Sad Faced Boy

Merrrrrrrrrrrr

Thursday, July 20, 2006

I got nothing.

I am completely and totally unable to come up with anything new on my own. So sue me, I have a bachelors in Business, that's B for business not A for artsy. Let me give you an example. When I cook no matter what it is that I am cooking I require a recipe. PB&J is about the only thing that I make that I may not require a recipe and truthfully if someone were to come up with a tasty variation of one I'd probably print it out and try it. SG on the other hand can bake any type of pie, cook any piece of meat, prepare any type of ethnic delight all without the use of those pesky recipe's. I'm exaggerating but she really is good at cooking much in the way that she played trumpet in high school. When we were in high school she was in symphonic band by her freshman year and never was less than third seat from Junior year on. When you play in a concert band you have seats where the best person is the first seat and the people generally get worse as you go down the line. It's been a long time since I was in band but I think the trumpets in symphonic orchestra's are split into first, second and third parts. Third parts may be something that exists for the use of high school orchestral groups but that's besides the point. The difference between the different parts is easy to explain, the first trumpet part is high and majestic with all the brass bravado that a composer can write. Think majestic entries of kings, declaration's from angelic hosts on high and that's your first trumpet part. The third part plays much lower and resembles more the honking and hooting of farm animals. The point of all of this is that SG never practiced and played perfectly while I practiced and got to honk and hoot. .


HERMAPHRODITIC PORN, CHICKS WITH DICKS AS BIG AS MINE
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In preparation for Clerks II I went over to a friends to watch Clerks and attempt to suck down as much watermelon vodka before my penis fell off. I actually like watermelon candy with all of its artificial flavoring making it taste nothing like watermelon. The Schmirnof watermelon vodka was true to it's artificial roots as it tasted just like a watermelon jolly rancher. However just because one likes a watermelon jolly rancher once and awhile doesn't mean that one should make a watermelon flavored vodka beverage and then attempt to pour glass after glass mixing it with as many types of juices that one can get their hands on. I'm still not sure if the vodka hasn't potentially given me a sex change. As far as the movie went Clerks II wasn't terrible but it also wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. Sure Randall is funny especially when he makes a super fan vomit on himself after ripping on the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The movie didn't feel as edgy as the original clerks and it didn't feel as polished as "Chasing Amy" or "Dogma". I still love "Chasing Amy" despite Ben Affleck and the ending mainly because it has the single best scene where Hooper (Black guy who is posing as a blank panther like activist but who is actually gay) is talking about his comic book at a panel in a comic book convention.

Hooper: Check this shit. You got cracker farm boy Luke Skywalker, Nazi poster boy, blond hair, blue eyes. And then you got Darth Vader, the blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god!
Banky Edwards: What's a "Nubian"?


Plus "Chasing Amy" had the best Silent Bob dialogue when he is talking to Ben Afflecks character about the girl that he let go. Ben Affleck and the ending aside that was a pretty great Kevin Smith movie.

THE UDF
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A couple weeks ago SG and I went to over to a friends house for a little cookout to celebrate the first harvest of corn. On the way over we picked up some beer at the UDF down the street. Normally we would have gone to this completely pleasant beer carry out that has all the beers that any man woman or child could possibly ever want to consume. Instead it was Sunday and the beer carryout was closed which left us having to go do the unfortunate task of hitting up the UDF. I've never seen a more busy UDF than the one near my house it doesn't matter when you go there's always ten people in line and 2 cars deep at all of their four gas pumps. Realize that I understand that my feelings that this UDF is somehow intentionally trying to get a rise out of me is completely irrational but I never claimed to be rational. What never ceases to turn me into a seething ball of inarticulate rage happens when I attempt to fill up a car at this UDF. It doesn't hurt that the only times I seem to go to this UDF is when I'm driving a car with a questionable amount of gas left which in of itself normally makes me very grumpy shall we say. It never fails too that when I go to this UDF the cars are two deep and the people at the pumps NEVER use pay at the pump. So I get to watch the person fill up their car, then walk into the store and stand in line behind ten other non pay at the pump yahoo's. A process that takes a few minutes now takes close to five minutes and when one is sitting on a car precariously close to running out of fuel you find that the whole situation is like playing pass 100 year old dynamite. You'd think that since I wasn't even buying gas this time that I could zen passed the whole experience but in fact I couldn't. While waiting in line this woman behind me decided that her bag of hamburger buns were far to heavy to hold and unceremoniously plopped them down on the counter and walked away to the magazine rack to check out some magazines. Like WTF are the buns that heavy that you can't hold onto them and is your little monkey brain so small that you can't stand in line without having something to entertain you?

