Build Date: Mon Sep 9 08:20:05 2024 UTC
I get the feeling that the Pentagon is the sort of place where after terrorists attack it, you just push over the corpses who have toppled onto your desk and get back to work.
-- Tjames Madison
How Nature Points Up the Folly of Men
1999-05-27 13:11:59
Here's another one of those 'net phenomenon deals that just freaks my shit right out. It's a game. It's a cartoon. It's Hello Kitty with an attitude. It's Pokemon, and it's made for little babies, but ADULTS are all into this shit! Why?!? Please write me and tell me how come.
I mean, it's bad enough that there's the whole "white Japanese" rage in the first place. First it was Hello Kitty, and then Keroppi, and all down the line to Sailor Moon (which is all about pedophilia, come on; they dress in schoolgirl outfits and have superpowers: does anybody think the show would be popular if Sailor Moon and her friends were middle-aged nuns?)
Then it went back to Speed Racer. People love that bug-eyed shit with the grossly overstated occidental features and the ass-simple morality plays contained within ("Here is a bad man! We will fight him because he is evil! Now we are winning the race! Yaaaay!"). It's even understandable on some level that, say, the Japanese fetish for schoolgirl tentacle rape is not. Speed Racer = Fast Driver, and all Americans worship cars and the people who drive them. When Speed wins the race, even Jed Sanders can stand up and hoot because he understands the simpler things in life, like drivin' fast and kickin' ass. You just have to ignore the monkey, that's all. Get past the monkey in the ballcap, and Speed Racer is Seven Samurai for Trailer Parks. Whooo doggy!
But Pokemon is... what is it? It's puerile, it's super-cute, it's made for little babies. The little monsters are adorable. The human characters are generic and bland and overreact to situations in the classic Japanimation eye-popping way. It's mostly harmless, Barney on a Vivarin bender and extracted through a multi-cultural eyedropper. There's nothing to it at all. But it's FANTASTICALLY popular! AltaVista finds almost 300,000 hits on "Pokemon" (including a "Pokemon gangsta site for those who love rap.") This is taken more seriously than that Star Wars crap!
I'm not saying this obsession is bad. I'm just saying it's downright weird, and possibly unwholesome. if you don't believe me, look at some of these sites and then tell me you're not worried about stuff you hadn't even thought about before.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
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SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
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Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
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C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The One I Feel Sorry For Is Joses
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A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
The quest for knowledge never ends at the super top secret Spock Mountain Laboratory, although it is frequently interrupted by beverage breaks. Recently, a team of crack ethnomixologists returned from a dangerous expedition to the frozen expanse of Canada with the much sought recipe for a Spocktail that is destined to replace blunt force head trauma as the major cause of brain damage in the civilized world. (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
On the Implementation of a Grocery Bag And Overforestation Initiative
Patient Joab and his evil cohort, Patient Steve, develop a proposal for the plastic-v.-paper problem that EVERYONE can be happy with. An EXCLUSIVE from Spock Mountain Research Labs! (More...)
