Best Summer Ever: Weeks 3 & 4 (and 5)

In the first episode of the flash-in-the-pan Lucky☆Star anime, the girls discuss, among other foodstuffs, soft serve ice cream, noting in particular that one is always left with an amount of creamless cone to munch upon at the end. They reach the consensus that the disproportionate ratio of the frozen treat to the wafer cone diminishes one’s ice cream experience.

Konata demonstrates a workaround. “While I eat, I do a push-and-shove thing.”

The main thing that I learned from this episode is that the ice cream technology that us Yorkshire folk have enjoyed for years is far more advanced than that of Japan. And it’s thoughts like this that make me feel really good about living here.

As an example, observe this standard-issue regular rolled cone. (This week's flavour was Strawberry, by the way.)

As you can see, unlike other brands, even when you've cleared the top…

…the ice cream just keeps going…

…and going…

…and going…

…and going…

…all the way down to the very last bite. No push-and-shove things required.

As Brother neatly put it, “what you see above the cone is only the tip of the ice cream berg”. No, I do not work for Ripley Ice Cream, nor do they sponsor me.

I had a dream about Lucky☆Star a night or two ago. I was back at college, and I’d just discovered that all this time I’d had accommodation available to me as part of my package and I hadn’t been using it at all (or even aware of it). It was a shared room with Konata, Tsukasa and Kagami also living in it. So I checked it out. Kagami (who appeared to me in this form) was the only one there. We had a discussion. That’s all that I remember.

And I don’t even like Kagami.

In further anime news, it seems that I’m not the only one out there determined to have the best summer ever. Haruhi Suzumiya, whose on-again-off-again anishow recently restarted with repeats interspersed with a seemingly random splattering of new episodes every so often, has been doing her bit by enlisting the assistance of her ever-so-loyal SOS Brigade in their latest episode, Endless Eight. Much like my mental to-do list (the completion of which these Best Summer Ever posts seek to log), Haruhi brainstorms a series of events and activities (such as hitting baseballs with baseball bats, going fishing and appreciating fireworks) to do within the final two weeks of their holiday together.

If any of this seems familiar to you, it’s because Haruhi’s latest arc invokes what TV Tropes calls the Groundhog Day Loop. Due to my rudimentary knowledge of the Endless Eight storyline, I put up a brief episode review with the intent of repeating the episode review in next week’s post in order to confuse the masses. However, next week’s post never happened. For one reason and another, I couldn’t be bothered to finish this update in time last week. And so the blog went over two weeks without an update. If I could go back and do it all over again, like in Haruhi (incidentally, there have been four episodes of Endless Eight so far, in which almost exactly the same events take place — Brother expressed concern that eight episodes of Endless Eight would be produced), nothing’d change. This is what I do in the summer. I put things off in favour of other things. And although I have done a wide range of blog-worthy activities over the past two weeks, I barely remember any of them. So this post’s going to seem a little uneven as I try and recall all the major events over the past fortnight. Okay. Here goes.

Better get the week before last out of the way first, as I remember it the least. It didn’t get off to a very good start. Monday (which started out with fog÷mist) was focused on writing the previous week’s Best Summer Ever update and filling in my student loan application. And waiting for the post to arrive. (It didn’t.) I don’t remember exactly what I was waiting for, though.

After biding my time, I finally selected the best day to leave the house and go to Harewood House using that membership card that I purchased way back when to encourage me to leave the house more often. Unfortunately, the best day also happened to be one of the hottest days of the year so far. Normally I’d go to Harewood’s on-site planetarium (which I’d really like to do a post about in the future) to get out of the heat but, as it is still term-time for many of the good boys and girls of the world, it was booked out for a school visit. So I had a walk around. The Harewood grounds weren’t as big as the map implied — I felt slightly ripped off, in fact — and I completed a circuit without too much trouble despite the torrential sun. I really should’ve made the most of it (or come back on a slightly less temperate day); not only has the average temperature dipped now, but my bus pass has run out. A day’s bus fare, incidentally, is over £6.

As I may not have already mentioned, I am a subscriber to Popular Video Rental Service. I first signed up after being impressed with the selection of anime titles on offer, and have continued to work my way through several decades’ worth of cinema history. My most recent rentals from the past couple of weeks include The Castle of Cagliostro (which hadn’t aged well, particularly in the soundtrack department. If the Japanese soundtrack of Laputa was anything like that, I’m not surprised that they fixed it for the American release), Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis (a fantastic retro-futuristic spectacle that I highly recommend), The Big Sleep (the original version, apparently famous for not making sense. It made about as much sense to me as anything else I watch) and The Karate Kid (which left me quoting many of its lines. “Show me sand-o floor” indeed).

Overrated developer Telltale Games released the first of a series of all-new Monkey Island games. After initial disappointment at the control system (hint: use WASD), I really got into the game — and then I got stuck. Then I got unstuck, and I continued playing until Brother booted me off his computer so that he could have a go.

After much waiting around, Gurren Lagann (the first nine episodes, at least) is being released in the UK. Four episodes in, and it’s really little more than a standard shōnen anime (albeit with faster pacing and robots). Still, time will tell.

I went to a music concert. The band that played was The Orchestra (previously known as ELO Part II), a band based on the Electric Light Orchestra. Most of the songs that they played were ELO songs.

I only managed to fit in one round of Ripley Ice Cream this fortnight, and that was mainly so that I could take those photos at the top. I’ve been inactive a lot of the time, and am now obsessing over my weight and overall health, so I expect to eat less junk food in the coming weeks. Incidentally, Japan’s annual Soft Cream Day (which commemorates the introduction of the frozen delight to Japanese audiences inspired by Independence Day-celebrating North American people occupying the nation at the time) was held the day before I purchased my latest ice cream. According to Wikipedia.

I played Wii Sports again for the first time in several months. My arm has hurt ever since. I think that I have damaged it somehow.

Me and Brother went to York in order for him to pick up a top hat. Apparently, Brother now cares about what he wears. Personally, I see clothes as a necessary evil, and don’t spend much time worrying about them. We had lunch at Little Bettys, which cost £24.35. Normally, I wouldn’t spend more than one tenth of that amount on lunch, but it’s Bettys. You’re paying for quality.

Over the past couple of weeks, I ate fish and chips a combined total of two times.

And that’s pretty much all that I can remember. I tried looking at my recent photographs (which are on Flickr; I’ll think of names for them later), but they didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. Most of this week, the fifth week, was spent working on or thinking about working on this very post, and preparing for the summer holiday. Really, just me in bed browsing the Internet, getting up only to eat, use the lavatory and watch Top Gear. I’d normally say something like “don’t expect any updates for the next week”, but seeing as it’s taken me nearly three weeks to finish this post, you wouldn’t be expecting one anyway. Yes, like everything else in my life, these posts have become a chore. I no longer wish to continue these “weekly” updates, and will instead switch to a “just update whenever the heck I can be bothered to” régime. I dunno. Maybe I just need a week away from the Internet to truly relax. There’s still a chance to save this summer. The rain is over (for now) and with a week in Northumberland, hopefully I’ll be able to turn this around.

Wish me luck.

Oh yeah, and I got my results from college. I won. ㋼