I still need to do an update proper, but I’m going to postpone that for a few days yet (I know, I know).
Until then, here’s three of my favorite Salinger short stories:
A Perfect Day For Bananafish.
For Esme – With Love And Squalor.
Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.
RIP, Mr Salinger.
Picked up the New Super Mario Bros. Wii game, and it is ridiculously fun and addictive. But it’s going to take me a while to get up to speed with these “Super Skills.”
In particular, the following is a video-grab of four people playing World 1 Level 3 with the help of Yoshi. If you notice, Luigi is quite lazy!
That was impressive.
On one of my sporadic trips to the outskirts of the interweb, I learned of the striking similarities between Disney’s 1994 The Lion King1 and Tezuka’s 1965 anime series Kimba the White Lion. The so-called “controversy” is chronicled here (kimbawlion) and touched upon here (wikipedia), with the most striking similarity being the whole dead-father-appears-in-clouds-to-console-son scene.
Admittedly, much of the evidence is at times anecdotal. Still, there is enough material there to form a conspiracy theory. From what I can tell, quite a bit of imagery from the Lion King looks borrowed from Kimba, although not much of the plot is. In fact, the Lion King is really more a re-hash of Shakespeare’s Hamlet than anything else – which is itself a retelling of ancient precursor legends (i.e. nothing is original).
But none of that really matters to me. What I love about this controversy is that I finally get the joke in the Simpsons episode “Round Springfield” where Mufasa’s ghost appears alongside the ghosts of Bleeding Gums Murphy, Darth Vader, and James Earl Jones and says:
“You Must Avenge My Death, Kimba… I Mean, Simba.”
Proof once again that the writers for the Simpsons, seasons 3 to 8, were (notice past tense) second to none.
A few months ago my parents bequeathed to me a box containing “things” of my past. Without my knowledge, they had kept everything I had ever done since I was 3 – including report cards, drawings, letters, pictures, etc (my father took great pride in this, which tells you a lot about the man).
Among those files was a story I wrote in Junior Kindergarten – well, co-wrote, as the handwriting will shortly reveal. I want to share it with you, so here it be, in all her glory:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
(The End)!
Inflatable Raptors Mascot
