Trivia that matter
The ponies got a shiny, bouncy new opening for their Japanese debut.
I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about it, but it is more palatable than the original.
To clear the treacle out of your ear, here’s “My Little Baccano.” ((Here’s the original Baccano opening, in case anyone still hasn’t seen it.))
For fans of Genesis and Steve Hackett:
The third Girls und Panzer OVA gave us a panoramic view of the school ship. (To see the full-size image, right-click to open the link in a new window.) In terms of Kansas cities, it looks larger than Haysville but smaller than Emporia.
Update: The more I look at this picture, the spookier it becomes. Where is everybody?
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You all had a narrow escape, by the way. I had a few posts in mind for tomorrow which I planned to type up this afternoon. However, my neighbors decided at 1 a.m. this morning that I didn’t need to sleep. (Curiously, when I called on them later they did not come to the door, even though the door was wide open and the teevee was on.) Instead of writing, I spent the afternoon dozing in bed.
Weeds are flourishing. Soon lawns will be purple with henbit.
… until the first tornado warning, but spring is almost here. Trees are still leafless, but daffodils and small bulbs are in full bloom. I visited the botanical garden yesterday and found the pink okame cherry in bloom. The white yoshino cherry is lagging about a week behind. (The very double kwanzan cherry, I am not happy to note, has been cut down.) There are more Botanica pictures beneath the fold.
Jonathan says that Shin Sekai Yori is “… the best science fiction TV show that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but it definitely is in a class with Serial Experiments Lain and Dennou Coil. It’s the best show of any kind I’ve seen since at least Madoka Magica. The ending did not disappoint — not that I was worried; it was obvious early on that the creators knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s absolutely not for children, and even for adults I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation. It’s partly a horror story, with monsters and worse than monsters, all the more chilling for what isn’t shown. But if you have the stomach for it and are willing to think about aggression, social control and human nature, Shin Sekai Yori is worth your time.
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I can give Girls und Panzer an unreserved recommendation for all ages. The premise is silly — teams of high-school girls compete in tank battles — but the staff played it straight and made it work, and did so without panty shots. The last episode was exhilarating and satisfying. If you watch it with friends, you’ll likely cheer aloud as Miho and her comrades fight their desperate battle.
… when the first thing you notice in this picture is the old film SLR camera (and also how ugly the tattoos are).
Yeah, right.
So the Japanese are going to get their own dub of My Little Pony ~Tomodachi wa Mahou~. Good for them; the first season, at least, (which is all I’ve seen) is often clever, rarely cloying, and probably better than nearly all other contemporary shows on western teevee.
Most of the actresses announced so far are new to me, but there are a few familiar voices. The Queen of Tears, Kikuko Inoue, is Princess Celestia. Fortunately, Celestia isn’t a weepy sort, and Inoue is a good actress when she isn’t bawling her eyes out. Rozen Maiden‘s Shinku is Twilight Sparkle, and Cardcaptor Sakura‘s Li Shaoran is Spike.
The surprise is the voice of the sweet, bashful Fluttershy: Emiri Kato. Kato earlier was the cute, cuddly and evil Kyubey. I have difficulty imagining Fluttershy with that voice. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
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Dusty Sage found a “State of the Herd” survey of Bronies. One of the findings is astonishing if it’s accurate: more than a quarter of all MLP:FIM fans are INTJs like me. I knew that thoughtful introverts are far more common on the internet than offline, but this is bizarre.
… so here is St. Patrick evangelizing the Irish, with a cameo by Voltron.
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day might look familiar to fans of Mouretsu Pirates.
It looked like spring would arrive early this year, but that was before 22 inches of global warming fell. The snow is finally gone, but Wichita is still mostly brown. I figure that it will be another week or two before trees leaf out. I went to the botanical garden yesterday and found very little color aside from pansies and daffodils. The lenten rose, above, was the highlight of the trip. The Corylus avellana was in full bloom; look closely to spot the female flowers.
The most colorful item there was the gateway to the children’s garden, below.
Children's garden entrance in Wichita
The okame cherry was showing some pink in its buds. There might be a few flowers opening during the coming week and perhaps more than a few next Saturday. (It’s already cherry blossom season in Japan. Here’s the blooming forecast, should you be planning a trip there soon. (Via J. Greely.))
Update: the panorama works particularly well as a “little planet.”
… of the breadth of your culture:
If this makes you smile, you pass.
Update: A variation on the theme.
The sky was mostly clear this evening, so I tried to find Comet PanSTARRS. I couldn’t see it myself — it’s not a bespectacled-eye object in Wichita skies, though possibly someone with better vision than mine can spot it — but my camera did.
