September 22nd, 2004
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Life without cable never looked so good
Recently I have been sleeping less (intentionally), and waking up earlier. Ideally, this precedes leaving work earlier, but so far that only happens about forty to fifty percent of the time (actually driving my number of hours at the office up). Anyway, I’m awake earlier, and if I’m not watching fansubbed anime’ [currently gorging myself on Chobits], then I’ll click on the networks and see what the rest of the country watches.
News is usually a little too dry for me in the morning (well, almost always), so I end up tuning in to Nihongo de Asobou�@(Let’s Play with Japanese) or more recently Oha Sutaa (a contraction meaning good morning star, I think). This show is wack. I mean really wack. It’s for middle school kids, and it features a different recurring guest character each weekday (today was the painted wrestler hero, Iron Hand). The corporate sponsors consist mainly of Nintendo, some drink company, and Pokemon (Nintendo). I’m not complaining, it’s the way I catch my Nintendo CM. A weekday dosage of the show includes hokey skits with the requisite melodrama, some contests, and the host, Yama-kun, jabbering on with the Star Girls and the daily visitor. Not a bad way to start the day, it almost makes me wish I still ate Captain Crunch. The show has been running on TV Tokyo for about eight years it seems, which is pretty impressive considering how short the halflife for most Japanese television series is (at least in primetime).
TV Tokyo are the lovely folks that brought us Love Hina, among other popular manga-to-anime’ translations, and their web page is just atonishing. Its garish colors and flickering widgets are quite exemplary of Japanese web page design, but it actually does a pretty good job of looking slick in my opinion. I mean honestly, which network would you rather watch?
