Did you know that wild pigs live on the beaches in the Bahamas and will come greet you with friendly oinks? (Youtube search it!)
Mr. Pig, consider yourself added to our must-see list.
Photo by Cor Bosman
(via laylalovehyuk)
Miyazaki: A Beautiful Mind: Interesting Fact About 千と千尋の神隠し
I’ve noticed that several of my followers are Miyazaki fans, so I thought I share this little tidbit of information with you about Spirited Away.
I always wondered why the symbol “ゆ” (said “yu”) was on the door to the bath house. I asked my Japanese teacher, and he wasn’t too sure so I did a little research.
The symbol is used on the entrance to 温泉 (onsen) and 銭湯 (sento), or Japanese bath houses. The word “yu” is translated to “hot water”. So, makes sense to be on a bath house, yes?
Then I did more reading. During the Edo period, these public baths became popular for men because of women who started working at these communal baths, washing men and selling sex. These bath houses were called “yuna baro”. The woman were known as 湯女, or “yuna”. This directly translates to “hot water woman”. So basically, they were brothels. Guess what the woman who ran this bath house would be called?
ゆばば。
Yubaba.
(translates directly to “hot water old woman”)
Yubaba is the name of the woman who runs the bath house in Spirited Away. If you watch Spirited Away in Japanese, the female workers are referred to as yuna.
Chihiro was forced to change her name to Sen. Kinda like how strippers get names like “Candy”.
カオナシ/No-Face keeps offering Chihiro money. He “wants her”.
THEN I read interviews with Miyazaki. This was all put in intentionally. As we all know. Miyazaki’s stories are weaved with different themes and metaphors. He said he was tackling the issue of the sex industry rapidly growing in Japan, and that children being exposed to it at such early ages is a problem.
To me, this makes me respect Miyazaki even more as a film maker.
And also, frustrates me because so much gets lost in translation, and people see it as this cute childrens movie and this “master piece of animation” (which it definately is) instead of the real statement that it is.
Thought I’d share :).
I told this to my Japanese teacher today. He was speechless for a bit and then said “I NEED TO WATCH THAT MOVIE AGAIN OBVIOUSLY.” Haha.
The poor mother cat kept licking the kittens, hoping it would revive the kittens. According to the family that adopted the stray cat, on the morning of the 11th when they heard thecat’s tragic cries, they rushed downstairs to discover this stray cat’s four kittens abused to death, and even placed in front of the mother cat. The kittens’ bodies were covered with bullet holes, with blood all over. One of the kittens had its neck tied with a rope and elongated, its chest cut open, heart exposed, while the other three kittens’ heads were stepped on.
I H A T E the human race.
As hard as it was for me to reblog this, I felt it necessary. Animal cruelty is just as much a problem as human cruelty. We co-exist with them on this planet, like they choose to co-exist with us. Any human inhumane enough to torture/murder innocent, well, anything… is sick and twisted. I teared up reading this story, no mother should lose their children, and I hope it sends a message. If you sense animal neglect/cruelty happening, please call your local police/animal shelter.
Happy Birthday, Murray Rothbard!
“Murray Rothbard, who left us much too soon, would have been 85 today. Mises died just before Hayek won the Nobel Prize, and Murray died on the cusp of a renaissance of Austrian economics. If only he could have seen all these great developments — the Austrian Scholars Conference, the Internet, the wild success of LRC and Mises.org, the rising generation of bright young Austrians, the Ron Paul phenomenon, and much else. And indeed we can hardly imagine the thunderous cheers he would have received from the hundreds and thousands of young (and old) libertarians who, having first heard of him over the past few years, would have come to see him. Although he never abandoned his traditional typewriter I feel confident we could have forced him onto the Internet, once he realized its potential. And what a foe of the neocons he would have been.
But he left us much more in terms of books, original thought, and inspiration than we have a right to expect from any individual, and that’s our consolation.”
(via anarchyagogo)
Kiki’s Delivery Service did not pass the reverse Bechdel test.
The reason that movies tend to struggle with the Bechdel test is that Hollywood really only allows two roles for women– Protagonist’s Mother, and Protagonist’s Love Interest.
Kiki’s delivery service, in a beautiful reversal of expectations, relegated the men to those roles, allowing this beautiful coming-of-age story to be a general reflection of women’s lives in all their complexities.
There are exactly two men with names in this film– the Protagonist’s Father, Okino, and the Protagonist’s Love Interest, Tombo. (There is a third man with no name, The Baker, who is the husband to Osono, the woman who takes Kiki in. Not having a name, or more than a few lines, The Baker doesn’t “count” as a male character for the purposes of analysis, just as a woman in a similar situation in a Hollywood film wouldn’t “count” for the Bechdel test.)
