Recommended Reading: The Tale of T-Joh and the Unicorn Onesie

Teaser:  Vicky Hurst named Tiffany Joh's unicorn onesie "Sir Cherry Bon Bon" and T-Joh wore it everywhere in the Bahamas.

Read all about it and weep (from laughter).  Just don't pull out your eyebrow hairs.

And Now for Something Completely Different: BerubeWatch Returns!

I don't have a tv that does anything more than play videotapes and DVDs these days, so I'm not getting my political humor fix from Stewart and Colbert (and haven't since we left for Japan in late summer of 2006). Sad, eh? Thankfully, Michael Berube has been picking up the slack over at Talking Points Memo. Now we know why he didn't jump all over my call for him to run as mayor of Blogoramaville last summer....

Super Happy Birthday, Onechan

From Sparkychan:



And Gojochan:



Please, may we have tea and ice cream? Yum!

Meet Carrie Mi

Yet another immortal addition to the pantheon of imaginary people in onechan's and my lives. Her origin story? Basically, she's my strategy for dealing with onechan's desire to be picked up and carried, which manifests itself all too often with cries of "Carry me!" Instead of ignoring her, telling her no for the millionth time, or getting frustrated that she's asking me again, I simply reply, "Carrie Mi? Where is she?! I want to get her autograph!" Usually onechan gets the joke and plays along, as in "Over there, inside that building!" For cases when she doesn't, the tsuma invented Karrie Yoo and Keri Hu. Now onechan has a trio of friends, one Taiwanese, one Korean, and one mainland Chinese, to distract her from wanting to be carried. And for me to use for other purposes. Right now, the three are really good kid golfers, but they could become good artists, or math students, or whatever I need at the right time....

Onechan Tells a Story

Dear Onechan,

Sparkychan and Gojochan just sent me a bunch of pictures they took while visiting Stranger Land in cyberspace. But they didn't tell me much about what happened. They said "Onechan will tell you all about it." So here the pictures are, Onechan. What's going on?

What's Gojochan doing here?



Why's Sparkychan sitting alone? What's Sparkychan looking at?



Are they on an old log? What're they talking about?



Where are they going? Why's Sparkychan riding Gojochan?



Is that an Astro Projection Wagon they're on?



Look out! Wheeeee!



There they go. But where?



Thanks for all your help, Onechan.

Uncle Bill

Paprika

From an email I recently sent to a friend:


I went to see Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" over a week ago. I was a bit distracted at the time, and so had trouble giving it my full attention. But then, it's the sort of movie that's presents difficulties similar to those in "Revolutionary Girl Utena." It's difficult to keep track of just which symbolic/surreal world you're watching at any given moment. In the case of RGU, of course, we've got a film that's retelling a story that's been told twice before in my expansive forms; so there's a problem of condensation. As far as I know, "Paprika" isn't like that. But it's still a challenging film.

I sense that here's a mode of organization that's more Japanese than Western so that one can't simply attend to it through the foreground-action focus that works for Western stories. You need to de-couple from the foreground action and simply let the gestalt wash over you.

Beyond that, we really struck me is how much "Paprika" seemed to be in thematic and imagistic dialogue with other films, including earlier ones by Kon, but also Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "Princess Mononoke"), Takahata ("Pom Poko"), and Oshi ("Innocence"), Otomo ("Akira"). We've got dolls, carnivalesque parades (of kitchen appliances, and frogs), a human reminiscent of Miyazaki's Night Walker (and, in a way, of Akira), and shrinks and detectives (Kon's own milieu). It's quite a collection of "stuff."

Why Mostly Harmless Will Not Be Honoring Acephalous's Call for a Blogwide Strike Action

By all means, though, do leave the poor guy a comment. And if you want to join me in making this a fundraiser for a worthy grad student in dissertation hell, follow my suggestion in the update here. Or don't--I'm happy to take a CitizenSE vacation for as long as it takes!

But Mostly Harmless is a group blog and I would never dream of unilaterally making a decision of this magnitude. Plus it's too much fun for me to stop here with the daddy blogging and the golf blogging and the animation blogging and the plugging-my-WAAGNFNP-blogging blogging--and whatever other kind of blogging seems fun at the time.

To wit: when I get time this week, I'll be doing all of the above, including more Golden Week family blogging, more LPGA not-quite-live-blogging, and more on the American and Japanese versions of The Powerpuff Girls (which I was a fan of long before I became a dad, thank you very much). I may even get around to that sources of my sense of humor series, or TolkienWatch, or warm-up for the May 23rd Star Wars 30th anniversary blogging thing--all of which I semi-promised a while back. But I'm definitely keeping it light here, as I'll being pretty heavy (for me) at WAAGNFNP the next couple of weeks.

Which makes me appreciate today's peter ramus post all the more!

In Which We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled TV Humor Inventory for a Pop Quiz

My stomach has been killing me today and most of yesterday because:

a) I have the norovirus;
b) my WAAGNFNP premiere is today (my time);
c) I invoked Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan in vain over at Is there no sin in it? (aka shirokuma-no basho);
d) I am wracked with liberal guilt;
e) I must bring myself to watch one of the Great (Blogging) Scotts do a Baudrillardean vloggy take-down of Ann Althouse's vlogging;
f) something else;
g) all of the above.

Whatever you do, don't believe Them when They tell you that trying to find fun or humor in being doubled over a keyboard can be fun and funny.

