Japanese TV: You are my best friend

On this gameshow, contestents were playing 5-team pentagonal dodgeball, with pictures of "obscure" things like the Mexican flag silkscreened onto their uniforms. If a player managed to hit a member of another team, both players were brought to a corner of the stage where the striking player would have a chance to answer a question about the picture. A total of 4 players failed to identify this flag before the announcer gave them a hint by telling them to look closely at cactus in the emblem.

I think I've said it before, but it's worth saying again. I love Japanese TV. A man on a drama I'm watching just decapitated a doll in a wee-little guillotine and then stared at the woman in the room dramatically for like a minute.

Iloveit. Iloveit. Iloveit.

Then the other day I was watching a variety show. The episode was called "lonely christmas" even though it's late January. it was either a rerun or they were just pretending it was christmas. One member of the cast had recently broken up with his girlfriend and apparently he was really upset. To cheer him up, his friends decided to give him a girl for Christmas.

First, because his girlfriend was half-japanese (abbreviated "half"), so they said, they brought him to a terrace filled with 'half women nonchalantly checking emails on their cellphones. They urged him to go ahead and nanpa whomever he fancied. When that yielded no chemistry, they brought out a crowd of "new half" transvestites who ran on-camera and ravaged him in a dog-pile. One of the trannies tripped while running away, and all the variety show members yelled at him/her about it.

Then they brought him to a girls'-night-out style drinking party at a karaoke bar and plopped him in the middle of it. But all the women were overweight, eating fried food, and over-aggressively flirting at him. One of them kept getting up to go out for something, awkwardly having to traverse across everyone to get to the door, but every time she wound up with her ass or cleavage in the dude's face. Then she would promptly realize she forgot something at her seat and go back for it. This repeated itself 3 or 4 times. Finally, our hero ended up getting so fed up that he twisted her arm behind her back and plunged her face into the salad bowl. He held her down in the salad for a good minute or so as if he was trying to drown her in the toasted sesame dressing. Everyone on set had a good laugh.

Finally, because apparently the guy is good at saxophone, they put him on stage with a band at a 1950's Americana style hop. But unfortunately everyone at the hop was already in a couple, so finally one of the female crew members decided to go into the field and turn the tides. She ended up doing a flash-dance inspired routine, which abruptly turned into thriller and they wound up in a graveyard. At the end of the dance routine, they pushed the single guy into a grave filled with mud, and the tombstone read "AWFUL CHRISTMAS" in Japanese.

Hell yes.