I’m completely thrilled! Not because I’m an evil man-hater, but because it’s so rare to find a movie that tells women’s stories. In an ideal world, most movies would be roughly 50-50 in gender make-up and tell universal human stories, and there would be a few movies that tell specific stories for each gender. In other words, for every blow-em-up, sex-em-up Man Movie, we’d have one woman’s movie (like Mama Mia or Sex and the City) and TWO universal human movies (like Wall-E, perhaps, or, uh…I’m drawing a blank.)
But this is not an ideal world; this is a world in which women’s stories don’t get told. So what’s beautiful about this movie is not that it mistreats men– which it doesn’t, really; it just holds them to be generally less important– what’s beautiful is that it shows us so many different women’s stories. Because as soon as you break free of the Mother Or Love Interest Only mindset, and allow there to be lots of women, you make it possible for there to be lots of people.
Just to illustrate the beautiful variety of named, talking people, we have:
Osono: proprietor of a small bakery in Koriko, Kiki’s new town. She is heavily pregnant throughout the film and can be seen feeding her baby in the end credits. She is the first person in Koriko to treat Kiki with kindness and respect, allowing Kiki to stay in her spare room in exchange for help in the bakery. She also acts like a mother to Kiki.
Ursula: an artist in her late teens, who lives during summer in a one-room cabin in a wooded area outside of Koriko. She takes an “older-sister” role to Kiki, explaining Kiki’s temporary inability to fly in terms of “artist’s block”, and telling her that gifts — including the ability to paint, to be a witch, or to bake bread — must be used, not rejected. She’s a loud, energetic person, and dresses somewhat like a boy.
Oku-sama: one of Kiki’s customers. She is elderly and aristocratic, but warmhearted and kindly, and crippled with arthritis. She bakes a cake for Kiki.
Bertha: Oku-sama’s housekeeper and friend. She’s much more spirited than Oku-sama, “trying out” Kiki’s broom and making “vroom” noises to amuse herself, and getting excited about the televised dirigible crash in gleeful schadenfreude.
Ketto: Oku-sama’s niece; she has nothing nice to say about the herring pie Oku-sama made for her birthday, even after Kiki, Oku-sama and Bertha spent all evening using the wood-burning oven to bake it; Kiki misses Tombo’s aviation club party to make and deliver this pie, and is disappointed that the girl rejects her aunt’s kindness. This girl is also one of Tombo’s friends, and recognizes Kiki as a delivery girl later, prompting Kiki to feel like an outsider.
Kokiri: Kiki’s mother, a witch and town herbalist. She worries that Kiki is not equipped to spend a year on her own. The success of Kokiri’s potions appears to be dependent on her concentration; interruptions inevitably cause them to instantly turn black and expel rings of smoke, much to her frustration.
And Kiki makes seven. Seven recurring, named female characters! Mamma Mia and Sex and the City each have that many, but can you name a fourth movie to do that? (If you can, I’ll watch it and review it!)
Plus, there are even more unnamed women who get snatches of screen time– a mother who has left her baby’s pacifier in the bakery, prompting Kiki’s first delivery job; Kiki’s group of friends back home who gather around her to see her off; an ancient female customer of Kiki’s mother who likes to gossip about the girl; and uncountable passerby. It’s a staggering range of ages, body types, and personalities, especially compared to the indistinguishable hot young things that Hollywood parades past us.
I also find the bratty niece interesting, because while the other characters show a range of goodness– from the brazen confidence of Ursula to the very quiet kindness of Oku-sama– the niece allows for the fact that not all women are perfect. There’s also a briefly-seen mother, who’s a little obnoxious in yelling at her son (“Turn off that TV! NOW!!!”), and it’s a portrayal that I would object to in almost any other movie (the nag, the “voice of reason,” etc) — because in almost any other movie, she’d be the only woman around. But here, with so many other women, this mother doesn’t have to bear the burden of representing half the population, so it’s just an example of how people can be sometimes (because everyone can be impatient and obnoxious on occasion).
Kiki’s Delivery Service is also a brilliant story even without considering its remarkable variety of female characters, so there’s no way I’m done writing about it yet, but I was just so thrilled to see a movie that so perfectly embodies the idea behind the Bechdel test, I couldn’t keep from going on and on about it. This movie has women, of all sorts of different backgrounds and personalities, and they talk to each other about all sorts of things relevant to their lives, and the story is not all about men, but rather, all about them. Beautiful.
For more on the subject read this related article.
“Life’s too short for the wrong job”
LOL
Really creative ads XD
