Later Than Most...

...but here nonetheless.

My Buddy Dan in Florida sends along a link to a bunch of ads, mostly foreign, that are hilarious. Unfortunately none are embeddable…you gotta go to the site to view ‘em. But. It’s worth the trip. I think this “Toy Boy” ad for Hyundai is French … I know the song is en français. Might could be Canadian. Les Quebécois, ya know. (It’s Swedish, and plainly labeled as such. My “Duh” moment for the day.)

“Wait…” sez you, Gentle Reader, “I thought you just said these things aren’t embeddable?” True, dat. The ones at the Turner Broadcasting site aren’t. But you can search YouTube.

Oh… Don’t miss the condom ad if you go to the TBS site. It should make ya laugh. Work safe, assuming you don’t have your volume turned way up. But then again, you need some sound… coz it’s all about the sound effects, Gentle Reader.

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Late Nite TeeVee Lows…on G4TV:

“Unbeatable Banzuke”
• Monday, Wednesday, Friday nights at 9:30 pm ET/PT

From the creators of “Ninja Warrior,” “Unbeatable Banzuke” raises extreme athleticism to an entirely new level. Each half-hour episode features an assortment of completely unique challenges, pitting contenders against one another to see who can beat the course.

Featured obstacles include:

• Hand Walk – competitors combine incredible strength and balance to traverse an entire obstacle course on their hands, navigating steep stairs, moving ramps and bridges.
• Giant Ball – challengers climb on top of a huge red ball and use the orb to cross a circuitous multilevel course.
• Super Rider – a fast-paced test of bike-riding skill demands that competitors navigate an obstacle course of giant cabling spools, two story drops and three-inch rails.

Subtitles help ensure the original action stays almost completely intact, letting American viewers experience the raw excitement of the high-energy play by play announcers. With constantly evolving challenges, “Unbeatable Banzuke” delivers triumphant victories, punctuated by truly spectacular wipeouts.

G4 is the network (and I use the term loosely) that acquired TechTV, the late, much-lamented (around here, anyway) Über-Geek delight. I could digress here, but I won’t. Not even for Morgan. (Not the Morgan who runs the Most Excellent House of Eratosthenes. Nope… A Morgan of a quite different sort.)

Back to G4 and Unbeatable Banzuke, which I’ll hereafter refer to as UB. UB is a Nipponese game show, and the Japanese come up with some of the most bizarre teevee concepts…ever. Concepts like topless models lounging around on the furniture during late-nite talk shows, a la Leno. The women never said a thing…they were just there, sort of like animated set decorations. I personally saw this show from time to time back in the mid-70s, when I lived in Nippon. It was a favorite in after-hours bars. (I’m having a hard time staying on-point here, obviously.)

I watched UB one evening this week and was quite taken with the Super Rider competition, which was athletic and quite skillful. It was sorta like an indoor observed trials on pedal bikes, as opposed to mo’sickles. But it was all downhill from there (pun sorta intended), and the raving, screaming Japanese announcer didn’t add a thing to the show. The sub-titles did add a lot, however. If it weren’t for the sub-titles you wouldn’t have a freakin’ clue as to what’s going on, other than watching half-naked male gymnasts fall into water obstacles all too often for my liking. The girls might like this aspect of the show, however.

OTOH, mebbe not.

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This month’s Air Force Magazine arrived this week. I was reading through it last evening and was both surprised and gratified to find this: “Special Operators Head West.” It’s a short, four-page article made shorter by the heavy use of larger format photos, but it’s all about Cannon Airplane Patch… with an obvious focus on the new proprietors. It made me smile to read this:

Part of the appeal of the sparsely populated eastern plains of New Mexico is revealed with a look at a topographical map of the area surrounding the cities of Clovis, Portales, and the town of Melrose. It has not gone unnoticed that the altitude and some of the environmental conditions around Cannon and Melrose are similar to what special ops forces experience in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Tanks on the Melrose Range
(USAF photo not from the linked article)

The Melrose range measures about 60,000 acres around the small town of Melrose, about 25 miles west of Cannon. About 8,800 acres are designated “impact acres”—space where actual strafing and bombing occur. In addition to a complete absence of urban encroachment, the space is well-equipped for advanced combat training. Dirt landing strips, bunkers, IR targets, and electronic jamming towers are spread out over the range’s impact areas.

The resemblance of our topography and climate to…ummm… “certain areas” in the Middle East hasn’t passed unnoticed in these parts, ya know. This, of course, is goodness… in that it helps me maintain an affinity for my brothers-in-arms serving “over there.” In a very small way, to be sure… or until such time as we get one of our infamous dust storms.

If you’re (a) an Air Force Association member and (b) might be wondering why I got my copy of Air Force Magazine so late… Then, answer: I get my copy about a week or two after other folks get theirs… due to the fact my copy is sent to my mailing service in Texas, where my mail is aggregated and sent to me here at Beautiful La Hacienda Trailer Park once a week. It’s a legacy thing from my “on the road days,” and I really should change that. But Hey! This is New Mexico.

Mañana.

―:☺:―