Happy Birthday, Yumi!

由美-chan: お誕生日おめでとう!!

Happy 33rd birthday, Yumi! Here's hoping that your 34th year is as fun and exciting as the previous 33.

Andrew at PuffyAmiYumiWorld has drawn up a special card that he's sending through the Puffy AmiYumi MySpace page and the BBS - I've written my wishes there as well.

By the way, that cake is from Pink Cake Box. Pretty nice one, eh?

New English Interview on JaME World

PUFFY's English-language marketing is definitely ramping up in anticipation of the honeycreeper release. There's a new interview up at JaME World, a site that I'd honestly never heard of before but which exists to promote Japanese artists in the west.

The interviewer obviously knows a bit about their music and asks quite a few questions; I just wish Ami and Yumi weren't so tight-lipped with most of their answers. My favorite answer is when they're asked to provide some "funny or weird" anecdotes about any of their music videos:

Yumi: "I did bungee jumping for the first time in my life for the shoot of the ELECTRIC BEACH FEVER (Nagisa ni Matsuwaru Et Cetra) video in Thailand. I swore to myself that I would never do it again."

The video in question:



If you missed the link above, you can read the full interview here.

iTunes Top 38

I just thought this was interesting, is all - my top 38 "most played" iPod songs (38 because that's what would fit on screen for a screenshot). I always thought my tastes were a little more varied than this. Click the image to open the full size version.


Apparently, I favor female leads!

I guess you can also take that as somewhat indicative of my favorite PUFFY songs. Though this is by no means definitive; I still listen to CD's in the car, for example, and Paramore, Foo Fighters and Kaela have all gotten a lot more car stereo play in the past few months than PUFFY. (No offense to PUFFY, but I do listen to other things!) I also carry a full stock of PUFFY CD's with me, so no doubt various songs have been listened to more than shown here.

By the way, PUFFY apparently just finished recording one song in Los Angeles, and their latest English staff blog post mentions a mystery person they were recording with who's "always funny". Gotta be either Butch Walker or Andy Sturmer, don't you think? (I'm nostalgically hoping for the latter... no offense, Butch!)

Lavshuca's Spring 2008 Campaign

No idea how long this has been up - I swear it wasn't there when I checked the site a couple weeks ago. So maybe I'm a little late with this, but hopefully not. Lavshuca's got a new TV ad starring PUFFY and some new wallpapers up, among other things. I gotta say both girls look fantastic, though I still can't really get used to this style on them.

Check out the site here. I'll be adding the wallpapers to my official wallpaper post as well.

Music Fighter 01/11/08

Last week, the Japanese TV program "Music Fighter" had sort of a retrospective on some of their favorite moments from the show in 2007. PUFFY actually made it in there twice. I actually missed their first appearance when it was on originally, though some of you may have seen it - but they also do what seems to be a little follow-up after the clip, which is new. The clip and follow-up are below.

The second appearance I posted here before, but again, there's some new footage of Tamio Okuda afterwards that some of you may be interested in.

The first clip is actually a little disturbing!


I love how mortified Yumi looks. I feel a little bad for her!

I wish I could translate even a little of this, but I honestly have no friggin' clue what they're saying. Maybe later!

Well, it's later. I can give you the gist, at least. Yumi apparently is not familiar with too many Japanese comedians, so Ami wanted to introduce her to one. She chose this guy. So this is basically a big joke being played on Yumi. In the follow-up segment, Yumi says she really didn't know what to do; her reaction was genuine.

That's about all I got...