“Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster” by the Geto Boys introduces the sound of rapping to the room… “Now a word from the President: Damn it feels good to be a gangster, getting voted into the White House. Everything looking good to the people of the world, but the mafia family is my boss…”

The other day, I’m not sure if he realised it, but Kev’s television blew up. OK, that’s not entirely correct, but it certainly had short circuited. He came into my room and asked me to go take a look and see if I could improve the picture quality by tactically repositioning the aerial. It was an old colour TV that must have been around 10 years old and had been in the maintenance shop once already for a busted tube. When I got to his room, the TV was off and there was a slightly cloudy residue of dust in the air above it. At this point, if the power switch on the front of the television set was metallic, I would have reached for a broom handle and/or rubber gloves, but luckily it was plastic. I pressed the switch and the TV powered up, greeting me with a high pitched “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” sound; the same sound you yourself used to scream whilst going round and round on the merry-go-round back when you were 5 years old. When the picture appeared on the screen, it was heavily distorted and focused on a small area to the bottom left of the screen. This was a sick TV. I asked Kev if this was what it was like before he turned it off and he said it was. The ariel was sat on a plastic stand on top of the TV set and to prove the prognosis that had been formulated in my head, I slid the aerial from one side of the set to the other.

Me: I think your telly is dead.
Kev: Can’t you fix it?
Me: Yes and no.

I could have tried to improve the situation by using the tried and tested method of applying a hammer to it, but that would have been of no use here. Clearly this set needed its tube replaced or realigned, because that wailing scream emanating from within was probably the sound of electrons clashing together; something they’re not supposed to. I questioned him, asking if he saw any smoke rising from the ventilation grills at the back of the TV. He said he saw some and that its introduction was accompanied with a single popping sound.

Me: It didn’t get damp in there did it? Did you spill anything into the vents?
Kev: No.
Me: Well, your TV is fried.
Kev: You mean you can’t fix it?
Me: Let it go. It was just its time.

I love making a drama out of simple situations with him. I told him we’ll get it repaired so that he can watch snooker and football in the confines of his own commode, but in the meantime to just watch it downstairs or in my room. If this drama had a soundtrack, I think Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” would have been a suitable tribute to our old friend, the telly.

The search for a venue to have the joint B-day shindig has been narrowed down. Will have to venture out later in the week to check one of them out before making a decision. Not all my friends celebrate their birthday by inviting their friends out and going to dinner or a bar. They tend to just have a quiet gathering of a small number of people at a restaurant. We do that anyway, so I like to make an occasion of my own and not because I’m an attention seeker. Far from it, but of course it feels good to get attention from friends. The next day or the next time I see them, everyone always says how much fun they have, which creates a tiny bit of pressure to make the next one live up to its expectations. I hope this year’s experimental “no dinner, just a bar and a club” option goes down well. If we were deciding to what to do for my birthday and we were in Hong Kong instead of London, there’d be no question about it. We’d have to go to the Vanilla Ice concert:

[This is the official poster/flyer. No joke]

I wonder how disappointed the audience would be if he didn’t play his hits such as “Ice Ice Baby” and errr… erm… anyway, they’d probably riot if he didn’t play that one song. I can picture it now:

Vanilla Ice’s set comes to an end, having covered his hits “Cool As Ice (Everybody Get Loose),” “Ninja Rap” and “Satisfaction.” He thanks the audience for coming out to see him perform and for supporting his career, and starts inching his way towards the backstage area whilst humbly throwing his hands up in the air. The closer he gets to reaching the off-stage area, the more the Chinese fans in the audience stare at each other wide-eyed and unable to comprehend why he left out “Ice Ice Baby” (which unknown to them, he was saving for a dramatic and explosive encore). Vanilla rubs his vanilla coloured towel over his face, to wipe away the beads of sweat when suddenly he bumps into a large Chinese man in a suit, reminiscent of Oddjob from the James Bond movie Goldfinger. The man waves his stumpy digits in the air, hawking at him in a Cantonese dialect completely alien to Vanilla, which just leaves him in a state of being puzzled with a damp towel in his hand. Vanilla tries to tell him that he is just popping to his dressing room quickly to grab a Gatorade before going back to do his encore, but his Californian accented English is lost on the monolingual Hong Kong native. The crowd begin chanting “Ice Ice Baby” and upon understanding the confusion, Vanilla reaches into his pocket for his Cantonese phrasebook to explain the situation to the stocky man blocking his way. Big mistake! Oddjob’s twin brother mistakes this for a move to gain the upper hand of the situation, so reaches deep into Vanilla’s abdominal region to deliver him, i.e. remove his liver. Vanilla’s career ends right there as he cannot continue without his liver.

