What the heck kind of file is that? It wants me to download plug-ins, then says they aren't found.
Never mind, it works in safari. For once.
I find your choice of what words to craft into links unorthodox but intriguing.
The subtitles were Chinese but the superimposed script was Japanese. It must be a Japanese thing about "those wacky Chinese" or maybe a Chinese thing about wacky Japanese.
Otherwise it looks very midwestern USA.
The constant commentary was in Japanese, so I imagine the original was Chinese.
The death of innocence, the birth of sticking your foot into the air.
Japanese characters use Chinese characters (kanji) mixed in with their own alphabets (hiragana, katakana). The writing was in Japanese. Those "crazy Japanese" and their inane variety shows are only really made fun of in the crazy US.
11 - turning Japanese? I really think so.
That video had nothing to do with Mesopotamia whatsoever.
Yeah, but the subtitles were pure Chinese, readable as Chinese. If I could slow it down I could probably translate it, more or less. I recognized binomes and patterns.
That video had nothing to do with Mesopotamia whatsoever.
I guess it's no loss that it didn't load for me, then.
That video had nothing to do with Mesopotamia whatsoever.
That's Er.
14 - my bad. Chinese it is. They probably were (jealously) making fun of it. The two Chinese boys must be on hiatus.
That's Er.
Not true. Er is the guy who comes back from the dead with a convenient eyewitness account of divine justice but accidentally loses the polaroids that would've proved it to the world.
There's more than one Er.
Back in the old days, when Er was walking about and Ur still existed, there were fewer things in the world, which is why all the names were so short. It was only later that people had to start using longer and longer names in order to account for the plenitude of objects.
20: My complaint re: Ur-with-a-U still stands. Also, Er-with-an-E sounds completely lame:
"And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er. ... And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him."
He doesn't even get a forbidding tale of plague and rape tossed in there; God gets mad and kills him in two verses. This is Cliff's Notes Christianity here.
Quite a lot of the kings had stories like that. So and so did evil in the sight of the Lord and perished.
Looking more closely:
The voiceover refers to the ankle-biter as "Botaro," undoubtedly a Japanese boy's name. The bigger, more colorful text (and the weather and title up top) is Japanese, while the smaller, more uniform text is Chinese. Though I can't really read the Chinese, it contains characters corresponding to "Botaro." So I conclude it's video taken in Japan, broadcast in Japan, then subtitled for broadcast in China.
So: Botaro, thwarted agent of the patriarchy, or earnest victim of a feminazi?
25: Neither. Earnest victim of the patriarchy. Poor kid. Whose bright idea was it to set a three year old up to enact some stupidly gendered courtship ritual, anyway?
22: That's Cliff's Notes Judaism, thank you very much.
Or, "Cliff's notes Judeo-Christianity". (This may actually be the only sort of Judeo-Christianity on offer anywhere.)
28: Not alliterative enough.
He's just a little kid giving someone flowers. I'd be willing to bet he's the little brother of someone at the recital.
It's not a stretch from there to courtship ritual, but it's not the sort of thing that's going to make me thrust my finger accusingly as I cry that this boy's tears would not have occurred, were it not for the patriarchy! He's a three-year old. They're lucky he didn't decide to moon the camera because he tired of wearing pants.
But why did all the commentators have to laugh? That isn't funny, that's sad!
33: Perhaps it's Chinese people laughing, a sort of schadenfreude at the Japanese boy's misfortune, after years and years of Teh Nippon Agression.
Japanese hosts on variety shows have to practice endlessly to repeatedly laugh that hard at embarassing moments, so you don't have to feel so insensitive for wanting to.
That isn't funny, that's sad!
I thought it was precisely the cackling that gave it the quality of a nightmare.
the directors know it's kind of abnormal. that's why they included the man in the screen corner looking like he's going to bust a blood vessel. he's letting loose the repression for all of them (oh the power of television!). only we over here think it's crazy; to them it's abandon!