VS Arashi 3rd May 2012

VS Arashi

Airdate: 120503

(Note: This was cross posted over to arashi_bangumi. Check out the community for more awesome reviews, or post your own reviews! XD )

Sososo… I saw a short clip posted on my friend feed and since I got so excited + sick of school work, I decided to try my hand at making a review of the episode! My 1st attempt at grabbing screen caps + writing a proper review, hope you'll like it XD

Screen caps are taken from the video uploaded by vendy over at Hachiarashi. Thank you so much to vendy for always uploading the videos in record time, and in good quality too!

Disclaimer: My knowledge of Japanese pretty much comes from watching Arashi shows and reading subs… after watching enough you kinda learn enough to get the general gist of what's going on… so I apologize in advance if I made any mistakes! Do let me know if you spot any and comments are <3

So the show starts off as usual with the 5 of them… 

ah… what are they wearing today? looks really shiny eh? I was wondering if the guest is like a rock star or something but...

turns out that its cos it’s the golden week in Japan now haha. I totally forgot about that :P

Jun was shocked when he saw the golden outfits hanging on the rack in the green room. They were debating who's gonna wear the shiny golden shorts - in the end Nino wore it.

i know you love the shiny shorts XD

And the guests for this week is the Nijiirojin Team (i hope i got the romanji correct ><):

And their plus one guest is Naoto Inti Raymi (ah i <3 wikipedia):After some small talk, our dear leader announces that the 1st game of the day will be kicking sniper!

The guest team starts 1st, with the following line up

They started out great with becky scoring perfect on the 1st kick, but after that…. in total they only got 110 points :X Ah yes, before the game started Sho asked becky how was her experience on the set of mikeneko with aiba (she appeared in the 1st episode)… but try as i did i couldn’t understand fully what she was saying T.T. It was something about how there were many heaters? (I'm guessing here!!!) or something pointing in aiba's direction since now he's the lead actor in the drama… she looked away for a while but the next time she looked back, she realized that Aiba had moved a heater over to keep her warm. 

(what does the machines in the drawing look like to you? i guess heater since spotlight doesn’t really make sense XD EDIT: ok! after watching the nth time, i finally caught what she said. it’s a STOVE! so yeah, heater/stove!)

That lead to a very excited arashi camp and this:

A totally random hi-touch (i.e. hi five) lol!

Next up is arashi's turn with an ultra excited aiba (but its aiba so… i guess its normal? XD)

Arashi's plus one guest is apparently real good at soccer…! aiba asked him to show off his ball lifting skills… Who'll be the one showing off their skills when the game start?

First target: Perfect from Aiba!

2nd target: Aiba knocked off all but the last can, scoring 40 points. The rest nearly hit the base can, but it stood where it was.

3rd target: A great shot from the guest! He hit real hard in between the bottom two cans and scored a perfect!

4th target: Aiba u're the man!

his shot hit the side of the cans i think? but the canned structure twisted around and fell flat on the ground! A 3rd perfect for arashi team!

Last target: all miss haha (or rather, 0 points). Even poor ohno who only got a single chance at kicking anything earlier… haha actually aiba's ball rolled off the platform as he tried to kick so his ball hit the bottom of the set ><

Great job aiba!

Nino decided to be mean though… he accused aiba of being too good and not giving their guest a chance to show off this soccer skills haha

(cute aiba is probably thinking: hey its not my fault!)

Can you guess what aiba is saying?

Pinball runner is up next!

The guest team did a great job getting 180 points… So its Arashi's turn to play. Runner = Nino. Giving commands = J+Sho+Guest

120 points is a great score but...

our dear nino doesn’t look too happy haha… Why? Cos when the 1st pink ball came, all the guest did was shout 'pink! pink!' with out saying that number haha. He says there wasn’t enough time for him to say the number LOL. After yelling pink the ball dropped off already haha. He admits that he sucks at that to which nino gave a most bemused laugh

Next up is bunk bowling! Guest team didn’t do well… scoring 49 on the 1st shot and 17 on the 2nd try.

