If there are two things I love, it’s Iron Chef (the original from Japan) and Les Miserables.
Well, that’s overstating it a bit, I love them both, but that makes it sound like they are the only things I love. Suffice it to say, I really love them both.
So that’s why I was especially surprised when I found out they were related!
This video, which I have seen several times, originally aired on PBS, and is a production of the music in Les Miserables on its 10 year anniversary. This particular song is “Do You Hear the People Sing?” one of the greatest songs from the musical, and this version is sung by 17 different Jean Valjeans, the performers who made it most famous from different countries.
And then look there — 41 seconds in! The Jean Valjean from Japan — It’s Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef!
Sure, he’s not yelling “Allez cuiscene!” and he’s wearing a much less ostentatious outfit than he normally does, but it’s him!
Let me be up-front about this - the world gets better for the sports fanatic every day, so I’m not really complaining, just amused.
When I was a kid, already a die hard Jays (and Expos) fan, I would get up in the morning, steal the sports section from the paper, and hurriedly skip to the baseball section to see the standings and how my teams did. If they weren’t playing on the west coast, I might see a story about the game (though often as not, given that our paper was the London Free Press the only stories might be about the Detroit Tigers - ew), or maybe all I would see would be a box score. I still love box scores, though all they really showed was the basics of the game (and were poorly formatted for a lot of the stats as well). If the game was on the west coast, all I would see was “Late game” as the report. I would have to wait another day to see the box scores, which would be reported as “Yesterday’s games”.
These days, it’s annoying to have to wait 3 minutes for an update on a game as it’s in progress, oh how times have changed. Sites like Yahoo have portals for each team that show all the information imaginable for them, from stats to blogs to articles and more.
These portals are effectively auto-generated (if they weren’t, the labour required to maintain them would be cost-prohibitive for sure), but although I love them, sometimes the auto-generated nature of them leads to some funny side effects, like the picture shown to the right. Really, they need to add a rule like, “If the leader of a category has the same score as everyone else on the team, how about you show another category instead?”
In the mean time, let’s all keep an eye on Jose Bautista and see if his stolen base leadership stands up!
This is what it’s like when I try to play Rockband at my house. Lance just wants love, and it’s hard to be mad at him for that, but he’s constantly jumping in my lap or nuzzling my bass pedal foot while I’m trying to play. I’m sure I’ll have video at some point.
In the mean time, enjoy this video of a guy playing and petting his cat at the same time. I’ll be honest, the cat looks pretty happy!
It’s rare that someone takes two seemingly unrelated things that you love and combines them so brilliantly.
For people who know and love Star Wars (and if you don’t, honestly, you wouldn’t be here) and Snatch the Guy Ritchie film, you’ll love this - Snatch Wars.
It’s nowhere near as dirty as it sounds, trust me, but the language is NSFW.
At first I was surprised at the choice of Brick Top as the main character for this parody, after all, he wasn’t the main character of Snatch - Jason Statham’s Turkish is - but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s a lot like Star Wars. Darth Vader isn’t the main character, but he’s the evil star of the show with all the best lines.
