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This elegant n' classy sign can be found near the elevators on the first floor of the Russian Tea Room Municipal Parking Lot on 85th Street and 5th Avenue. It has that perfect combination of polite request and practical advice to dissuade peeing in the stairs. Someone has also drawn us a sketch of what appears to be a rough rendering of "Blanka", the electrical discharging character from Street Fighter 2, which I thought was a nice touch. It also looks like there is a "Frank '07" tag on the bottom right. Well, hello, Frank.


Though I'm not much of a video game fan, my favourite video game character, by far, happens to be Blanka. I'd just pound on the controls until he did that electric shock thing and everyone would call me "cheap". Oh well.

Blanka's in-game storyline states that he was once extremely pale and was known locally as the hombre blanco (white man) and adapted the blanco into his name Blanka. This is a strange storyline point because the language spoken in Brazil is not Spanish but Portuguese (in which that expression would be homem branco).

Blanka's green skin colour in the games is attributed to his constant use of chlorophyll from plants to better blend in with the jungle environment, a color change that eventually became permanent. His colouring changed in later games, making him bright green with vivid orange hair as opposed to the yellowish green skin he had in Street Fighter II.

Apparently Blanka's original prototypical name was "Big Dean Caves" - sounds like a porn star. But I guess he was originally going to look more like a caveman rather than an electric Hulk meets faker He-Man.

In his Street Fighter II ending, Sweet Blanka reunites with his mother, Momma Blanka, who recognises her son from those little anklets he wears. She reveals that Blanka was once known as Jimmy, before he was in a plane crash as a little boy. This crash caused him to grow up in the wild, although he has connections to a local village. Ever since the crash, Blanka had been separated from his mother.

However we are never told for sure why he does that electric charge thing now. I do know that Blanka ate a melon on a poacher's truck and thats how he traveled to civilisation for the first time from the site of his plane crash. Maybe he ate some wires from the crash site? Or maybe he ate a toxic melon? Hey, what the fuck do I know.