Hypnotic Bird and The Marvel Bullpen School of Blogging

I don't want to devote much brain power to blogging today so there's this:

ITEM! A strange, hypnotically repetitive pigeon with chilling blood-red eyes that I filmed at Maruyama Zoo.

ITEM! I've been dropping down something of a well of Japanese pop culture. After years spent assuming that Neon Genesis Evangelion was the kind of impenetrable saga that I'd be better off leaving well alone and sticking to my own impenetrable sagas (oh Clone Saga, how I love you) I've finally watched some of it. And I really enjoyed it! In a way. The main character is a scrawny high-school kid, who is comically... nay (unintentionally) hilariously angst-ridden, and who is piloting a giant robot in order to fight off possibly celestial threats that are bent on wiping out humanity in order to win the approval of his unfeeling father. It's fairly ham-fisted, but if you're going to have a giant robot vs. giant monster slug fest, you might as well do a disection of human insecurities while you're at it. Also, while the series seems to have been going forever, they've actually just been telling the same story again and again, progressively refining it, changing the plot and improving the animation. I'm glad I can just jump into the new movies and not worry about the original series which was completed, revised, the revisions postponed, remastered, released as one film, then two films, then...

ITEM! Also I've been picking through a bunch more Japanese hip-hop and finding a bunch of good stuff (easily outweighed by the bad stuff admittedly, but still, the good stuff's really good). Kreva has such a great flow when he's on, I wish he would stop making R&B. And man, he's making autotune sound bad. And I'm finally listening up on M-Flo, since I always dig Verbal's verses for the Teriyaki Boys, and I was talking about him being a deranged prince of fashion. However, it turns out... even princes can make mistakes - like on this early best of:


I don't know what happened there, I can only assume he was drawing on his eyebrows and got a little playful. Then someone jolted his arm. Then he ill-advisedly ran with it. Christ.

ITEM! I found a new American rock band I like too - Self. I'm blown away by a few songs on each of their albums, and that's enough to get a thumbs up from me. However I read a bunch of posts about them talking about how they're indie-rock, or pop-rock or electronic-rock (absolutely not). Genre discussions are just a terrible, horrible idea in any situation but seriously, people - this is Power-Pop. And people wonder why Self kinda failed - Power-Pop doesn't sell! The best you can do is Fountains of Wayne, and they're still pretty humble. The fact that Power-Pop is entirely about feel-good spirit lifting joy and yet it still doesn't sell is one of those mysteries of the ancients that I've always wondered about.

News From The Zoo

What the hell's been happening?!!?

I know, and I can hear those two exclamation marks hiding between the double question marks of your cry. No need to get pushy. With all this time and still no blog posts? Alex, are you really that much of a mess?

Well, yes and no. See the end of my contract has coincided with summer finally arriving in Sapporo. Until now it was like rain for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now it's heat, hotness and a sizeable side order of sweltering. I don't function very well in the heat. Scratch that - I hardly function at all in the heat, and I'm very lucky to live in Sapporo where this season is relatively brief. Also, my new appartment, stoked though I am with it, tends to turn into something of a furnace in the afternoons when the sun comes roaring in. So, in the heat my brain doesn't work, and when my brain no work I no writey-writey the blogs.

However I'm still doing some stuff! Like going to the zoo! This is the second time I went to Maruyama Zoo and it looks a lot better in the summer than it did while the snow was melting away in March or whenever I went last time.

This time I learned the following:


Tapirs used to fight underwater duels with giant fish that were so terrible even tigers cowered whimpering on the land. At least, I think that's what this is about. I didn't bother trying to read it. Also you can put your face where the fishes face should be and pretend like you're having a battle to the death with a Tapir. If your face is really tiny. Oh, like a child! Of course.


Tigers are pretty much big pussy cats. Until they eat you.


This crow swooped in like... like a crow to steal a seal's lunch from off a rock where he'd left it. Evil! The last laugh went to the seal though, because the crow promptly put the fish on the next rock and it fell into the water. Can crows swim? Not as well as seals that's for sure!


This mynah bird was brave enough to eat from anyone's hand, and I thought I remembered that mynahs can speak and was about to ask the bird-lady when she started to explain that mynahs can speak to some kids. They tried to coax it into saying hello, but no dice.