[Update 4/7/06: The answer, for those who were wondering, was f)--my stomach, either being psychic or a time traveller, was in pain from laughing at Berube's Vlogtopia post at the WAAGNFNP's sworn enemies, teh CT.]

I accepted the invitation.

Least Harmless Historical Analogy Evah?

Here's a great way to start a blogspat: claim that someone's historical analogy is offensive--it's even drawn a rather stylish French ex-blogger into the fray. Clearly we at Mostly Harmless must make like The Poor Man Institute and invent a New Blog Award. Because, really, the world doesn't have enough of them.

OK, so I hereby open nominations for Least Harmless [Bloggy Misuse of an] Historical Analogy of 2007. Surely someone in Blogoramaville can top the [Chafe-Kristof-Johnson] Scottsboro Boys/Duke Lax Boys Will Be Boyz II Men nomination from one of the Many Blogging Scotts! Just be sure to provide links to [specific blog posts that offer] analogies and/or [make] critiques in the comments. Nominations close on GNF Day (that's 9 January 2008 for those who have not yet joined the WAAGNFNP). Other rules to be made up as circumstances dictate. [Or as commenters activate more unintended ambiguities. Those things are like, like, no, wait, let me not go there.]

[Update: And since this post does double-duty inaugurating MH's BerubeWatch (which Adrian will no doubt love!), here's yet another plea for the glorious resurrection of Floating Head Professor from the unwashed masses of Blogoramaville. This won't appear first in the hopefully ongoing series when you click on the label to your left, b/c I added it to earlier posts that turn out to have already fit the bill.]

[Update 2/7/07: I nominate this post for Most Ambiguous Award Nomination Call in Blogoramaville. I've added some clarifications (in square brackets) so as to limit the range of ambiguities. For good measure, I've even edited the first update, but you'll have to use some sort of intertubesque time machine to identify those changes! I hear that's all the rage these days.]

[Another Damn Update: Just to prove that blogspats can generate light as well as heat, Ralph Luker has helpfully (if inadvertantly and somewhat nonsequiturly) pointed out that Timothy Burke has already written the rules for judging egregious historical analogizing, bloggy or otherwise. I just wanted to make him feel better, because otherwise he did not come off that well. Plus, doing this gives me a chance to strike ambiguous parts of a supposedly clarifying addition from a prior update--and feel like Glenn Greenwald at the same time. Whee! Now if only we could harness blogspat heat, we'd be well on our way to diversifying world energy sources.]

Ironies and Traumas of the Culture Wars

Somehow I'm trying to get my head around the synchronicity and the juxtapositions that being in Blogoramaville exposes you to.

What does it mean that the latest Weblog/Valve blogspat is happening right as blogospheric debates over the Mooninite invasion of Boston are beginning to take on War of the Worlds proportions? (You don't need me to point you to other more interesting and amusing takes; that's what the [Update 2/7/07: insert "now updated"] blogroll's for.)

What do these rumblings among academic and pop cultural bloggers have to do with the assassination of Hrant Dink in Istanbul fairly recently? (I will link to bloggers Mostly Harmless readers are less likely be reading.)

Why does all this--and so much more of this crazy decade--feel like the Golden Age of the Culture Wars (say, from Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind [1987] to Levine's The Opening of the American Mind [1996], no, wait, from Hirsch's Cultural Literacy [1987] to Berube's Public Access [1994], or, even better, from Kimball's Tenured Radicals [1990] to Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical [1997]), writ large in American and world media culture? Why is Blogoramaville beginning to feel like a huge graduate seminar that's open to (slices of) the (mediated) public?

What's your latest "deja vu all over again" moment?

A Paler Shade of Fire

.FNG a ni demusnoc kcurt a yb revo nur saw enoyreve ylnedduS

***BREAKING*** *** Web Only Exclusive*** ***BREAKING***

By KIRBY ALTHOUSE, Associated Press Writer

PALO ALTO - Cyber-researchers at the Hoover Institution on Massively Redundant Sucking and Blowing confirmed the discovery of an Internet White Hole in a rarely visited corner of the blogosphere. Long postulated, but never previously observed, researchers traced the source of the White Hole via Internet tubes to a much more significant Internet Black Hole that had developed several weeks prior (see comment #287 here.)

Experts puzzled over the interesting transformations that the content being emitted from the White Hole had undergone. While certain images and in-jokes were unchanged, other content was not: danger had become harmlessness; hockey, golf; French, American; and 2001: A Space Odyssey emerged as Star Wars. Other key elements and content appeared to be missing altogether. A pair of shoes was found as well.

The significant mismatch in size and information content between the two suggests that the connections between them have split and fused repeatedly, and that this particular White Hole probably represents a mere fraction of the total energy consumed in the Black Hole. This led some to predict that other White Holes might pop up elsewhere on the Internet in the near future.

The discovery caused a ripple of excitement among some of the giants of Internet lore. When some Pseudonymous guy who sounded like indigenous people who had been portrayed in Earth Island Jo heard of the development, his face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale, and he skated off without comment. An earthtone clad Al Gore, however, greeted the news warmly. “Hot damn”, he sighed, “This is the kind of thing we were looking for back at the start. Now we’re cooking with gas!” Internet tubemeister Ted Stevens (R-Dementia) responded by rushing an emergency Appropriations Bill to the floor of the Senate to fund construction of several hundred bridges to locations in his home state where new White Holes might or might not appear.

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.