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The tortoise victim and the nut job hare.

You know in those horror movies where there is always some masked psychotic killer on the loose. There is almost always that quintessential scene where he is chasing someone through some remote location where the victim is running as fast as their two little rabbit legs will carry them, hair streaming in the wind voice shrieking in the most blood curdling of ways. Meanwhile back in happy serial killer land our zombie/clown/hockey faced/skin masked chainsaw wielding killer is shuffling his way along with not a care in the world. Eventually our victim gets to a point where they think they are ok when [BOOM] out of nowhere our killer appears again and kills the poor voluptuous victim thereby removing one more big boobed baby from the gene pool. That's ok, if our killer didn't kill the victim I'm sure they would have grown up to have many puppies car pooling them from one beigeburbian home to another in their urban assault SUV vehicle. So really our serial killer is really doing us some good, a blessing in the disguise of an ax wielding nut job.

I've always wondered why our vivacious voluptuous vigarious beauty of feminine grace at the height of their athletic prowess is completely unable to get away from the killer. Are serial killers made of denser things than normal people and in being so much more dense do they exhibit a gravitational pull on their victims? I'm not a big horror movie fan actually I can't stand them mainly because they are like birch bark or dryer lint to my already over active fire of an imagination. The imagination that will believe that almost any terrible thing that goes bump in the night actually exists once the sun sets and the devil and all of his horde come out. There was this one time when I was younger when I went and saw a 3-D horror movie that in turn freaked me out and pissed my mom off for the next two weeks. What can I say.

Up until a few nights ago I would have though that the concept that an older less in shape serial killer would be able to catch up to it's faster prey as being silly. Sure I know about the story of the tortoise versus the hare but that's a childs story my friend. This all changed when making dinner one night I hear a scratching scurrying sound as our fat cat came fly down the stairs, skittered with all four feet moving in a scooby doo like fashion for a moment before continuing it's mad dash into our dining room all the while hissing and spitting like a cobra on caffeine withdraw. It was so fast that all I saw was a blur of beige and grey first and the sounds of the hissing and spitting and growling following her like a sonic boom. WTF, cats are cats. About 5 seconds later down comes the little cat, prancing in a very self satisfied way, tail up raised in a periscope like fashion and a big toothy Cheshire cat grin on her face. All of a sudden I saw the horror movie scene before my eyes and realized that indeed it was possible for a victim to be tearing head long out of control looking for nothing but safety and have the killer slowly plodding along. It happened right in front of my eyes, a reenactment of a horror movie right before my eyes done with cats.

I figure it has to have something to do with the concept of how people can get lost in dense woods. People when lost in a dense forest like environment have a tendency to walk in circles. Seriously I totally heard this on the Discovery channels "I shouldn't be alive series". The explanation, which SG in all of our science MUMBO JUMBO claims is bunk is that depending on which leg you favor your gait tends be shorter on one side of your body which then leads you to walk in a circle. You know when you write that down it really does seem silly, I'm standing by it though because in this country standing by your potentially stupid opinions and beliefs wins you the admiration of others as you are sticking to your guns and holding your ground. So my solution to you potential future victims of the world if you find yourself being chased by a crazed killer with a mask made of [fill in the blank] keep your eyes forward and find the furthest thing in the distance and run to it and when you get to that thing find another thing further ahead. Each time you reach whatever thing you are walking towards be sure to look behind you to make note of your previous navigation point and of course make note if said nut job is still there. By doing this you will if nothing else avoid getting lost and potentially running into your killer and scaring the shit and potentially the rest of yourself out.

On a blog note it seems that SG has found another gem of a blog that goes by the name of Mimi Smartypants. I have no idea where SG finds these things maybe she is tuned to frequency of blog. If anyone got that reference to the long ago canceled T.V. show "Night Man" then I feel for you as I'm sure you too have been through quite a lot having seen just one second of that show. I am thoroughly enjoying the reading this new blog and it may in some way have something to do with the fact that she reminds me of SG. Granted that is if SG drank like I did and actually wanted kids. Anyway this woman is funny and I find her strangely easy to relate too, so no guarantees if you like it either. Bon Appetite.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Infinite energy like a gummy bear on a bike, a gummy bear whose bike breaks.

