Wild But Formal: The End

Wednesday 29th July 1998

Wild But Formal III | Website Update | Brand New Bland Band | Not Climbing Mt.Fuji | Fan in the San | Japlish

How time flies. You start a pet project, something perfectly innocuous like, oh I don't know, designing and writing your own website, and before you know it, it's taken all your free time and turned you into a reclusive hermit who fails to keep in touch with his friends.

Social skills? Overvalued in this electronic age, if you ask me. (Of course, you'd have to ask me by email.)

But fear not; I can practically smell the tension as you wait for the third installment of the Wild But Formal extravaganza. And who am I to keep the audience waiting?

Wild But Formal - No.3

An attractive blonde executive with a wilderbeest growing out of her left nostril is on the phone; "Why don't you meet me at the club in thirty minutes?" she says invitingly. Cut to the other end of the line - for it is Cedric the Lion-headed Man she is speaking to! Who says nothing! Again! (He nods, but I doubt she picks that up, what with it being a telephone.) (Just kidding about the wilderbeeste. Sorry.)

Cut to attractive blonde executive driving her standard-issue 4-by-4 along what looks like a desert road - see how smoothly she changes gear! Cut to Cedric, also driving a 4-by-4 - the very same model, in fact. Almost as if the makers of this short film were trying to tell us something, no? Cedric's bit, though, has been sped-up slightly, and looks like he's going a little bit, dare I say, "wild" behind the wheel. Suddenly! His 4-by-4 zooms off the desert track it has been following, onto the road, neatly cutting up the blonde executive's vehicle. Cedric has made it to the club in time. Good lad, Cedric.

Cut! to a swimming pool. Attractive blonde executive is now swimming. In the swimming pool. That's why they're called swimming pools, I guess. She swims (see?) to the side, elbows her way up onto the ledge to reveal MASSIVE cleavage the Donner party could easily have got mislaid in, and says, "So; what do you think of my tits?"

Sorry, sorry, no she doesn't. But that's clearly what the director was thinking. She practically plonks them down on the poolside, for heaven's sake.

She says, "What do you think of my analysis?" Which is much less plausible, really, but I swear it's true. We cut to Cedric, who is sitting at a poolside table, reading what is ostensibly her "analysis" - he looks at her, and gives her a big thumbs-up. Her figures (and, indeed, her figure) are fine. Hurrah.

He says.... nothing. Formal to the last.

The moral of this story? If you're a man, then having a lion's head need not be an obstacle in your career path - just look at Cedric! If you're a woman, then having much-larger-than-average breasts need not be an obstacle in *your* career path - unless they really are the size of Nissan Micras, in which case they'll probably get in a lot of other people's way as well. Just look at attractive blonde executive! (Just *look* at attractive blonde executive's er... analysis...)

Website Frenzy!

Well, it's still there, anyway. Trying to be clever and use a bit of ninja programming wizardry the other day, I managed to reset the hits counter by mistake. I'm not terribly bothered because it was only on about seven anyway, most of which were me, but you should go and have a look again to a) get the counter going again and b) check out my not-actually-quite-ready-yet funky new graphics and navigation toolbar. Guaranteed to confuse an iguana from 50 paces.

Tokyo Tales - Embracing the information age, only to have it recoil because of the stench.

Brand New Bland Band

There is, unsurprisingly perhaps given the phenomenally-high turnover of idoru (or idols) out here, another all-singing, all-dancing girl group on the music scene. It's either just a really unfortunate "pick a word out of the dictionary, Yoshihito" kind of choice, or a very subtle take on the whole J-Pop idol thing, but the powers that be decided to call these guys "Bland". Seriously. And they are, seriously, bland.

Add to this the fact that most Japanese can't distinguish easily between "ruh" and "luh", let alone produce different sounds, and you have a further potential twist - Bland or Brand? Either, if intended, would be nicely ironic, I think, given the way these groups are marketed.

I'd have to hear interviews or something, or read an article before I could work out if it is just stupid or actually very very clever (in a "The Day Today" or "Brass Eye" kind of way, if any of you remember them). Bear in mind, however, that this is Japan. And pardon me if I sound condescending here, but I would be very surprised if it were the latter rather than the former.

Not Climbing Mt. Fuji

I haven't done it yet. I would have done it last night, but it rained. And before you scoff, it was thunder and lightning, so don't be dissing me behind my back. What's the one thing you don't do when lightning's out to play? Go and stand on the tallest bloody mountain in the country, that's what.

So, stay tuned for further not-climbing-Mt-Fuji exploits over the coming weeks.

Fan in the san

Incidentally, something which I thought was hilarious when I first heard it was that "san", as well as being a suffix like "mister", can mean mountain in Japanese. So if you're called Mr. Mountain, that would make you "San-san", right? Cool. San also means "three", so if your father and grandfather were also (as seems likely) called Mr.Mountain, then you could be "San-san san-ban", or Mr Mountain the Third. Cool again. More amusing translations as I find them.

Japlish du Jour

(as seen on the side of a building near Ikebukuro:)

Naigai Vicars

(Nothing so strange there, perhaps; obviously they just sell vicars. What's wrong with that? Nothing. These are not the droids you're looking for... He may go about his business...)

Bye now;

Chris

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