New Roomie

No sooner have I moved into my new appartment than I get a new room-mate:


Jesi is covering every inch of Japan that she can before she flies back to the states, so this leathery blighter has come to stay with me for a while. His real name is Kame-san, but while he's staying with me I'm calling him Dinosaur Jr. Isn't that right Dinosaur Jr?


Shut up, I put you behind the chair where you can't even see the TV. Anyway I'm a little sad to find that he doesn't really do any tricks, unless you count being able to kill a man when dropped from a fourth storey window as a trick. As soon as my new place is tidy enough for him to walk around without hiding in some impossible to reach nook I'm gonna dry him off and let him walk around. And hope that Jesi's right that he has no taste for human toes.

Wonders of the Zooniverse 2 : Maruyama Zoo

A recently departed (for dear old Blighty, not for the next life) friend left me a season pass to Maruyama Zoo, the zoo that's actually in Sapporo. I've been meaning to go there since forever, so this was all the impetus I needed to finally head down. Of course, one of the things that had made me hesitate a great deal before was that almost everyone I talked to about it gave me the impression that it... pretty much sucked. I had this mental picture of something like the Edgbaston nature reserve that I used to walk past on my way to work; or possibly just a three legged giraffe leaning against a tall shack in a muddy field. Well, it should come as no surprise that people were sorely underselling the place. It's certainly not a patch on Asahiyama Zoo in terms of... well, being good, but it's got a lot to recommend it.

For example, at the moment it has baby polar bears:


They're the big star attraction since they were born recently, and their first appearance (yes, it does feel like a show) before the public was only a couple of weeks ago. They're impossibly adorable, and move like toddlers dressed up in bear suits. Which, y'know, isn't impossible. That photo also illustrates one of the things that people are bang on about with Maruyama Zoo - it's really pretty shabby. There are some shiny new areas, but on the whole there's so much chipped and peeling paint that it's a miracle the animals aren't filling their bellies with the stuff and dying off in droves. It looks like Otaru Aquarium in that respect, but I like both places, I can't say that the lack of a lick of paint is anything that bothers me too much.

One thing that does bother me about Maruyama though is that that animals' areas are nowhere near as big or well designed as Asahiyama. Before I went to Asahiyama I worried that I'd feel sorry for some of the beasts, which I did because they're in a zoo at all, but they were kept in big, well thought out pens so they didn't go crazy. In Maruyama, especially since some of the animals are cooped up inside because they can't hack the chilly Sapporo winter (which still hasn't died), they look really depressed and bored. They have some awesome big lizards and tropical apes, a much more interesting selection than Asahiyama, but they look really cooped up. I felt especially bad for the loneliest mandrill, alone in its cage and brooding on a branch. And the orang-utan quarters were just depressing in comparison with Asahiyama's.

Still one of the things that they absolutely nailed was the shiny new wolf enclosure.


That guy was just pacing back and forth the whole time until he was fed. He put his paws up on the glass too, as if testing it, and you just know that to him that viewing screen looks just like a microwave that never goes off. There are all these moving, edible things just on the other side of this invisible wall and he can never get to them. It was interesting to see the the wolves being fed, the girl would eat pretty much from the keeper's hand through the bars, but the guy wouldn't come close, the keeper had to hang the meat on the bars and the wolf snapped it up and carried it away. It was a bit weird to have the macabre wolf pelts up on the walls though.

All of the tropical animals were inside too because it's still too cold for them outside, so we went into this vast, cavernous animal house. I was so excited to see this next guy that I almost grabbed some old fella's coat thinking he was Yuki:


Fuckin' Tapirs man. They're awesome. My other favourites included the komodo dragons (which weren't man-eating size, but were still pretty awesome), the macaques and the sloth bear that looked like a huge matted ball of fur sleeping on the edge of a cliff.

Also there were tortoises. Y'know:


Doin' it.

The Pipsisewah and the Skeezicks

BAM! BAM!

Who's at the door?

Why it's the Pipsisewah and the Skeezicks.

Of course.

From Animal Comics #4, 1943

Animals EATING Other Animals!

