Sdtrk: ‘Let the wind catch a rainbow on fire’ by Death in June

Found another article on das Infobahn about Japan implementing robots into everyday living. I mean, moreso than usual. However, it does make prominent mention of Kobalabs’ SAYA-chan, so there you go.

In the meantime, I’m fighting what may be a small-scale flu. I’m not as fatigued as I was yesterday, and food is tasting less like looseleaf paper, so I think I’m on the Road to Recovery. I still feel like a pig shat in my head* a wee bit, though. Damn this frail human body! *weakly shakes fist*
In any case, I’d better be well enough to see Broadcast, as they’re playing at the Magic Stick this Saturday. Perhaps I’ll go back to bed for the rest of the day

*fifteen Cool Points to anyone who can name the film that quote came from

Sdtrk: ‘Very friendly’ by Throbbing gristle

First otaku in space? Yes. But it’s okay, cos he’s cosplaying as someone cool.

Space geek to orbit in cartoon outfit

AFP, October 13, 2005

TOKYO: A Japanese Internet whiz is tipped to become the world’s fourth space tourist — and he wants to orbit the earth dressed as an ace pilot from a hit Japanese animation series.

The candidate for the $US20 million trip is Japanese investor Daisuke Enomoto, a 34-year-old former board director of the Livedoor Internet firm headed by flamboyant entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, local media said.

Enomoto has already passed medical checks and started flight training for a trip in late 2006, Jiji Press news agency reported.

Enomoto said in January that he was likely to be the first Japanese to make a paid space trip.

“I’m planning to do something amusing,” he wrote then on his website.

If he gets Russian approval, Enomoto said he wanted to dress up on the trip as “Char Aznable”, a character in the popular “Gundam” hero robot series of animation whose name is inspired by French singer Charles Aznavour.

Enomoto describes himself as a “Gundam otaku” (geek).

The third civilian to pay for a space flight, US millionaire businessman Greg Olsen, returned to Earth this week in a Soyuz capsule.

The 60-year-old American paid Space Adventures US$20 million for a seat aboard the capsule and eight days of gazing down at the Earth from the International Space Station, 370km up.

He was preceded into space by two other millionaire tourists, American Dennis Tito in 2001 and South African Mark Shuttleworth the following year.

DON’T LET HIM DO IT!! HE’LL HIJACK THE SHUTTLE AND DROP A COLONY ON AUSTRALIA!! Heh heh, little Gundam joke there.
Actually, Enomoto-san, during the inevitable filming of you tumbling round the shuttle in your Char outfit, I’ll give you $50 if at any point you shout ‘Sieg Zeon!’

Sdtrk: ‘Sympathy for the devil’ by Laibach

Funny story: at the bank today, I encountered another bloke with a robotic left arm! He and I didn’t actually speak, as we didn’t know each other, but he entered the queue about four people behind me. But I mean, it was rather strange; it wasn’t just the coincidence that he had a prosthetic arm just like Kyle, but this bloke’s left arm was mechanical, just like Kyle. What the hell is going on here??

It looked exactly like this, to be honest. Without the accessories, of course

I was giggling, however, as I was reminded of the character Martin Finnucane from Flann O’Brien’s surrealist riot of a book, ‘The third policeman‘. He was the self-proclaimed captain of all the one-legged men in Ireland, and a pivotal scene describes him leading a small army of men, each boasting a timber shin, into a rescue operation. A highly recommended book!

If Kyle truly is some sort of mechanised assassin, I’m guessing he probably sent that fellow round to keep an eye on me. How very clever, Kyle… if that is your real name

Sdtrk: ‘Cosmic country noir’ by Stereolab

Although I missed it by a couple of days, I observed on rotten.com (caution: not safe for anything) that 4 Oct was the 19th anniversary of the infamous ‘What’s the frequency, Kenneth?’ incident, where television news anchorman Dan Rather received an unforseen thumping from professional psychotic William Tager. This shit still unsettles me to this day.

“What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” – Not Just an R.E.M. song!

The Assualt: On the evening of October 4, 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by William Tager who, contrary to popular belief, had a very good reason for attacking Rather.

Bill Tager was born in the year 2265. Bill Tager is from the future. Bill Tager is not from our planet. Well, technically he is from earth but not from our earth. Tager comes from an earth in a parallel universe and was sent here by the government of his planet. On Tagers earth, the entire planet is under the control of one government. Tager’s world wide government has been experimenting with travel to other parallel universes (which involves a warp of the space/time continuum) for almost 150 years. Bill Tager, a convicted felon on his planet, volunteered to be the first human test pilot on the condition that he be given a full pardon if he returned safely.