Tragic, I know. But a more glamourous ending for the one hit wonder whose main riff was actually a sample of one of Queen’s hits, “Under Pressure.” I remember when Vanilla Ice was at number 1 in the charts. I was probably about 9 years old and we had a school disco and the DJ there was just crap. He was spinning the real cheesy stuff like the “Birdy Song” and what sounded like a dance remix of Glenn Medeiros’ “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You.” I then remembered one of the guys, I think his name was Ross, barged into me and the rest of my schoolyard clique, flashing a tape in his hand. “I got it!” he yelled, excitedly. I tihnk he said it loud enough for most of the people in the hall to hear, because the whole room was suddenly overcome with murmurs of “He’s got that Vanilla Ice song” and “Is it that ‘Ice Ice Baby’ song?” Ross parted the crowds like a river to his Moses and proceeded to tell the DJ to play that tape. The DJ looked around the hall and was met with the faces of pretty much every schoolkid, watching to see if he’d agree. And agree, he did. From the moment the song started playing, the hall went alive with people grooving to Vanilla’s flavours/flavas. I can’t remember, but I think he used to do that dance move called “The Running Man” (later made popular again thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger), which is basically like running on the spot, but sliding your feet. I think nearly everyone was doing their own rendition of The Running Man by the time the song got to its chorus section.

Back then in the 80s, Vanilla was flavour to be licking off your cone. He prolonged the ice coolness of wearing baggy pants and chunky chains worth their own weight in gold. He may have only really been a one hit wonder, but he certainly had hs time. He made appearances in several movies as himself, but did make one movie where he actually acted; playing the lead role in Cool As Ice. This was exactly the same as the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause, only much crappier. It was essentially a rap version of the same film, but with really bad acting. Needless to say the soundtrack was provided courtesy of Vanilla himself and broke no box office records. I think I read somewhere that Vanilla’s main income now is via his motocycle shop, which he personally runs. Now he’s planning a comeback tour to try to carve himself another musical career, so good luck to him. He did better than M.C. “I can do you a good deal if you buy more than one phone” Hammer.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I love Engrish in all its forms, whether it be Japanese-Engrish, Indian-Engrish, German-Engrish, whatever. For those that do not know, Engrish is defined as the language of speaking in bad English translations. It’s just that a large chunk of it comes from translations to and from the Japanese language (the other large chunks come from other parts of Asia). My ex-work colleague Nathan explained this best when he explained how one of his English-learning students in Japan expressed her proficiency for the language with, “My Igirish is berry berry goota.” If you hadn’t guessed, she was trying to say, “My English is very very good.” Ouch.

The thing that makes Engrish from Japan possibly the best lineage of Engrish is that in Japanese certain syllables and sounds don’t exist, but are required for correct English pronunciations. In Japanese, there is no “th” sound. This is replaced by “s” or “ch,” so the name “Nathan” becomes pronounced as “Nay-san” or “Nay-chan.” Nathan is a brilliant name to have when you’re trying to make Japanese friends for this reason, because the word “(o)nesan” (pronounced “nay-sun”) means “older sister” and “nechan” (pronounced “nay-chun”) means “drag queen.” When Nathan was in a teacher in Japan, he made a lot of gay friends.

I found a great exhibit of Engrish yesterday when I stumbled across a website that had published stills captured from a Chinese bootleg DVD of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The site had to have them taken off after a stern e-mail from Warner Brothers, but I was able to salvage a few, just to illustrate the amazing Engrish subtitles provided:

[Gandalf the Grey tries to confuse the Hobbits]

[Sounds like a trick question]

[The actual line of "I say you got to toss me" loses its magic]

There is a multitude of bad translations in the overseas Chinese film market. Some are downright gems!

“You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken” from Pedicab Driver.
“The tongue is so ugly. Let’s imagine it to be Tom Cruise” from My Neighbours Are Phantoms.
“Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants” from The Seventh Curse.

Equally fantastic are the translations of western film names to Chinese film names, namely western movie titles translated into Mandarin. The movie The Faculty, a science fiction thriller about aliens posing as schoolteachers literally became Teacher Is Not Human. The film Babe, about a loveable talking pig was much harder to translate, so became I’m Not stupid, So I Have Something to Say. Its sequel, Babe, Pig in the City following the same logic became I’m Well Behaved Because I Want to Go Abroad. The Taiwanese struggled with The Shawshank Redemption, so issued an alternative title that would get people wanting to go see what it was about. They called it Exciting 1995.

The world famous and overhyped The Blair Witch Project had its title renamed to give the basic plot of the movie. They called it Night in the Cramped Forest. Nearly every film starring Jim Carrey will have the words “Trump Card” in the title (as in “Ace,” as in “Ace Ventura”), even the films that have nothing to do with Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Furthermore, any film with 007 in its title is by default a spy movie.

The exception to these 2 rules is Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, which adopts the Taiwanese title of Trump Card Big Spy. The sequel, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me became Space Spy 007. The one to complete the trilogy, Austin Powers: Goldmember became the curiously inspired title of Man Enough, I Guess.

I guess when you are allowed to use the titles of other films to annotate a new film, anything goes. I remember when I was in a large computer market in Bangkok (in 2001) they already had the DVDs of Star Wars: Episode 2 and another called Star Wars: Episode 2002, even when the film [Episode 2] wasn’t completed yet. The sleeve covers on the DVDs looked pretty good and if I remember correctly, had Christopher Lambert wielding a light sabre. I was tempted to make a purchase of it for its sheer comedy value, but it was probably just the latest Highlander movie with spaced out packaging.

Engrish quote of the day:

[Now, I don't remember anyone actually saying that]