UFO

A British science fiction TV series created in 1970 by Gerry Anderson, about a secret organization, called SHADO, which defends the Earth from Alien invaders. Only the first season was produced, with a total of 26 episodes.

Ten years into (their) future (1980), the military discovered that aliens were coming to Earth and kidnapping people. SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation) is created to put a stop to it. SHADO's main headquarters are hidden beneath a film studio in London. SHADO also has a Moon Base (called just "Moonbase"), a fleet of submarines called "Skydiver", orbiting satellites to detect the UFOs (called SID, or Space Intruder Detector), fighter like space interceptors, and a fighter plane ("Sky One") that is launched from Skydiver.

Some curious things about the show:

• All women on MoonBase had to wear purple wigs. It was part of their uniform. Sylvia Anderson, the show's co-creator, decided that some day wigs would become part of the uniform. Remember that this was in the early 70's! Wigs used to be very popular.
• Ed Bishop had dark hair, but his character, Col. Straker had blond hair. The actor bleached his hair on the first episodes, but then decided that it would end up damaging his hair. He also wore a wig.
• Several other actors had to wear wigs. This could well be called "UFO, the series of wigs!". :)
• The private life of Col. Straker had a important role in the series. This is very common now (X-files), but it wasn't at that time.
• In UFO's version of 1980, English cars have the steering wheel on the left side. They believed, back in 1970, that in ten years or so England would reverse their current "inverted" driving system.

UFO's are a brand of clothing extremely popular in the "raver" community. Your average article of clothing produced by said label is a pair of nylon pants, with a profuse surplus of cloth in them. They are identifiable by the useless pieces of cloth dangling from the cargo pockets on the outsides of each leg, as well as the ability to shoplift a refrigerator in each pant leg. They come in many colors, from black and white, to soylent green and camo. They are available in malls, trendy consignment shops, as well as online. The average pair of said pants costs about $50 American, but I've seen them range anywhere from $35-$80 a pair. The same brand also makes t-shirts, skirts, and accessories. I own one pair of said pants, in an olive drab color, and they are my favorite pants. Many of the people wearing these pants defy the "raver" stereotype, and they are becoming quite trendy.

See http://www.ufojeans.com/ for a look at some of the styles available.

UFO is also a type of instant ramen that emulates the Japanese yakisoba dish. It's quite popular in the Far East but almost unheard of elsewhere. Several companies in Japan, China, and Korea make the stuff, and you should be able to find it at your local Asian market.

The UFO comes in a plastic bowl, with a detachable lid. Inside this package, you'll usually find a brick of ramen, a packet of sauce, a packet of seasoning, and a plastic fork. Remove the fork and sauce, and pour the seasoning over the ramen. Then add boiling water, replace the lid, and let it stew for a few minutes. When the ramen is ready, you drain the water, usually through perforations on the lid, and then mix the sauce in with the fork. The result is a tasty brothless noodle dish, in stark contrast to the soupy goodness that is top ramen.

Nowadays, I eat these when I need a quick lunch. In olden times, UFO was the best food obtainable in Osaka in the early hours of the morning. You could buy it at a convenience store, get boiling water and waribashi there, and then make the stuff out by the curb and wolf it down in the city night. Many clubbing trips were made happy by a 2 AM jaunt across the street to Lawson and a bowl of UFO eaten on top of a garbage can or police car.

The Japanese UFO's only came in one flavor, yakisoba. The Chinese and Koreans, on the other hand, have made all sorts of UFO flavors: spicy, meaty, fishy, etc. Unless you read Chinese characters, you'll need to squint at the fine English print to see what you're buying. It's all synthetic anyhow, so don't worry.

generic-man has pointed me to http://www.oriole.net/~rworne/yakisoban.shtml , which details the superhero exploits of Yakisoban, star of his own movie and video game made by Nissin. Good stuff.

