I have something of a fascination for Japanese culture, which seems to my admittedly uneducated eye to be equal parts beautiful, mysterious, and childish. Japanese TV is the greatest, a often baffling exercise in… well, silliness. Consider the following, which seems to be something like the old Candid Camera show here in the US. We’ve got a Spanish speed-walking champion out on the track doing his thing, and a group of phony samurai poised to see if they can get him to break his stride:

I love the dramatic Godzilla/anime-style music as the samurai chase this dude around the track, and the way the speed-walker actually thanks the TV show when he finds out what’s going on, as if he’s thrilled to have had a practical joke played on him. (He says, “Arigato,” which, thanks to the immortal song-writing capabilities of Dennis De Young, we know means “thank you.”) And who would’ve guessed that the Japanese for “stand by” is… “stand by”? Fascinating…

Okay, I feel kind of silly asking, but I’d like all of you reading this to do something for me. It’s like this: I’ve got this co-worker who has built a website for his wife… only she doesn’t know about it yet. For some reason, he’d like to get the hit count up before he tells her about it. Or, in his own words:

…last week my wife had a pretty tough week. And to top it off, she smashed her big toe with a large ceramic pot. So I decided to start building her site.

 

She doesn’t know it exists yet, and I’m hoping to keep it that way for as long as possible. I’d also like to have as many visitors as possible before the inevitable happens and she discovers it. So spread the word, to everyone (except her). My goal is one hundred thousand visits before she finds out.

As of my visit tonight, he’s had a mere 104 visitors. So, if you have a second, click on over there, will you? Just for a second, just to register that the site has had a new visitor. And if you’ve got a blog or friends with Internet access and nothing better to do, spread the word, will you?

Well, kids, if you’ve been looking for a definite sign that the Christmas season is upon us, the picture above is probably it. That’s the giant tree in New York’s Rockefeller Center, which was lighted last night in a televised ceremony that I — grinchy-grinch scroogemeister that I am — did not see. Fortunately, however, our special Manhattan-area correspondent Brian Greenberg was on hand to document the whole thing. Click the photo above to see his complete Rock Center Christmas Tree photoblog, or follow this link here. He’s got some really cool shots of the behind-the-scenes preparations (which I guess aren’t really very “behind the scenes,” since anyone walking down the street could see them, but they’re nevertheless things a lot of people wouldn’t ever see). He also provides some amusing commentary that’s worth reading, so be sure to take a minute or two to savor the text instead of just flicking through the pics. (I loved the story about Josh Groban. See, that’s the difference between New York and Salt Lake; here, people are too polite to tell an opera singer who sucks to pipe down, let alone somebody who can really sing!)

Be warned that Brian’s photoblog doesn’t seem to like Firefox, so you’ll have to use *shudder* Internet Explorer. But that’s alright… there are compensations…

I got out of work early today for the long holiday weekend, and found myself a little taken aback by the unaccustomed pleasure of seeing an entire afternoon stretched out before me with nothing on the agenda. I considered a number of options for what I could do with my free time. I ended up taking the light rail up to the U of U campus and meeting a buddy of mine for lunch, with a detour along the way to the U Bookstore.

I haven’t set foot in the Bookstore in years, possibly not since I graduated a decade and a half ago. The whole experience filled me with deja vu — it’s not much different now than in my own student days, aside from the flat-screen TVs and life-size Master Chief statue in the lobby — but the most evocative aspect of the scene was the music playing on the PA system, a song I remember very well, “Crazy” by Icehouse. Here’s the video:

Two thoughts occurred to me as I wandered among racks of familiar-looking red t-shirts while listening to a band whose name I had to really work to retrieve from the memory banks: can I really have been out of school long enough for the music that was popular when I was in school to become “golden oldies retail ambiance”? And if so, is the Bookstore’s manager simply playing the same damn tapes he had way back then?

On any other day, this epiphany would’ve made me feel positively ancient. Today, though, I was walking around free during my normal working hours, feeling vaguely like a kid playing hooky. And it was just plain good to hear this song again… and on that note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone…