Golf Channel, Here I Come!

Today in history, the Constructivist family entered the 21st century. We've had high-speed internet since we got back from Japan but now we have it with Verizon, whose triple play deal means that we also have DirectTV (with a sweet HD DVR) and a home phone (VTec, of course!), plus we went in for a Sony Blu-Ray player (connected to our new 42" plasma Panasonic with the scariest of Monster HDMI cables) to supplement our old Sony DVD-VCR player. Golf Channel, here I come!

Now, some of you may be wondering, "Constructivist, how can you afford your rock and roll lifestyle?" Well, I'm happy to report that I'm starting a serious product placement initiative here at Mostly Harmless (see above). Other than that, I don't have a clue. Anyone out there in Blogaramaville got any ideas?

Sakaki Rides a Dolphin in the New Savanna

Hey kids! I've set up a new blog, just around the corner. It's called New Savanna. And it's got photos and writing AND, a longish piece about a dolphin ride that I couldn't post at That Other Place. It's got about 10 seconds or so in Azumanga Daioh, one of the cutest anime series ever (for tweeners, I suppose).

Benzon-a-rama

Apparently Bill Benzon, who has all the privileges of the author function here at Mostly Harmless, was too embarrassed to post this himself:



Yes, it's Carson and Rickles at a Tonight Show studio onsen in 1968--I truly have no shame. And on the morning of the most sacred Sunday in the world of golf.

As penance, I'm linking to Uncle Bill's robo-subaltern post over at The Valve.

The Day the Earth Stood in the Balance

Liked the title of my critique of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still that I recently posted over at sf@SF so much I thought I'd link to it here. As you can see from the tags, it may be of interest to those who come to Mostly Harmless for something--anything!--besides women's golf.

Time for the Terrible Twos

It's Mostly Harmless's second birthday today. On to the terrible twos! Let's give imoto a run for her money. No, wait, better to pass along some tantrum antidotes:







Yup, we're all about the public service here.

Constructivist Family Sing-along: My Grandfather's Clock

Actually never heard of this until the Full Metal Archivist got curious about the English lyrics to the song she was teaching onechan in Japanese. Thought I'd include some things I found along the way, just to show that I can at times be more than a one-note blogger during the golf season! (But how about that Paula Creamer making 4 birdies on her last 5 holes to overtake Jeong Jang at the Fields Open? Wow!)

First the Johnny Cash version:



Interesting how the grandfather basically calls for...robots near the 1876 song's end, eh?

Then some Vanilla Mood:



Next, the daikon slide whistle:



And finally, the MTV generation learns Japanese:



No, wait--let's not forget the NHK generation!



In Japan, the song is all about the loyalty of the clock (kinda like that song about the dog), whereas in America the same general idea gets expressed more negatively. Any historians have a bead on the cultural politics of the song as a post-slavery lament? Or have a sense of its transmission lines to Meiji Japan and just how and when it got transformed in translation?

Rahsaan Roland Kirk KILLS!

Most charismatic performer I've ever seen. Here he is playing three horns at once, in a tuxedo:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x22m1n_pedal-up-by-rahsaan-roland-kirk_music

Welcome, Crooked Timberers

If you've recently come to Mostly Harmless via this Australian election update, please feel free to hang out, relax, check out the archives. For more from your guide, JP Stormcrow, you can go here or here, or just check out our "politics" tag. Which takes me back to the early days of this here experiment in interwebitudinal fun, back when this blog mattered made a difference was often funny based in Japan, before it became all LPGA and stories for kids all the time. You can tell how much things have changed here when, upon checking out our most recent slew (for us) of visitors and composing this piece, the following associations rattled through what's left of my brain: "Has Berube finally returned to golf blogging? Crooked Timber--now there's a great name for a golf blog! How can I get a joke about a mashie in a post on this? Is a mashie even made of wood? Or is that a niblick? Heh, niblick. Australian politics...hmm, I wonder if Karrie Webb reads Crooked Timber? Bet she's glad the 2007 season is over. Hey, isn't Amy Yang playing out of Australia these days? Wouldn't it be cool if she did well in Q-School? Now there's a kid with a good head on her shoulders. Ah, kids. Time to check on onechan and imoto." The end.

Return to Nature - Who Walks Here?

Pigeon Wednesday

Family Friday with the Ducks and Drakes

FYI: Family Friday at CitizenSE

Recently I've reimagined Citizen of Somewhere Else to make it possible to keep the blog going while I'm not on leave and to better represent the range of roles I play on and off the job. One of my favorite features is Family Friday. For those jonesing for onechan and imoto stories, the Dramatis Personae tag includes them all. They'll still be showing up here, of course. If I can ever keep from breaking the digital cameras we buy, I'll even be able to post some of Sparkychan and Gojochan's Adventures in ToddlerLand. But they'll also be there.

Post-Modern Monday: Rhinoplasty

Cross-posted at The Valve.

