Here are the answers to yet another unpopular blog quiz. :P I did get a few answers by e-mail, but if they were unwilling to post their answers in the comments, then I'm unwilling to post their answers here. :P

1. "Getting a hold of [her] is like getting a hold of the Pope... except harder."

June in reference to Charity. I think she said that when we were trying to get a hold of her for dinner one night. We made pasta and then watched "Analyze That" (or was it "Analyze This"?) afterward. That was fun. :)

2. "I'm a skeptic, not a cynic." [Ed. note: Yeah, right.]

My dad always says this about various things... especially in regards to many things political. But we all know the truth. :)

3. "Your love's more deadly than Saddam.... that's why I gotta drop da bomb!"

Haha, this is from a Simpsons' episode. Bart and his friends are the members of the latest boy band, and they do this music video called "Yvan Eht Nioj". Lol! Obviously, there's a subliminal message contained in the video. :)

4. "If you've got a caper, then you know who to call! It's The Sneak, it's The Sneak!"

The Ballad of The Sneak

5. "Not that it really matters what I feel. It's nice to think about, I guess. But I wouldn't want to spoil it by getting my hopes up."

MegaTokyo Strip #489

6. "It is corrosive to one's character to steal."

Rolling Stone's interview with Steve Jobs

7. "I'm usually right about these things."

When I first came in to PWR class Winter quarter of freshman year at Stanford, my teacher thought that I was a foreign student, for some reason. It was funny because when I went in to have a conference with her about one of my papers, she said she thought that I must've been born abroad or something. Something about having a slight accent or something... I've heard a few other people say the same thing. She said this quote during the conference, though, and it became a sort of running joke because she was wrong. :)

8. "At your command, before you here I stand, my heart is in my hand..... yecch."

The Masochism Tango, by Tom Lehrer

9. "Some words when spoken... can't be taken back. Walks on his own... with thoughts he can't help thinking."

Nothingman, by Pearl Jam

10. "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed."

Error: Cannot find Weapons of Mass Destruction -- I suppose this isn't really a "quote", but whatever. Look carefully at all the text, too. :) In the spirit of funny 404 error messages, here's another one. It's funny in a different way though, of course. ;)

11. "Nine night of matter, black flowers blossom. Fearless on my breath."

Teardrop, by Massive Attack

12. "[He] will return. The most important person in the world to him is here, you."

This is a quote from Escaflowne, near the end of the movie. Allen is talking to Hitomi, in reference to Van who has just left to go to battle. I've mentioned this movie a few times, and I'm not exactly sure why it is that I like it so much. It's anime, and it's 12 and a half hours long in total (spanning 3 DVDs). The story's about a young, orphaned king named Van of a country in a world called Gaea. Hitomi, a girl from Earth, somehow gets transported to this world, and she and Van go on an adventure starting out in Fanelia (which gets burned by Zaibach, the evil country of Gaea) to places like Asturia and Freid, where they meet many people with which they ally to fight Zaibach. Van is fighting to restore his totally devastated country, Fanelia, by trying to destroy Zaibach once and for all (his brother, Folken, is part of the Zaibach empire). Hitomi is just tagging along, trying to figure out a way to get back to Earth, and she gets attached to the lives of Van and Allen. Allen is a knight from Asturia, and he often fights alongside Van against Zaibach. This whole story is intertwined with the theme of fortune telling (Hitomi often sees visions of the future and can predict the future very accurately through the use of her pendant and her tarot cards), a sort of chivalry (knighthood, honor, although they fight with these contraptions called "guymelefs", which are just basically big mechs that they control from a chamber inside), the relationships between the various characters (Van vs. his brother, Van vs. Allen over Hitomi, the story between Allen, Marlene, and Millerna, Marlene's sister, etc.), and fate. There are parts that are pretty bad, like when the movies try to justify the luck intensifying blood with DNA theory, but I for the most part, it's a very engaging and well-created movie series. The music is very well done, too, in my opinion. The end is very sad, and it never fails to make me cry whenever I see it.

Note that there was a movie adapted from this series, and it's like an hour and a half long, but it changes a lot of the story, and obviously it can't go as in depth into the various themes as the movie series can. I saw the movie afterward and obviously it pales in comparison to the movie series. If you see the series, don't bother with the movie -- it's just not worth it once you've seen the series, because the series is so much better (but obviously more time consuming).

