Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Saturday, April 06, 2002
I admit that I hadn't heard about this local story until a family member of the kid involved posted a link on Metafilter. I really need to get away from my computer more often.
There is nothing on this green earth that could have prevented me, once I discovered it, from linking to The Periodic Table of Comic Books. Yes, I am weak and broken.
So while I've been gathering screencaps from the Hi-Ho Flash animations, my friend Glenn Austin has dug into the mysteries of Hi Ho, and reports in with the following (in clicking on any Hi-Ho related links, if you're using Explorer just click Cancel whenever prompted to install Japenese language components; you'll still be able to be baffled with the rest of us):
Intrigued by the goofy animations, I went poking around the
site. Between my rudimentary japanese and babelfish, I was able to
find their e-cards section, and I generated this little gem:
http://town.hi-ho.ne.jp/cgi-bin/town/ed/sc4.cgi?095529827248974337
It sent it to me in a japanese email, which in mercy for your system,
I won't include. However, here's what the fish had to say about it:
It starts with a link to a flash ad for universal studios japan, at:
http://www4.ynot.co.jp/site/hiho/ad/html/20312usj_g2f.html
and then went on to say (babelfished):
>Hi-ho E card transmission completion
>
>Glenn Loos-Austin[glenn@clotho.com]
>
>To above-mentioned one,
>The hi-ho animation E card of request was sent.
>The hi-ho E card utilizing, thank you for.
>For you to view the E card which you send, please click the URL below:
>http://town.hi-ho.ne.jp/cgi-bin/town/ed/sc4.cgi?095529827248974337
>(Clicking the URL above, when the E card is not indicated,
>everything copying in the URL address input column of the browser,
>please view.)
>
>* As for hi-ho E card Panasonic hi-ho and Ynot Inc. Cooperating, it
>is the service which we have reported. In inquiry, Ynot Inc. From
>you reply. No soldier/finishing please acknowledge.
>
>* As for question * opinion to
>this way !" help-hiho@ynot.co.jp
>
>* Hi-ho E card: http://town.hi-ho.ne.jp/ecard
>
>* Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. corporation Panasonic hi-ho
> http://home.hi-ho.ne.jp
>
>Powered by Ynot Inc.
All in all, I have the following observations/speculations:
It appears to be a goofy mascot for a ADSL broadband service. The
opening animation of the flash says "ADSL, 750 yen a month" among
other things.
I'm guessing the animations linked from your page are either parts of
e-cards, prototypes for e-cards, or independant animations intended
for some similar indirectly promotional purpose.
It seems not too dissimilar from something like the 7-up dots
promotions of a decade or two ago. The relationship to the actual
product is dubious. Had the web existed, I bet there would have been
7-up dot e-cards that seemed as contextless as these do.
So, driven by curiousity, I have translated the subtitles of the
animation that you characterized as "too inexplicable to summarize".
My best effort is:
Hey! Come see! (kids against white)
HI-HO! HI-HO! (kid with microphone)
The mouse dances! (4 dancing mice)
Yes!
With provider HI-HO! (cresting wave in background)
beloved internet, (growing thought bubble)
(as you call it) (-showing other expensive utilities)
HI-HO! (waving computer)
With our cheap plan (computer with flying yen)
we will perhaps even allow (might purse with coins)
your dinner of tomorrow to be (chopsticks and bowls)
Sukiyaki! (picture of hot-pot)
chattochatto (cha-cha-cha)
chattocharanto (cha-cha-cha)
charirarirariraan (la-la-la)
HI- HI- HI- HI- HI- (also could mean Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes)
HI-HO!
Thanks to Glenn, it all starts to make a strange sort of sense. I have even delved into the Hi-Ho e-cards section to make a very special Choose Your Own Adventure Hi-Ho card just for OD readers. No, I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know why the kid's dad seems to be portrayed as a devil figure either.
One last thing, caps of the Hi-Ho Gang, for your Photoshopping pleasure:
Enjoy, and have a good weekend.
Friday, April 05, 2002
Okay, one last post before I head off to the Wisconsin Film Festival for the evening: Ozzy is going to Pennsylvania Avenue. If that doesn't strike your sense of strange, funny, and sad, check out how Rodney Dangerfield is in the background of the photo used by the BBC, yet doesn't even rate a mention in the caption. Poor guy. (Best response to this story on Metafilter: IT'S A TRAP OZZY DON'T DO IT!)