On Tagers earth the Vice-President of the world is a man named Kenneth Burrows, who just happens to look exactly like Dan Rather. (I should explain here that most everyone on our earth has a double on all of the other earths in all of the parallel universes.) Before Tager entered the travel chamber he was paid a visit by Vice-President Burrows and was told that he had a transmitter implanted in his brain and if he chose to remain in the section of time/space that he was being sent to and didn’t return at the designated time, he would be barraged with messages to return until he came back and reported on his mission. Then, and only then, would the transmitter be removed and he be given his full pardon.

Tager’s trip was successful and he landed in New York on September 1, 1986. All was going as planned and Tager was preparing to return to his own time and world when he was mistakenly arrested for putting coins in expired parking meters. After spending 30 days in jail (and staying on our planet 14 days longer than he was supposed to) Tager started receiving extremely hostile messages from Vice-President Burrows telling him to return immediately. His window of opportunity had passed and he would have to wait another week to try to return but there was no possible way to let Burrows know this. The constant voices were driving him insane. He wasn’t even able to sleep at night. If there was any way Tager could find out the precise frequency that was being broadcast to his brain he could possibly override the voices and be able to sleep at night until he was able to make his return trip.

As he walked the streets of New York late on the evening of October 4, 1986, Tager saw a man who he thought was Vice-President Kenneth Burrows. He quickly came to his senses and knew that Burrows would never make the risky trip himself and figured it must be Burrows’ double on our earth. However, he thought, what were the chances that out of over 5 billion people on this planet, he would meet the twin of the man who had been sending hostile messages directly to his brain for over two weeks?

Tager called out to the man, “Kenneth! Kenneth Burrows!”. To his surprise, the man, whom we know to be Dan Rather, turned to see who was yelling and was knocked to the ground. Tager repeatedly kicked Rather as he lay on the ground and yelled “What’s the frequency Kenneth?” hoping to learn the frequency of the signal being broadcast to his brain and stop the voices. When Rather didn’t respond, Tager realized he had made a terrible mistake and had indeed attacked Burrows’ double on our planet. He fled the scene and later missed his second, and last, chance to return to his home planet.

Years later, in 1994, in an attempt to get in contact with someone who might be able to identify the frequency and put an end to the voices that had haunted him for so many years, Tager shot and killed an NBC technician outside the “Today Show” studios. Today, William Tager sits in a prison in New York, the voices, now an automatic message that replays itself every 20 minutes, still play in his head.

While in prison, Tager wrote various stories and drew odd cartoons depicting his adventure.

I also still can’t believe that that incident occurred almost 20 years ago! Furthermore, I would kill to see Tager’s stories and cartoons. Well, ‘kill’ is too strong of a word; I should probably say ‘assault’.

NOTE TO SELF: Don’t go outside, there’s loonies from parallel dimensions about

Sdtrk: ‘Moderns’ by Pizzicato five

So this afternoon, I was on campus a couple of hours before my Document processing and production class, playing Death from above 1979 on my secondhand .mp3 player (thanx Tomas!) and working diligently on my homework. This bloke who couldn’t have been much older than I am stopped in front of me, and got my attention. ‘Excuse me, did you go to Shrine?’ he asked. ‘Actually, yeah I did,’ I responded, the little gears whirling furiously in my head as to 1) who the hell this person was, and 2) how the hell they knew what highschool I attended.
‘I thought you looked familiar!’ he said. ‘I walked by the lab windows and saw you in there, and had to stop and see if you were who I thought you were.’
‘Yeah!.. I’m Dave. And you are..?’
‘I’m Kyle.’ He extended his hand to shake.

Now here’s the eerie part of the story. We each clasped each other’s right hands, and it was at that point that I noticed his left arm, up to about halfway up the forearm, was robotic. Well, actually, it was just a prosthetic arm, but saying it was robotic is something you’d undoubtedly expect me to say.
You have to understand; at this point, I’ve got the name Kyle in the cyclotron of my mind, repeating kyle KYLE kyle KYLE kyle at high speed over and over, and without any results whatsoever. I’d say about 80% of the people in my graduating class are kids that I went through several grades previously with, so anyone outside of that group of familiar faces either stood out for some reason or other, or was entirely innocuous. And had Kyle posessed his bionic arm back in highschool, he definitely would’ve stood out. But nope, I was drawing an utter blank on him.

So he asked if I was attending this year’s class reunion (that’s a negatory), and I asked if he was taking classes at this campus this semester, which he answered he was. After three minutes’ worth of what passed for a conversation, Kyle said that he’d let me get back to what I was doing, and bid me farewell. I replied ‘Hopefully, since you’re taking classes here, we’ll run into each other again!’ And that was that..

I have to say that he’s got one hell of a memory if he was able to recognise me, despite my radical change in appearance, after an absence of fifteen years. Until I got home and checked my yearbook, I thought he was some sort of assassin, confirming whether I was the correct target. ‘You’re Dave? From Shrine, right?’ *robotic hand pops off, 10-inch steel blade snaps out of forearm* You know how it is.
I’m rather curious to know the story behind his new mecha-hand, but polite conversation dictates that that’s not the sort of thing you ask someone who was barely a casual aquaintance fifteen years ago. Very good memory, though, squire! Almost too good..
…
O shit, he really is a cyborg assassin! If you’ll excuse me, I have to run for my life, right now. Back in a few

Sdtrk: ‘Out out out’ by NON

File this under ‘Things That One Only Finds in Japan’. Behold: the art truck phenomena.

As you probably suspect, finding decent info about art trucks (or, as they’re also known, ‘deko-tora’, short for ‘decoration truck’) in English is uncommonly difficult, but from what I gather, they’re simply trucks used for shipping that just happen to be heavily customised by their owners. Like those who ‘rice out’ or ‘dub’ their Asian-made sports cars, they’re for showing off, but unlike sports cars, art trucks are still used for actual freight and utility purposes. It apparently started in the 70s, spawning a couple of films starring Bunta Sugawara of ‘The Yakuza papers‘ fame, and recently a game for the PS2 was made, called ‘Shin Dekotora densetsu’ (‘New Decoration truck Legend’).

Pretty decorative, pretty crazy.

Yep, art trucks.
So, like, do they hand-polish these feckers, or what?

Sdtrk: ‘I like Mozart’ by France Gall

This morning, like I’d said, I managed to stumble out of bed and successfully type out notes to my most recent dream. Hoorah!

It occurred during a morning in late Autumn/early Winter, cos I remember the light had that kind of super-clarity that you only get during the colder months. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, but it was definitely brisker than I like it. After walking along the stretch of small office buildings on northbound Livernois between Eight and Nine mile, I entered one of them. Soon, I was in a room about the size of your typical small office centre, where there were rows of desks, of the same sort that you’d find in school. There was even a chalkboard down the front. As I sat down in the rightmost desk at the front of the class, other people started arriving, and took seats of their own, and shortly after that, Boyd Rice entered with two other blokes, all of whom were wearing cold weather coveralls. They all sported either some kind of bag or backpack, and one of them went to the chalkboard and started writing things on it, whilst Boyd and the other bloke (Michael Moynihan?) began walking up and down the aisles, distributing papers and pamphlets to everyone. Boyd caught my eye, and he acknowledged me with a ‘Hey, Davecat,’ to which I gave a wave. The person sitting behind me had gotten up for a second to leave the room, so Boyd took a seat.
‘Hey Boyd, what’s been up?’
‘Man, I feel like shit. I’ve got this pounding headache, and my sinuses are all screwed up from this cold I’ve got,’ he replied, and I could see that his nose was indeed runny and puffy. There was a little bit of snot too; it was kinda gross. ‘But you ‘ll never guess what’s getting me through this.’
‘Err, Sudafed?’
‘No — Pepto-Bismol! It coats everything, and it’s so pink and reassurring. In fact, I took some last night and it helped me get some writing done.’ He reached into his bag and pulled out a bubblegum pink notepad, with copious sentences written out in longhand in blue ballpoint ink. ‘Check out how much I wrote!’ He sectioned off about 3/4ths of the pad’s pages with his thumb and forefinger.
‘Damn! Not too shabby!’ I replied.
‘Also,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been speaking with some people, and it turns out they really want me in the role of The Master in the upcoming season of Doctor Who.’
I was impressed. ‘Wow. You’ve been busy! Which reminds me — I saw a flyer stuck onto a telephone pole that says you’re running for some kind of office?’
‘Yeah, actually, that’s why I’m here now, in order to speak to people.’
‘Well shit, I’ll let you do your thing, Boyd, and we’ll talk more when you’re done.’ And then he stood up.
‘Okay, cool, we’ll talk in a bit.’ As he got back to handing out pamphlets, I wondered to myself — I had seen that flyer on a telephone pole in Ferndale, which is in Oakland county. Now, since I live in Wayne county, would I be able to vote for him? *stroking chin*

And that’s it!
Hrrm.. Boyd Rice as The Master. On the one hand, he’s no Anthony Ainley, but on the other hand, he’s no Eric Roberts, thankfully. Plus, he has had a goatee in his life. And been accused of being evil incarnate.
Personally, I think he’d be better running for office. But what the hell kind of office would he find suitable? Furthermore, Ferndale is like a Fisher-Price city — it’s about two-tenths the size of Detroit. What kind of motions would Boyd pass, if elected?
I’m sure he could bring back the Circus Maximus, for starters