I write about work because I have nothing else to write about and sadly it's what I do for most of my day. I wish I could say I was taking photographs, driving fast cars, speaking Russian, slaying vampires and other things English/Irish/German playboys do when they aren't working but low to the lowest I sit in frigidly cold office staring at a monitor all day. Actually I do have something else but we'll get to that in a bit. Today a survey at work was sent out asking us about job satisfaction.... yeah you know what we like, what we dislike, what we would like changed, our comments and what not. Normally I'd ignore the survey as I tend to ignore all surveys on the principle of the "what's the point" principle but this one is right up my alley. We shall see how anonymous it was because for once in a review I pulled no punches and started hitting like Mike Tyson during a domestic violence bender. There's was a point where I got a little worried as knowing that this was my company they weren't expecting anyone to actually list so many negatives and that by writing so much it would cause the survey to explode and crash the webserver thereby causing an alarm with my IP listed in the message. That would be great. I did realize something that I left out and wasn't sure if it would be ok or not if I could drop a suggestion in the suggestion box asking if I could have another hit on the survey as I left off somethings. The suggestion box too is anonymous so I might get away with it.

I've come to realize that my relationship with my job is much like the relationship between a married man and his mistress. Here's how I see it, Sprockets is so full of false hopes, like the promises a married man makes to his mistress that he is leaving his wife. You can see how great we could be how we could go gangbusters on everyone and really make some money, but the reality hits you every time when you realize he/she/it isn't going to change and that they are just stringing you a long like a chump. I really have no idea if that actually works or not but it at least sounded good last night.

On to that other thing, over the weekend I got to experience a little bit of the cycling sub culture but without the jersey's and spandex crotch padded pants. A friend of mine while stopping by to get his farm produce asked me if I wanted to do a local bike tour in Licking County called "Land of Legends". In the amateur cycling world it seems there are these things are called "tours" you know like the "Tour de France" but without the doping and the mountains and the French, nasty cheese eating wine suckers. A "tour" as far as I can tell is just another word for a VERY long bike ride. How long? Well the one we did was called a "metric century" which gets it's name because it is 62 miles or 100km, see 100km, metric century, century = 100, C, etc, etc? Ok you get it. There was another called the "century" which is 100 miles and there were some shorter ones but my motto has always been "If it doesn't hurt it's not worth doing." The tour started at the Newark Licking County YMCA with registration starting at 7am with most riders starting anywhere from 8-8:30am. Newark (aka Nerk) is about an hour or so away from Columbus so that found me waking up on a Saturday way before I normally wake up for work and strangely I woke up nearly a half an hour before my alarm clock went off. Now if I can only master that same technique with work I'd be doing oh so much better, maybe if work was MORE painful it would get me up.

Earlier in the week I was telling intern1 about the tour and he got this snooty marathon face on and said "62 miles isn't that far, it shouldn't be that big of a deal, I've ridden [fill in the blank number of miles] miles before what's another [fill in the blank number of miles]." See the intern is a tid bit loony he's training for a marathon and has ridden some 24 miles at one time on his mountain bike and sees no problem with tacking on another 38 miles. See except here's the thing, just because I can run 6 miles doesn't mean that 18 miles should be a breeze. In reference to breezes the description of the tour on the sign-up sheet mentions a hill 13 miles into the race called "Dragoo Road Hill". It gets the honorable mention because it is the hardest hill of the day and once you finish it the rest of the day will be a "breeze". My assumption however poorly made was that the rest of the course would be relatively flat as it said the "rest of the day would be a breeze". When I think of breezes I think of cool breezes blowing across tropical blue waters, sailboats plying the water to their next destination and me sitting on the beach with a giant painkiller in hand. Breeze equates to easy in my book, easy does not == me wanting to throw myself into an oncoming pickup. Let me check my math though:

62 miles + 1 giant hill + numerous other hills for 35 miles.