A decade or so ago I read an article about appropriation as a BIG THING in the art world. I thought it was silly. And so I did what any intelligent person does when confronted with high-toned silliness, I riffed on it.

I took Dürer's rhinoceros as my starting point:



I then scanned it into my handy-dandy Jobs-Wozniak Appropriator and concocted the following dialogue on bioengineering and informatics.

* * * * *

“Do you think he would mind?”
“Who?”
“Albrecht.”
“Albrecht Einstein?”
“No, Dürer, Albrecht Dürer, the print maker.”



“Mind what?”
“If I appropriated his rhinoceros.”
“What for?”
“I want to do some genetic engineering.”
“Genetic engineering?”
“Yes. I had this dream the other night. A voice kept repeating 'zebroceros' over and over again, with a very deep and meaningful intonation.”
“What's a zebroceros?”
“Well, it must be a cross between a zebra and a rhinoceros.”
“And you want to get into genetic engineering so you can make the cross. Isn't that going to be difficult? I mean, the zebra and the rhinoceros are such very different animals. Do you think the cross will take?”



“Don't see why not. This isn't like ordinary cross-breeding. Here we get right into the genetic material, the information specifying the organism's form and function. We just splice one strand of information into the other and voilà! we've got it.”
“I see. Tell me. Do you think we could make a rhinana?”
“A rhinana?”
“Yeah, a cross between a rhinoceros and a banana.”
“Well, if it's OK with Albrecht. It's his rhinoceros.”



“You mean there's no problem about the rhinoceros being an animal and the banana a plant?”
“Of course not. When you get down to the genes it's all just information. Bits and bytes of biocode.”
“Well, then let's try something between animate and inanimate. Wrapping paper. Yeah, a rhinoceros and wrapping paper.”



“But wrapping paper doesn't have any genetic code at all. No DNA to splice.”
“But it does have a pattern. And the pattern is information, just like the DNA. What should I call it”
“Wrappoceros? Papoceros? Zigzagoceros?”




“Oh.”

Paprika

From an email I recently sent to a friend:


I went to see Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" over a week ago. I was a bit distracted at the time, and so had trouble giving it my full attention. But then, it's the sort of movie that's presents difficulties similar to those in "Revolutionary Girl Utena." It's difficult to keep track of just which symbolic/surreal world you're watching at any given moment. In the case of RGU, of course, we've got a film that's retelling a story that's been told twice before in my expansive forms; so there's a problem of condensation. As far as I know, "Paprika" isn't like that. But it's still a challenging film.

I sense that here's a mode of organization that's more Japanese than Western so that one can't simply attend to it through the foreground-action focus that works for Western stories. You need to de-couple from the foreground action and simply let the gestalt wash over you.

Beyond that, we really struck me is how much "Paprika" seemed to be in thematic and imagistic dialogue with other films, including earlier ones by Kon, but also Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "Princess Mononoke"), Takahata ("Pom Poko"), and Oshi ("Innocence"), Otomo ("Akira"). We've got dolls, carnivalesque parades (of kitchen appliances, and frogs), a human reminiscent of Miyazaki's Night Walker (and, in a way, of Akira), and shrinks and detectives (Kon's own milieu). It's quite a collection of "stuff."

Stupid Human Tricks

I give you "A wandering human simpleton loose in a community composed of (i) apes who spend all day trying to persuade people to give them candy and (ii) human keepers trying to hype the non-existent linguistic abilities of the apes. It looks like the fire season and the silly season are both going to be bad ones this year."

Why Mostly Harmless Will Not Be Honoring Acephalous's Call for a Blogwide Strike Action

By all means, though, do leave the poor guy a comment. And if you want to join me in making this a fundraiser for a worthy grad student in dissertation hell, follow my suggestion in the update here. Or don't--I'm happy to take a CitizenSE vacation for as long as it takes!

But Mostly Harmless is a group blog and I would never dream of unilaterally making a decision of this magnitude. Plus it's too much fun for me to stop here with the daddy blogging and the golf blogging and the animation blogging and the plugging-my-WAAGNFNP-blogging blogging--and whatever other kind of blogging seems fun at the time.

To wit: when I get time this week, I'll be doing all of the above, including more Golden Week family blogging, more LPGA not-quite-live-blogging, and more on the American and Japanese versions of The Powerpuff Girls (which I was a fan of long before I became a dad, thank you very much). I may even get around to that sources of my sense of humor series, or TolkienWatch, or warm-up for the May 23rd Star Wars 30th anniversary blogging thing--all of which I semi-promised a while back. But I'm definitely keeping it light here, as I'll being pretty heavy (for me) at WAAGNFNP the next couple of weeks.

Which makes me appreciate today's peter ramus post all the more!

How to Make a Dinosaur

Not a real one, of course. Just a remote controlled machine that acts like one.



What would Gojira think? And ((almost) big girl now) onechan?

Another sign of the GNF

Q. Where should you set your irony-meter for this one?