In appreciation of receiving gifts that continue to give without any end in sight and even a few that have gone from blow to suck, I think we’d best take a brief moment for assorted props and shout-outs.

I’ve often tried to use media as a tool to figure people out. Lately, the person I’m trying to figure out is myself, so while I’ve been poking around occasionally in unfamiliar places, hoping to have my assumptions proven wrong, I mostly spend my time seeking out stimuli that appear to cater to my tastes. Still, sometimes friends come along, leash in hand, and open my eyes to previously unseen wonders. At the same time, they give me a little bit of insight and access to their own ideas and preferences. This makes it easier for me both to know them as my friends as well as to buy them horrifying and/or delightful presents when such occasions present themselves.

One such friend who shares some amount of my obsession with Japanese culture is Regan. But if you were to draw a Venn diagram of our individual specific interests in that area, you’d notice that there isn’t really an overwhelmingly large overlap. You’d also notice that I was casting disparaging glances in your direction for conjuring up such a ridiculous, circa middle-school method of presenting information. Shame on you, really. But where I like anime and horror movies, she prefers the likes of literature and boy bands.

Which brings us to Cartoon KAT-TUN. Long-time readers of MediaSlave already know how Regan feels about one sixth of the marvelous sextet who are the namesake of the latter half of the show title, but you have missed the memo detailing their weekly variety program. While I can’t say I’m a regular viewer, I’ve seen more episodes than is probably suggested for one possessing my type of reproductive equipment. I’d love to say that I only watch when the guests include cute starlets like Horikita Maki, Toda Erika or the incomparable Shokotan (pictured at right above), familiar to me as a side effect of an all-consuming dorama and anime habit.

But I cannot lie to you fine people. I can’t even lie to those of you who are not fine at all, and instead are complete jackasses who have betrayed me and destroyed within me all hope for happiness in the future. But I digress, for the sake of postponing the following admission: I find the show and even its hosts to be highly entertaining. But you’ll never get me to admit to having a favorite member of KAT-TUN, especially not the oft-perplexed and rough-around-the-edges rapper Tanaka Koki. And I’d die before ever offering up the caveat that none of them hold a candle to Yamapi from another boy band under the same management empire. So don’t hold your breath for such revelations.

Many thanks go to Regan though, for this suicidally embarrassing process, from which I’ve been able to reap the discovery of a new source of clean-burning undiluted cuteness that I’d like to share with you all in the interest of protecting and preserving such precious resources. Seen above on the bottom left kicking the collective KAT-TUN ass in a game of darts is Kataoka Ayumi, professional baseball player. Just to give you an idea of the way in which this particular bundle of cute rolls, she plays second base for an otherwise all male team. But that’s not even the awesome part yet, so brace yourself. The name of her team is the Ibaraki Golden Golds. Yeah. I know.

“Which Golds were they again?”
“Oh, you know. The golden ones.”

You’ll never come up with a better name, unless it contains a poop reference. Now, if you asked me about this a couple years ago, I would be unnerved by the observation that she looks an awful lot like that one guy from NEWS in the screenshot above. Unnerved because of the level of familiarity with said visage required to draw such a comparison, and because it would make me question my historically unchallenged preference for estrogen-infused organisms. But really, this makes things easier, because all of the Johnny’s Entertainment crew look confusingly like girls anyway, so I can always rely on that defense, which was previously unavailable whenever it came time to discuss Heath Ledger’s level of dreaminess.

This entry was posted by eugene on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under japanese, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.