Absililtly Gorejus

The LIGHTNING ROUND

As I have been bad about posting, I decided to throw one of these multi-topicers out. Sort of like fishing with dynamite.

1) Title - It's been very nice weather for the past few days. I have one picture that I'll share in the next few days that documents this lovliness. I'll try to get a few more. The actual words are a poor attempt at making "Absolutely Gorgeous" resemble something that Krazy Kat might say.

2) Great gig - We had a gig Sunday morning at a local grade school that has been just about my favorite job so far. It was very focused on the neighborhood so the crowd wasn't huge, but it felt very friendly. It was close to the base so travel wasn't tough and we didn't use up a whole day. Finally, before we went on we had some time to look around at various vendors. The pounded rice vendors caught my eye because they were actual pounding the rice in the back. Pounded rice turns into a very doughy kind of substance that is then used (in it's gooey state) as sort of a replacement for pastries. The pounding is done with an oversized mortar and pestle where the mortar looks more like a wooden sledge hammer. When they saw that me and my buddy were watching, they insisted that we took a turn at slamming the rice. Japanese culture is big into being a good sport. You're almost expected to take part in these public spectacles for the enjoyment of others. This is why karaoke is so big over here. Knowing that I did play the good sport (supressing my natural timidity of course) and took my turn at the pounding process. Afterwards they let us sample our handiwork for free. Very cool.

3) Tightwads - I have about 3 copies of forms and agreements that were signed by me, my recruiter, my commanders, etc., etc., but the U.S. Army still doesn't want to pay me my enlistment bonus. It's getting re-fricking-dicu-dern-ulous. I'll hopefully have it ironed out by the end of the week.

4) ...Thanks to Superman - I finally got around to watching the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons (courteousy of brother Joe). These were paramount studio cartoons made in 1940-2. Some excellent animation and some good action stories. The DVDs are terrible. Image quality is okay, but this is from a publisher that decided to add their own sound effects to "modernize" the cartoons. That's bad enough, but then they use public domain sound effects and just throw them in any way they feel like. It ruins the audio mix, makes voices difficult to understand, and covers up some really nice music. I don't usually say things like this, but I can't imagine anyone doing this unless they were stupid. Whoever was in charge of this project...I hope your company goes bankrupt and you find complete hapiness and fulfillment in a new job far away from the entertainment industry.

5) The MMO bug bit. I never thought it would happen, but alas, here I am.

6) Back to Highschool. The band is working on a marching show. Every year they participate in a big marching show at the Budokan. It's one of the biggest shows we do and one of the oddest. I seriously thought I was done learning drill movements when I left UNL.

7) Japanese...the language without a spell checker. I started taking my Japanese language class this week. I think it will be fun and I'll learn quite a bit. I've learned most of the Hiragana alphabet by sight, but still need to drill it quite a bit to make it permanent. Speed will then come with time. Related to this, walking home I realized that it's almost impossible to mispell something in Japanese. Everything is chunked out into easy syllables already. If you can say it, you can spell it and be completely confident. No hidden vowels, double letters, or rules and exceptions to worry about. Just a few more symbols to memorize.

Alright. All for now. I'll post soon when I put up some more flickr stuff.