Torley Lives

Didya ever see those Sony ads featuring a blue alien of sorts walking around in relatively juxtaposed environments, like a college campus? Dewd kinda looked like E.T., only a lot blue-er and fuzzier. I never learned his name but I watched those ads compulsively. Apparently, his name is?get this?PLATO. Wow, I just found this out. My question of many years has been answered through the Internet. So here's what he looks like and on occasion he even gets a trim. "He" being a very vague, unstable pronoun, mind you.

OMG THIS IS SO EXCITING, I JUST FOUND THE PLATO CREATION INFO PAGE TOO! Going to download those shorts and watch 'em in a bit?too enthralling! I miss him and I wonder if he's gone back to his whole planet. I don't generally relate to alien characters by themselves in the media, but when they're immersed in a kind of context and all looking strange and outta place, I feel this way too. Looking into an electronics store and fascinated by the blinky lights, or maybe a donut shop and watching how they make 'em. I liked to subtlely sit on a mall bench and watch many walks of life just do that?walk on by. Curiosity compells me. There are times I get the impression I am much more of an observer than a participant, but when I start to snake into a discussion, it is never as calm as I hope it'll be.

I'm seeing it this way: you know those puzzle games (there are some splendidly animated ones at PopCap) where it's a variation on a theme and you have to match X number of pieces to get Y number of points and advance to Z level??And sometimes you get a "bonus piece" that's hard to use or maybe stubborn or incompetent on the wrong light, but you can't waste it or you'll be the fool? And if you use that bonus piece wisely and position it at the right place, right time, it clears a whole section of the board?maybe even a majestic combo?and the screen explodes in a shower of glowing, sparkling crystal clarity. Color everywhere. You know about that? Well, this is me.

I'm not a general-purpose multitool, but for being a specialspecialist, I cover a wide angle of diverse terrain. I can't fix your sink, but maybe I can blow it up and structure it into a magical sucking pipe that reveals the civilization of molepeople living beneath your kitchen. I can't mow your lawn, but maybe if you come with me, we can both find buried treasure at the end of your yard. And no, that's not a euphemism…

It gets to this time where I'd like to share?if you haven't read it yet, as it's quite popular?this very harsh and funny article by Maddox about blogs. I find much truth in his assertations. Many blogs, I get confused on. There are many links and I don't know where to click.?It's often not sensory overload but visual stupidity. This is why I strive to keep my own linky, yet easy to find your way around. (Some limitations in the current Blog-City toolkit prevent me from doing as much as I'd like, so I look forward to upcoming revisions.) I also notice how homogenized many blogs appear, and it's not because they all use similar/same Blogger templates (I like Scribe meself). Sometimes it's the style of writing. Go Google this:

blog?"my life sucks"

There. See? A real pick-me-upper. I also don't see a need for huge margins (with tiny profit margins, as Donald Trump might say). In particular:

If the thousands of mid-sentence links don't annoy you, the long slender columns of text will. Most of the screen on a blog is blank for an imaginary populace of readers still using 640×480 resolution.

LOLEX! Me too. While I know there are websurfers out there using 800×600 and I used to too, into the future we go and 1024×768 is pretty "standard" as far as a commonplace resolution goes. This is why I picked it and make ample use of my screen. I chose one gutter instead of two because I find the latter confusing unless I had a really good sorting reason. But I couldn't think of one, and didn't want to squish body text, so there it is. I have tried to space and breathe on the text to make it more readable, and my use of Georgia stands. Still looking for little tweakin' improvements, always.

Like Maddox, I feel very deceived by the word "podcast". I'd like to take the time to mention that because itself is a nice word. However, what it actually means rankles me like "redundant" or "politically correct": that is,?a lowmind term which could be so much more. Before I knew what it was, I used to imagine it was a new way to use iPods as mobile broadcasting stations and envelope a designated area with a harmonious shower of "sound plants". Or maybe use magical wi-fi wands?no doubt to?come into the equation at one point?to aim music into almost organic hard drives like these game pods. But, to learn these were just MP3s or whatever uploaded to a blog for downloading later on a music player?how disappointing! The drug does NOT fit the face.

If I wuz a vampire, I'd want to be resurrected in a way not unlike Dracula from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Body carved up, bits of vital organs strewn around some ghoulish but really scenesque places to visit, and assembled again with bags thrown atop a pillar of flame. And then I could bounce around and do my teleporting thing while cool battle music played, except not get whipped by a vampire hunting. Oh, and part of the?ritual would involve popping open a bottle of watermelon wine and spraying it all over while braying the Ami chant from "Return to Innocence". Something about an image like that really haunts my dreams.

I've long had a thing for vampires. While not puregoth, it's another hard drive in my server racks and certainly something that comprises the unpredictable, volatile, but ever-so-lively me. There was a time when I was younger and couldn't control my rage as well?or more effectively, convert it into creative productivity?and focused with such dire agony unto myself that my nose began bleeding. These episodes usually resulted in me lying on my back and taking my Mom's "good advice" of putting a freezing can of orange juice concentrate on my forehead. I don't know why that was ever a suggested remedy when I later found that lying back and pinching my nose with a Kleenex and falling asleep (provided I didn't choke in my own blo0d) worked too.

