The wrong place

Yu Muroga was a Japanese delivery man. He was doing his round when the earthquake occurred on March 11th 2011. Like most people in the area, he did not feel under the threat of the tsunami as he was driving far from the coast. That’s why he kept on driving and doing his job.
The HD video camera on his dashboard did not only film the tremors but also the moments after the earthquake when several drivers were trapped by the tsunami waters.
The video camera was recently found by the police next to the passenger’s body.

Click on the quote above to see the video.

(Via a comment at Eruptions.)

A post including the word “paradox” and a mention of G.K. Chesterton, but not in the same paragraph

Very miscellaneous links and curiosities.

Quote of the week:

Lutherans are not Baptists. Catholics are not evangelicals. Methodists are not Presbyterians. Presbyterians are not Anglicans. No one is an Episcopalian.

From the same authority, an appreciation of Joseph Levitch.

Paging AC/DC.

A paradox of quantum etymology.

Expected real-life Batman generation rate.

The inverse law of sanity.

Schopenhauer in the key of E minor: Heavy metal keeps us sane. (Yeah, right. Oh, and G.K. Chesterton was a proto-metalhead.)

Tasted like chicken.

Is the heat wearing you out? There’s plenty of snow at Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Minimalist Marvel posters.

When it comes to Wonder Woman redesigns, skirts beat pants. Colleen Doran did some “high fantasy” concept drawings of WW, which you can see here, here and here.

Want your very own action figure, just like Danny Choo?

Who needs real musicians anymore? Who needs real singers? All you need are a computer, some good instrument sample sets and a troupe of Vocaloids. Here’s a lively twelve-minute musical vaguely based on Lewis Carroll. (I note with annoyance that the Cheshire Nekomimi doesn’t have a grin.)

Some of the above via The Rat, Jonathan Tappan, Project Rooftop and Vocaloidism.

Prelude to a sleepless night

I’d like to meet the man who invented the subwoofer. I don’t want to shake his hand; I want to slug him in the solar plexus. It is hard to think of any other innovation that has done as much to make life in the 21st century needlessly unpleasant. I feel lousy tonight, and I’d like to go to bed early. However, the inhabitants of my neighborhood believe that it is their inalienable right to party all night long on weekends, and that includes playing bad music loudly. I cannot not listen to music, no matter how stupid, and low bass notes can penetrate ten feet of concrete. Sometimes the neighbors will turn the garbage down or off if I ask them, but I have to get out bed and dress first, and when I get back home, it can be an hour before I’m drowsy enough to think about sleep again.

I’ve observed many times that the worse the music, the more loudly it is played. My hypothesis is that the chief pleasure in playing rap, techno ((“Disco for robots”)) and the like lies not in what minimal musical virtues the recordings might have — you’d have to be pretty damned stupid to find such drivel intellectually or aesthetically interesting — but in tormenting those who cannot escape the exaggerated, mindless beat.

Testing …

If I have the feeds set up right, this post should appear at Anime Nano but not at Facebook. (Yeah, I am on Facebook, and no, I’m not very friendly. I’m there mainly to keep tabs on friends and family. If you want to know what’s on my mind, my weblog is the source to consult.)

… testing

If I have the feeds set up right, this post should appear — eventually — at Facebook but not at Anime Nano.

The amount of trash Askimet is catching indicates that bookmarks and links to my old sites are indeed sending visitors and spambots here. You should not need to update your links. However, you probably do need to change the RSS feed if you use one. You now have a choice of feeds, available at the bottom of the sidebar at right. “All Topics” includes everything I post; “Anime” covers posts on animation and Japan; “Not anime” encompasses everything except posts on Japanese animation; and, “Photo gallery” gathers posts featuring pictures I’ve taken.

Black and white

While setting up my new photo gallery, I came across old jpegs of pictures I took back toward the end of the film and darkroom era. Here’s a sampling. All of these I shot, developed and printed myself.

One of the first pictures I took when I began photographing dance, and still one of my favorites. The lady in the air is Melonie Buchanan, one of the best dancers ever to study at Friends University in Wichita. The image was taken with a 4×5 Crown Graphic camera. The negative made excellent 16×20 enlargements, one of which was on display for many years at Lawrence Photo in Wichita.

Continue reading “Black and white”

Good news, bad news

The good news: There’s more Marie & Gali translated. Wasurenai is up to episode 27. That leaves 13 episodes to go of the first series, plus the 30 of Version 2.0.

Marika, a magenta-haired middle school student who favors EGL fashions and has no interest in science, finds herself marooned in Galihabara, an isolated town populated by famous scientists. They’re a little different there than they are in history books. Galileo is a buffoonish gonk, Newton is a snooty bishounen who only has eyes for his apple, Darwin is a robot, (John Ambrose) Fleming says “Yo!” a lot, etc. Fortunately for Marika, Madame Curie is relatively sane and provides her a place to stay.

Each of the five-minute episodes illustrates, sorta, a scientific principle. In the episode from which the screen captures above come, Archimedes, Hertz and Galileo compete in a fishing tournament. Through various ridiculous strategies, they catch enough fish and other aquatic creatures to capsize their boat, leaving them up lost at sea in a lifeboat with Marika. The episode ends with a brief lecture on bouyancy from Archimedes.

How much of the science kids watching the show will retain, I can’t say. It doesn’t really matter that much, though. Marie & Gali subordinates didacticism to broad, goofy humor, to its benefit.

The bad news: Captain Planet, the live-action movie. Please excuse me while I throw up.

Welcome

Welcome to the successor of The Kawaii Menace and Scuffulans hirsutus. There’s still a lot of fussing and tweaking to do, and I may well change the name and template yet again, but the place is organized enough now that visitors shouldn’t get too lost.

Don’t hurry to update your links. Once I have everything in place, I’ll redirect my other domain names (tancos.net and tancos2.net) so that old links will take you here.

I decided to merge my two weblogs. I don’t post enough these days to warrant maintaining more than one. I know that few people share my range of interests. If you are not interested in animation, skip those posts; if that is all you care about, skip the rest.

The WordPress export/import process worked fairly well, but there were some glitches. Most of the music and many of the pictures that I’ve posted in the past didn’t make the transfer. Unless one of the missing pieces is of particular importance, I’m not going to worry about it. There will be plenty more new things here.

*****

If you didn’t vote in the poll at right at The Kawaii Menace, please do so here. It’s not necessary to have seen every single nominated character to vote. (I’ve transferred the results from the poll at the old site, so if you did vote there, please don’t vote again. (If none of the characters are familiar, then you probably shouldn’t vote.))

From Parma Tyelpelassiva

Recognize this?

Man naeg mathal, ae maethor veren,
Erui reniol ar nimp?
I thâr pellen uin ael
Ar ú-linnar in aew.

Actually, you do know the poem of which this is the first stanza, though probably not in this translation.

There’s more poetry here, and much else about Tolkien’s languages, including downloadable courses. ((It’s oddly refreshing to see such an old-fashioned website.)) Here’s an overview of the Elvish languages.

The last AFW post …

… until next year, maybe.

I finally got through all the Anime Festival Wichita photos. You can see 421 of them here.

Here they are in a slide show:

[flowplayer src=’http://tancos.net/flv/wp-content/uploads/afw7SlideShow.mp4′ width=640 height=480]

Right-click on the blue lady to download the file (57 megabytes).

I was surprised that there weren’t any Madoka cosplayers. Also absent: Chii; Rei and Asuka; miscellaneous Rozen Maidens; Ayumu and Haruna.