Ohno and the plus one guest went for the 1st round!

Ohno explains to the guest that they should be careful so that their bowling balls won't hit each other's… although there were times that after the knock things actually became better haha. He asked the guest to pick whether he want the bowling balls to hit each other or not LOL.

And then they're off!

YES! Oh-chan got the red pin!

haha look at ohno's satisfied face XD

and the victory pose (no. nth)

139 points for arashi team!

Sho did his reporter thing again (at least, i remember he did it before with ohno at bunk bowling…)

Basically, the conversation went something like this:

You just hit the red pin, how are you feeling now?

Very very happy

Who would you like to share this happiness with? (Something to that effect, I'm not 100% sure!)

My mother

So, in front of the camera, face and camera, and please say a message for your mum

Thank you for giving birth to me

So there, Ohno did it again, PDA (public display of affection) for his mum XD

Junba pair went next, but that part of fast forwarded :P (blame it on the 'ohno interview' haha!)

27 points scored only… but its not their fault since the ohno+guest pair got most of the points already :P Anyhow… Arashi team is enjoying a formidable lead at the moment. (Oh i didn’t mention it earlier eh? They've lost 4 weeks in a row thus far! So naturally they'd want to win this time round!)

Shot gun disc is next!

Net wielding becky! Woah fierce! XD

But we're more concerned about the arashi team right? (yes, I'm getting lazy here haha!)

J and Sho are wielding the guns today!

ah… maybe this would help?

Gori asked J if he would hit down the frisbee even though the guest team is losing by a hefty 200 points...

No mercy at all there from matsujun! (He said: I will definitely hit them all down!)

And Sho is all relaxed and confident :)

And the shooting begins!

The guest team managed to get 180 points… but arashi did a great job too… look at how pleased they are XD

Jun n Sho's work of art - the fallen discs

and we have sho's pleased look once more

'Bang Bang!'

"Its rare to have so many discs shot down… you guys kinda had bad luck" Haha evil sho! And another funny face from J

Arashi's turn next! Leader is the passer, i.e. the 1st person getting hold of and throwing out the frisbees (i seriously think their passer and shooter terms is quite messy haha! blame the structure of the game haha!) Nino + plus 1 guest as the shooters - i.e. the ones standing on the staircase with the point markings. Aiba is the catcher aka net wielder.

They decided that BOTH of the shooters will stand on the 30 points step, just as the guest team did earlier. This is the 1st time they did this, previously its always 1 at 30 points, 1 at 20 points. Nino's thinking that since the guest team caught 6 discs just now, they shall aim for 10 discs i.e. 300 points!

1st time aiba's in the catcher position! (well it’s a new game after all)

Will you be ok?

Yup I'm completely fine! Its gonna be fun! Like really fun! (its hard to translate it exactly, i hope the the translation is fine :P)

haha as expected of aiba XD Sho commented that out of the 5 of them, aiba and nets seems to go the best together ( XD i have the same image too! perhaps its cos he's always chasing animals around on tensai shimura dobutsuen?)

Aiba wants them to shoot the frisbee has high up as possible! Makes it harder for the bazooka ppl to aim and will also probably make it more entertaining… (i don't understand how his 2nd point links but never mind)

haha he raised the net like really really high up :P

a nice high catch!

Ohno seems to be getting a little slow/tired… that one fell a little short...

Nino's doing a little 'come here' motion here but the image is rather blur :(

That shot veered too far right and out of reach :(

And the last catch of the day!

yes! that makes it 330 points for arashi! 11 discs! they actually surpassed nine's goal!!!! whoohoo!

Ohno looks tired tho :P

Nino standing like a boss with his shiny shorts! (haha just can't resist this one!)

And the victory celebration!

When asked about the entertainment value of their performance, aiba replied:

It was spectacular!

Last game of the day!

Koro Koro Viking!

And Arashi has a HUGE lead! 370 points ahead!

Eh? what's this???

