Trivia that matter
Bad: 106°F (41°C).
Worse: Riding your bicycle home from work in 106°F.
Worser: Discovering that the air conditioner has quit working.
Worser still Rotten: Finding that the landlord is not answering the phone.
I am sitting in front of a fan, dripping sweat. I am not happy.
Update: The air conditioner decided to start working again. This is fortunate; the predicted high for tomorrow is 113°.
Miscellaneous notes:
A few months ago I cancelled my minimal-speed DSL connection and signed up for cable internet. I am supposed to get downstream speeds of 18.5 megabytes per second, and according to online speed tests, I do. In fact, I can download a gigabyte-plus torrent in the time it takes me to shave and brush my hair. However, surfing the world wide wait web is still an exercise in patience. No matter how fast your connection is, a page that is assembled from 150 little items stored on several sluggish servers will always take forever to load, even if you have ads and Flash blocked.
By the way, if you are building a website and want to add comments, please don’t use Disqus. It takes far too long to load, if it loads at all.
I pulled another Newtype out of Richard’s box. This one is from July 1991, by which time the Japanese had discovered the steampunk aesthetic. Here are some of the images that caught my eye.
This is what the sky looked like just before I left work.
It’s been a rather chilly day today, only reaching 99°F, instead of the predicted 108°. It’s even cooler now — not that I’m complaining.
In the pastel future depicted by Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, a.k.a. Humanity Has Declined, we can expect plucked, headless, scheming chickens
Nothing special — just plain, ordinary gypsy metal and the like.
I get around town primarily by bicycle. Since the city planners have made it nearly impossible to travel any distance greater than a half-mile in Wichita without using arterial roads, I often ride on sidewalks. This can present difficulties. Here’s what I encounter when I go the the grocery story:
Badly-placed banners.
Here’s about two week’s worth of accumulated trivia.
I lost patience with radio years ago. The only time I listen nowadays is during storm warnings. Consequently, I never knew the Piano Puzzler existed until Angela at Mommy Bytes recently mentioned its tenth anniversary. Each week, pianist Bruce Adolphe arranges a “familiar” tune in the style of another composer, and the contestant’s task is to identify both the composer and the melody. I can usually identify the composer right off, but naming the tune is often difficult. What makes the segments memorable is Adolphe’s fantastic ingenuity in devising his arrangments, which must be heard to be believed. He does things like combine Schubert with Gershwin, Gershwin with Copland, The Fantasticks with Berg, spirituals with Handel, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” with Brahms, etc., and makes each combination, no matter how unlikely, work. You can stream the programs or download them here. My favorite so far is the April 6, 2011 program.
The Japanese have a word for it. (But do the Japanese have a word for “missing nose”?)
I had some unexpected free time this weekend, which gave me an opportunity to watch some first episodes. While nothing I saw astonished me, there are a few shows this summer that might be worth following.
Dog Days 2 (I’m sorry, but Dog Days’ just looks stupid) started off well, and it might be the most entertaining series of the summer if it doesn’t lose its way. It looks like the anime staff has something better in mind for Becky other than having her hang around Shinku and get in the way. Now if only the designers could find something more fitting for someone of Leonmitchelli’s status to wear than jean cut-offs —
— and if only they would drop the Most Common Special Attacks and general boinginess. The first Dog Days was a very good children’s show that I can’t recommend for children because of the frequent, irrelevant fanservice. It looks like season two will be the same.
Joshiraku is probably hysterically funny if you know Japanese and can catch all the puns. Monolingual Americans could use some footnotes. Even so, enough of the gags survive translation to make it watchable.
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita combines the twilight of humanity theme of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou with the nightmarish nonsense of Hare & Guu in deadpan fashion. It will be a long time before I want to look at a another loaf of bread. If I watch the next episode, I might not be able to eat chicken ever again. Dare I risk it?
Moyashimon Returns looks to be much like the first season: seriously quirky characters, lectures on fermentation, an elegant gothic lolita, and cute microbes. It’s missing Polysics, though.
All of these — even Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, despite the risks — I’ll watch at least one more episode of. I also saw Campione, Sword Art Online, and Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, which impressed me less. I might watch more of the first two, but “yaoi sticks” disqualify the last from further consideration.
Gee, it’s summer already, and I haven’t yet finished ignoring the spring anime season. Is there anything coming up that’s worth my attention? Let’s see. Moyashimon Returns and Dog Days’, probably. I might check out Sword Art Online, Joshiraku and Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined), ((Speaking of decline ….)). And that’s all that looks even slightly interesting.
Out of morbid curiosity, I watched fifteen minutes of Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse. Pros: Girls in skin-tight uniforms. Cons: Everything else.
I did watch the first episode of Chouyaku Hyakunin Isshu: Uta Koi all the way through. The art is low-budget but pretty. It looks like the emphasis of the storytelling will be on romantic intrigues, which is not of great interest to me. What did catch my eye was the botany in the opening, in particular what looked like Epiphyllum hybrids. This is curious, because the parent cactus species come from Central American jungles and were not likely to have been cultivated in 13th-century Japan.