Check it out:


Pretty sweet, huh? Allow me to elaborate. Every week I have to find a topic for a discussion class and write a bunch of vocabulary and discussion questions about it. I basically trawl through a bunch of newspapers and online news sources until I find something that people can talk about for an hour and have at it. Luckily all of the British broadsheets are comprehensively represented online, and the BBC is an invaluable resource, so I can usually find something good although sometimes it takes me bloody ages.

A side result of this is that I've become pretty analytical about the style and level of English that the various newspapers use. Since I'm setting the articles for second language learners, even when they have excellent English understanding they can find flowery, idiom strewn prose really difficult. Because of this I have to basically steer clear of the Times and the Guardian, which are both fabulously well written, but just too acrobatic in their grammatical construction. The BBC is always simply written, partly because it's aimed at an international audience; and as a friend who studied some journalism pointed out to me ages ago, the Independent is generally pretty badly written, but not incomprehensible, so I can often use that. Interestingly the paper which I find most reliably well written, but pretty simple is the Telegraph. I mean, I wouldn't read it back in England, but for my purposes, as long as I avoid politics, it pushes the students' vocabulary and grammar without completely flumoxing them.

This week, hunting through the Telegraph site for something I could hang a discussion on, I was checking on the most read articles and noticed that today's no. 5 was "Giant spider eating a bird caught on camera". That's cool, I can understand how that could make no. 5 any day of the week, but then I clicked through to the top 5 for the week. "Giant spider eating a bird caught on camera" was at no. 1 for the week. Now, what with the US election and the global financial meltdown we are hardly in a slow news week, so that raised my eyebrow, but then, when I clicked on the top 5 stories for the month... well, guess what is the most read story on the Telegraph website this month. "Giant spider eating a bird caught on camera".

I'm gonna stop snobbing it up now, coz I gotta admit it's great stuff. That spider looks freakin' evil. And when you click through to the actual article you find a veritable treasure trove of animals eating other animals. Seriously it's like some kinda hidden bestial-snuff-porn microsite on the Telegraph server. Shark eats seal (see above). Seal eats duck. Leopard kills crocodile. Heron eats rabbit. Mouse bites snake to death (that one's a doozy).

So check it out, for the love of God. What are you still reading this for? THERE IS A PICTURE ON THE INTERNET OF A HERON SWALLOWING A BABY RABBIT WHOLE. Go look at it.

Return to the Zooniverse contd.

So Andy, what were your favourite animals at the zoo?

Well Alex, I really liked the polar bears of course. We were really lucky because when we turned up at the polar bear museum it turned out that it was feeding time for the bears, so we could watch them diving for fish underwater. It was very exciting.


I also liked the hippo a lot. I wondered if he wasn't a little lonely on his own in his little pool of water. But he had a great big smile on his face and looked really peaceful.


I think we both liked the capibaras, even though they looked a bit stupid. They were relaxing in the same enclosure as the spider monkeys. You wanted to see a spider monkey jump on a capibara, or throw a nut at a capibara, just to annoy it. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.


Your favourites were the gibbons. Those guys could swing about on ropes really well. It was fun to watch.


I almost forgot. Another of my favourites was the seals. They swam about effortlessly like big blubbery torpedoes. There was a big glass tube and every time a seal swam up it everybody went "OOOHHH!" and took a picture. Here is your picture, the seal comes out looking like a blob of light in the tube:


I really did like those gibbons (I think they were gibbons). I loved the way they were trying to find the best way to swing from one rope to another, or the way they would try to increase their momentum while swinging and chasing each other round. And also when one fell on the floor I liked the way his arms flopped down like a stuffed toy.

Return to the Zooniverse

Today we took a day trip to Asahiyama Zoo in Asahikawa. Last time I went it was covered in snow (I wrote about it before), but this time it was warm and sunny, so I had a pleasantly different experience. We should probably go over what animals were the coolest, but here's a little snippet. Recognise this fella?


He's a porcupine right? Except after a thorough survey of two (2) Japanese people, they've never seen or heard of one before. And the Japanese name for porcupine is Yama Arashi, meaning either "Mountain Storm" or "Mountain Destroyer" which is awesome however you break it down.