When batteries talk...

For my birthday a few months ago, O got me one of these mini radio-controlled cars that zoom around, and then you can recharge them on the controller. I happened to dig out the instructions the other day and I found this sheet that is printed with helpful tips on how to insert the batteries and general good battery usage, all illustrated by batteries that can talk in 6 different languages. It's a brilliant piece of Asian manual, though, amazingly, the English is near perfect.

So on the first page, the batteries illustrate that they are happy when you place them in the slot in the right direction. But don't touch two battery heads together, or "Wham!" (or, in German, "Bums!"): painful batteries.

The second page is even more brilliant... The illustrations on the left show how your battery is happy when it has good contact with the spring ("Now I feel comfortable!"). But keep the contact clean, or else you'll have a battery declaring "Oh, you're so dirty!" Which apparently is a turn-off for a battery... And to the right, we see Old Man Battery, who is dead tired, being replaced by Mr. Power, the fresh battery, who confidently, with muscly arms, tells us we can depend on him. Mr. Power to the rescue! I love it.

And speaking of other Asian madness, O and I have been stuck in the world of Katamari Damacy, which is addictive as hell, but the story bits are fucked up beyond belief. You are the strange rectangle-headed prince whose verbally-abusive king father has wiped all the stars from the sky. You must roll up objects on earth into a ball to replace the stars. Not only is the king on crack, but there's these other bits of a story where a sister and brother see on the news that the stars have all gone missing and they try to tell their mom, but she just smiles and nods and says in a sweet voice "Yes, dear. Now come along now..." It's all like one big insane dream...