Sad resolution to childhood mystery...

For years I had nightmares about certain scenes in this show, without remembering it was a cartoon I actually saw. It's crap and not scary at all of course, but pretty gruesome for something ostensibly for children. what's annoying me is that it could have been a great mystery, one of those weird memories that you're never really sure about. the last time I flicked through as many 80's cartoon intros as I could find I was looking for this, almost frantically. When I didn't find it, there was a sense of genuine spookiness. It felt a bit like having seen something unique, unrecoverable, something from somewhere else. I knew it had to be a real cartoon, my own memories are never traditionally cell-animated, but maybe, just maybe it wouldn't be what I thought it was. But of course it wasn't. I came across it and there it is, just an 80's cartoon with a bit more gore than average.

The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.

Every reality show ever...

Well if that doesn't stop you flattering yourself about the idiots you keep watching, I don't know what will. That's the sad tragedy of the ironic viewer, you're really watching it because you like it, even though you won't admit it. I think celebrity news should just be part of the whole main event anyway. Knowing that there's a weird twitter-based argument between two people you haven't thought about since '98 going on at this very moment is usually pretty uplifting, coming after the natural disasters, financial doom, political instability and random acts of senseless violence that make up the bulk of it. It's even a great all-purpose palate cleanser. Try this after a hard day's work and encroaching misery: Type [celebrity name] fight into google to end up somewhere fun. Who knew Nicole Kidman's bodyguard punched some guy?

I was right...

A while ago, I mused that Currently popular recording artist Kesha was going the same route as Katy Perry before her, lackluster follow-up singles, a dearth of performance chops when not supported by lavishly over-produced songs and the inevitable cheesiness of casual celebrity murdering the artistic impulse. This SNL performance with nonsensical alien interlude is the definitive proof. Insecure looks to stage right, where there must be some kind of person in charge of this looking on. It's almost like she was just released from the record company kennel and tossed in front of the studio lights for the first time ever. It's a shame really, for a moment I was beginning to believe the manufactured 'I don't give a shit' attitude she was peddling.

Statuesque

Fantastic. Only in Japan does a cartoon get enough respect to merit a statue. It's kind of tragic how many statues there are of forgettable politicians, religious leaders and lame abstractions of universal concepts, and how little of fictional characters. The only one that springs to mind is the statue of Peter Pan in London. There ought to be more. There's an obvious reason why fiction is a lot more inspiring than reality, it is meant to be a story after all. But why this disqualifies the average fictional character form their own statue is beyond me. It's not as if a representation of a 19th century statesman makes as much of difference to a park as imagined. Unless you make a study of it, would you recognise a statue without reading the inscription? I think it's absurd to think of a representation of a figure in reality as less real than a representation of figure in fiction. The existence of the statue itself is an attack on the authenticity of the figure.