While the guest team rejoices… Arashi team is like -.-'''

Haha… cos the point gap is too huge, the guest team gets a handle (advantage)…! Every single partition will give 100 points! And if the golden ball finds its way to the end point they'll get 200 points! Now that's A LOT of points! No wonder arashi looks so down haha.

The guest team manages to get a total of 600 points! They missed the 1st golden ball though sadly...

While the guest team is busy celebrating...

Arashi is busy pouting haha

In comes nino with his snarky comment: "Oh you guys finished?"

Haha, so arashi will certainly have a lower point (as in the score for each compartment)… but how much points will the staff give arashi? If it’s the usual with a max of 50 points, it’s a tad too difficult to get 235 points yeah…?

Yup! The program staff isn't THAT mean after all… they gave arashi 2 blocks of 100 and 2 blocks of 50!

And so its starts!

Ohmiya up on pink, junba in green, and sho with plus one on orange! 

haha the 3 of them are so shiny… sho's jacket totally stole the limelight in this scene haha

in contrast this side looks rather dull :P

Announcer: 'Sakurai-san, you really want to make a comeback and win in this game right?'

Sho: 'iyaaa… we really haven won at all lately….' yup... 4 loses in a row for arashi previously ><

tsk tsk… right before the game isn't a good time to think about such demoralizing stuff sho… :P

Everyone: 'we'll definitely win this'

Sho: 'we're probably doing the 10 seconds challenge too rarely…' (or something to that effect ><)

Can Arashi get the 235 points needed to win?

GAME START! (at last haha)

Ball no. 1… so far so good. 

50 points on the 1st ball… not a bad start.

No time to rest, the 2nd and 3rd ball are already here!

The 2nd ball made it to land safely… how many points will it get?

and….

Another 50 points for arashi!

3rd ball!

that should get 100 points right? right?

But no… another 50 points!

Here comes the 1st golden ball!

Can they nail it with this one?

ZOMG the ball rolls dangerously on the EDGE of the wooden thing...

but it was not meant to be… the ball rolls off and out of play…!

ARFFF the frustration!

and they screwed the next ball as well ><

Ball no. 6!

Yay 50 points!

BUT WAIT! They still need 35 points to win! All hopes on the last golden ball now!

Time out! J checks with the rest/announcer to see how many more points they need! They still need 35 more points!

As long as the ball doesn’t end up on the 5 points block, they win! (and if the ball doesn’t drop out!)

Somewhere here Sho commented that the new announcer can't make it! Haha cos the announcer was slow to respond to their questions i guess...

Everyone move forward to watch the show (or add pressure haha)!

haha aiba rushes all the way to the front to stare at the ball

Safe!!!! They did it! but will it be 50x2 or 100x2 points?

aw hahaha the ball went over to the 50 points… So basically all the five balls that scored got 50 points lol! What a coincidence?!

Grand victory celebration time!

Gori-san: With that kind of handle but arashi still managed to win, i was touched.

Gus-san: If we won just like that, i probably wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight...

haha :P

100 points for every single block… that was really a huge advantage yeah? haha

Sho-chan is saying something about the guest here i think… no idea what ><

Finally… the 10 seconds challenge!

Basically they randomly grab someone's hand and than have to untangle themselves (w/o letting go of the hands of cos!) within 10 seconds! I've done this in camps before and i think its pretty impossible to do it in 10 secs… unless you are really really lucky (or u cheat) and the 'tangle' created initially isn't much of a tangle - if you get what i mean… ><

At the starting position...

10 seconds start!

haha they are really badly tangled up ne?

This is mission impossible! Like seriously!

Now sho's in the middle… they kinda look like a bunch of kids playing london bridge haha!

Or maybe ring around the rosie? 

Here they were talking about stepping over the hands and stuff… but too bad its TIME OUT!

Did they even untangle themselves a single bit? haha

note the ending position of J and nino! bear hug from behind! hahahaha!

The ending (position) is like we are really good friends...

I don't really understand how it happened but I'm hugging nino...

I'm being hugged by him right now...

Haha the ending position is really funny! XD

THE END!