No, that isn't a breeze. Had I known that the man who wrote up the description was the president of the Licking County bike club and who in his spare time enjoys long bike rides up steep mountains in Colorado then I would have realized that for him it probably would have been a breeze. Dragoo Hill was everything it was hyped to be being, .5 miles of climbing hell that reduced me to the speed of a slow walk in the granny gear tingling limbs an and overwhelming desire to vomit. Coming down however was a bit more exciting as we hit a top speed of 41.6mph which ain't too shabby for a bike. The first stretch of the course ended at 24.5 miles where we got to stop eat PBJ's, fruit, various crunchy foods and drink copious amounts of gatorade. The next bit as I found out later is about 30 miles of nearly continuous hills and valleys. Apparently in cycling there is the holy grail of hills called "rollers" where the speed that you gain going down them allows you to nearly cost all the way up the next one. There were no rollers. At about mile 33 I hear a [plung] and realize that a spoke just broke on me. The good news is that this isn't my bike it's a borrowed road bike from a friend, the bad news is that I am in the middle of nowhere and the only phone number for the people organizing the event gave me voicemail. Shi~t. Why not ride the bike you ask? Here's another little one of life's hard earned lessons, road bikes rims are apparently under so much pressure that when just one measly spoke breaks it can cause the rim to warp. My rim warped so badly that the rear tire was rubbing on part of the frame, game over man, finito, owari deshita ne.

Luckily the people I was riding with were able to go ahead and find a SAG vehicle to come pick me up. What does SAG mean? That was one of my many questions I got to ask as I rode in a couple of different SAG vehicles in my planes trains and automobiles like journey back to the YMCA in Newark. The best definition I got from the people I met between the two vehicles and the three checkpoint stops is that SAG stands for the people who "sag" behind due to either physical or mechanical failures. Other questions? Well apparently Licking County is called "Land of Legends" due to it's Indian legends, high concentrations of earthen mounds and it's natural accumulations of flint. The flint thing I think is important because it wasn't always so easy to find and the amount found in Licking County brought tribes from many different areas to trade.

My second SAG driver was a guy by the name of D who turned out to be a really interesting guy. D was born and raised in the heartland of Illinois and currently lives in Licking County because he still loves being near to the farms watching the crops grow. He graduated with a PHD in drama from Otterbein and taught their briefly before realizing he would never be able to afford to send his kids to the place where he taught. He got an MBA from OSU and did interior store design in Columbus for a few years before starting one of his own companies doing the same thing. His third company made durable tablet like PC's for delivery truck/utility type vehicles. He got the idea to do them when he did some market research and figured out that with the electrical utilities that were just becoming privatized were on the verge of spending large amounts of money to update their computer systems in order to make themselves more efficient and potentially profitable. The tablet PC's that he was making turned out to be the key and while the military and other's bought some it was the utilities that bought them by the truck load. His last company was founded around the production/distribution of computer fuel injectors for ATV's and motorcycles. The thing that got my attention was that they wanted to write a software interface that someone could run on their PC and use it to tune the fuel injector. The reason was that the injector would change the optimum settings for your engine and without a piece of software to talk directly too the injector you would be stuck using pieces of hardware to do the job which weren't as effective. So D went on the interweb looked around and found some websites that paired programming consulting firms from all over the world to what you needed and ended up with a team of Russian programmers. D. wrote up some specifications handed them off to the Russians and a little later was given a prototype that looked nothing like what he was thinking. It however gave him ideas of what could be possible and eventually they got the software to the point where it was able to provide a near video game like interface where you could at a glance take all the data generated by the fuel injector computer and determine the best settings to use. How cool is that, it's actually a mini software project that actually worked, people writing up specifications, describing functionality, someone else coming up with a prototype, discussion, revisions and a final intuitive product. Everything Sprockets doesn't do.... sigh but a programmer can dream you know he can dream.

This cycling has put the road bike bug in me now all I need is $1200 and a pair of S-E-X-Y spandex pants and I'm good to ride on the streets with rest of the cycling loonies cycling next to drivers pay more attention to their radios and cellphones then what is going on around them.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Bowling alone again on the Fourth of July.

