You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Japanese TV, Remakes, Work

Google continues to amaze.

Without Video Google, how could I have seen clips from the program "Morning Musume"? And if I hadn't seen them, how would I have known just how close to reality the "Mathew Magic" clips in Lost in Translation were? I mean, here's a chinese whispers drawing game, or girls with pork-chops on their heads tempting a giant lizard (and being freaked out), or watching a really freaky clip from Ringu. Given how scared some of the girls appear in some segments, I'm surprised that they come back; but then again, there seem to be bits where they pretend to be cats. I guess you have to take the giant black guys and random English lessons with the visits to horror houses.

***

To follow from the "music redone in different styles" thing of my last entry, I've stumbled onto the soundtrack of the game Stubbs The Zombie, which takes a bunch of alt rockers (like the Ravonettes, the Flaming Lips and the Dandy Warhols) and has them rock out on 50s-era tunes such as "My Boyfriend's Back" and "Mr Sandman". According to the Amazon review, the standout track is Cake's "Strangers in the Night" -- given that they've already done things like this in their regular releases (I'm thinking of "I Will Survive" and "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" on Fashion Nugget), it's not that surprising.

Why I don't understand is why movie remakes don't take this approach more often -- Clueless is a perfect example of what I mean. I guess one big difference is that the length of a music track is measured in minutes, and the number of people involved doesn't normally run into three digits; people aren't going to devote a year or two of their life just to see if "Dancing Queen" works well as a ska number. (I think it would, by the way, but that's neither here nor there.)

Of course, it could be argued that if they change genre or setting, then they often don't call it a remake. And sometimes they call it a remake even when it's more a sampling -- the new version of The Italian Job has a similar relationship to the original that Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby" had to Queen's "Under Pressure". Wait -- is that unnecessarily mean to the new The Italian Job, or to Vanilla Ice?

***

At work, I've been told they want to extend me to April; however, I'm not holding my breath until the contract arrives. Nevertheless, it's certainly better than finishing in November, no matter how good the job market is at the moment. On the other hand, it's a timely reminder that I should polish the CV, and have a look around for other possibilities next year.

Weekends at work seem unnecessarily busy and exciting -- hardware failures, obscure errors being tickled, and so on. I'm doing my best to ignore all of it, since most of it is out of my field, and I really need to get this FileMaker stuff to a usable level. I'm certainly learning a lot; the one thing that I wish I had was a FileMaker equivalent of the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. The format of those books is quite neat: they have a whole heap of entries in each chapter, split into three sections (Problem, Solution, Discussion) which sets out what you might want to solve, how to solve it, and how the solution works (and how to modify it for different situations). Having something like this for FileMaker would be pretty nifty, but I'm not sure whether there would be a market outside of me. :)

I've been writing up some FileMaker tricks and traps I've found on our internal IT wiki; I'm starting to wonder whether I should stick them on a web page somewhere, so that other people can benefit from them. Something to think of in the future, I guess.

Posted by svend at November 13, 2005 11:55 AM