Month: September 2003

I am all over the new Mark Robinson album, ORIGAMI AND URBANISM, and what a fitting title for this site. Get thee to the TeenBeat website and order this as fast as humanly possible. While you’re there, also order his excellent CANADA’S GREEN HIGHWAYS. This came as a total surprise this week as I had no idea he was coming out with a new album.

Edit: Actually, the album was not released on TeenBeat Records, the label started by Mark Robinson, but rather on Tomlab. You can order the CD from their site, as well as download two MP3 tracks from the album.

From Japan Today:

People who give their store a French name don’t worry about the meaning. All they care about is how it sounds.

– Jean Dacher, head of the French department at Nova, on the current trend for many retail outlets to adopt French names. (Reuters)

This is so true, you see it everywhere. And not only does it often not make sense, but it’s often spelled wrong or grammatically incorrect. Really, if you have enough money to invest in starting up a shop, you’d think you could spend a little more time making sure that the shop’s name is at least written correctly (I don’t feel like meaning is that important).

An anime series based on the game GUNGRAVE is going to be making its debut on TV Tokyo October 6 at 25:30 (which is the Japanese way of indicating after midnight). So that’s what will be replacing LAST EXILE, which ends next week. Looks like it might be good.

Satoshi Kon’s MILLENNIUM ACTRESS is getting distributed in North America through a new Dreamworks label called Go Fish Pictures. They’ve just launched their site.

And in other Satoshi Kon news (from AICN):

Satoshi Kon, whose anime movie work has included Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress will be writing, producing, and by some reports directing TV series Mousou Dairinin, which will be airing on Japanese network WOWOW this February.

Oh yeah, a new comic hero for our age. From Yahoo! News (click on the link for the whole article):

A newly published comic book depicting the bizarre life of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Il has proved a runaway success with Japanese devotees of manga cartoons.

Oh man, Andrew W.K. was just on WARATTE II TOMO. He was participating in a game with the regulars where they show two images, and one person says the Japanese word, and Andrew and a bandmate had to guess what it was. Everytime he got it right he was freaking out, jumping up and down and headbanging, and you could tell that the girls in the front of the audience were kinda scared. It was so funny. My wife had no idea who he was, and just thought it was an average gaijin they had on the show for the game.

The numbers are still going up on this site, and I’ve added an average of about 200 daily visitors this month. I found this out while checking out the stats for the first time this month, and got surprised to see that I was already getting ready to pass my bandwidth usage quota. I’m presently going through the process of upgrading my service, but if the site goes down before then, rest assured that it will be back up quickly.

I don’t know where this comes from, but at the WBCD site you can download a bootleg trailer for KILL BILL. It’s a mix of cheese and good stuff, and shows off somes sequences I hadn’t seen before. The countdown continues, only a few more weeks until the release…

Link via Arne Schmidt.

Another reminder that you should be checking out Ziboy‘s photolog of Beijing. We might be heading back there this winter.