I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BABYMETAL – メギツネ – Megitsune (2013).

My friend Lar introduced me to this colossal mash-up known as Babymetal just yesterday, and I am utterly hooked by this completely fabricated band.

The visuals absolutely make this song what it is, because without seeing it you probably can’t imagine what is actually happening.

This song is a super heavy thrash metal song.  Even when a hyperkinetic keyboard riff gets laid over the top of it, it still maintains that thrashy sound.  Then three junior high school aged girls start singing.  In Japanese.  The lead singer has a great voice that fits in very well especially around the 90 second mark when the song gets very catchy and swerves into a pop metal vein.  The other two sing in very high-pitched, only-in-Japan voices.  Some time around 2 minutes she starts screaming (heavily processed) adding a  whole new dimension of noise to the song.  And we all like the break around 3:12 which has a brief spoken word section (man I wish I knew what she was saying).

And so this winds up being a meeting of death metal and J-Pop.  And your mind will explode when you watch it.  The video shows the three girls doing their best kawaii–being adorable, in school girl outfits–while headbanging.  And the musicians behind them are all wearing masks and playing traditional Japanese-looking obi and drums while shredding like maniacs.

Everything about this is so artificial that I just love it.  Looking for any info about them, really all you read about is the three girls, there is no mention of the musicians who play amazingly fast and precise shredding guitars solos and can also switch gears into pop and (on some other songs) dance and rap.  I have no idea what this song is about, but I am totally hooked on it.  I imagine this will be a passing phase, but man, what a fun one to get hooked on.

[READ: March 3, 2014] Stick Dog

C. wanted me to grab him this book at the library and then proceeded to devour it in a few minutes. Then he suggested I should read it too.  So I did, and I devoured it pretty quickly too.  Obviously the precedent of the Wimpy Kid books is at play here–a short funny book that combines paragraphs of text and simple drawings, but this story doesn’t really have anything really in common with the Wimpy series.  Because this is all about a dog.

Stick Dog lives alone in a tunnel (but Watson assures us not to feel badly for him).  He has four friends: Poo-Poo (C. loved that name) who is a poodle; Stripes, a dalmatian; Karen, a dachshund and Mutt, a mutt.  The very simple plot of this story is that Stick Dog and his friends want to steal hamburgers from a family picnicking in the park.  That’s it.

The joy of the book is listening to Stick Dog (the smart ones) and his friends (mm, not so smart) try to figure out how to accomplish this task.  Watson prefaces the story by explaining that he could just write “woof woof” but it’s much easier for everyone if he just translates it into English for us.  The dogs are easily distracted by squirrels and garbage.  But when they put their minds to it, they come up with over-elaborate plans (and are offended when Stick Dog points out their lack of common sense).  And just as they are sure to go on a plan that works, Karen gets lost in the tall grass, and the others spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to best remember her.

Poo-poo who is possibly the dumbest oft he four does have a keen sense of taste (and was once able to differentiate between kibble and bits).  He gives very funny description of the bag of chips they discover.  Being a shaggy poodle he also winds up with all kinds of things in his fur.  Stripes has never told anyone about the Nacho Grande Incident which is why she no longer has an owner.  Karen just seems to think she is bigger than he is (especially when she wants to do elaborate stunts).  And Mutt is just full of wild ideas.

How can five dogs steal burgers from a picnicking family?  There’s more than one way–but most of those ways are pretty dumb.  One even involves them stealing a car.

This book had a lot of fun set up from Watson as well.  As the narrator, he is a young kid.  He talks about what his teachers expect from him in his writing (which is long sentences–and no pictures), but he’s not easily swayed by that kind of talk.  He also acknowledges that the drawings are not very good (they’re actually very good at conveying an awful lot very simply).  And he does interrupt the story once in a while with some funny asides.

While I didn’t find this as funny as Wimpy Kid or some of the other books that C. has enjoyed (I think having an entire book with such a simple plot is a little limiting). I thought it was very clever and quite funny–especially if you have or like dogs.