Re: Recall Notice for the Faulty Housing of your Immortal Soul

Dear Sentient,

As you are aware from our previous correspondence, your soul’s housing is a contributing factor in your continued partaking of a number of deadly sins - sloth, wrath, et al. (for the full count please view the rather excellent instructional video we sent starring Mr. Morgan Freeman and Mr. Brad Pitt). Our legal advice is that we should not leave ourselves open to any future claims. We have decided to recall all of the defective parts.

Please return yourself to us at your earliest convenience for a full refund.
We admit liability for any costs you may incur in this process. Please keep receipts for a full refund of expenses incurred.

Thank you for your expected cooperation in this matter.

Signed,

The Manufacturer

Coming Soon! A shiny, new, indestructible ROBOT body!

Canine Coprophobia

My school is in an area of Tokyo called Den-en Chofu. Den-en Chofu is a rather swanky place where residents live in 3-story houses rather than apartments. They drive European cars rather than take the bus. And they leave their pooch's shit on the sidewalk rather than pick it up.

Dog knows why this is so. But every moring without fail I have to perform some unintended sidestep while walking to work to avoid a K9ian present. What can be so hard about cleaning up after one's dawg? If they really are Man's Best Friend then you should want to pick up after them. If my best friend shit on the street, I'd pick up after them.

Then again, maybe I'd just get a new best friend.

The Greatest Idea for a Game Ever but...

apparently JAWS Unleased's game play blows chunks. Difficult to control plus a camera that unerringly chooses the worst place to sit seem to be the universal complaints. But even so who wouldn't want to play THE great white shark from the greatest movie ever made. That is so whack.

So you swim around eating up greedy developers and nefarious scientists who have some kind of hokey plot for Amity. But who gives a shit about plot? As JAWS I've got less morality than a Grand Theft Auto player. I wanna eat bad guys and do-gooders alike. What could be more fun than devouring a rubber raft-riding group of drift net protesting Greenpeaceniks?

You begin with just a few moves to kill your prey, but as you advance you can get more advanced attacks. I so hope they've put a few wrasslin' moves in there.

Tombstone! Suplexxxxxxxxxx!

This had better be PSP-bound.

The Greatest Story Never Told

Mari and I have now played a few games of Once Upon A Time. We don't play to win; we just want to kill time.

The biggest problem we found in our non-competitive games was picking up cards when interrupted. There were too many new elements introduced into a story. The story usually became unwieldy. And towards the end the games became difficult to finish because we'd be interrupted by the other and so have to pick up a new card. This meant that just when the story should have been drawing to a conclusion, a hitherto unknown "stepmother" or "window" would somehow have to be woven into the tale. Passing is an option, but that was too often used just to get around the unwanted cards we'd been forced to pick up all along, rather than because we'd run out of ideas. So we made some changes that worked well in the sample size of 1 game we played.

1. We don't keep "Happily Ever After" cards secret. Instead we lay out 3 of these face up at the start. You can choose any of them to finish with.

2. When interrupted you don't have to pick up another card UNLESS you have no cards.

Under these rules we both added much more description because we weren't so concerned about taking a backward step in hand size when interrupted. In fact there were several times when we both added heaps of description in an attempt to give the role away when we felt we'd added enough to the story. We talked for nigh on 45 minutes and both felt the story that resulted was the most cohesive of any of the games we'd played.

It's all good clean family fun.




With drill and sex.

THE GREATEST COVER UP THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

This realizaton hit me last night while I was watching the Argentina vs. Serbia & Montenegro World Cup match. Maradona standing in the stands (well, duh), was ceaslessly twirling a towel above his head in a mad frenzy. He looked like a man pretty excited about Argentinian soccer. Every time the camera cut back to him, around and around the towel continued to twirl. I was surprised that a stomach-stapled ex-junkie had the fortitude for such a display of patriotism.

Around and around the towel went...

Around and around...

And that's when I understood the brilliantly simple deception that Argentina was fooling the world with.

No living human could possible continue such a towel-twirling frenzy.

Maradona is animatronic!

Yes, Maradona, Argentina's Living National Treasure is in fact dead. I don't know when he died. Maybe he never regained conciousness when under the surgeon's knife. But dead he is. And he's been replaced with a robot double. Argentinian Soccer wants to keep the spirits of its team high, so they've never informed the world that Maradona is no more.