Yup! that's the end of the show! Hope you enjoyed reading it… sorry if it got messy somewhere along the way, i hope you didn’t have problems following the review ><

Sorry some of the pictures are quite blurry… the video gets rather blurry when there's fast movement, like during the shotgun disc game ><

Hmm… now for some show analysis (you can  skip this if you're not interested, its just my erm, extra rantings)

Arashi started off the year really well on VS… they won consecutively for like a month or more at the beginning? (Not counting the new year SP, but even then at least they got into the final round) That time i remember having rolling coin tower as the last game every week, with them purposely setting things up so that the final win/loss decision lies on which team topples the tower. I remember getting rather irritated cos i felt arashi was purposely holding back in all the games so that the score gap wouldn’t be that big… 

Kicking sniper has appeared as the last game for quite a number of times… i was pleasantly surprised to see it being the 1st game today (don't recall it being the 1st game before but could be just cos i've forgotten). When kicking sniper just debuted, you couldn’t get much points from it even if you get a perfect each time… (and arashi totally sucked at it!). Some time later the staff figured that it could be a great game to put at the end cos u can spam loads of red cans in case one team is severely falling behind (to ensure that the winning team don't win w/o even playing the game) and after that kicking sniper made quite a few game appearances. 

And today they found out that koro koro viking can easily be a last game too cos with the electric scoreboard you can easily give the epicly losing team an advantage… Unlike kicking sniper though, this is an advantage given to the losing team… whereas in kicking sniper both teams get the same no. of red cans (though they can always be unfair if they wanted to!)

Hmm today we also saw both shooters standing on the top scoring step in shotgun disc cos there's not rule saying that they can't do that… This could be a bit of a problem though… in the sense that it'll render the lower steps of the set useless. Already the 5 and 10 points steps were completely useless - no one has caught and thrown frisbees from there and no one would bother either, when you can get 3 or 6 times the score by standing a little further away. Previously at least 2 steps were used… from now on… I'm guessing everyone will only stand on the last step? Would they change or tweak things around so that the shooters will be forced to be more active? o.o E.g. changing scores on each step say every 20 seconds…? That could over complicate things though >< And scoring calculations will also get kinda messy >< Maybe they'll just leave things as it is haha. 

So that's all for this week's VS, really hope you enjoyed reading! Now go watch the show already haha!
Preview for next week: Seems like arashi will have a hard time, their up against the female volleyball national team!

[One Shot] Kanji Game

Title: Kanji Game
Rating: G
Pairing: General Arashi friendship
Length: One Shot (~600+++ words)

A/N: I got the idea for this drabble one day while I was listening to Tochuugesha and staring at the title… Wrote it but didn’t post it cos it wasn’t very well written... but after 3 months I've still not done a thing about it, I decided just post it as it is… kinda clueless how to change it as well >< Hope you'll enjoy it!

The members of the popular group Arashi were sitting in the greenroom. And getting very bored. Due to some technical issues their shooting AnShi was delayed. And because of the rule of the show that there will be no hints given to the members on the guest or theme of the day whatsoever, the staff had literally confined them to their green room in fears of arashi bumping onto someone or something they shouldn’t be seeing yet.

Matsumoto was sitting on the side of the room, focusing all his attention on his lucky 7 script. Sakurai was busy reading newspapers, and Nino was playing with his DS as usual. Ohno… Ohno? He was happily curled up on the sofa and fast asleep. Everyone was doing something… except for poor Aiba. And he was bored… "Come on guys! Let's play some game!" he yelled as he literally ran, and sat, on leader, waking the older man up immediately. However, apart from Ohno, everyone else continued to ignore Aiba. "Aw come on! The loser shall have to buy the winner a treat!"

Matsumoto closed the script he was looking at and gave Aiba a most annoyed look, "Fine, what game do you want to play than?"

"Let's play magical banana!" Aiba chirped

*Silence*

Matsumoto rolled his eyes and impatiently went back to reading his script.

"Aw come on guys! What's wrong with magical banana? We used it play it very often didn’t we?" said Aiba, getting exasperated.

"Nope, not playing it today," Matsumoto replied without even looking up.

