Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/category/entertainment/page/3/)
I’ve always been a bit of a chicken. I’m easily startled and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m afraid of the dark. The amount of things that I’m afraid of is endless. I’ve always been so afraid of heights that even when going up an escalator, I refuse to look down, or I shut my eyes. But despite my fear for heights, and despite my being afraid of the dark, I have always been interested in crime.
Every time I take a shower, I think about one of three questions:
If it weren’t for the Middle Ages, where nobody did s*** for 900 years, just how advanced would human civilization be right now? Does Anderson Varejao or Robin Lopez look more like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons? Is the club scene from John Wick or the church scene from Kingsman: The Secret Service the better killing spree?
What are we about to do? Determine whether the John Wick club scene or the Kingsman church scene is the better killing spree.
Olivia Lutwak
I’m looking forward to the food. Every year for the Super Bowl, my dad throws a party for which he cooks massive amounts of food. It’s like Thanksgiving, only a million times better (no gross Thanksgiving foods you’re forced to eat out of obligation, no questions about your GPA, no family fights). I always make spicy chicken wing dip, my mom makes brownies and my dad makes two kinds of chili, shrimp and cocktail sauce, guacamole, three kinds of wings and whatever other fattening dishes he feels like making that year. Even now, I still go home every year for the Super Bowl — and I honestly couldn’t care less about football.
I hope everyone had a wonderful break, filled with family, friends, food and anime binge-watching until some ungodly hour of the night. I know mine was. I also got some new anime and manga, which is always exciting. In other news, I’m back from Japan at long last (though I can’t say that I really wanted to leave). Hopefully I’ll be able to continue incorporating my experiences there into posts here on Manga Mondays.
Meet Corinne. She is a contestant on Season 21 (yup, that’s not a typo) of The Bachelor, she inherited her family’s million dollar business, she is 24 years old and she has a nanny. A personal, live-in nanny. On Monday’s episode of The Bachelor, the greatest competition ever invented by mankind other than SlamBall, when Corinne was interrogated by the other girls on the show about said nanny, she launched into an epic monologue about said nanny. There is easily accessible video evidence of this on YouTube, which gives me hope that we haven’t utterly failed as a society, but here’s the transcript:
Raquel keeps my life together, okay?
Last night, people around the world wildly celebrated, in intervals of exactly one hour, the Earth moving past an approximate, arbitrary point in its orbit about the sun. In New York City, specifically, thousands of people stood outside in the freezing cold for more than ten hours to watch a ball move slowly down a short to medium-length pole and then reach the bottom of that pole at the same time as the Earth reached the aforementioned point in its orbit. And with that, we made it to 2017! A lot of people are excited that it is no longer 2016, because a lot of bad things happened in 2016. But, believe it or not, some good things happened too.
Sometimes when people mention the Seven Wonders of the World, for a few seconds I think they’re talking about the Fast and Furious movies. The Fast and Furious franchise has gone from low-budget street racing movies to big-budget street racing movies to big-budget action movies to even bigger-budget action movies. It is a franchise running out of combinations of “and”s, “the”s and words starting with “F” to use for movie titles. It is a franchise that went from Vin Diesel playing a street-racing criminal to Vin Diesel playing an indestructible superhero. It is a franchise so far removed from logic that its chronological order is 1-2-4-5-6-3-7-8.
As a society, we suck at naming things. I don’t really need to defend this claim other than stating that someone decided to name this place “Greenland,” but there are countless other examples. We park in driveways and drive on parkways, whoever named oranges “oranges” is possibly the least creative person to ever walk the face of this planet, there is a car repair shop in the United Kingdom called “Poorly Car Repair” (I swear this is real, click on the link), and the number of expert astronomers that probably signed off on a planet being named “Uranus” is truly quite astounding. Case in point: Last month, we had a baseball team in the World Series called the Cleveland Indians. Sigh.
If you’re ever riding a train in Japan’s Tottori prefecture, you might be lucky enough to ride the “Conan Train.” Which, as it happens, is exactly the same as a regular train, except for the fact that the outside is a giant advertisement for the “Conan” anime (that’s “Case Closed” in America). Why, you might ask, is there such an over-the-top advertisement for an anime in the middle of Japan’s least populous prefecture? Surely the advertisement would reach more people in Tokyo? As it happens, Tottori prefecture is the home of Gosho Aoyama, the author and illustrator of the Conan manga. Thus, it’s not that someone is advertising the anime or manga.
It’s 2016. Donald Trump is the president. Kanye finally dropped an album. The Cubs won the world series. We, as a society, are witnessing the unfathomable before our eyes.