Lazy Sunday Afternoon Thoughts

One of the coolest things about living on the 44th floor of a building in the middle of Singapore's business district is being able to observe the flow of human traffic on the streets down below. When I was 6 years old, I'd sit by my window after waking up in the morning and count the cars that drove along Robinson Road. Yeah, everything was exciting back then. On a weekday I'd count upwards of a 100 cars in 10 minutes, easy. On a weekend I'd be lucky to hit 50 on in half an hour.

Today's a public holiday (Happy Chinese New Year, one and all! It's the year of the dawg!) so there's even less traffic in this area than usual. Chinese New Year is one of the few public holidays in Singapore when most (not all, but most) shops are gonna be closed so it's more or less a sit-at-home-and-relax kinda day for me. Well, actually, I'd go out and watch a movie with my sister normally, but she flew off to the UK early this morning- she's gonna be there for the next two and a half months for a training thing- so I took the opportunity to go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to on my Rojo account.

I'm currently listening to Gackt's new single Redemption- it's the theme song for the FFVII spin-off game Dirge of Cerberus (both the song and the game came recommended by the mildly-infamous-on-the-Internet gonzo journalist Tim Rogers). The song's pretty damn good! I'm surprised. I really enjoyed his songs with his old band, Malice Mizer, but nothing the man's done in his solo career seemed very interesting. Gackt's last album Diabolos, in particular, was pretty awful. It's cool to see him finally on-form. I wonder if he can keep this momentum? Well, seeing as how the man is a 400+ year old vampire (I kid you not, go read his Wikipedia entry :p), time is on his side ey?

Speaking of music, I've been meaning to integrate my Last.fm account with my blog and it looks like there's finally a way to do that! Must be a new feature. Coolness. So I've added a Last.fm chart of my most-played artists of the week to my sidebar. As you can see, I've been listening to The Strokes a lot lately. I bought their new album First Impressions Of Earth last week. It's got some great tracks, like opener "You Only Live Once," "Heart in a Cage," "On The Other Side," "Killing Lies," and "Ize Of The World." Though I think their last album, "Room on Fire," was more consistent overall, I really like that the band experiments with their signature sound a bit here instead of just doing the same thing over and over (randomize songs from "Room on Fire" and their first album "Is This It" and you wouldn't be able to tell which song came from which album. They're that similar.).

Back to my Last.fm chart- if you click on it, you can go to my Last.fm page and see what songs I listen to the most every week and also what artists and songs I've played the most overall. Last.fm's nifty, but the charts aren't perfect- the site's software plugin only checks what I've been listening to on my iTunes, but not my iPod. And apparently it doesn't count repeated plays of the same song. Oh well.

I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. So many, in fact, that it can take me more than an hour to go through them all once every 2 days. Well I haven't checked my Rojo for a week so I've ended up with a mountain of unread entries. But I read em all anyway because I never know what gems I'll find in there.

Like these really cool pictures of upcoming Batman Lego figures and sets. The 8 year old me, who was equally obsessed with both Batman and Lego, would have fainted on the spot upon seeing this Batcave playset. Isn't it awesome? I may actually have to buy some of these when they come out (apparently in April).

Another thing I've noticed while reading all my feeds is that everybody's talking about Chuck Norris these days. I hadn't heard anything about the guy since Walker, Texas Ranger (reruns of which are actually showing on TV these days!) which I never really watched anyway. The only thing I knew about the man was that he fought with Bruce Lee, which is actually really cool. But late last year he exploded onto the Internet as a sort of thought-virus. As far as I know, it all started with this page of "facts" about the man, compiled from a thread on the Something Awful forums. Well, the guys who hang out on those forums are nothing if not bizarrely creative, which is why we get gems like "Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing." Or "If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death." Or "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain."

OK I'll stop now. After this one! "The original theme song to the Transformers was actually "Chuck Norris--more than meets the eye, Chuck Norris--robot in disguise," and starred Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger who defended the earth from drug-dealing Decepticons and could turn into a pick-up. This was far too much awesome for a single show, however, so it was divided." Yep. I'm done with the quotes. But that's not all the Chuck Norris stuff I've seen online lately.

It seems Conan O'Brien's gone Chuck-crazy- he's been playing random clips of Walker: Texas Ranger on his show. But the culmination of all this Chuck-related madness (which includes people digging up old Chuck toys, comics , a cartoon series... What? Even Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't have a cartoon show and he was the toughest dude alive in the 80s! Not to mention the 2nd toughest robot, after Optimus Prime, of course.) has got to be this SNL skit about the young Chuck Norris:



It's actually pretty funny, though far inferior to the SNL Narnia rap skit which made the rounds on the Net last year. Both these skits, by the way, were made by these guys. Wow. Saturday Night Live's actually funny again. Anything's possible in TV Land I guess.

There's just one last marginally-related-to-Chuck thing I've got to write about: this video, titled The Ultimate Showdown, on the Flash portal Newgrounds.com. It's a surreal flash animation where Godzilla, Batman, a zombie Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime and several other characters/celebrities (including everybody's favourite Chuck Norris) fight to prove... err.. who's the baddest. Or something like that. Yeah, it makes no sense at all. But it's decently-animated (in a South Park sorta way) and all the carnage is set to a really catchy-song! Ok now I've gotta go away from my PC before my brain leaks out my head because of all this rampant weirdness.