For those interested I’ve taken over Reeda’s responsibility of blogging for CNET Asia: presenting Derived Regulation!
This probably means all ICT related topics will be posted there from now on. You lot are going to have to make do with my fun little observations within the Land of the Rising Sun.
Three characters cumulatively possess the hearts, minds and souls of the Japanese public. The first is fairly obvious and really should be addressed as a Heavenly Queen. It’s Hello Kitty, of course. She must be the Japanese avatar of the perfect female: cute, innocent and no mouth to talk back with. You’ve all seen the pictures online somewhere so I need not elaborate. She is everywhere.
The second Heavenly King does not have the same reach as Hello Kitty but his presence is still quite palpable. Like Hello Kitty, Heavenly King #2 is also a cat. You thought right if you guessed Doraemon, the robot cat from the future. Why cats are so popular here is beyond me but it may have something to do with the Beckoning Cat.
So that’s two cats and… a dog I suppose. Well, that’s what the third Heavenly King has been described as. And he’s surprisingly not of Japanese origin either: Stitch from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. Other Disney characters, in particular a certain Pooh Bear, are also common-place in the childrens’ department but none hold a candle to Stitch: I’ve seen an entire UFO Catcher stocked with nothing but Stitch caps! Experiment 626’s popularity here is probably what led Disney to re-imagine the movie in a Japanese setting.
The Brunei halal brand has to be branded and it has to be able to explain to people why (Brunei) is better as a centre for excellence than somewhere like Malaysia or Singapore.
We’re boned.
How come no one told me the Scatman died nearly 10 years ago? It’s probably for the best considering how scat now means something else entirely.
Congratulations to my sister who gave birth to her first son at 5:20am! Way to make me feel old, sis.
I finally made it out to the movies here in Kanazawa! The weekend price was ¥1,400 (SGD$17.00) with a generous ¥200 discount for being a student. How do these people stay in business?
Since Iron Man won’t be released here until September I went to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to tide me over. While most foreign movies here are dubbed in Japanese they do reserve a few screens for airing the movie with its original English dialogue complete with Japanese subtitles.
I found the movie slightly disappointing though I’m not entirely sure why. Either Lucas, Spielberg & Co. forgot what made the original trilogy such a fun ride (who can blame them? It’s been nearly 20 years since we saw Dr. Jones on the screen!) or times have changed so much that Indy, sadly, may not cut it anymore. The dismal Tomb Raider movies made me pine for the original whip-cracking spelunker and I really wanted to enjoy this movie more than I did but I keep coming back to the realisation that the parts of me that liked the movie also happen to revel in the nostalgic.
The movie isn’t bad but at the same time there is nothing particularly noteworthy here either. Nothing in this movie came close to capturing the same awe and excitement that rolled forth as (heh heh) Indy ran from a giant boulder in Temple of Doom. And the irony from that same movie when Indy was jumping about, with his shoes literally smoking, yelling for water and seeing a torrential flood heading for him is completely missing from Temple of the Crystal Skull.
I re-watched the original trilogy less than a year back when it played on Astro and the adventure was as fresh as the day the movies were first released. Perhaps it’s time we retired Indiana Jones. Let’s wrap him up and vacuum-seal him in a transparent box for future generations to see and adore. Let’s set him upon a golden-encrusted pedastal as a tribute not to an action hero — those guys are a dime a dozen — but to he who is perhaps the last adventure hero. You can bet they’re going to try and re-invigorate the franchise with another character, this movie certainly dropped enough hints towards Shia LaBeouf’s possible donning of the legendary fedora, but let us not forget there can only be one Indiana Jones.
For the forseeable future I am a survey pusher. This means I will stop you in public, shove a survey sheet in your direction and demand 5 minutes of your life (uncompensated) so that I can analyze some larger societal inclination.
The only rung lower is telemarketer; I’m testing the waters as we speak.
Earlier this week I gave a presentation (in pre-programmed Japanese) on “My Country”. Considering that most people have next to no knowledge of Brunei it wasn’t too difficult to wow the crowd. Ha! Take that, Steve Jobs! Our next presentation is supposed to have a little more value to it: we come up with a hypothesis and test it in the open field. It doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly unique — a previous student looked into how much people spent on make-up monthly and found a corelation between higher expenditure and those who go clubbing more. The idea is that we get used to preparing, conducting and analyzing such surveys in Japanese.
I started off feeling very apprehensive about distributing my survey in public, not to mention a little nervous. Strangely enough though the more I handed out the more fun it became. It was like getting a high score in a video game, very addictive. But I still felt dirty inside. I’m going to take my fifth shower of the day now and try to scrub the scum off my soul.
If you are a teacher and above a certain level of hotness/cuteness I forbid you from wearing glasses while you’re teaching me. And if you also happen to be of obvious Japanese descent, get your eyes lasered.
And while we’re at it, bending over and giving us a feint outline of your Hi-Leg Briefs is not cool! You’re supposed to be teaching me Japanese, not teaching me to… argh!
The other teacher with the cute lisp wears Midi Briefs. What are you people doing to me?!
Anyone else had this problem? Ever since I installed Opera 9.5 some downloads have been dying. I’ve set Opera to send particular downloads to GetRight (.exe, .msi, .zip etc…) but GetRight aborts the download with the error “Service Unknown for [download URL]”. The same download works fine in Internet Explorer 7 (and presumably other browsers).
So far no useful hits on Google either.
(Wednesday 25th June 2008) This was apparently a problem with GetRight. Version 6.3e works fine with Opera 9.5
Looks like another earthquake has hit Japan, a big one this time. I’m fine, didn’t feel a thing.