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February 23, 2005

Pitagora Switch

Getting Influenza type-B has it's benefits. The prime of them being Japanese daytime TV! In the morning, there are the great Japanese children's shows. The award for most visually appealing show is a children's show called "Pitagora Switch". I'm not sure what "Pitagora" means. It features a comendy duo called "Rahmens", which are two totally deadpan, skinny guys in suits. Yes, they are totally deadpan and wear suits on the kids show too! This show features elaborate chain reaction setups, theater of the ten lines (wherein ten lines go on a mini adventure), TV John (that is sort of shaped like a dog), Dictionary Man, Father Switch (wherein a kid pushes a hiragana letter on a box and the dad does a pantomine of a word or phrase that starts with that hiragana letter), and lastly but not leastly ALGORITHM DANCE! Algorithm dance is wonderful. The two deadpan guys in suits do this strange exercise dance. Everytime they have a different set of people perform with them. Last time it was maiko (geisha apprentices). I've seen sumo wrestlers before.

algorithm_02.jpg

Posted by Emarrific at 07:17 AM | Comments (2)

February 19, 2005

Shrimp Named City hosts Odakyu Night

I went to a city whose name is shrimp, but is very far inland. I drank lots of beer, blah blah. Most eventful of the night was karaoke. My favorite karaoke performances: Mai-- and In----'s sexy but smooth rendition of Madonna, P---'s deep-throated bass version of "Like a Virgin", the twin duo of French Canadia, and my own successful rendition of "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi. OK, it's a bit conceited to rave about my own performance. Yea.

Of particular note, one of our number, J---, saved a woman's life tonight. As far as I can ascertain, there as a woman vomiting and seizuring in the bathroom and J--- stepped in an gave her CPR and got an ambulance. Wow! What a great gal! That's quite brave. Understandably she was very emotional afterwards. Unfortunately I didn't really catch on until much later. I just thought she was having a bad day or regretting her decision not to recontract. I'm such a doof!

Posted by Emarrific at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2005

Game Night or the Spanking of the Clay

Last night, instead of the usual movie night, me and my friends had a game night. It started with animal Karuta as we waited for the game supplier to arrive with Cranium. Karuta is a traditional Japanese game that involves listening to a phrase full of words starting with that hiragana (japanese letters) and finding the card with the corresponding picture and hiragana. It was pure edutainment... everyone breathlessly poised over the cards, waiting to hear the first hiragana letter of the phrases I was reading so that they could slap their hands down on the right card. Mistakes were rewarded with slaps from the person to the left. When we got to the last card, everyone sat upright with hand behind their head and as soon as I started reading, arms and hands descended at once producing a sort of biological inverse maypole.

The game supplier, N---, nototrious for being late, showed up 40 minutes late and was summarily pelted with dried beans when he arrived. You see, February 3rd is Setsubun in Japan. It is a day when Japanese people go outside of their houses or temples and pelt beans at someone wearing a oni (devil) mask while saying, "Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" This roughly means, "Out with the devils! In with good fortune!" Although N--- was not wearing an oni mask, he was branded the devil for being late.

No less than three people showed up with dried beans.

Next, we moved onto Cranium. Cranium is quite fun, although I have to say that the questions were much easier than I had imagined. It holds not even a flame to Trivial Pursuit in terms of difficulty. In any case, let me try to explain the rules. You form teams as small or large as you wish, but in the end you are probably better off with larger teams. You'll see why in a minute. Each team gets a little pawn to put on the game board. The gameboard is pretty simple; it is a spiral which leads to a big purple brain in the center that has four spots around it. There are five differnet kinds of squares: red, yellow, green, blue and brain. The four colors are categories: red for trivia, yellow for word-related questions, green for play-acting/scherades and blue for artistic sort of questions. The main point is to get the other people on your team to guess the answers to the questions. If you land on a brain, you get to pcik which color/category of card you get to pick.

When it is your turn, you roll the dice which has all the different colors on it. Then you go to the corresponding square. You can never pass a purple brain without landing on it. Then the other team picks the card and reads it. Depending on the category, you could be doing scherades, spelling backwards, trying to sculpt something, answering trivia, unscrambling words, humming a tune... it's tons of fun. It also gets you to do all sorts of interesting things. The object of the game is to get to the end.

Memorable moments that I can remember: N--- spanking clay formed in the shape of a butt to get his team to guess "spank" (technically it was against the rules to do gestures, but oh well), me unscrambling a word that was supposed to be a powertool and coming up with "saw table" instead of "table saw" (WHATEVAH), S---- pulling her pants low to show "low rider", Al---- trying to show "hypertext" by jumping up and down to show "hyper" and pretending to read "text" on a computer and An----'s uncanny spelling abilities.

Good times, donuts and royal milk tea were had all around. Ah, life is good.

Posted by Emarrific at 10:19 AM | Comments (1)