*****
I recently finished the first season of Dog Days, by the way, and it was good. I wish I could recommend it for youngsters, but there is a little too much fanservice.
I also finished Soul Eater, finally. At the two-third’s point, it looked like it was going to be a very good series, with Vast Conspiracies Revealed at the end, and Everything Explained and the World Put to Rights. But the plots fizzled out, and the rest of the show ended up being mostly just a lot of fighting.
Which is not to say that it’s a bad show. It is always entertaining, with effortless transitions between violent action, horror and farce. It just could have been more.
*****
I see that Haibane Renmei will be available in September for a very good price.
My father was a clarinetist in his college marching band. He frequently played recordings of band music at home while I was young, with the result that I grew up allergic to John Philip Sousa. Over the years I’ve acquired some tolerance to the genre — though I’ll never be a fan — enough so that I can enjoy stunts like these.
(Several hotshot young pianists play Horowitz’s transcription on Youtube, if you want to hear it with better sound. To my ears, Volodos is the least unsatisfactory. If you want to understand why it is so difficult to take Lang Lang seriously, this will make it painfully clear.)
*****
I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, but it amuses me that the best-known of all mahou shoujo is clad in red, white and blue.
Tokachi has roused itself from its nap. Its eruptions are usually “mild-to-moderate,” and I’d be more concerned with what El Hierro is going to do next, but any erupting volcano presents dangers. There are pictures and videos here, ((Update: as far as I can tell from the Giggle translation, the pictures are from five years ago.)) and a webcam here (the fourth on the list).
At the southwest end of Japan on Kyushu, Sakurajima remains its usual explosive self. If your local authorities forbid fireworks Wednesday because of fire danger, you can always watch the show here and here (fifth from the bottom).
Update: Since I grabbed the screencap of Tokachi, I haven’t seen any incandescence in the webcam, and there might not be anything of significance going on, after all. It’s not mentioned in the Japan Meteorological Agency’s list of warnings. You might want to keep an eye on Popocatéptl, instead.
I guess I’ll have to find something else to do on Saturdays at 11 a.m, now that the (first season?) of Mouretsu Pirates is complete.
There might be more to come. (Update: There is indeed a movie in the works.) I wonder how much chance there is of the novels being translated.
“… if your life isn’t bigger than your politics, you’re doing one of them wrong.”
I don’t really want that spider to be the first thing a visitor here sees, so here’s something else I saw this morning.
… but I’d rather deal with mice.
Blogging is low priority right now. I’ll be back eventually. Until then, here are a few links.
Mouretsu Pirates is the only current show I’m following. (I’ll eventually watch Sakamichi no Apollon, and I might finish Tsuritama, but it will be a while before I get to either. The soundtrack for the former is worth tracking down.) One advantage space pirates have over their earthbound predecessors: the cuisine is better.
Everyone who ever writes a review needs to pay attention to Steven Greydanus’s thoughts on spoilers. Once Kirika and Mireille are done with the perpetrators of comment spam, I’ll ask them to pay a visit to the bloggers who announced a certain event in the eleventh episode of Katanagatari, sometimes in the titles of their posts as they appeared at Anime Nano.
Eve Tushnet writes about three of my favorite writers: Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite of his books, too); John Bellairs (who wrote about shufflies); and, Diana Wynne Jones. (Memo to web designers: Black type on a white background is easy to read. Light grey type on a white background isn’t.)
I don’t do politics here beyond the occasional sarcastic aside. Ace touches on one reason why. Elizabeth Scalia writes about another, related reason.
Winter wear for the physicists among you: emission spectra scarves. (Via Fillyjonk.)
John C. Wright, proponent of Space Princess Science Fiction, reprints his research on the Catwoman Equation.
Although Yellowstone is a superdupervolcano, it doesn’t really pose an immediate, immense threat. There might be enough oomph left for one more VEI8 eruption, but there will be plenty of warning and probably thousands of years before that happens. If you own land in Wyoming, you don’t need to be in a hurry to unload it. The vicinity of Mt. Ranier is far more dangerous. It wouldn’t take a large eruption to generate lahars that would reach Puget Sound. However, the most nightmarish city to live, from a vulcanologist’s point of view, is Naples in Italy. Vesuvius is its best-known neighbor, but it’s only one of three. Update: Let’s not forget Auckland, built on a volcanic field and liable to experience a Parícutin-type episode at any time.
Here are the true lyrics to “O Fortuna.”
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
I’m generally in favor of girls with guns, but this batch could use a few lessons in gun-handling.
The Brickmuppet hasn’t scheduled a trip to Tokyo, has he?
A snapshot from today’s “Ballet in the Park” production of Peter and the Wolf.
