Sorry

Sorry, its been a while since I've written about the wonderful world of Japanese TV. I've seen a couple interesting shows, but have been too lazy to type about them. Tonight, however, is the show called Lincoln. I might have mentioned it before. It's hosted by the very popular manzai duo Downtown, supported by a large array of various other comedians. I'm not really sure what the premise of the show is, but it usually seems to revolve around some sort of one off game show hosted by Downtown. One of the more memorable ones involved a 2 hour special, the centerpiece of which was a $160,000 dollar prop that exploded 15 minutes into the show. Last week's show had a segment celebrating all famous people with a born in March. They rented out a big banquet room in a hotel, but only a couple people showed up, three of which were members of the show. A special guest comedian congratulated them from the stage and sang a song that went something like 'Chinko, unko, hitomoji shika chigainai, megane, oshiri, zenzen chigau,' which loosely translated means 'Penis, poop, have only one character that is different (using Japanese characters), glasses, butt, are totally different.' An old, classical singing lady in the audience who was celebrating her birthday looked very confused.

Tonight's show is a parody of the once popular show "Toribia no Izumi", which had a short run in America as "Hey! Spring of Trivia." The original show starred two hosts and a panel of 5 judges that explored various pieces of extremely random trivia. Each trivia point was awarded a number of 'hey's, which is kind of like 'wow' in Japanese. The parody show tonight substitutes 'dondake's for 'hey's. I have no idea what 'dondake' means, but I'm assuming its some strange word in the Osaka dialect, something Downtown are famous for using. Anyway, the interesting things they showed were one comedian's house that he burned down accidentally bc he was careless with his cigarettes, an impression of Mr. Bean miming strange, vaguely sexual actions, and another comedian changing his clothes in under 10 seconds. In true Lincoln style, they introduced the final bit of trivia only to stop short of the last word and leave the viewers hanging until next week to find out what the final trivia tidbit was. Boo. So that's it for tonight's update. Hopefully I'll be back after celebrating Golden Week by driving around Kyushu in a rented utility van.