It's funny: Merle, one of the characters in Escaflowne reminds me SO much of June. Lol, I tried to explain it to her the time she and Charity were over for dinner, but it came out less than flattering. ;) The one weird thing about Gaea is that there are a lot of animal-people, including dolphins, cats, foxes, and moles. Merle, one of the cat-people, is a really interesting character and makes the movie really fun to watch. She's really loyal to Van, since they've been friends ever since they were really young. She's an orphan just like he is, and so she's really protective of him when he goes out and fights. She's also someone who's good at listening/talking when needed. But then there's this other really funny side of her, where she's all playful or jealous or just plain annoying to Hitomi. It's really funny to watch some of the scenes with Merle in it because of that. All of those characteristics is why she really reminds me of June.

Escaflowne seems to be one of those littler-known anime series, but I think it's one of the best. I've watched Ranma 1/2, Dragonball Z (or is it Dragonballz?), and a few others, and they haven't really been that great. It's not like most anime either, because more than one thing moves on the screen at a time (in contrast to most anime). Escaflowne also seems to have a small but loyal following: at hidden passage, there's an awesome sequel to Escaflowne which I think fits in perfectly with the story, even though it's kind of short. It's called "Ancient Vision", and it's split up into 14 chapters. Be forewarned, though, there are spoilers at that site.

I kind of want to learn Japanese just to be able to watch this in its native language. :) I don't think I will have time to do that this year or next year, though. :(

13. "Life is like [a] camera: you can get all the materials you need to put it together, and two of the cameras may look exactly alike, built with the same parts and work in exactly the same way, but each will produce its own unique image -- it is our own vision that will make the difference in the outcome of our lives."

This is actually something that I said in my 8th grade graduation speech. I made an analogy between how a photographer influences the outcome of a picture and how someone influences the outcome of their own life. I guess it's profound, but it sounds kind of corny. :P I spent a lot of time on that speech, and I remember being really nervous while delivering the speech. But I guess it all turned out in the end. :)

I actually still have the text of the whole speech... I saved it from when I wrote it in 8th grade.

14. "In other words, you know how their minds work AND you can talk about it."

This is another of June's priceless quotes. She said this about Brad (my roommate from last year) when she heard that he was a communications and a psychology major. I had invited June, Brad, Charity, Andrew (my former dormmate), and Bryce over for dinner for this night. That was fun. :)

15. "Dead cats!"

This is something my hydrology teacher (from last quarter and this quarter) always says. Of course, it's not on it's own, it's always reference into something... like how there's lots of bacteria, clay, sand, water, and dead cats in the soil. It's really funny though because it's so random.

16. "Simple pimple: it pops right out!" [Ed. note: Ew.]

Mr. Randall, my physics teacher from junior high, used to say this about many of his physics problems when we did them in class. Obviously, though, many physics problems are only simple in hindsight -- it's so hard to set up the initial problem sometimes. :p

17. "Tell me how you drive and I'll tell you what kind of idiot you are."

Yes & No. That guy's other videos are hilarious, too. (By the way, if you're wondering about the later videos being split in half, that's how TV shows and movies shown on TV are done in Italy. There's two parts that are unseparated by commercials, and then a big chunk of commercials in between that often lasts 5 or 10 minutes. It's kind of nice.)

18. "[Y]ou think of other things that are bothering you, questions that you still don't have the answer to, other people to whom you need to tell something very important, but you know that you can't. You think of what would have happened if you had said something earlier, when the time was right, or what would've been different if you had made a different decision in the past."

Biking

19. "And they found no brain."

I don't remember exactly how this got started. That's something you have to ask either Charity or June about. They always used to say that to me (especially Charity), for some reason. Maybe it was because I said something extremely stupid one time, they said this, and it stuck somehow? I don't really know.

20. "Shall we go swim in the sky?!"

Broadband version. Low-bandwidth (dialup) version.

21. Music quiz

If you were bored enough to take a stab at that music quiz, here's the answer: it's actually the ending music to Super Mario World. I got an emulator and played the whole way through that game... it's really fun. :) It's cool, though, at the end, there's a whole sequence showing the various characters that appear in the game, and they give their official names! You know those multi-segmented yellow things that stand upright and move slowly, and you usually have Yoshi eat them segment by segment? That's called a "pokey". The things in the castles that try to smash you by coming down on you when you're near them are called "thwomps". Mini versions of those are called "thwimps". And would you believe it, there's even a creature called a "Blargg" in Super Mario World? It's the lava monster! It's really cool to finally know exactly what to call all of those things.