To keep you busy while I'm gone, Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas (courtesy of leuschke.org.)
Check it out: a a blog centered on the CBDTPA and intellectual property laws. I haven't read much of it yet, but thought I'd share anyway.
Congratulations to someone at the IP address 167.218.153.#, who was the 3000th hit on this page. Wow.
The first 'Hi-Ho' Flash I saw was a parody uncovered by fellow Head Mike Flynn, and it looked too weird to be real, even for the Japanese. Then, via Tom Tomorrow's weblog, I found the following:
Wintertime Hi Ho!
Food poisoning Hi Ho!
Hi Ho forest fun!
Too inexplicable to summarize Hi Ho wackiness!
Hi Ho meets Jaws--wacky fun is had!
Hi Ho romance!
Hi Ho fishing misadventures!
Hi Ho saves the princess!
It's a Hi Ho Christmas!
My confusion has no bounds. I even found Panasonic's Hi-Ho page, just to verify there was an official connection. And now I really don't get it.
But damn if it isn't funny...
Dare you ask for her phone number? What could happen? WHAT COULD HAPPEN?!?!?!?!? (Courtesy of a pretty darn reprehensible website.)
In other news, start shooting up the neighborhood and spending your savings, because one of the Seven Signs is upon us: a live-action Underdog movie...
Oh, and this asteroid won't come until after the next election cycle, so don't expect to ever hear about it again.
Thursday, April 04, 2002
Jon, if you haven't already, you should go check out the Kalakala. It looks cool. Rusty, these days, but still cool.
An * blog kept by a Denver Rocky Mountain News columnist who is providing a running commentary in his dying days.
* I stumbled for ten minutes over what adjective to put in this place. Why don't you go read some of it and decide for yourself.
Wednesday, April 03, 2002
It's been almost five days since I posted anything related to the CBDTPA, so here's a great editorial suggesting (likely most correctly) that you will be presumed guilty until proven innocent if it passes.
There are certain things about the present that make me look forward to the future--like Oklahomans deciding to build a spaceport. Don't laugh; read the article, check out some of the linked organizations, and think about what the future might be like if these seeds grow...
I'm not much into baseball, but I love the fact that the Internet and web logging has produced a well-written page dedicated to regular ruminations about the Red Sox. When I do web research, it's exactly the sort of source I hope to find--a microportal of sorts. It's like my friend Smitty says: "You gotta love the obsessed--they may be crazy, but they're at least interesting crazy."
The government would like to sell you some lucky money.
In other wacky government news, Kentucky is thinking about buying a submarine.
Since I activated it a few days ago, Tracenoizer has continued to create clones of me: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11. I think this one in particular freaks me out because it manages to close in on me personally yet use nothing actually connected to me.
Oh--short online text adventure. Enjoy.
And while I think it's been years since Peter David did his best work, I dislike Bill Jemas enough that I'll be picking up Captain Marvel for six months.
Best Google search to hit this page yet--not only because it's a hilariously weird thing to search for, but also because it hits on the first OD entry ever.
I've been asked why I post to my blog so much. Now I have an answer: at least when I'm sitting at my computer I don't get stabbed in the head!
For almost ten years now I've been getting haircuts at the College Barber Shop here in Madison. (That may seem like a long time, but judging by the photos on the wall that show basically the same shop in the 1940s, I'm just a blip in the place's history.) It's a long, narrow room, ten feet wide and forty deep, with a long mirror and a row of barber chairs down one side.
Usually I get my hair cut by one of the barbers (who are both male and female; is 'barber' a gender-neutral word?) in back, but this morningI came in and was brought up to the Front Chair. This is the chair at the head of the line, near the door and the front window, overlooking the most bustling boulevard in Madison, State Street. The barber for this particular chair is the owner of the shop, and when I come in he's usually busy cutting the hair of local politicians, businessmen, and athletes. It's not that I felt any great honor going up there, per se--it just made me realize it was a slow morning.
So I sit down in the chair, which is then rotated so that I'm facing the front window. This is nice, because it allows me to watch the passers-by. The barber stands behind me and goes to work. He had just set aside the electric razor for the scissors when I felt a jab above my forehead. That stung a little, I thought. But no big deal. Just caught by the edge of the blade or something.
