• Raff, Riff, of Notre Dame, Indiana
• Bunny, Soul, of Williams Bay, Wisconsin
• Vader, Darth, of Spokane, Washington
• Mouse, Mickey, of Anaheim, California
• The Elf, Buddy, of North Pole, Alaska
• Hydrox, Cookie, of Newport Coast, California
These and the others on the list are all better choices than any of those offered by the political parties.
Here a few pictures from one of the ballets performed at last night’s rehearsal at Friends University. The dancers put their telephones aside for the other pieces. I took about 100 gigabytes of photos altogether (including raws), which will take some time to go through. Click to embiggen.
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.
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.
I looked at random first episodes of the fall shows debuting on Crunchyroll. Overall it looks like another season for watching old favorites and working on my backlog, but a couple show promise.
Easily the best is The Ancient Magus’ Bride. Chise, a girl without a family who sees yokai, lives with a sorcerer in the English (I think) countryside. Her guardian/owner/future husband has an animal skull for a head, but he seems to be a decent, caring fellow who enjoys a cup of tea. At various times I was remineded of Spirited Away, Natsume Yuujin-cho, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman and The Twelve Kingdoms. It’s worth checking out if any of these names mean something to you.
Unfortunately, The Ancient Magus’ Bride is an OVA rather than a regular series. There will be two more episodes released six months apart. If you want more, the manga might be worth tracking down.
A better broomstick (or “boomstick”?)
Izetta: The Last Witch is yet another alternate history of WWII. This time, the principal characters are a strong-willed and capable princess from a small country in central Europe, and a “white witch” with red hair. What particularly interested me was the music. One scene is set at a performance of The Magic Flute, and we hear parts of both of the Queen ofNight’s arias. It’s probably too much to hope for more Mozart in future episodes, but I’ll likely will watch another episode or two to see how the story develops. The ending art hints that there will be yuri; if that happens, I’ll drop the show.
Other shows I sampled:
Nyanbo! features CG cardboard cats doing cardboard cat things during its brief episodes. A character I would rather watch appears momentarily at the end.
Guess who
Kaiju Girls is a sort of mahou shoujo parody with very short episodes, except that the chibi girls transform into chibi monsters. It’s almost too light to call “fluff,” as is Ninja Girl and Samurai Master.
I watched five minutes of Tiger Mask. Ugh. The hell with it.
To my astonishment, I made it all the way through the first episode of the latest iteration of Time Bokan. It straddles the border of silly and stupid, but it might be tolerable for those who occasionally enjoy a little dumb humor.
This looks strangely familiar
Magical Girl Raising Project looks like an attempt to be another Madoka Magica, this time pitting the girls against each other in a battle royale. Without Shaft, Akiyuki Shinbo, Gen Urobuchi and Yuki Kajiura, though, it’s not likely to work. The black and white parti-colored mascot is probably a shout-out to Danganronpa, a show I have zero interest in. Ubu is watching it; I’ll check in a few weeks to see what he thinks of it.
Magical Girl Raising Project is populated by girls. (People obsessed with “gender identity” will be pleased to learn that one of the girls is not a traditional female.) Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru is populated entirely by young men with pointy chins, many of whom also wear red eyeliner or dangly earrings. Gee, I never realized that swords are so effeminate. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, and it’s rendered innocuous by horseplay and slapstick, but it’s not for me and probably not for you, either.
One curious note: both Time Bokan and Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru deal with historical revisionism. Neither do it as well as Peabody and Sherman.
Additional screencaps below the fold. Click to embiggen.
There were a few “Bernie” yard signs in the area earlier this year, but they are gone now. I had not seen a single sign for any presidential candidate since the conventions until this week, when I spotted the above on my way to work. I still have yet to see anyone advocating for either the Democrat or Republican embarrassments in his front yard.
The ceremonial presentation of the cheap red sunglasses to the fiddle winner.
A young friend of mine named Roger had a nice little racket going. He’d enter the old time fiddle competition at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, take second or third place, and go home with a shiny new fiddle. This year he goofed and took first. It will be five years before he can enter the fiddle competition again.1 Perhaps he’ll start collecting mandolins.