Well'p another holiday has passed and again it has been an SFB first. First what? First no going to a fireworks display that's what the first is. I'm sure some of you don't go and that's nice really I applaud your lack of desire to go out and celebrate our countries independence you Commi pink bastards. I think I just called myself a Commi pink bastard but that's ok my excuse for not going to any of the festivities was that I wasn't feeling very festivous. Festivous non Funous. I had one of these wicked sore throats that probably started after my Chariots of Fire run I had last Wednesday. Unlike Chariots of Fire I was NOT running with a beautiful elongated of a gazelle but more of the stumble of a three legged dog. I was wearing a white shirt though... a white undershirt.... SEXY! I call it my Chariots of Fire run because I decided to try out a new route which takes me from my house down into a nearby park, along a bike path and then up to a major street that the path parallels. The run is only about four miles but is still no small potatoes for me as the most I generally run is three miles on a treadmill in a environmentally controlled gym. Besides running on a treadmill is nothing like actually running as the treadmill has a tendency to propel you forward while sadly the ground does not. So on Wednesday I start running and I get to the point where I was supposed to turn around however at that point I decided "I'll go a little bit further". Well a little bit further became a little bit further until I ran nearly four miles one way which isn't bad as I had met my four mile quota for the run sadly I had that return trip to do. My second super power if I was allowed to have one would be transportation, instant transportation to any location just by thinking it. The first super power? The ability to blow my farts into a soap like bubble and then gently push them towards unsuspecting people. Sooo.... Yeah.

It was on the return run that things turned nasty and not in the way in which you want someone to treat you nasty, nasty like God oh God I'm going to die and potentially shit myself Nasty. It all started when I noticed dark bluish black rain clouds were blowing in with streaks of lightning lining them like veins of electrical gold. They were across the freeway a little ways off so I figured I was good, but of course I figured wrong. Sheets of rain started coming down and after that hail the size of small BB's began falling on my head and if that wasn't enough the Ent's decided it was time to shed some unwanted pounds. Yar. At one point while running I had so much water flowing down my head and into my ears that the music playing from my earphones sounded like I was listening to music underwater. If that wasn't bad enough I thought I had maybe shat myself without realizing it. A not so well known fact about running marathons and other distances that most people consider only worth traveling unless they are burning some sort of fossil fuel is that marathon runners have been known to shit themselves during a race. Since my longest run was about four miles I figured my body under the stress of my Chariots of Fire run had crapped itself and that along with looking like a drowned rat in a soaking wet see through undershirt that I now had a stream of liquefied poo traveling down my leg. After repeated checks to my leg and visual checks to my junk I realized that in fact I was just smelling dog crap and that I was ok. Soo I figured maybe I caught a cold from that, but most likely it was a combination of that and inhaling too much lead infused paint dust due to the fact that my disposable mask has now been used some umpteenth times. Disposable. See I know it's disposable I am just unwilling to throw it away.

No fireworks for me then, no parade either but I had stopped doing the parade thing a few years earlier. Something about no floats, little league football/soccer/baseball championship teams riding on the backs of various convertibles, flat bed trucks full of high school alumnus and some marching bands that really just don't do it for me anymore. I do remember there being more floats by the different neighborhoods when I was growing up and maybe this is just another bit of proof supporting Robert Putnams theory that we as a society are becoming more and more isolated and maybe like everything else things seemed better when you are a child. There is some merit in the bowling alone theory from my own perspective, I don't belong to any civic associations or clubs I barely know the neighbors who live to either side of my house and while I see my parents it is by no means on a regular basis. How much of this is due to the fact that I am a programmer and how much of it is due to the proliferation of video games, Television, Tivo's, computers is unknown however I think the culprit above all these other things could very well be something much older. Air Conditioning probably started the isolation from one's community, sure it's great but the minute everyone got it people started closing their windows and sitting in hermetically sealed bubbles. I can't imagine living in Ohio without AC but I do think there was probably something to everyone having their windows open and sitting outside or going to the pools to avoid the heat. Then again I'm sure family vacations in the family truckster with no AC and no interstates is often nice to talk about if one never went through it.

Anyway no fireworks. We could have had people over but the state of our kitchen and the fact that our dishes technically homeless due to my last and final white whale home improvement project made it all seem that much less appealing and I was feeling sick . Work sucks I'm sure that everyone knows this by now but I just got one of my favorite things of ALL time happen to me. This person walked into my office today and was like "So we are already to go with XYZ?" No you bucket of monkey urine we are not ok. How hard is it to grasp the concept that YOU, YOU must create a ticket so that I know that there is something for me to do. This coworker just assumed that when they gave me print outs of the latest specs a month ago that in the language of retarded Gorillaz with two digits missing from each hand that it meant "Worky now these yes?" Fuckers. Deadline? ASAP. Shiiiiiiiit. I'm think I'm going to call off dead next week. The silver lining in all of this however is that deadlines mean almost nothing at Sprockets I will have more than sufficient time to get this stuff done but you know it's the lack of thought that counts.