(Via a comment at God and the Machine.)
Jonathan Clements remembers Toren Smith, who passed away Tuesday:
Toren’s enthusiasm for Japanese comics had brought him to the attention of the early staff of Viz Communications, but his relationship with many of them was confrontational and often irascible. Told by one manager to “go and do it himself” if he thought he knew the market better than them, Toren took it not as an oriental brush-off, but as a career move. He stayed in Japan for nine months, selling all his possessions and throwing himself into what he regarded as a real industry with potential growth: translating manga. Crippled financially by the fall in the value of the dollar, he lived a precarious existence nickel-and-diming, working as a janitor in exchange for no questions about his tardy rent in the apartment building, and freezing through a Japanese winter. He was reduced to stealing noodles from a convenience store, but he was also making the right deals, and on the way, acquiring wife number two, the lovely Tomoko Saito. He arrived back in America with a set of Japanese comics entirely packaged, photographed, flipped, retouched, and translated, the rights already agreed.
…
When it turned out that there was no comic tie-in to the Dirty Pair franchise, creator Haruka Takachicho let Toren buy the right to do his own, with artist Adam Warren. When the rights for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind were sold to Viz, Hayao Miyazaki insisted that Toren Smith be involved with the translation. When Eclipse Comics went under in America, Toren was sure to pay off the debts owed to the Japanese using his own money. He was always prepared to put his money where his mouth was, promising, for example, to indemnify Dark Horse against losses if an unknown title called Oh! My Goddess failed to make a profit.
At one point, Smith lived in the GAINAX house with about a dozen animators. According to Yasuhiro Takeda in Wikipedia:
Make no mistake, GAINAX House was a den of rabid bachelors. Nobody cleaned or even straightened up—ever. When we received a visit from Hiroe Suga (who for a time was staying at a boarding house in Tokyo and working as an author), she was literally sickened by the smell. The color drained from her face and she beat a very hasty retreat. Ultimately, we elected to move out of GAINAX House. When the landlord came by to give the place a once-over and release us from our contract, he was stricken speechless. Almost immediately after we vacated, the house was demolished.
If you’re a creative sort, you have an opportunity to collaborate with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, the deadline is next Monday. I wish I’d heard about this earlier.
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Coming attractions: Pixy might be able to see Comets Lemmon and PanSTARRS now. The latter should be visible to those of us in the northern hemisphere soon.
There are more comet pictures here.
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Vertical, Inc., is considering whether to translate Yusuke Kishi’s Shin Sekai Yori. If an English-language copy of the novel would be worth $25 to you, go to Vertical’s Tumblr page and “like” it. They need 4500 people to express an interest before they’ll undertake the project, and I was only #699.
Kishi does have one book available in English translation. I’ll probably include The Crimson Labyrinth in my next Amazon.com order.
If you’re not watching the anime Shin Sekai Yori, you’re missing one of the finest — and most nightmarish — science fiction stories ever broadcast.
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Bambi Meets Godzilla, rebuilt:
You can watch it in 1080 if your computer can handle it.
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Professor Mondo‘s novel is now available as pixels at Amazon.com. I just got a new pair of glasses, so I’ll probably wait for the print edition and read it the way books were meant to be read, on dead trees. You can read one of his short stories here.
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A note on current events in the Catholic Church: everything you read in the secular press is complete and absolute BS. Don’t believe anything you read. I suggest checking in occasionally with Elizabeth Scalia if you want an informed perspective.
Meanwhile, here’s the Vatican version of March Madness, and Christopher Buckley’s introduction to simony.
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Which famous British poet is this? The answer is here.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
During my youth, I was sent to four grade schools and three high schools, public and parochial, where I spent most of my time feigning attention and wishing I could go off by myself and read and explore all day. I eventually realized that the purpose of these schools had nothing to do with learning. They existed to keep me under close supervision and out of my parents’ hair during the day; any real education that might happen was incidental. The American school systems, public and private, are the greatest achievements in day care in the history of civilization.
I’m not the first person to observe that. In 1972, John Holt wrote that
society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. Mom doesn’t want them hanging around the house, the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor force. What then do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? We put them in schools. That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.
(Via Joe Carter.)
At the same time the cathedral was being renovated, across the street a new, gigantic YMCA building (with two indoor swimming pools) was being built. Now that it’s finished, construction workers are demolishing the old building, where I used to swim laps in the crowded basement pool. The picture above was stitched together from nine snapshots taken over the fence around the site with my little go-everywhere camera.
Who needs a theremin when you’ve got a saw?
There are two kinds of dulcimer. This is the right kind.
(This post is a response to this.)