"We just did it on Shiyagare the other day," Nino was still deeply engrossed in his DS.

"Whoever's coming after you will suffer…" Said Sakurai, still thinking about how he got beaten at the game by his teammate the last time.

"Leader… say something please!" Aiba pouted.

Finally, Sakurai folded his newspapers and gave out a sigh.

"Fine fine, shall we play the kanji game? Each of us have to take turns saying a phrase made up for 4 kanji and 4 kanji ONLY. Whoever who can't think of a phrase in time or repeats a phrase will lose," Sho said.

"Ja let's do it," Ohno nodded in agreement.

"Ok, I shall start 1st," Sho said.

Sakurai was confident that he could win this. After all he was the most well read among all the members...


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


Nino+Sho+J: "OUT!"

Aiba: "Ehhhh????"

Nino: "That phrase was used earlier already"

Aiba: "Ehhhh??? Majide??? Yabai!"

Sho: "Ja, next is leader… start!"

Ohno: "Ehhh… Gori mu chuu"

Sho: *blank* "Ehhh? Wait a minute…"

Nino: "Hai! Out desu!"

Sho: "Ehh… but… but…"

(round continues, and it's Ohno's turn once again)

Ohno: "Tochuugesha" Ohno smiled, happy that he found a way to come up with 4 letter kanji phrases.

This time it was Matsumoto's turn to be stunned. "Eh… is this even allowed?"

Sho: "But it is a phrase… and its only made of kanji…"

J: "Ah darn…!"

(Showdown between Nino and Ohno starts)

Ohno: "Zekkouchou Chou!"

Nino: "WHAT??? This isn't counted! It’s a phrase that you just made up!"

Ohno pouted. "But it made it into our song title! So its officially a phrase now…"

"Yay so leader is the winner!" Aiba happily exclaimed and ran to bit leader a bear hug.

Nino sulked while Aiba happily chatted with leader about how they HAVE to find time to go drinking together this year and it'll be his treat…

Just than, there was a knock on the door and a staff informed them that they were ready to start filming at last.

"Let's go guys! The sooner we start the sooner we can finish… I still have drama filming early tomorrow morning."

With that, Arashi filed out of the green room and headed for the studio.



Additional note: All the phrases that Ohno used were their song titles.

Music station! (and an exceedingly long story about my poster)

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Arashi appeared on music station just now! Nope, have not watched it yet... which is why I'm screaming in anguish and excitement right now... i wonder how long it'll take for a streaming version to appear ><

EDIT: oh wait, seems like it was just starting only? ok, at least i can listen in on keyhole...

Ok, so I'm bored. So bored that i replied to every single person who commented on my posts ><... In fact I'm even wondering if i should go make a review of another arashi show... Or maybe i should just update my blogspot blogS which have been abandoned for like a month cos of my FYP. I would just go and play maple BUT i don't want to do that till i send my poster for printing... which would be about tmr.

So I'm finally done with my poster design... barring any mistakes or changes that my mentor wants... and pending changes from my dad and my sis (like i asked them to give comments on the color scheme and stuff, the science and the actual content they don't understand ><)
well my sis is way better than art then i am (actually, my dad too), so i asked her to give some comments on my poster yesterday... i was telling her that i tried to make my poster as less wordy as possible... but she was like 'huh? u call this not wordy?' gah! It can't be helped that the intro, methods, objectives, and conclusions all HAVE to be in words right? tch! Already i've put like huge pictures and graphs to make things as pleasing as possible - while still retaining its 'scientific-ness'...

I decided to do things differently this time round... following in part my experience at SSEF when i was in junior college. I cut out whole portions of the report from the poster, and didn’t present a lot of the obtained data. I don't want my poster to be a case of too cramped, too much info, and too confusing... i felt that last time i didn’t win at the SSEF cos apart from that fact that I'm not THAT good a presenter (I'm not the very lively, talkative kind), there was also too much info in the poster/report. If I'd cut out the last part of the results entirely and focused on something else instead, the results could have been very different. Regrets regrets sighz... you live and you learn... what else can we do?

