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My standing joke is that there's a thunderstorm every afternoon about 1:30, and that if it fails to rain you can go to the Ministry of the Environment and get your hand stamped for a free day. That's a bit of an exaggeration; often the rain is earlier or later in the day, and there can even be exceptional days when there's no rain.
This past week has not been exceptional. For a couple days now there's been heavy rains that start right about 1:00 and continue pretty much until dinnertime. It was heavy enough, in fact, that yesterday I skipped dinner because I didn't have my umbrella -- consecutive days of heavy rain don't impress on me the wisdom of taking my umbrella along, which shows the kind of thinking that my brain accepts -- and couldn't get to a hawker center without getting soaked. I made do with a toaster-oven pizza which may not have been good, but which I could get without being soaked.
So I was mildly curious to hear a report from back home, that near my parents there'd been ten inches of rain in just a half-hour. This didn't affect my parents, though; they were just outside Cobra's weather-control machine range, because they were bone dry. I learned from poking around (nobody ever tells me of flooding anymore) that actually it was closer to eight inches, and over the course of two hours, as if that's substantially better. I don't think it's rained quite that heavily here, though ... yet.
A spam sent me came from the alleged name ``Asphyxiating J Pontiff.'' What a ring that phrase has...
Trivia: Before getting into vaudeville, Arthur Godfrey had a job selling cemetery lots. Source: A Pictorial History of Radio, Irving Settel.
Currently Reading: Tudor Historical Thought, F J Levy.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-20 02:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-20 12:05 pm (UTC)Really? Maybe you're thinking too highbrow; I'm just thinking of that little kid's ditty
It ain't gonna rain no more, no more
It ain't gonna rain no more
It's just gonna pour and pour and pour
And pour and pour and pour.
There are other potential verses, about such questions as how in the heck did one get so wet, but that's all I was thinking of.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-20 01:48 pm (UTC)It ain't gonna rain no more, no more
It ain't gonna rain no more
How in the heck can I wash my neck
If it ain't gonna rain no more?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-21 01:25 am (UTC)Hm. That would be a less strained internal rhyme, wouldn't it?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-20 07:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-20 12:06 pm (UTC)It's a fun experience, yes, and I don't miss the freezing rain one drop.
Old-School G.I.Joe
Date: 2005-07-23 02:13 am (UTC)After watching the first of the 10 eps, I think I'm going to count exactly how many times the story Makes No Sense. And I thought the recent "Valor Vs. Venom" CGI direct-to-video had script problems... (despite being written by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens).
--PT in PA
Re: Old-School G.I.Joe
Date: 2005-07-23 02:58 am (UTC)I've thought about going through the stories of cartoons like that and reviewing the stories. There's something gleeful in it. I got a Video CD of some second-season Transformers cartoons that give me that pleasant cognitive dissonance, and the Superfriends volume two -- the year they introduce Zan and Jayna -- are even better. (It's not released yet, but I can't wait until they get to the story where a bad Space Shuttle docking with Skylab and accidentally sends the space station hurtling to the sun.)
While it's been years since I've seen the videotape, there's a five-part Go-Bots miniseries that's really compelling in its badness, for its missed plot points, fumbled story elements, and absolute lack of any building drama. There's just things happening, interrupted every seven minutes for an elided commercial break. And it doesn't even have that much for its fifth part.
The thing that got me -- after the fact -- about the Mass Machine and the Weather Machine was that it was really dumb of Cobra not to try again. Their plans to take over the world failed by only very thin chances and wild strokes of luck the first time around; it'd surely be more effective to try patching up those flaws than go into a weird scheme of constructing a fast-food franchise to plant intermediate-range missiles over the whole United States. Granted they couldn't succeed, from the structure of the stories, but the characters couldn't know that and it shouldn't influence their actions.
I wasn't aware there were CGI direct-to-video movies of G I Joe, although I suppose there's direct-to-video everything these days.
Re[2]: Old-School G.I.Joe
Date: 2005-07-25 03:06 am (UTC)From the deliveries, it sounds like "mass device" (the teleporter) is really "MASS device," an uppercased acronym that was never defined in dialogue. There are, alas, no closed captions to confirm it (as with the "Invader ZIM" DVDs -- the c'captions are copyrighted), but most everything *else* in GIJ was acronymic -- COBRA, HISS tank, FANG, SNAKE.
The individual musical cues are decent enough, but they're edited together in a choppy way. Like the rest, it was probably a matter of time and staff pressure -- though not to the shoestring extent of "Gigantor" c.1965, which was adapted in the US with exactly four voice actors, with an all-new musical score performed by the Radio City Music Hall orchestra during intermissions. (Unlike the Rhino disks, the "Gigantor" ones come with commentary.)
Both the GIJ and TF:BW case-copy feature "special thanks to Tim Finn," who is a TransFan [Transformers fan] of some note, having collected numerous artifacts related to those two 1980s Hasbro-Marvel-Sunbow-Claster productions. (Remember GIJ's "And knowing is half the battle?" PSAs [public service announcements]? Similar ones were created for TF:G1, but never aired.) With no bonus features, I can't imagine what he contributed (though it'd be easy enough to ask).
http://www.yojoe.com/
http://joes.propadeutic.com/index.html
Re: Re[2]: Old-School G.I.Joe
Date: 2005-07-25 04:13 am (UTC)I did like the feel of the original G I Joe miniseries; somehow it felt a lot more natural, even given the super-science premise of the MASS device (and I think you're right, it was probably meant to be an acronym of some kind). The music and sound effects for the 80s show always seemed fine to me at the time, and the couple episodes I've seen on tape or on Cartoon Network since then still seem reasonably well-produced, even given the time and animation constraints. (``Sink the Montana!'', particularly, still hurts in the way the producers intended.)
Marvelous sites, by the way, thank you. The only G I Joe site I was aware of was this Brahma bull-choking list of every anomaly, every color glitch, every everything that went weird on any episode, and included detailed trivia quizzes. If it were easier to glance through it'd probably be the best cartoon reference ever.
I'm afraid I hadn't noticed Tim Finn, but I'm not in the right fandom circles to recognize the name even if I see it.