I visited my family last week. While there, I spent more time watching American teevee shows then than I have in all the previous 30 years. My folks don’t have cable, so the menu was mostly ancient reruns. In my last post, I suggested that early televised anime was not very sophisticated. Well, compared to I Spy, Dororon Enma-kun is a brilliant example of wit, subtlety and charm. I endured about ten minutes of a drearily preachy episode of Dragnet; I can’t think of any anime I’ve ever seen that was half as lame. Of contemporary series, I saw several “CSI” shows, which were slicker than, but not really much better than, The A-Team. The highlight of each evening was Wheel of Fortune, believe it or not, and at least half the time of that was devoted to commercials — the same damned noisy, stupid commercials, over and over and over and over again and again and again.
There was also an awful lot of “news.” I have a low opinion of newspapers, but sometimes they actually do convey information. Televised news is too dumb even to be a joke.
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National Review doesn’t quite know what to make of Hatsune Miku. I gather that there will soon be an English-language version of Miku; this is one of the very few reasons I have ever found to consider working with Windows.
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Here’s a nice piece of Taiwanese animation:
(Via Beneath the Tangles.)
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I don’t have a car, but if I did, this is the “coexist” sticker I would prefer on my bumper:
(Via Dustbury.)