Years after that, I became riveted by the Blade movies (just the first two, actually), hugely because it mixed two of my favorite things: techno music and vampires. Nothing like kicking ass while pumpin' rave beats are pounding out of the speakerboxes and fresh blood is pouring out of the speakers!?I wondered for awhile what it would be like if?traditional?vampyr mythology took some twists like the following:?vulnerable to moonlight, allergic to onions, and the innate ability to manipulate locomotives with great technical prowess. Furthermore, what if silver did nothing particularly damaging but in this canon, fool's silver did? Or even diamonds? Imagine using the De Beers stock to battle the damned undead.

While it didn't go out on such a limb, the cartoon Count Duckula did suggest that the eponymous character had a big hankering for ketchup and that?uh?he was a duck, among several other quirks. The show, when I watched it, had such a gritty style by way of film deterioration and just the sheer style of how Duckula and friends (and some not-so-friends) were drawn. Same with Dangermouse, another favorite although I really can't remember much past the intro sequence. Dangermouse is suggested to have been inspired by Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, who to me is not only King "Longshanks" but The Prisoner. Again eponymous.

Quite often, I'd arrive home from school and watch one, two, or all three of these (and other shows which served to titillate and prod my imagination). One time, I came down with a gross sort of scalp infection, and my Mom (who truely, to this day, continues in her ways) gave me tea tree oil to rub in it. If you've ever smelled that oil, well, then you know you're in for a doozy. Here I was, on the edge of a queen-sized bed and sniffing all the fumes, this almost acrid cloud of woozability, while these shows rolled on. Occasionally I'd drop out of consciousness and go to sleep?for a ten of minutes until my little brother pounced on me or awoke me otherwise?and then the watching process would begin again… until I fell asleep once more.

As it stands, I honestly never watched most of these shows in whole. If it wasn't tea tree oil, it was the chilliness of the winter knocking me asleep and then coming back up again. To increase the probability of these matters, it likely doesn't help that I am narcoleptic?moreso at the time?and dropped off to sleep in the most awkward of circumstances. My memory is a foggy haze of clips of TV, stitched end-to-end. I can recall giant chess pieces from The Prisoner tromping about the board, and invading the castle of the mallard Count, while Zippy and Bungle yammered on about a giant?heliotrope?moon ruled by KOMPLEX. Frogs turned to salamanders, pawns to people,?literal doorways into children's?programmes morphing into gateways into?my own personal?hell with purgatorley 'round the bend.?With, antiestablishment rebellion antics giving way to relaxed sitting in an innertube quicky, breathlessly, take a few steps forward before being swept back and dashed against the rocks?yawns ascend like laughter and jolt me awake once more. Or am I still dreaming?

These disembodied bits have helped?and are helping?me to revive the whole of who I am.

Dan Bloom?helpfully writes in to inform me that the watermelon house I gushed over several days ago is not located in Taiwan, but rather, in Japan! He offers the following explanation from a couple:

This photo is from Japan, not Taiwan

http://www.konagai.org/furusato/IndexGenerator.asp?path=fruitbusstop

Hello Dan,
Please see the site above.
We have found that the photo you sent us is from Japan! Not Taiwan, as boingboing.net noted. You gave them the wrong info. [Egg on my face, Dan!] The bus stop is located at Isahaya City in Nagasaki Prefecture. In this city, there are several fruits but stops (as you can see at the site above), which seem to be popular features there. — It seems that the city government built those unique bus stops to invite many tourists.
Very interesting!
Satoru and Mitsuko, TOKYO

Thanxaroonie, Dan, Satoru, & Mitsuko! Kewl, so there ARE a variety of them.

Just a few days after about musing about Engrish comes a truely gemfilled find. Straight off of a page of MonkeyFilter, I've learned of a phrasebook titled English as She is Spoke. Makes sense to me! But ahhhg, where are the scans of the original edition? It must be quite a dusty relic.?English… really does read like a tome of "alternate English", with many of the words themselves in place but rearranged, like the existence of the language becomes a deck of cards, shuffled and reshuffled until the resulting order makes for a lot of —??s and a few !!!s.

More to the point, I wonder who's actually used this book in a serious capacity without being aware of its?uh?various misgivings. The anecdotes read like magnetic poetry in a blender at times, but one of my faves comes a section of Useful Words as classified into categories such as "Woman objects" (which is surprisingly skirt-lacking) and "Music's instruments". Get this:

• A flagelet
• A dreum
• A hurdy-gurdy.

Uh, not exactly Mr. Holland's Opus, is it? Although such a trio could make for good jigging music to get down to. More suspicious still is under the "Trades" section:

• Starch-maker
• Porter
• Barber
• Chinaman <— WTF?

…

Okay, I've never heard of that last one as a type of job, but if you want to work as a Chinaman (and my Dad most surely was one), be my guest. It gets more and more LOLarious?yew know, if this was some bastardized variant of ol' Tudorspeak, it might not be so charming, but can you imagine a world where everyone speaks like this? The lists themselves read like things you might expect to collect on a journey in a King's Quest game before slaying the evil wizard, and some of the animal names are plain fantastic too: heuth-cocks? Morpions? A sorte of fish?

What a catch of the day!