According to those lovely guys at Yahoo News, talk-along anime machines are on the way. These machines will appear in Karaoke parlors across the country and allow people to talk along with their favourite animated weirdo before having it played back to them. According to some nerdy spokesman;

“You are unbuttoned at karaoke places where you drink with friends,” he said. “The freer you are from your usual persona, the more fun you can have. You can also easily change your sex.
A quiet person can be a courageous hero while a straight-laced businessman can turn into a delicate young girl.”

That’s odd, I don’t remember being unbuttoned at a karaoke place. I don’t think that’s even legal. Anyway, the whole thing is going to kick off this weekend, and I’m sure it will have a great following and will probably be quite good fun, if you’re into that sort of thing. There’s really just one big problem.

It’s lame!

I mean, come on. They could have had anything and they went for talk-along anime! But worry not, intrepid reader, for I have created a handful of wonderful alternatives. Read on and be amazed!

1. Complain-Along Machine

Boy oh boy do I love complaining. So does everyone, and reguardless of how nice you are, when the doors are closed there’s nothing better than to have a good whine about the weather, or young people or something. So I’m planning to harness the mighty power of the whine to create the ultimate complaining paradise.

There is one big problem with what I have dubbed the “Angryoke Machine”. Almost as soon as it comes out, people will use it to complain about the machine itself. This will of course lead to a loop in the time-space continuum, and we’ll all be sucked into a black hole and the world will end. But to be honest, I think I’m OK with that. Imagine the advertising. “Come complain with Japan Is Doomed’s Angryoke Machines, or we’ll end your world! “. I’d go.

2. Beeroke

Admit it, this would be awesome. The majority of people who head to the Karaoke bars use it as a weak excuse to mask their near-dangerous alcohol consuption, myself included. I suggest we just cut out the middleman altogether and have Beeroke – the machine that tells you to drink beers, which you do, whilst drinking beers. Hurrah! Once this great idea takes off, I can follow up with Wineoke, Vodkaoke and, for the kids, Juiceoke. Dogoke and Catoke will launch late 2008, and by 2011 I plan to have a BeerOkeOke machine in every house, which tells you to tell yourself to drink beer, whilst drinking beers, and drinking a beer. Oops, I think I just ended the universe again…

I should probably release my own beer brand too. The sales would be astronomical!

3. Silent Movie Karaoke

This would be a simple change to the tried and tested Karaoke formula. Rather than sing the words, you write them down on card and hold them up. That way, everyone still gets to perform their favourite song, but if like me you’re a terrible singer, you don’t have to suffer the usual embarrassments of forgetting you sound like a frog being shot.

I feel this particular brand of Karaoke will prove popular with mimes. That’s right, I shall finally conquer the elusive mime market.

4. Ekoarak

So you think you’re a good singer, huh? Think you’ve mastered Karaoke? Well you should try my latest, craziest invention – Eroarak! It’s Karaoke backwards! But wait, not only do the songs play backwards, you must infact do everything backwards! You need to walk into the shop, backwards, thank the sales assistant for the wonderful time you had, she’ll then hand you some money, then you sing all your songs backwards, then you book the room, then finally leave.

I will allow two things to be done forward; drinking and using the bathrooms. Gross. Unfortunatly this latest scheme would lose me an awful lot of money as I’d end up paying people to come, and I’m just not that nice a guy. Sorry!

5. Elimination Karaoke

This is the same as regular Karaoke, except the songs available are all 15 hours long. Last one standing gets to choose the next song. Everyone else recieves medical treatment.

So there we go! Five perfectly good ways to enhance the Karaoke experience! Now I’ll just write these up and send them off to be processed, and await the inevitable excited phonecall and business class trip to Japan where I will be heralded as the sole creator of a new age of Karaoke. Wait, what’s this? Hello Officer. What? No, I never said I’d give beer to dogs and cats? Dogoke? Oh yeah, whoops.

Countdown To Japan : 77 Days! Woohoo!

20 Today!

(19 is gone)

See you at 21!

