Category: Virtual friends and acquaintances

Links in the time of hurricanes

It looks like the Brickmuppet will get a reprieve from Matthew. Down in Orlando, William Luse might not be as lucky. He links back to his posts from 2004, when Charley and friends paid visits to the Florida peninsula.

Update: The Brickmuppet’s luck ran out.

Derek Lowe recently added another post to his “Things I won’t work with” file, this one dealing with a feisty nitrogen compound (“Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself….”) and anhydrous hydrogen peroxide.

I am told that I barely talked at all until I was nearly four, though when I did start chattering, it was in complete sentences. I was perhaps fortunate that this was back in the dark ages, when autism was a rare and exotic affliction and few people had even heard of Asperger’s.

Japanese dream

Roger, who is spending the current semester in Japan, recorded a theme from Someday’s Dreamers, playing both the piano and fiddle parts. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed Facebook videos on my site, but you can listen here.

Update: It’s on YouTube now.

Update II: Roger with some of his Japanese friends playing a different sort of music:

Something about a dragon?

Josh has seen fit to present me with another award. This time it’s the “Dragon’s Loyalty Award.” Gee, thank you, Josh. It’s a great honor, etc., etc., etc. Someday I may forgive you.

Dragon's Loyalty Award

These are the rules:

1. Display the award on your blog.
2. Announce your win with a post and denounce thank the blogger who awarded you.
3. Present 15 deserving bloggers with the award.
4. Link your awardees in the post and let them know of their being awarded.
5. Write seven interesting things about yourself.

These “awards” are a bit too much like chain letters, and I’m not going to pick 15 more suckers. Anyone listed in my blogroll is worthy of an award. If this exercise looks like fun, feel free to participate.

I’m running out of fascinating trivia about myself. ((The most interesting facts about me are none of your business.)) Let’s see, what haven’t I mentioned before?

1. I had piano lessons as a kid, but they didn’t take. When I was around 20, I got tired of being musically illiterate, so I bought an old upright and found a teacher. Later I took a couple of semesters of music theory at the university. I would have taken more, but the theory classes were scheduled for the convenience of freshman music majors, not non-major upperclassmen with jobs and complicated schedules.

2. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I still don’t.

3. I deliberately mis-matched my socks during my college years. Similarly, I often wore parti-colored hose when I was active in the SCA.

4. I prefer the fragrance of dianthus to that of roses.

5. I do know how to drive, but I generally don’t.

6. When I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, I wandered all over Brigham City, Utah, sometimes with friends, more often alone. Sometimes my friends and I rambled around the lower slopes of the mountain east of town, or we rode our bikes to campgrounds in the canyon to the southeast. I’d pack a lunch and spend entire days at the town park by myself. When I was 11, I explored much of San Francisco north of Golden Gate Park on my bike. I could ride to Baker Beach from home in five minutes, and I’d usually have the sands all to myself. Present-day opponents of free-range parenting would have been aghast.

7. I’ve had fun with depression throughout my life. I rarely mention it because, well, it’s depressing, and others have faced worse and written better about their experiences. I figure it cheated me of about ten years of my youth. Little blue pills have made life a bit easier for me and those who must deal with me. ((This is not a request for advice or inspirational messages. I most likely will never allude to the subject again.))

A world full of Walters

RetsbeilThe results of the Liebster project are in, and there are some interesting data uncovered about these three very different people. The Brickmuppet played trombone; Robbo was nearly run down in a parking lot by Antonin Scalia; Topmaker likes Ian Hunter and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But all three did mention the same name somewhere in their responses.

“I lieb’ ya, I lieb’ ya, baby, I lieb’ ya. Now lieb’ me alone”

Thank you, I think, Josh and Professor Mondo, for giving me the “Liebster Award.” Twice. It’s a great honor and all that. It’s also a fair amount of work. I’ll try not to groan too loudly as I comply with the terms.

This award has been floating around the internet for several years, and the rules have mutated over time. These are what I’m going by today:

LiebsterThe Quasi-Official Rules of the Liebster Award
If you have been nominated for The Liebster Award AND YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT, write a blog post about the Liebster award in which you:
1. thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.
2. display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)
3. answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
4. provide 11 random facts about yourself.
5. nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)
6. create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.
7. list these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!)

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Eleven noteworthy facts about myself that I haven’t mentioned before? This might be difficult.

Continue reading ““I lieb’ ya, I lieb’ ya, baby, I lieb’ ya. Now lieb’ me alone””

Psychopathological aggressor …

… Ken the Brickmuppet condemned by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Details here.

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For those of you who use your computer to make noise, Native Instruments is offering a nice little compressor for free through the end of the year. NI’s Mikro Prism is another interesting freebie, a soft synth with a distinctive sound.

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Double word score?

Dark [K]night

(Via man with black hat.)

Collector’s item

Tsukimi

So Steven is looking for girls with red half-rim glasses? Here’s one he might have missed: Tsukimi, from Princess Jellyfish. ((The frames look brownish here, but elsewhere they’re clearly red.)) (It’s a good show, often very funny, that badly needs a second season, but I suspect that it’s not quite to Steven’s taste.)

The truth about Lincoln …

… and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon. Fred Himebaugh, a.k.a. The Fredösphere, who has neglected his weblog for too long, shares the results of his historical research. Content advisory: robots, alien gods, banjos.

Fred earlier wrote a chamber opera “They’re Made Out of Meat,” using the Terry Bisson short story as the libretto, as well as a touching ballad of interplanetary romance, “Earth Girl.”

