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Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected pope (ABC News). I don’t have a strong opinion about whether he’s a good choice or not. I was a little disappointed to read on Wikipedia’s page about Pope Leo XIV (as he’s now known) that he’s already returned a bit of the pomp that Francis so clearly disdained. I suppose that was probably inevitable.
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Work held its annual medical examination on Friday. As luck would have it, I was near the end of a 42-hour fast and my weight was down to 65.5 when I left in the morning. I didn’t know if the clinician manning the scale would even have the data from last year but she did and did a literal double take when she saw the result (the previous year’s recording was over 70). That felt like a nice reward.
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Sunday was Mother’s Day but I’m sorry to say it was a bit of a shambles. I thought we could all go out for lunch together but the kids couldn’t agree what to eat and we would have had to wait longer for a table for five so I took the boys to the MOS Burger that’s to the north of Shakujiikoen Station while Eri took Emma to an udon restaurant that’s to the south.
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I finished showing the kids the three Back to the Future movies. We watched the first one at the start of Golden Week, the second at the end and the third over the weekend. Emma wasn’t particularly interested but John and Rowan managed to sit through most of the running time. Rowan was particularly excited about Part III given how big a role a train plays in the final act.
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You may have seen the raft of stories about a pirated font being used in the famous ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ series of public service announcements trying to dissuade people from downloading movies (example). The extent of awareness about the PSAs has always surprised me because I assumed they’d been made in Australia. Nope! Turns out it was produced by the Motion Picture Association of America (and maybe the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore…?) (Wikipedia). This now makes it much less surprising that it eventually became such a popular meme.
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Pat Finnerty put out episode 5 in his ‘Little Stinkers’ video essay series. This time it’s about Locash’s ‘Isn’t She Country’ and it is easily one of his best. How does he squeeze in Coldplay and the Chainsmokers to a video about a Stevie Wonder interpolation? This is what makes him so great.
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Last year, Batwheels came to Netflix in Japan. For those without small children, the show is a cartoon about the vehicles of Batman and his associates, all of which become sentient in the first episode. Would you believe that Ethan Hawke (yes, that Ethan Hawke) is the voice of Batman? He is! And that’s not the craziest part. I meant to write about the show over Christmas because I was stunned to discover there were almost no toys in Australia and that there’s apparently very little available in the U.S. either. What is wrong with children’s television these days? When I was a boy, everyone would have understood this was a 12-minute commercial whose sole purpose was to get kids to badger their parents into buying the complete set. Is it just that the show took forever to come to Japan? The first season did originally debut in 2022 but it got a second season and that came out in 2024. How has there not been a tie-up with Rocket League, for instance? DC, take my money as they say.
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The Kooks have a new album out called Never/Know and I should link to that I know but nothing on it especially grabbed me on the first listen and as soon as it finished, I rushed to put on ‘Naïve’ instead (Apple Music). Make of that what you will.