While browsing the web the other day I found an interesting article on "The Straight Dope" about what would theoretically happen if you were casually thrown into the vacuum of outer space. Good stuff, I have no idea how trustworthy the contributor of "Straight Dope" Cecil Adams is, I mean I'm sure it mentions it somewhere on there what he does I just haven't gotten around to the whole reading of it because reading gets in the way of me doing other things like sleeping. I love sleeping... though I keep getting less and less of it. This morning I felt like someone had picked me up in the middle of the night carried me to the top of my roof and dropped me over and over again just to test if gravity was still working.

Monday, July 03, 2006

For example you be the noodles and I'll be the soup.

I've been meaning to mention this in a post but what can I say I'm a little lazy. About a week ago I got an email from a friend of mine with the subject "quality Japanese television". Upon opening the email I found a URL too a video segment on YouTube. The segment was about a Japanese comedian calling himself "Hard Gay" who dresses up in a leather bondage outfit and walks around Tokyo doing various good deeds. "Hard Gay"? Yes "Hard Gay". I'm not saying he calls himself "Hard Gay" in Japanese I'm saying he calls himself "Hard Gay" in English but instead of "Hard Gay" it comes out more like "Haadu Gay". Who is "Hard Gay" well if you want the long version you can go check out Wiki, if you want the short short version and I know everyone likes a good quicky now and again I'll tell it to you now. "Hard Gay" is Masaki Sumitani who also goes by the names "Razor Ramon", "Razor Ramon Hard Gay" among potentially others. He is one of the many comedians in Japan who either has their own variety show or has their segments shown on a variety show.

JAPANESE CULTURAL CONTENT

The whole thing, err well not the leather outfit and the pelvic thrusting but traditional Japanese comedy dates back to a Japanese style of comedy called "Manzai" where you generally have two guys standing up talking and exchanging jokes. The "Boke" says stupid things and the "Tsukkomi" corrects the "Boke" in a berating fashion and in many cases hits to the "Boke". The style dates back to the Heian period (~800 - 1200 A.D. ) a time when the Emperor actually had power and books like "The Tale of Genji" and "Sei Shonagons Pillow Book" were written. That last bit didn't have anything to do with the rest I just thought it was cool that the comedy style still popular in Japan dates back more than 800 years. If you want a western analogy I guess Abbot and Costello would be a good match. The modern style of Manzai came out of Osaka after WWII and with the help of T.V. and radio became the dominant style. That's enough, if you want to read more about "Manzai" and "Owarai" go to here.


Again what does all this have to do with "Hard Gay"? Nothing. Seriously nothing, I just thought it was interesting. Fooooooooled you. For whatever reason variety shows are all rage in Japan, sure they have dramas, and comedies and all that but it seems like it's mostly variety shows. The topic of variety shows is varitous, shit must I tell you everything. There are lots of variety shows about food, traveling, traveling to places to eat food, food fights, music and food, rock stars eating food, music, comedy and music, comedy, etcetera, etcetera.. There was this one show on when I was studying in Japan that was called "Yoshimoto Chogokin" and it was about these four comedians who I think were out of Osaka. This one episode they would take random people off of the street and put them in front of the camera. They would then have them drink a bunch of milk and then have each contestant try to keep it in their mouth while each member of the comedy team would then try to make the person laugh. They called it Milk Fight or if you want GYUNYU FIGHT-O.

The first thing that you are going to notice when you start watching these "Hard Gay" clips is that periodically subtitles in Japanese will appear. Why do they subtitle something in the same language that they are speaking? Why do I keep watching SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Why do I call SG with all of my stupid questions, Why is my Brain Age only at 40 and why doesn't Brain Academy understand the word blue? Shit who knows, this is Japan remember. My assumption and this is just an assumption mind you is that it is to give extra emphasis to what is being said, kind of like a verbal bolding. I imagine this falls into the same category as using katakana (Writing system used to write foreign words and concepts in the Japanese syllabic system) to write Japanese words in written materials or using English in advertisements. Another question you might ask is why doesn't anyone react to an over 6' tall man walking around in a leather sleavless shirt, leather short shorts, sporting a leather hat and sunglasses pelvic thrusting. Huh... I don't know either. I can't even fathom it, but I do love it. And I don't just love it because it's one of those things where you say "Those wacky Japanese what will they think up next" I just think it's damn funny.