UFO is the title of the second Need New Body album, released September 16th, 2003 on File 13 records.
This album contains all of the reasons why I love N.N.B.: It's really catchy and fun to listen to, and at the same time it's also extremely jarring, frequently toeing the line of being way too obnoxious. This album includes some older, live-only material that had not yet been recorded, such as the fantastic "Pen" and the even more fantastic "Beach". By the titles of those two songs, it is easy to tell that Need New Body is nothing if not totally weird. Their music, on this album especially, isn't really fit to be categorized, although if hard pressed to do so I'd call them something like spazz-folk-hillbilly-klezmer-jazz improvisation, all created with banjos, eight-bit video game noises, junkyard percussion a la Tom Waits’s “Bone Machine”, absurd free-ranting, and campfire sing-song-y sing-a-long fun. UFO, in this way, is a whole lot like N.N.B.’s first album: It’s completely ridiculous. The spontaneity keeps you listening just to hear what they'll try next. And even when they flop, when they totally suck, you can't help but admire the sheer enthusiasm poured into even the most obviously half-baked experiments.

The first track of the album is a great example of one of these half-baked experiments As if to weed out the weak and unadventurous, "Gigglebush Meets CompUSA" starts with an off-balance, none too special beat, then it jarringly disintegrates into what sounds like the death cry of a robot sent from the near future, beeping and whirring without any kind of rhythm or form. Few bands that I’m aware of would be so brave (or perhaps foolish) as to try this sort of thing. The second track, "Hotshot" continues with a fist-pumping chant-along that shows off drummer Chris Powell and his signature old school R.E.M. meets Kraftwerk 4/4 beat. "Moondear", the third track, is maybe the most unlikely thing Need New Body could do at this point- a (nearly) straight-faced acoustic love ballad. But with the fourth track, "Popfest", they settle back into what they do best, that unavoidably catchy and bouncy beat shows up again with industrial noise drilling and hammering away while the whole bands , again and again and again,

"Meets, hits it off, hangs out, makes friends, and is never seen again"

One could go on and on. Each song offers something new and exciting. And even after the album is thoroughly digested, UFO continues to satisfy through Need New Body's untouchable rhythm section, its sense of humor, and its almost scary level of exuberance. UFO, like its predecessor, and like a good Frank Zappa album, is a must-be-heard-to-be-believed album.

Track Listing:

  1. Gigglebush Meets CompUSA - 1:16
2. Hot Shot - 2:59
3. Moondear - 1:39
4. Popfest - 3:59
5. Pisscat - 0:36
6. Tittie Pop (In Japan) - 0:47
7. Show Me Your Heart - 4:06
8. Pow Pow - 1:27
9. Red as a Bone - 4:27
10. Turken Hogan - 1:03
11. Make Gay Love Not War - 0:21
12. Beach - 1:56
13. Magic Finger - 0:42
14. Ox - 2:49
15. Manglor - 1:21
16. I Know - 2:04
17. Shark Attack - 2:52
18. Need Newage - 1:59
19. Dr. Spliffin's Food Drive - 1:19
20. Coffeeshop Girl, Pt. 2 - 0:05
21. Pen - 2:17
22. Applesnake - 0:30
23. Turn Pillars into Trees - 0:54


allmusic.com

UFOs are a packaged cheese-flavoured snack, consisting of bite-size portions of deep-fried potatos with orange colouring, flavoring and preservatives. In many respects they taste like Twisties, and if they are made from the same substance then a 100 gram packet of UFOs would supply 9% of a person's daily calcium needs, 12% of their protein needs and a whopping of their 35% energy needs (aka fat if the energy is not expended). UFOs are in the shape of three-spoked wagon wheels or the peace symbol, but in fact they are marketed as "unusually flavoured objects", hence UFOs.

UFOs were packaged in distinctive silvery wrapping, which made them look quite unique when they first hit the shelves in Australia in the late 1970s. At the time they complemented the zeitgeist of the period, asStar Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Close Encounters of the Third Kind fired up the imagination of many a child and teenager about the prospect of us getting in contact extraterrestial life, just as the first trials of the Space Shuttle suggested this could become a reality. Television advertisements for UFOs featured (as I recall) a beach party at night with people looking at bright unusual lights in the sky, which beam down back to earth craters full of UFO snacks.

UFOs have long since disappeared from the stores, however they are still produced and sold in the civil war torn country of the Solomon Islands (of all places) .