TV Time, Blue Kit Kat & Tuna Eyeballs

I've been meaning to update more frequently, but Rin is quite the little handful. In fact, He's sitting on my lap as I write this, drinking milk to his little heart's content.

Since I'm pretty much housebound on weekdays, apart from my daily walk with Rosie, I've been watching a metric assload of TV.
As anyone who's watched Japanese TV can tell you there are basically 4 kinds of TV shows: news, variety, drama and cooking. I can take or leave the cooking and drama shows, but I'm starting to get hooked on the variety shows, especially the quiz shows or the shows with cute animals.

My three favorites are:

1) Nep-league: a quiz show where every week a new celebrity team battles the hosts,( a comedy trio called Neptune) in a series of general knowledge and kanji quizzes. It's somwehow comforting to see a Japanese person mess up a kanji I know. I get to yell "Ha! Baka! I'm a gaijin and I knew that one!" (Pic is the hosts of the show, Neptune)

2) Hexagon: another celebrity quiz show. The second stage is great because the teams have to answer questions while jumping rope at the same time. ()I should have guessed but a GIS for the jump-rope quiz produced almost nothing but upskirt pics of the various female contestants... (Pic is the final round ladder-quiz)


3) Waratte ii tomo :the classic variety show, hosted by Tamori-san, it has celebrity interviews, silly Double-dare style physical challenges and my favorite corner: Dancing Queen where regulars on the show choose the prettiest of a selection of 3 transsexuals. (Pic is the host of the show, Tamori)

OK, Rin is sqiggling and hiccoughing so the Blue Kit Kats and eyeballs will have to wait 'til next time. Goog Niter

Bones: 骨は語る

Our latest addiction is the crime drama Bones. We found it at Tsutaya and we've been watching it every chance we get. We've made it through the first 2 seasons and are starting season 3 tomorrow. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's gross, funny and sappy by turns and the ensemble cast is great. I especially love Dr. Hodgins (third from the right with the curly blond hair).

And in other news...

With all the excitement about the new baby I almost forgot about our other news.

For ages and ages we've been dying to get a new TV since the old one had worn out connector ports making it nigh on impossible to watch videos or play Wii. We had to tape down the cables so they'd stay at the precise correct angle, but if they got joggled even a bit we'd have to do it all over, so we finally just got rid of our ghetto-ass TV and got the lovely red model you see pictured above. It's also digital-compatible, so when Japan makes the switch to all digital broadcasts in 2011 we'll be ready!

We picked up an el-cheapo DVD player to go along with it since season 2 of Heroes is now at the video stores in Japan. (Don't even get me started about the British samurai dude's Japanese; it's rubbish). But Hiro is as cute as ever and I'm happy to see Sylar didn't really croak, he's such a fun villain. Also, did anyone else notice that Bob is Ned the insurance salesman from Groundhog Day? Probably not, but I recognized his voice right away. For some reason Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies ever!

Yatta!

Ok- I know I'm super-late to the party, but I've just recently become addicted to "Heroes". My Mom recommended it to me several times, but unfortunately it was impossible to find in Japan. However, last week when Sho-chan and I went to Tsutaya they had a big Heroes display with all the episodes from the first series. We rented the first two disks and watched all 5 episodes on them in one go!

After that I was well and truly hooked and I went back the next day to rent the next 4 DVDs, then back 2 days after that to rent the final 5. I watched the entire first series in less than a week, and now I can't wait until the second series comes out over here. Of course Hiro is my favorite character. He's so adorable with those little chubby cheeks and those glasses and that childish smile of his. I just want to pinch his cheeks and give hima big hug.

It was interesting to watch the various scenes in Japan, because whoever the set-designer was, they've obviously never been here. All the outdoor sets looked like they came from some weird 1980s bubble version of Japan, and other scenes, like the office cubicles were just plain wrong. (Japanese offices don't usually have individual cubicles they have blocks of desks set up facing each other.) Also a lot of the cultural refernces that Hiro makes (X-men, Star-trek etc.) would be unknown to a Japanese guy of his generation, even a big nerd. I realize they had to use characters American nerd viewers would know, but why not go with Astro-boy or Gundam or Macross something else popular with geeks in both countries?

Also, although Hiro's Japanese is quite good (apparetly he's fluent), all of the other actors' Japanese is bad to the point of requiring subtitles, (apart from his sister Kimiko, who is actually Japanese.) The police "interpreter" in the first episode was especially egregious as was the waitress Charlie. George Takei is stilted but understandable. Ando is obviously trying hard, but his intonation is really weird, which makes it hard to follow him, and since he's Korean he has trouble distinguishing between some voiced and unvoiced sounds. He gets an A+ for effort, though.

Are there really so few actors that can speak Japanese that they had to cast Chinese and Korean actors instead?