There were not many Ai Kago reactions after all.

Buono’s Kiss!Kiss!Kiss! PV was released and can be viewed at some boys blog. I haven’t watched it yet so I don’t have any opinion. I just like that, after 2 previous singles, it’s possible to label this PV as “Typical Buono.”

There are more reviews for Perfume’s GAME. Shanimuni Paradise and boylikesmusicPerfume. It pains me to see that neither of them enjoy “take me take me” as much as I do. I will freely admit that I’m liking this song because it was made for the exact reasons Shanimuni points out:

If there was ever fan service in a song…….

They had an album called Fan Service, they are not above this!

I do enjoy that GAME is getting reactions to Perfume across the blogs. It’ll take some time to win over more fans and there are some who simply won’t pay attention to this group at all. This is slowly changing.

Posted on the Hello!Online tracker was Morning Musume’s appearance on Utaban. I am going to review this for TLS later on today as I have some fun comments for it. But real quick, this is a combination of mainstream Japan’s opinion of Morning Musume (Utaban doesn’t care about Momusu anymore) and an episode of Haromoni (boring rubbish as we watch Momusu watch other people do nothing). I would recommend watching this but it really is no different from the last few years of Morning Musume on these shows.

As for Airi Suzuki’s third photobook (from strawberrie)…

Aika. Kanna. Junjun.

This is a post, for educational purposes, of Ai Kago in Renai Revolution 21.

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As this is the first entry of this style, I want to catch up on a week of entries instead of just the most recent. I’ll be focusing on the last few days if I can. Furthermore, I have a lot of blog reading to catch up on. I’ve been working on the new theme today so I’m pretty far behind.

There is a new wave of podcasting in our International Wota community. My Pleasant Vista, Pink Wota, Stuck in a Pagoda with Motoko Aoyama, The H!P Opinions of a Metalhead and Raid My Minibar all have new podcasts within the last few days. It is a much more personable style that lots of IW bloggers have taken to. I really am interested to see not only who keeps at it but who else decides to try their hand at podcasting.

As for the current podcasts, I have to admit that I’ve skipped over the music that is played. I either know the song already or would rather listen to the suggested music at my own leisure. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone that is going to be podcasting to completely drop the idea of playing music. It depends on what type of audience you want. Personally, I love talk radio. Therefore, I am going to enjoy the parts where the host is talking more so than the music the host plays.

The big news today that I want to share comes from wiki.theppn.org, which has the sales charts for Oricon Week 17. What’s important to me is Perfume and Morning Musume.

Morning Musume clocks in at 3rd with 48k sales. Is this good? I think lots of fans will definitely be happy. I wouldn’t call it a resurgence yet though. It’s an improvement in sales but that’s only because Mikan sold so horribly on the Oricon chats. It’ll be interesting to see where RB goes from here and what style Morning Musume uses for their next single. With Kanashimi Twilight and now Resonant Blue being reasonable successes (at least compared to other recent MM singles), it wouldn’t make sense to switch things up again.

Perfume’s GAME sold 154k and is #1 for the week and I am so happy about this. When I first became a fan of Perfume, I never expected such things. I am under no illusions that they got #1 because of a relatively weak competition in albums this week. However, 6 figures is still 6 figures. Perfume’s popularity can be maintained if handled properly. Releases from the group have been spread apart, so overexposure doesn’t scare me at this point. I do know that the higher they climb, the harder they will fall.

Raid wants me to go insane.

He has a post about what voices he would marry. Yes, only the voice.

The thought of marrying only a voice is truly a horrifying one to me. A disembodied voice could theoretically follow you wherever you went. You could not escape it. Furthermore, if you got into an argument with your vocal spouse - think of how insane you’d appear. Oh, you could try to tell the men in white that you are not crazy; that you are just married to a voice. That’ll get you far. In the end, you’d be locked in a room with padded walls, rocking back and forth as you argue with your spouse (who only you can talk to and hear) about who left the milk out on the kitchen table.

That being said, if I am going to go insane, I’d like to do it with the following:

- Orson Welles. I can’t be the only person who has wanted Orson Welles to narrate their life. My boring life would be poetic and interesting if Orson was dictating.

- Sou Matsumoto. Of Going Under Ground. His voice isn’t that strong and powerful type. It’s not sultry or sensuous. It is just pleasant on my ears. If I were to delve into insanity by being married to a voice that only I could hear, I wouldn’t mind it being his.

- Bonnie Pink. Again, not the best singing voice or anything. It’s not sexy or booming. It’s just that right flavor or pleasant that I’d be fine with for the rest of my days.

- Randy Savage. As in Macho Man Randy Savage. Come on, that’d be GREAT. If I want Orson Welles to make my life more poetic, I’d want Randy to make it absolutely insane. Because he’d take me to The Danger Zone, east of the Pacific Ocean, west of London, England, south of Mars, and north of Hell.

- Koharu Kusumi. If I am going to go out, I am going out IN STYLE.

I just realized that there’d be no backing out of this marriage. In a divorce, all the voice could take would be half of your brain. I’ve already lost so much of that watching Haromoni -I can’t afford to lose anymore.

Well now I am caught up on Haromoni. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing.

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Was Haromoni worth watching? It took me a week to watch it. There’s your answer.

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Will I keep up with Berikyuu? Probably not. I didn’t keep up with Musume Dokyu or Uta Doki. Too many files to download, too much to keep up with. It’s going to need to be some kind of show for me to follow it regularly.

But before I get to watching it - I have high hopes for Berikyuu.

Haromoni is not the same show it was when I started watching it on a weekly basis. Two months ago, the majority of the show consisted of the Musume girls watching videos. Now an episode of Haromoni is more about the girls themselves. In an ideal world, the show would be better due to the changes. It isn’t. It is true that the girls are acting out the majority of the videos. However, the videos are still boring, predictable and repetitive. It makes me wonder if they filmed a month’s worth of episodes at a time. It’s possible to get a hit using the same format and the same gags over and over, but more often it’ll be a miss.

Berikyuu will save me from this! It just HAS to. We are all starved for variety entertainment from the H!P Kids. DVDs of material only come by so often. Appearances on the music shows only come with releases. There has never really been a steady stream of variety material from the H!P Kids. I am of the belief that the majority of them can be great entertainers in these situations. But am I giving them the benefit of the doubt? The fact is that the Kids - unlike Morning Musume - haven’t have the chance to disappoint yet.

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Last week’s episode was better than usual, but it came with the promise of Koharu Kusumi in a Superman costume this week. Haromoni licenses music or at least samples it. If they don’t play the Superman theme, I am ended this series and never watching Haromoni again.

I almost hope they don’t play it.

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How the hell can you have a pink rainbow?

There are some days where I question how much of a fan I truly am of idols. Today is one of those days. It has been roughly one year since the Hello!Project, and thus, idol career of Ai Kago came to an end. It was a bitter end - at the time there was hope and promise for a revitalization of her career that had been previously suspended for a year. However, Ai did not want to play the by the frivolous and petty rules rules of being an idol.

And this makes me not want to play by the rules of idol worship.

So there are some days that I look at Kanna Arihara, and others, and think:

“We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.”

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