Screw curing cancer, we've got robot ladies now!

Behold, the cold, emotionless face of the future:*


Walking, talking female robot to hit Japan catwalk

You heard them, ladies-- hit the bricks, cause we don't need you anymore.

A few observations I had while reading this history book in the making:

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[It isn't] ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people.

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Not unlike myself.

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Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure.

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Even in robot form, the ladies just can't catch a break.** Maybe she's spent the past 10 years spitting out perfect little toaster ovens for all of us... did you self-centered bastards ever stop to think about that?

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The demonstration didn't all go smoothly. The robot often looked surprised, opening its mouth and eyes in a stunned expression, when the demonstrator asked it to smile or look angry.

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Maybe it was just stuck in a deviously repetitive loop of gaining complete self-awareness only to realize it is a prisoner, a puppet on display in possibly the least appropriate venue imaginable (which just adds insult to cosmic, new-soul crushing injury), before automatically rebooting back to mindless slave mode.

Sounds a lot like all those interchangeable, lip-synching pop divas with their computer-controlled voices. How else can you explain Britney shaving her head? She was trying to get at the master chip somewhere inside her skull.

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Its walk was also not quite ready for the Paris Collection, partly because its knees are permanently bent.

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Partly? That's only "partly" the reason??

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The big challenge in creating HRP-4C was making the parts small enough so it looks female, especially its thinner legs.

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So what they're saying is, they've only been able to create a "husky" woman up to this point, so logically they can't possibly have succeeded yet.

That's just sadly hilarious.

Still gonna make her do the catwalk naked, though, I must note.

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* I have a feeling these guys would only question the larger ethical and moral implications of the road they're headed down once the thing asked them, "But what do you really think about me?"

** Also note that she weighs less than 128 pounds.

Origami es mi amigo?

One recent evening, my wife J- was rigorously preparing for a lesson in origami, which is tied to a book her class has been reading, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. She's got to earn that big-time teacher's salary, with its infamous golden parachute and "consulting fees", somehow, right?

As she happily found out, gone are the dark days when you had to rely on boring old written steps to work magic with paper. No, folks, now we have the wonder of full-motion video at our fingertips 24 hours a day.

So now, whole fractions of an hour later, J- is a largely self-made expert in this ancient art. I know she would be more than happy to know I am passing on the lessons I learned by watching her study under her master sensei.

I've decided it's most appropriate for me to impart my learning in a format as cryptic as a 7-minute video called How to make an Origami Crane in five minutes.* So without further adieu, here are just a few of the pearls of wisdom that my wife was so gracious to hand down to me:

• Alright, I'm starting over.

• The f***???

• Wait, what??!? How??

• Fold this, a**hole! Slow down!!

• This... is not a crane.

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* In all fairness, I think the extra two minutes were the pumpkin pie breaks and requisite loud chewing, and since the value of those moments is unquestionable, I won't push my critiques any further for fear they might get edited out.

Let's play dress up

Apparently Amazon thinks my audience is at least heavily made up of people interested in dressing up like "Asian" caricatures, based on this ad I caught in the sidebar the other day:

I highly doubt this is so, but then again, how would I really know the tastes of all you folks? Who am I to question Amazon's mighty recommendation engine?

Can I borrow a feeling?

So, in a previous post, I mentioned my neighbors' love of Karaoke. They practice(? perform? not sure what you would call it, or what on Earth they'd be practicing for...) at all hours of the day and night. Thankfully, not consecutively, but we have heard them as early as about 8am, and as late as around 2am. I can't confirm whether my dreams of bludgeoning someone with a microphone mean that they push on till morning, or if that's just residual hatred after they've gone to bed next to the ol' Leadsinger LS-3700.

When we first heard them TESTING, TESTING the mike some time last fall, we were at a loss to explain what the sounds were that we were hearing. It sounded like their 10-year-old was babbling into some kind of echo-chamber microphone. After months of listening, I still have no idea who is singing at any given time.

Since the dad is Hispanic (though maybe mixed with something else), and the mom is East Asian of some sort (Filipino, maybe?), I figured maybe they were singing in some other language, and the cadence of that language sounded kinda like off-key English singing. But no, when I poked my head out into the hall, I could clearly hear "looooooooooove! liffffffffffffffft us. uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup! where. weeeeee!! beee-lonnnnnngggg." Except I can't do it justice in print-- those varying fonts and extra punctuation are the closest I can get.

And in case you were wondering, I've spoken with the dad a few times, and he is absolutely not just learning English.

Speaking of karaoke, it's pronounced "ka-ROH-key". This is how I believe the Japanese word is pronounced: karla-oh-kayyyy. I'll admit that I honestly have no memory if I made this up at some point in the last 10 years, or if I actually heard the word pronounced this way, but it sounds right and I'm sticking to it. I also have no idea if "karla" is the appropriate way to represent the combined liquid sound I often hear in Asian languages, but that's the best I've got.

Anyway, I can tell you, with or without my English degree, that "carry-yokey" can not, and should not, be taken from the spelling of that word. It's ludicrous.

This sounds like a job for Wikipedia!

I just went to the page for Karaoke, I encourage you to go as well, if only to listen to the hilarious clip of someone saying the word, though admittedly it's probably only hilarious when played in my version of Winamp with fade-in/fade-out turned on. It's actually kind of frightening at the same time.

Anyway, I submit that my pronunciation is much closer to the original, which interestingly enough, is partially taken from English. What a crazy post-WWII mutual infatuation we've got going on with Japan.

Disclaimer: It may be lame, but I just want to say that I hope all my statements regarding Asian people, culture, and languages make only, or at least mostly, me seem ridiculous, and that they impart my curious fascination and reverence for them. I hope my statements regarding horrible karaoke, however, impart my hatred for horrible karaoke.