So the hair-cutting continues, and I feel a trickle down my forehead. Water, I think; the barber had sprayed me down a few moments ago. Then the fluid drips off my eyebrow, over my cheekbone, and down to my lip. Weird, I think. Salty.
Wait a minute...
The next time he was between clips, I turned to face the mirror and saw that I had a red streak running down the left side of my face! "Whoop," said the barber, who gave me a towel and felt through my hair until he found where he had apparently inadvertantly jabbed me.
So for a few minutes, instead of the minor local celebrities that were usually seen in the front window of the College Barber Shop, the passing workers and students got to see some guy keeping pressure on his head with a wad of bloody paper towels.
These are the kind of strange things that happen to me. They do have upsides, though: after the wound had clotted, the barber went to great lengths to make sure I ended up with a decent haircut, and then gave it to me for free. And now, three hours later, I can feel the slight sting of the spot, but can't find it visually. So I guess my first assessment--no big deal--was correct.
But I'd still rather be here typing than getting stabbed in the head.
Tuesday, April 02, 2002
Thanks to Whim and Vinegar for planting a copy of the Yahoo wants to spam you Google bomb I suggested a few days ago. Why haven't you done the same?
Okay; I've been hit by many Google searches for "nude SSX Tricky" (and now will probably be hit by many more), but this is the first time I've been hit with this one.
Six hours of meetings means no time to update thusfar today. Hurray for the glamour of game development.
Hurray for Jon and the launch of HeroClix! There goes my income...
Monday, April 01, 2002
Carter Beats the Devil is my reccommended book for the month of April. Go read it, before it has to become the book for May as well. Because I'm not taking it down until every one of you has turned in a book report.
For JP, Karla, and other typeheads out there: Typecasting: The Use and Misuse of Period Typography in Movies, as well as another site on the same topic.
Sunday, March 31, 2002
i like archiving.
some day before too long i'll get a DVD burner and start transferring everything to DVDs. and so on, until everything digital i've ever done is stored on a single Zantrovian Mindcube, or whatever kind of hellishly advanced storage device we're using in the not-too-distant future. and then i'll lock that in a 10 meter thick titanium-walled vault deep beneath the sea, and my data will be safe.
Read that on Planet Crap and laughed out loud before I even noticed it was JP. Of course, the nonconformist capitalization should have been a clue...
Did you know that Infogrames has theme music you can download? Apparently they will "rock your world". I only wish I were making this up.
The story about the changes to Yahoo's privacy policy is starting to spread.
There are a lot of upset people out there, but the message is lacking enough coherance to really grow. Blogdex lists four separate links--if they were combined, the story would be number one on the index. What's needed is a Google bomb, so that the story gains higher Net prominance, much in the way that DigitalConsumer.org is the top result in a search for CBDTPA.
Allow me to reccommend the following. If you use Yahoo at all, or if you agree that being sent more unsolicited marketing is a bad thing for Internet users, please place the following text on your webpage or in your Internet posts:
Yahoo wants to spam you.
The HTML code so that it links to the related story (and thus becomes a Gbomb) can be found here (Right-click, 'Save as', and open in a text editor, or open the link in your browser and go to "Source" under the "View" menu to find the HTML code.) Pass it on far and wide.
It's not the most powerful bomb out there (it's not trying to link the words "Yahoo" and "spam" directly, for example), but it's purpose is intended informative and unifying rather than a tactical attack.
Let's light the fuse and see if it works.
It's hard to hide on the Internet unless you share the name of a celebrity, and even then it's not too hard to find information on you that you didn't enter yourself. But to increase your chances of remaining hidden, you might want to check out TraceNoizer.
I tried it, and I now have another homepage that includes stories about when I used to work in Apple Tech Support, as well as other 'personal details' cobbled together from the pages of other people sharing my name. It looks like a typical half-assed Geocities personal page on first glance, though it starts to break down under even casual inspection as the generator repeats paragraphs on a page.
Still, it's an interesting way to increase the noise side of the signal-to-noise equation for someone looking for you on the Net. And, I suppose, it would be an interesting way to plant the seeds of false identities and Internyms...
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