I went in for my last chemo treatment Tuesday. I've officially beaten cancer! To all the nay-sayers out there, I say thee, nay! To my cancer, I'd just like to say boo to the yu: booya! Everyone else was, like, "You're going to die, Miss Kitty." One day when I was feeling particularly cancerous I said to my cancer, "You're not going to keep me down. No more Mr. Nice Miss Kitty!" I guess I won.

The doctors say that my cancer is in remission. I must admit that I'm surprised to hear that. I didn't even know it was Mormon. If you should see a skinny young crab riding a bicycle and wearing a white dress shirt and tie, that's probably mine. Tell it that Miss Kitty says "Hi!" and then squish it.

Unfortunately, despite my victory over cancer, I wasn't allowed to go to the Yoshida Brothers concert at Yoshi's Jazz Club in Oakland. I'm pretty bummed out about that. I mean, how could I miss the Yoshida Brothers? They're just amazing. They practically made Nintendo, and they are almost completely responsible for the skyrocketing popularity of tsugaru. Still, I bet a lot of people don't know who they are.

The Yoshida Brothers, Yoshida Yoshida and Yoshida Luigi (and their as-yet unfamous brothers Yoshida Beau and Yoshida Brent), are these cool guys who inspired a series of best-selling video games and related merchandise, a movie, and a television show. The original Yoshida Bros. was a Nintendo arcade game that featured Yoshida and Luigi running around a series of tunnels under an old west town. They had to gather gold and avoid discovery by the townsfolk. They could run and jump, but they could only fight by leaping up and punching the roof of the tunnel directly below a townsfolk. Voiceovers by Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, as well as an awesome theme by SOWN, made the game way cooler than the gameplay might suggest. Plus, in the console version, you could jump and then repeatedly pause and unpause the game to leap right up through the tunnel ceiling. For some reason, the original never got the attention it deserved. Things didn't really take off until Super Yoshida Bros., which was based on the Yoshidas' daily life. From there it branched into Super Yoshida Bros. II: Mushroom Boogaloo, Super Yoshida Bros. III: The Search for Brent, Super Yoshida Bros. IV: The Annihilation, Super Yoshida Bros. V: The Empire Strikes Back, Super Yoshida Bros. VI: Leonard's Island, Paper Yoshida, Yoshida Party, Yoshida Party II: The Jaws of Cerberus, and many more. The theme to the famous Super Yoshida Bros. video game series was written by Joe Hisaishi and performed by Agatsuma Hirumitsu, and it made the shamisen seem cool again in the same way that Hikaru no Go is making the current generation hip to go.

The Super Yoshida Bros. Super Show was, of course, inevitable. I was a mix of live action and animation. The live action sequence starred Captain Lou Albano as Yoshida Mario and Joe Odagiri (brother to the show's musical director, Joe Hisaishi) as Yoshida Luigi. The Bros. did their own voices for the cartoon part. Eventually Captain Lou and Joe Odagiri left the show. They were replaced in the final two episodes by by Roger Moore and Robert Colbert as Yoshida Beau and Yoshida Brent, respectfully. Despite the fact that Moore and Colbert did good jobs with their characters, fans wanted to see Yoshida and Luigi.

Super Mario Bros. the film came out four years later and was a big success. It starred David Carradine and Rob Schneider as Yoshida and Luigi, and also featured James Garner as their father, "Pappy." Garner really stole the show, in part because he is a very charismatic actor and in part because fans have been wanting to know more about "Pappy" ever since the original Yoshida Bros. video game. Between levels your character would say, "As my old Pappy used to say," and then deliver some bizarre aphorism like "'You can be a gentleman and still not forget all you know about self-defense.'"

I can't believe I missed them. Dangit.

I've been trying to figure out how episodes 3 and 4 of Star Wars fit together. I've tried flowcharts, concept maps, contour maps, Mercator projections, overhead projectors, life planners, and everything else I can come up with to help me make sense of it, but I can only conclude that there is room for Star Wars Episode 3.5: Everyone Somehow Forgets About the Jedi. At the start of Episode 4 (the first real Star Wars, for those of you new to the series), Luke is in the 18-24 age range. At the end of Episode 3, he is in the 0-0 age range. This means that there is a gap of about 18-24 years between the end of Episode 3 and the start of Episode 4. For those of you who haven't seen Episode 4, nobody really remembers the Jedi. Old Ben is just "some bloke who lives in the desert." Yoda is just "some bloke who lives in a swamp." Darth Vader is just "some bloke who strangles his employees." Bail Organa is just "some bloke who was left out of Episodes 1-3." Luke's mom, Ms. Skywalker, was just "some bloke who didn't actually die during Luke's birth." When I saw Episodes 4-6, I assumed that the Jedi Order was a secret society, kind of like the Illuminati, NOM, or the International Red Cross. They couldn't have played that public a part in the fate of the galaxy and then be completely forgotten by the next episode. It's taken people longer than that to forget about what really happened during World War II, after all.