So yeah, i cut out the entire lab work part (which wasn’t much to begin with anyway) and only focused on the bioinformatics. I also didn’t attempt to squeeze results for everything for both genes in... either or, not both of them. No tables of long lists of numbers either - i changed it into a graph instead. BLAH that stupid graph took me SOOOO LONG to get done! The new office layout was really confusing for me - cos the last time i work extensively with excel was... like... 5 years ago or something... using the older version of excel. (plus i wasn’t on mac yet). Than direct copying and pasting the graph to powerpoint didn’t work. I was really really pissed with MSoffice then... like WTF on earth are you doing! The graph copies over alright, but it changes the freaking style and everything that I'd painstakenly arranged in excel! and i can't change the style back in powerpoint! Then after googling i found out that i could use the paste special thing or some sort, but it only worked in another ppt doc, not the one with my poster... in the end i took the nice looking copy pasted in the other ppt, saved it as a picture, than imported the picture to my poster. zzzzzzz! so troublesome! The resolution should turn out alright... i hope ><

ah my mentor wanted pictures of bleached corals too... i took like over 5 hours to search for copyright free etcetc images that i can safely use on my poster... finally found several on flickr (i don't use flickr so it too me a while to remember which site it was that had the creative commons license thing, at 1st i went to gettyimages but like nothing is free?) and picked two out of the lot. Next problem was that i didn’t know what species of corals they were... searched around for a bit but only managed to identify one of the two... gave up in the end ><

and than there was the stupid guide tree. oh gosh how many DAYS have i spend on the phylogenetic trees in total? i really lost count! From that time when writing the report to now the poster...! At the beginning i skimmed around for something that can open/plot dnd files... didn’t find anything that worked, so i skimped on the work by screencapping from the clustalw2 website. Than my mentor suggested that we put in bootstrap values... (that was like, a few days before the report was due). So i started google to find out what ARE bootstrap values... (very last minute, i know). Turns out that i had to use clustalx to generate those so... thankfully i downloaded that a while back. So it took me a while to tinker around with that program... and hohoho! It generates the raw files, but you have to use something else to open the raw files. BRAVO! After a lot of fail attempts (some required you to compile the program yourself, but somehow when i try to compile the files it just WONT WORK!, others were like powerpc programs or something which apple withdrew support for in Lion...) i finally got njplot to work. BUT that stupid program could only generate trees that were A4 sized. So things ended up being really cramped...! I ended up having to draw a sub tree for one of my genes zzzzzzz. And that's the big problem too... for my poster i needed the tree to be more like in a landscape kind of orientation (otherwise no space!) which the program can't get me. I ended up resizing the window and screencapping AGAIN. But that's bad because you end up with the tree on a white background. I want the background to be transparent.... -.-''' So i took a million years with photoshop and stuff, in the end i had to trace out the tree in photoshop and type out all the species names separately in powerpoint.... sighz.

So yeah... hopefully everything is alright with the poster now!

*looks at my subject... hmmm this post is more about my poster than musicstay lol!.... ah that's better now*

Ah.... just watched, or rather, listened to arashi's performance on music station... could barely see anything cos it was just too lag PLUS halfway thru it froze just completely froze up, never to move again... so i just listened in... they were wearing black outfits and reports from twitter say the dance is really cool. seems like the MS set background is really cool too... spotted ohno wearing a black wristband? that looks cool - as cool as a very pixelated image of oh-chan can get haha. ah! can't wait to get my hands on a nice HQ version of the performance! *looks around at the arashi comms and at saobang2211* :P i really don't know what i'll do w/o all these ppl... i probably wont be an arashi fan if i can't get my hands on all these arashi goodness... i mean like, you could you love a group when u barely know anything about them? No videos, no nothing... <3 ya all!

ok, no more mood to continue writing about my darn poster after watching MS... i'll just go hide and a corner while i try and calm myself down..

EDIT: Streaming of love so sweet and facedown here http://www.yinyuetai.com/video/407225
To the person who uploaded this: I love you!