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Yesterday I introduced my friend Trevor Knudsen, an American living in Japan, to the Carry On movies. He’d never even heard of them. Well, I’m not a fan of them all, but I do think the specific parody ones (Spying, Cleo, Screaming, Follow that Camel, Don’t Lose Your Head, Up the Khyber) remain very funny. So, Trevor and I watched Screaming, Cleo and Spying yesterday. It’s been a while since I watched Spying and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good a parody of the early Bond movies it was, and how well it stands the test of time. Carry on Screaming, however, remains my favourite of these movies, although Cleo has my favourite line (Infamy…).

Someone just linked to the Lolthulhu site from User Friendly comment board. I’d not come across this one before. Great fun.

my response is to wonder “What would Cthulhu do?”. This always gives an easy answer to the dilemma, because the answer is almost always “eat their heads”. Works in just about any situation. Particularly when faced with people like these.
Campus Crusade for Cthulhu: Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?

A lovely way to bring home to smokers the destructive nature of their habit: flickr picture link.

The Now Show included a wonderful piece this week about Net Authority, a group which attempts to claim the right to specify the acceptable use policy for the entire internet. With the age-old cry of censors “Think of the children!” they decry the inclusion of, amongst other things, “materials concerning bestiality, including interracial relationships.”
Among the websites they claim violate their acceptable use policy is that of the UK’s Labour Party .
I wonder if there’s another net censorship site which attempts to get racist material removed from the net. Maybe I can get these groups so interested in each other that they’ll stop bothering the rest of us.

One of the Nippon 2007 committee just posted a brief English email to the staff mailing list. A message to an large list in Japanese would have started with “???” (that’s a made up name, not the name of the person who posted), giving the name of the originator. I’m not sure why this etiquette exists on Japanese lists. Possibly it dates back to when email systems couldn’t hold kanji/kana characters in headers. Anyway, when writing in English, this staff member translated “???” as “I’m Akira”, which in isolation is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Japanese. Unfortunately, in context, it’s very odd English. I had to manfully resist the temptation to reply with one or all of::

“I’m Spartacus”

“I’m Sparkey Tickets”

“I’m Brian, and so’s my wife.”

Bonus points (scored by the lovely Samantha) to anyone who can name all three references.

This brings me to the point of this post. One of the downsides of living in Japan, for an Englishman like me, is the lack of opportunity to make puns and other word play jokes. On the odd occasion when I can’t resist doing so, I’ve always got to explain it. If you have to explain it, it’s not funny. My Japanese isn’t nearly good enough to make Japanese puns, either. <Sigh>

Wired had a fun short article this month. The best quotes preceeding an apocalypse.