So here we are, then. I’m writing this from the only cafe I can find Wi-Fi in, trying to get it all written and uploaded before my laptop battery remembers that it harbours a deep hatred for me and gives up. I did manage to get a couple of nice photographs too, but I haven’t really had time to head out on a photography trip yet. I am trying to upload as many as I ca but the internet connection is stupidly slow, so for now I’ll just stick them on Flickr. Sorry!

Not much news, really. Snowboarding is as fun as ever, and with my new board and bindings it’s even better than I remember it to be. Sadly some moron decided it would be awesome to gouge a chunk out of the back of my board in a lift queue, so I’m hoping that will get sorted in the tuneup, otherwise I’ll have to hunt him down and take a chunk out of his face. The weather has been pretty bad – until about 10.30am it’s fine, then every day a horrible cloud floats over the valley, making it impossible to see more than a foot infront of you, which leads to some interesting descents.

I’m back on the 29th, my birthday, at which point I’ll do a huge bumper update which will include the rest of the photos I take here and news about the summer and so forth. Until then, stay cool everyone!

Update: I am not sure if I will be able to get an internet connection in France. Thus this may be the last post for a few days. Apologies!

I know this isn’t technically anything to do with Japan, but as it’s been a really long time since I went snowboarding, I knew once my family announced they were planning to head off to one of Europe’s premier ski resorts that I should sneak into the back of the car and get myself some quality snow.

I’m leaving tomorrow and will return on March 29th, which is my birthday! There’s nothing I love more than sitting in a car for 11 hours to celebrate my 20th, but that can’t be avoided. The six days immidiatly preceding that will totally make up for it anyway.

I am planning to take my camera and laptop with me, and I will try to make some interesting posts about French culture and so on. Failing that, I’ll just take pretty pictures and waffle on about them. I had an email asking why I never upload pictures to Flickr – I will, I’ve just been stuck at home revising, so there’s nothing to post yet. Yuck.

In other news, as I just said, I’ve been revising as I have yet another exam once I head back to university in two weeks or so – Semester 2 midterms. Although we’ve only done about 5-6 weeks of content it’s still promising to be a difficult exam, andsome of the grammar points we’ve covered like ために, the volitional form & ところ give me a horrible headaches when I think about them, so I think some more hard work is needed there, as usual. Kanji is still a big horrible problem and I hate it and plan to push it out of a window in the future, but at least I can take my textbook with me to France to ruin yet another holiday with stroke orders, Chinese readings and faded lines.

That’s about it for exciting news, then. Blogwise, I’m tuning up the archives to make them easier to use, as a big list of months is pretty useless, and I’ll probably fiddle with the look a bit. That’s about it, though. No more exciting news. Oh, apart from that there’s only 88 more days until I head to Japan! Yahoo!

Remember a week ago when I reviewed Tampopo and found it ever so slightly bizarre? Well worry not, I’ve found an even more insane film in Survive Style 5+ which features a whole host of famous actors including Tadanobu Asano (Zatoichi) and the legendary Vinnie Jones. That’s right, Vinnie’s going to Japan.

The story follows a man killing his wife, before returning home and finding she’s sitting at the table waiting for him. Every following time he manages to off her she comes back stronger and angrier, each time trying to off him before he can off her.  Woven into this tale is the story follows the tale of a family who get hold of some tickets to see a famous hypnotist (above, right) as he performs his amazing 1 Million Yen challenge – if the audience member chosen is not affected by his skills, he wins a million Yen. Sadly the father of the family succumbs to the magic and begins to believe he is a chicken. Sadly, before he can be changed back, Assassin Vinnie Jones pops up with his bumbling translator and demands to know “What is your purpose in life?” before killing the hypnotist, thus leaving the father a chicken for the rest of his life.

However, as with all these bizarre films, there’s always plenty of other storylines to follow. Yuko is a woman working for an advertising company who continually throught the film comes up with rediculous ideas for adverts. We the audience are then shown these ideas (through a curtain with “What the advert Yuko is thinking about” written on it) before cutting back to the story and Yuko giggling.

This film is great if you’re prepared to sit back and accept you’re not going to understand it. The subtitles are well written and the entire cast gives a convincing performance (even chicken man). Well worth a watch for fans of Pulp Fiction.