Now of course current robotics isn't what SF novels set in the future claim it to be, so the robot Maradona can't do much. He won't for instance be performing intergrated calculus (if there is such a thing). But then again he's just impersonating Maradona, so he doesn't have to. He just has to trundle out, act like he's having an apoplectic fit, and then trundle back out of sight until the next media event.

BTW, Kudos to Argentina for beating two countries in the one game. That will certainly save heaps of time later.

Fatlines of the gods

OK, it's 2pm and while still a little cloudy the so called storm has obviously finished hours ago. Seems the VP was prescient in continuing with the day.

Note to self: Investigate the possiblity that minor dieties, demi-gods, or at the very least oracles may be amoung the upper-echelons of the staff.

Your God is a Piss-weak God

At 8am the VP decided that we're going to have classes from the 1st period, come what may. Oh foolish mortal, to tempt the fate that the Gods have so obviously willed upon us.

Lousy Raiden.

Finish Us Raiden!

It's 7:30 in the morning, and there is a storm warning in effect. I can believe it, as I did more swimming upstream than walking uphill to get here this morning. The 1st two classes of the day are already canceled. If the warning continues until 8:30 then the whole school day will be deep sixed.

One of life's little pleasures for a teacher is a canceled school day.

Sad I know, but there you go. You can take the lazy Aussie out of Australia but...

Don't Rock the Boat, Baby

This contains very minor spoilers for those who have no idea what Poseidon is about. Otherwise you're safe.

After we left the aquarium we noticed that the theatre next door was playing the other movie about a sinking ship that's on in Japan now. As it was in IMAX and in a mere half hour, we decided to enjoy watching 40-foot high CG victims.

Due to a typical clusterfuck I bought tickets to the regular-sized screen, so we had to make do with the doomed being only 20-feet tall.

Poseidon is one of those drowning-by-numbers actioners that is a lot of fun if one sets the expect-o-meter to "Low" and just lets the spectacle wash over you. And wash it does, for the effects are top-notch and the danger comes thick and fast. I genuinely enjoyed myself because I just went with the flow.

Josh Lucas, who has obviously graduated from the "Bruce Willis School of Smirking", inanely grins his way through as the action man. The script tries to give almost everyone some emotional baggage, but just forget that the talking heads ever mentioned it. Why does the scriptwriter seem to think that an overturned ocean liner resembles a therapists couch?

Actually the weak point is the script. It contains some real howlers, especially from the captain who, with all the gravitas he can muster utters nonsense like, "Ladies & Gentlemen, we are not exactly sure what has happened. But we think that the ship has been struck by what is called a rogue wave. They are rare, they are unpredictable, and they are lethal."

Yes Ladies & Gentlemen, you are watching, "WHEN WAVES ATTACK!"

Also his opening speech about how man first left the water millenia ago just started me a chuckling. For some reason I was picturing Mr. Burns speech about man's eternal desire to extinguish the sun.

Animals, animals, animals, animals, animals everywhere

Sunday was Zoorasia, which was the best zoo I've seen in Japan. The cages and pens were very big, and spread out over a wide area. Much walking had to be done to get around the whole place. The polar bear's enclosure looked especially good, and there was even a toy in there for it. And they have okapi. Okapi! At 600 yen it is great value as you can spend the whole day there.I still feel sorry for elephants though.

Due to the school's foundation quite a few years ago happening to be on June 5th, today became a holiday. So Mari took the day off and we went to Epson Shinagawa Aqua Stadium. This was my second attempt to visit there. The first, last summer holidays, ended when the line of school children waiting to get in didn't. Just what I NOT want to do on the school holidays is spend more time with kids.

But on a Monday of non-school holidays it was just fine. The whole facility is really beautifully presented. And it's quite amazing that one can see dolphins, penguins and sea lions right in the middle of Tokyo. But it must be said that the aquarium is too small. One could walk around the tanks in a few minutes if you weren't taking the trouble to look closely. And we did stroll and look, but we were expecting it to be at least more than one floor so we were checking our maps in confusion after we'd failed to find any stairs going anywhere else when we'd returned to the exit. We ended up spending almost 3 hours there, but mostly that was waiting for the sea lion and dolphin shows (45mins wait + 2 shows of 15mins each), which we felt we'd better stay and watch as without them we'd just spent 1800 yen on a few, albeit pretty, tanks.

Man, dolphins can jump high. I estimate one especially leapy critter reached 6 metres out of the water.