Those of you who haven't seen Episodes 1-3 may be surprised to learn that the Jedi Order was, in fact, pretty darned popular in the time of the Republic. Everyone knew about them. They had a big council. They were the big heroes of their day, and everyone knew they could be scary. What happened in those 18-24 years that caused the entire galaxy to forget them? Surely there were Jedi breakfast cereals, cartoon shows, movies, novels, board games, console games, trading cards, caps, shoes, ships, key chain fobs, speeders, notebooks, coffee drinks, greeting cards, LPs, soft drinks, furniture, silverware, candy bars, car seat covers, teas, and action figures. There were probably also plastic light sabers, how-to-draw-Jedi books, and a couple of pencil-and-paper Jedi RPGs. It's likely that one or more members of the Jedi Council appeared on the news every week. I would suspect that Mace Windu had his own late-night talk show, and that Ki-Adi-Mundi and Sora Bulq hosted their own weekly automotive-repair/comedy radio program.

I would estimate that Han Solo was about 30 when he met Luke. That means that he was in the 6-12 age group at the end of Episode 3, which was shortly before the end of the Jedi. He must have seen the cartoon shows. He probably wore Jedi Council^TM jeans and took a Kit Fisto lunchbox to school. He undoubtedly saw images on the news of Jedi fighting during the Clone Wars, throwing cars, leaping 25 meters at a time, and cutting huge combat machines in half with light sabers. How is it that he forgot all of this in time to make fun of Obi-Wan in the Mos Eisley cantina?

Even if the rest of the galaxy somehow forgot the Jedi, you would think that the Empire would have something about them in its training manuals. At the very least, you'd think that at some point during Officer Training, one of the instructors would say something like, "You know this Vader character? Yeah, the one on all the tee shirts. He can kill you with a thought. He doesn't even need a tray, although he could certainly kill you with one of those, too." How is it, then, that all of the Imperial officers are so casual around Vader in Episode 4? Neither Grand Moff Tarkin nor General Motti seemed the least bit scared of getting strangled to death for contradicting him, making fun of the Force, or playing the "Your shoes are untied" trick, and they were certainly old enough to have known better. You can't say that the Empire had a blind spot for Vader like voters in the United States have for Bush, either. People were much more scared of Vader in Episodes 5 and 6, presumably after all of the Imperial employees noticed that he could kill people with the "I'm squishing your head!" gesture. Hadn't they noticed this before? Hadn't any of them, or any of their parents, cousins, aunts or uncles, or older siblings, heard of him prior to his capture of the Tantive IV? If that was the case, wouldn't the Rebel troops on the Tantive IV stopped their shooting long enough to ask, "Hey, who's the new guy?" when they saw him?

I'm not suggesting that anyone actually go out and create Episode 3.5. Lord, no. I don't think it would sell that well. It would be 75 minutes of young Sith running from store to store buying everything Jedi-related, 10 minutes of said Sith eating ton after ton of Plo Koon Chocolate-Coloured Lumps beakfast cereal, and 5 minutes of Palpatine using some wicked force powers to make everyone in the galaxy slip while taking a shower and develop selective amnesia. Of course, I couldn't see Episodes 1-3 selling that well, either, especially after Episode 1 proved to have less plot than the maze on the back of a box of Plo Koon cereal.

If there's one thing I hate, it's misleading advertisements. Oh, I hate them so much. I'm not even talking about those old tobacco adds like "Less throat irritation = more smoking pleasure," either. No, I'm talking about the dirty lies that advertising companies penetrate with packaging. You know, maybe you'll buy something because the box is just huge and you assume that you're getting a good deal, only to open the box and discover that what you actually get is tiny and at the bottom, hidden under a layer of awful, squeaky styrofoam? Even worse, though, are the pictures on the packages. Some are simply misleading, like the picture of someone winning a gold star in the Olympics on the front of a bottle of vodka, while on the back, in really tiny letters, the label says, "Watching this moment on television is as close as you will get to this, you fat, drunken slob." Even worser than worse, though, are the pictures that they've just completely faked. I mean, I'm 99% sure that no matter how many boxes of Cocoa Puffs you open, you'll never get to eat that damned toucan. In fact, I suspect they've never even arranged for a toucan to come near a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, so it can't be that cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. The even worstest worser than worst part is how they use plastic foods, spray-on glosses, and trick photogaphy to make the food look tastier than it really is. I just tried licking the milk off of a box of Toasted Oatmeal cereal. I know what Toasted Oatmeal milk tastes like. I had some earlier this morning. Unfortunately, all I tasted this time was cardboard. Fuckers.