So, as the USA lurches toward kakistocracy, I have a choice between gonorrhea and syphilisKang and Kodos a crook and a clown in November. Like hell I’m voting for these jerks. (It doesn’t help that the crook’s running mate is a devout member of the American Catholic Patriotic Association.)
The following are the candidates I’m considering for November. Any of them is a better choice than the Evil, Stupid, Libertarian or Green party offerings.
Last week’s earthquake has been upgraded to 5.8, the strongest ever recorded in Oklahoma. I came across a gif of quakes in the 48 states from 2005 on. Keep your eye on northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas.
I spent the morning at Wichita State University taking pictures of the sculptures littering the campus. Here are a few; there are some more at my Flickr site. These are all crossview stereo. To view them, cross your eyes until you see three images, then focus on the middle image. Click on them to see them at larger sizes.
Agatha Christie apparently liked Muriel Spark a lot, and one similarity I noticed–which goes along with the novel’s arch, judicious tone–is that both novelists paint human nature in shades of folly and wickedness. Those old-fashioned words (a Christie character in The Pale Horse explicitly points out how nobody calls things “wicked” anymore) have found no adequate modern replacement. Folly, in particular, is a category we have a hard time naming. Christie generally portrays even her characters who do great and lasting harm–the instigator/victim in The Mirror Crack’d, for example–as extremes of a trajectory the best among us follow now and then. Folly can destroy a life; folly is an inevitable tint in every human action. Folly is ridiculous and deadly, and normal.
One of the many shows I don’t plan to watch this fall is ClassicaLoid. ANN describes it thus:
The story follows high school students Kanae and Sōsuke, who live in a provincial town that is trying to revitalize itself with music. One day, suddenly “Classicaloid” versions of Beethoven and Mozart appear in front of Kanae and Sōsuke. When the suspicious-looking Classicaloids play music they call “mujik,” it has a strange power: stars start to fall, and giant robots appear. Now every day is tumultuous. Eventually, more Classicaloids start to appear such as Bach, Chopin, and Schubert. What is the great power that the Classicaloids have? Are they friends or foe to humanity?
The show’s music will include pop, rock, techno, and other arrangements of famous classical works, arranged by well-known Japanese musicians. The official website states that the show will also feature “battles, slapstick comedy, heartwarming stories, and light love(?).”
It sounds dumb, and while you are welcome to do what you like with Liszt and Tchaikowsky, I don’t appreciate anyone monkeying around with Chopin.
One of the composers victimized is a certain Bądarzewska. I’d never heard of this person, so I did a little searching and discovered that the composer is presumably Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. She wrote a piano piece called “The Maiden’s Prayer.” From Wikipedia:
Percy Scholes, writes in The Oxford Companion to Music (9th edition, reprinted 1967) rather unkindly of Bądarzewska: “Born in Warsaw in 1838 [sic] and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three [sic]. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilised world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allen of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.”
The composition is a short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody, and others have described it as “sentimental salon tosh”. The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as a “dowdy product of ineptitude.”
You can listen to the piece here, and Bob Wills’ version here.
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The only current show that I’m following is Mob Psycho 100. Though less overtly comic than One Punch Man, it has much of the same sensibility, with a similar contrast of naiveté and cynicism, and with a similar satirical edge.
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I gave up on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress half-way through the first episode. Pixy stuck it out and reports that it is
Completely implausible. These people are so dumb the zombies would starve to death.
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At one point in Summer Wars (recommended), a list of people who solved a puzzle in the movie is displayed. While rewatching the movie recently, I spotted a familiar name. You might find other names of interest, variously misspelled.
The little inverted purple triangle signifies a “tornado vortex signature.” With luck, it will dissipate before it reaches Wichita, but I was hoping for a nice quiet evening tonight.
Update: There was a lot of wind and rain, but nothing beyond that in Wichita. Although the radar indicated three different tornado vortices during the evening, only one touched down, and that was in a rural area well west of here.
