So I had no idea in English the verb “to be” served dual purposes. It can be used as a copula and for the purpose of existence.

In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated cop) is a word that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence “The sky is blue.” The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a “link” or “tie” that connects two different things. – Wikipedia

In Japanese the somewhat well known “desu” or です is used as a copula. Note that “desu” is polite. There is a plain form that is also very commonly used “da” or だ. A big thing note here – the plain form copula also varies depending on dialect and region.

Source: Wikipedia

To provide an example let’s look at the following:

この部屋は台所です。Kono heya wa daidokoro desu.

“As for this room it is the/a kitchen.” More naturally – “This room is the kitchen”.

Japanese doesn’t have articles (“a” or “the”) like English. My Japanese friends learning English find figuring out which article to use in English maddening.

However, unlike English, Japanese has two other words that are used for existence – “aru” or ある and “iru” or いる. In the polite form they are “arimasu” or あります and “imasu” or います. Why are there two forms? Because it’s Japanese and things need to be difficult. Animate objects take “iru” and inanimate objects use “aru”.

台所に猫がいます。Daidokoro ni neko ga imasu.

“There is a cat in the kitchen.” OR “The cat is in the kitchen.” Without context we don’t know if we are talking about our family pet or if the neighbor’s cat climbed through the window. Welcome to the obscurity of Japanese. A cat is animate so we use “imasu”. Note that the particles we are using here are different compared to the sentence with “desu”. We are using the particles “ni” and “ga” and not “wa”.

台所に冷蔵庫があります。Daidokoro ni reizouko ga arimasu.

“The refrigerator is in the kitchen.” Last time I checked a refrigerator isn’t able to move on its own volition so we use “arimasu”. A car also doesn’t move of its own volition so we use “aru” when describing the existence of a car. However, a robot despite being a machine does move by its own volition so robots use “iru”. Simple, right?

There you have it. In English the verb “to be” accomplishes what takes three different words in Japanese – desu, arimasu and imasu. In their plain forms these are iru, aru and da in standard Japanese.

Actually, thinking about it further, if we use very polite forms of Japanese we need some additional forms for existence and the copula. I’ll save that maddening topic that is polite Japanese for our more fluent in Japanese Glibs…

September 26, 2019
Movies You Need: Old Man Edition

My dad raised us to be fans of classic movies. He observed that he knew he had raised us right because I could pick out Spring Byington. We were fed a steady diet of Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Howard Hawks, John Huston… you get the idea. Indeed, this shaped many of my sensibilities.

The world is lousy with Top 50 or whatever lists, but this post is a bit different. Rather than rehash great movies that everyone knows, I wanted to throw out a few of my favorites that for whatever reason never achieved the fame that they deserved, but were influential on later films that you probably have seen. In some cases, there’s even a bit of a libertarian twist. Admittedly, this will be skewed toward older movies, but I’ll toss in a couple more contemporary efforts. If there’s one or two that you didn’t know and this inspires you to give them a watch, my work is done.

Six of a Kind (1934):

This was a noble experiment (and immediately following the end of Prohibition): take several great comedy teams with vastly different styles, set up a loose plot, then watch the fun. Although Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland are nominally the stars, and they do yeoman work tying everything together, George Burns and Gracie Allen are the real comedy focus. And indeed, they’re at their peak, and they presaged just about every smart guy-dumb guy comedy team that followed. The sequences with WC Fields feel tacked on, but if you’re going to tack something on, you couldn’t do better. The thing that will immediately grab your attention is how much of this movie was stolen by the hilarious National Lampoon’s Vacation. Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.

O. Henry’s Full House (1952):

This is actually a collection of five short films, each with a different director and screenplay writer, and all based on O. Henry short stories. OK, I’m a sucker because I absolutely love O. Henry’s writing and storytelling. And what delightful stories these are! Most of them will be familiar to anyone literate, and the screenplays hew close to the originals.

Interestingly, the Ransom of Red Chief filmlet was badly received and was apparently dropped from earlier versions. In my view, it’s the best one of the group, and this is a group with no clinkers. Fred Allen and Oscar Levant are perfectly cast as the kidnappers and it leaves one to wonder why Hollywood didn’t use them more. The rest of the cast is also an amazing collection: Charles Laughton, Marilyn Monroe, Ann Baxter, Jean Peters, Dale Robertson, Richard Widmark, and narration by John Steinbeck.

Other fun bits: I believe this may have been one of Marilyn Monroe’s first credited screen appearances. She was great as a hooker. Levant is best known for one liners like, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”

Million Dollar Legs (1932) may be the most libertarian movie ever made and possibly the most surreal. The setting is the fictional country of Klopstokia. In Klopstokia, every woman is named Angela, every man is named George, which certainly can be an aid to memory. The citizens are all superb athletes, and the leader of the country (played by WC Fields) is chosen via arm wrestling. George survives several challenges, with very little effort in fending them off. The country is dead broke, but sees a way to recover by leveraging the athletic ability of its citizens (notably the president’s daughter, Angela, and his personal messenger, played by Ben Turpin, who can outrun The Flash) to win the 1932 Olympics. There’s a romantic subplot, naturally, involving a visiting reporter (Jack Oakie) and Angela that somehow manages not to ruin the fun, and the official way of wooing Klopstokian women is revealed- singing a traditional song, set to the tune of Eddie Cantor’s I’d Love To Spend Each Sunday With You, but with, ahem, different lyrics.