A few quotes

Josh W.:

… while a massive philosophical gulf separates J.R.R. Tolkien and Hayao Miyazaki, their works both come from a strange and unmodern place, and speak to the part of us which is unmodern and strange; which is to say the human part of us.

Gilbert Seldes in 1928, quoted by Helen Rittelmeyer:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the word “reformer” meant one who wanted to give liberty to others; today it means, briefly, one who wants to take liberty away. The change in meaning is accompanied by a change in method. There is a dislocation of the center of fear. Laws, lobbies, censors, and spies have displaced God as the object of awe and veneration, sometimes even as the object of faith. The great social and religious movements of the middle of the last century were based on the belief that man could be made perfect. The current belief is that machinery, including the machinery of government, can be made perfect. . . .
The typical zealot of 1800 was a man fanatically busy about salvation; in the 1840s he was as fanatically busy about improving himself; later he turned to uplifting his fellowmen and later still to interfering with their pleasures. . . .
Eighty years ago, [a reformer] withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. Today, he passes laws and cries, I forbid.

J. Greely:

When engineers sleep,
catgirl breeding runs amuck;
Steven, get well soon.

(This is in reference to this news.)

The many flavors of cheesecake

To save you the trouble of clicking repeatedly on the lower left corner of Steven’s header, I’ve collected 915 of the images and assembled them into a convenient slide show.

The singer is Mayumi Kojima. She’s probably best-known in the anime world for “Poltergeist,” the memorable opening theme of the otherwise disappointing Ghost Hound.

Alternative animation

Ubu on $369.98 ($498.98 retail):

I refuse to apologize for bittorrenting any longer, and I refuse to feel guilty, and I refuse to buy any series from anyone, anywhere at that price. Burn in hell, Japan.

If that is indeed what purveyors of anime have planned for us, and if they do finally succeed in eliminating torrents and downloads, then anime will be dead outside of Japan. However, there are other places where good animation can be found. France, for instance. Recently I made the mistake of browsing amazon.com and found both The Triplets of Belleville and Persepolis for $7 each.

Belleville was as good as I remembered, though I had forgotten just how fat the Americans were. Here are a couple of excerpts showing the eponymous triplets in their prime and in the movie’s present.

Madame Souza, who plays the bicycle wheel in the second clip, is one of the great heroic animated characters. She would have been serious competition for Balsa in the current poll had The Triplets of Belleville been a Japanese movie.

Persepolis is a girl’s-eye view of the Iranian revolution, with a sojourn in France. Despite its subject matter, it’s often quite funny.

I highly recommend both movies.

Other bargains I spotted include Chicken Run and The Corpse Bride, each for $5. I also found a two-disc edition of Coraline for $7 at the grocery store. It includes two pairs of red/green 3D viewers.

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Looking for Christmas presents for youngsters? Petite Princess Yucie is on sale at RightStuf for $10. This is an excellent price for a very good series. (Here’s Steven’s review, with which I concur.)

Princess Tutu is on sale for $15, also a good price for a very interesting story, though not as suitable for young viewers.

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Both Jonathan Tappan and J. Greely have been posting pictures of their recent trips to Japan. Visit their weblogs and see.

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Newt Gingrich has an idea for enhancing American defenses.

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Hot stuff:

What really happened to Gollum and the ring in Mt. Doom?

A spectacular recent video of Kilauea in action.

Who is the unluckiest person in the galaxy?

Seina Yamada, of Tenchi Muyo GXP, or Ken the Brickmuppet? Consider this, this, this and this, and there’s plenty more in the archives.

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So there is a rumor that Bob Dylan might get the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well, okay. The Peace Prize is absolutely meaningless nowadays, so why not make the literary prize a joke as well? ((I am aware that some intelligent people think Dylan is a Great Artist, but in my arrogant opinion, he has but a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music.))

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High heels obviously make no sense for superheroines. ((Sailor Mars’ greatest superpower is the ability to sprint in stilettos.)) Neither does exposed cleavage.

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Some examples of the ninja in Japanese art.

Tall, slender and on little wheels

Fred Himebaugh, a.k.a. “The Fredösphere,” who once wrote a jazz chamber opera using Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” as the libretto, has unleased his idea of a pop song upon an defenseless world. “Earth Girl” is an a capella celebration of interplanetary romance. The performers are not credited; I presume they are Fred, Fred, Fred and Fred. Frëd is some kind of genius; what kind, I hesitate to say. It’s available at Amazon.com.

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It’s spring preview time again. As usual, little looks worthwhile. C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control is directed by Kenji Nakamura, who previously did Mononoke and Trapeze. Even if the story makes no sense, the visuals should be entertaining. I’ll probably also sample Moshidora to see if it’s possible to make management interesting. I might see how Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera compares to the original. The preview looks true to Go Nagai: too childish for adults, too pervy for kids.

There are times when I would swear that every man, woman and child in Japan is a pervert. I really didn’t need to read about Lotte no Omocha.

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Some visitors have come here looking for a “shinmoedake webcam.” There’s one here and a couple more here (the sixth and fifth seventh and sixth from the bottom in the box at right. The fourth fifth from the bottom ((The Suwanosejima camera is back (second from the bottom), though you still can’t see much.)) is Sakurajima, which is worth checking regularly). The Shinmoedake crater at Kirishima did erupt again Sunday, but it was not as catastrophic as the L.A. Times would have you believe:

If there was destruction and panic, everyone was over it in time to go to the mall the next day.

The big show was back in January.

If it’s “silly hindu stuff,” you’re looking for, I can’t help you.