Typical dialog:

Reporter: What a marvelous country. Say, I’ll bet you if they laid all the athletes end-to-end here, why, they reach…

Angela: Four hundred and eight-four miles.

Reporter: How do you know?

Angela: We did it once.

I think this is the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. You’ll immediately see parallels to Duck Soup and The Mouse That Roared.

The History of Future Folk (2012) is a “small” film, but absolutely delightful. Imagine a mash-up of kids’ stories, sci-fi invasions of Earth, and a bluegrass musical. OK, hard to imagine, but somehow it works. SP and I kept looking at each other and saying, “Charming!” which is the best one word descriptor I can think of. Of course, for days afterward, we kept saying, Hondo!” which was the aliens’ greeting. The alien plans to conquer Earth are sidetracked when they discover an amazing invention of humans- music- and once they discover it, they immediately take it up with great skill. Best song: I Cannot Breathe In Your Atmosphere.

Here’s one that is almost impossible to find, a great tragedy. Dadetown is a 1995 mockumentary that you won’t realize is a mockumentary until someone spoils it. More realistic than reality. It’s a wonderful look at Schumpeter in action as a Rust Belt town, whose economy is dependent on a paper clip factory, suffers from a technology company moving in; in true creative destruction, the tech company specializes in document imaging, displacing paper and the requisite clips. The paper clip factory, in an interesting twist, was originally a WW2 aviation parts plant which had been converted to the new civilian use. The tech company, of course, uses essentially no blue collar labor and mostly brings in tech workers with urban sensibilities who start transforming the town. The culture clash between the tech workers and the old time residents is explored in a deep and meaningful way without the dime store moralizing of someone like Michael Moore. This is the pic that Moore would have made if he were a lot more creative and intelligent. It’s a crime that it’s so difficult to see. The auteur, Russ Hexter, died shortly after this was made, and the world is poorer for this loss. Roger Ebert hated it, which is what attracted me to it in the first place.

September 10, 2019
Straffinrun’s Glib Crossword Corner

How Glib are you? Find out by doing the following special Glib crossword!

How’d you do? Check your answers here.

August 26, 2019
Learn Japanese Through Anime Titles – ソウナンですか？- Are You Lost?

Image source: Wikipedia Image

Let’s start this particular post with the summary of the premise:

Four girls enjoying a school life witness their lives take a turn for the unexpected when they are suddenly stranded on a deserted island. Fortunately, Homare Onishima has experience in surviving in the wild and teaches the other girls on how to make the best of their current situation but it will take true teamwork if the girls are to survive and return home.

Source: Wikipedia

Hard pass on this one. Pretty much everything that is wrong with recent anime. Why the girls are stranded has yet to be explained and the characters continue to most of the time wear their full school uniforms that never get dirty. That would make things too difficult to animate in way the industry currently operates. The show mostly shows the girls overcoming their revulsion of eating insects, various creatures and the like in semi-humorous ways along with obligatory fan service. The punchline to most of the gags in the anime usually ends with “sou nan desu ka?”

Japanese: ソウナンですか？

Romanized: sou nan desu ka?

English: Are You Lost?

The title is intentionally written in katakana. Katakana is usually used for foreign words, but also may be used similar to they way we use italics in English. Here it is done to obfuscate the meaning. Written in hiragana そうなんですか? it is used like “really?” in English. However, written in kanji (Chinese derived characters) 遭難ですか? it means “is it a disaster(or shipwreck or accident)?” It’s essentially a rather untranslatable play on words.

What I wanted to show with this anime was the practice of “active listening” used in Japanese. During a conversation the listener uses a variety of expressions while the other person is speaking. In English the amount of interruptions used by the listener in a Japanese conversation would be considered rude. However in Japanese it’s the reverse and not actively listening shows disinterest and is considered rude. For a more comprehensive look at this I’d point interested readers to this webpage – The Art of Aizuchi: Active Listening in Japanese Conversation.

What I wanted to highlight from this anime title was the word “sou”. There are a myriad of meanings for this word, but the usage used here is “so, really or seeming”. Recall the stereotypical pre-woke Hollywood portrayal of Japanese people saying things like, “Ah So, Smith-san!” for “That’s right Mr. Smith”. It shows agreement and an active participation in the conversation.

For me personally, it took about four years of study before I unconsciously started to begin using the various active listening expressions. The most common for me are the many variations of “sou”, “hai, hai,hai” (yes, yes, yes) and “un… un… un…” essentially a grunting sound in English that is casual “yes” in English. I just about fell off the chair when I suddenly realized I was using that one.

The one that I’ve resisted using, but now actually do use is “heeeeeeeeeeee” (sounds like “hey” in English) said with a rising intonation. It’s always sounded ridiculous to me, but it’s incredibly common in Japanese. It expresses surprise. You’ll hear Japanese all say it in unison on TV variety shows and the like.

I’ll leave you with 12 seconds of video that actually uses all the expressions I’ve discussed in active listening as spoken by the woman on the left, Saori Oonishi. The video will start at 25:25.

25:28 – hai, hai, hai

25:30 – honto ni (really, truly)

25:36 – heeeeeeee

25:38 – un,un,un

25:40 – sou desu ne

None of these really add any information to the conversation. They just demonstrate her interest in what the speaker is saying.

August 1, 2019