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.
Author: Don
Habemus spinacia
(Via a comment at God and the Machine.)
The youngest licensed hang glider pilot in Canada
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.
Miscellany
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.)
Hard time
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.)
No swimming
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.
Memo to the Brickmuppet
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.)
Quote of the day
In the 30s, serious intellectuals traveled to the Soviet Union to hail it as the future of humanity. In the 60s and 70s, writers, actors & other assorted glitterati went to Cuba to be schmoozed by El Jefe. And now North Korea has hauled in…a retired basketball player with a penchant for shock publicity. The quality of useful idiots is on a definite downward trajectory.
Insomnia and czárdás
Early this morning, after I had given up on getting any more sleep, I discovered that there are a number of full-length ballets on YouTube. Coppélia is a favorite of mine. The melodious score is worth listening to even if you are not interested in dance, and the story almost makes sense. There’s even a mad scientist (or magician). The video above is a Bolshoi Ballet performance.
Others I found include La Bayadere, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and more, often in multiple versions and occasionally in HD. There’s also opera.
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And now for something completely different: Japanese Vikings, singing songs of [censored].
Update: And the video is gone. This is what you missed.
Stonehenge Lite
We got six inches more snow yesterday, which makes 20 inches since Thursday. I took the scenic route to work this morning, passing by the “standing stones” in a nearby park.
Update: Here’s the panorama. Right-click and pick “little planet” for a different kind of view.
Standing Stones in Riverside Park in USA
This was assembled with Panorama Studio Pro. Hugin, which I had been using, is free, but it’s finicky, and I got tired of constantly finding and editing control points and still getting glitchy output. I also considered PTGui Pro. It has more features than Panorama Studio, notably HDR support, but it didn’t do quite as good a job stitching images together in my tests (though both worked much better than Hugin), and it costs twice as much.
Quote of the day, anime edition
Arhyalon, in a discussion of “aristocracy”:
So, is it impossible to show noble characters well on film?
Not at all. In fact, it is done very well over and over again today. By the Japanese in Anime.
One also sees it occasionally in British films. The Japanese and the English, both peoples with a long history of a noble class, seem to grok nobility in a way that the Americans and New Zealanders just do not.
There will be a slight delay …
… before spring arrives: fourteen inches of snow so far, and it’s still coming down.
Update: The view from the front porch Friday morning.
Playing with a new toy
Let’s run a few raws and HDR stacks through Photomatix. ((Yeah, still more cathedral pictures. I did these at lunch yesterday, and these are what I have on hand at the office.))
Briefly noted
Here’s an earlier, very different version of the Mononoke Hime story. You can see some additional Miyazaki art here.
First color
I rode out to the botanical garden this afternoon to find that it’s closed on Sundays until April. My irritation was slightly allayed by discovering a Japanese apricot in full, fragrant bloom.
72 years ago
Patty Andrews died two weeks ago at the age of 94.
Nonsense and stuff
Presenting the Pulp-O-Mizer.
(Via dotclue)
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While researching jurisimprudence, I came across some additions to The Rules:
Cunningham’s Law – The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
Muphry’s Law — The principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling
…
Chuck Jones’s Law – If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a bunny.
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Via the professor, here’s the Monty Python “Happy Valley” skit. which I hadn’t come across before.
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I quit watching teevee decades ago, so I missed this classic commercial. (Via Robbo.)
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When assembling a web page, be sure to close all tags. (How large a monitor would you need to read the final line above the footer?)
(Via Dustbury.)
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Even rapidly-flowing, basaltic lava, such as that which Tolbachik is currently erupting in Kamchatka, is dense stuff, as illustrated by the process of taking a sample, above.
Here’s a spherical panoramic movie of a helicopter touring Tolbachik. You can click and drag to change the direction of view.
Since lava is so dense, is it possible, with the appropriate footwear, to walk across a fresh flow? Sometimes, if conditions are right:
At Etna you can walk on small lava flows with good hiking boots (it might be their last hike, though), because the lava is more viscous than on Hawai’i. However, you won’t try on a larger flow because heat radiation is so huge.
You go first.
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Mt. Rainier erupting the Milky Way.
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Some true rock music, made with volcanic phonolite.
Musical archaeology
The worst time-sink on the internet is TV Tropes, followed by Wikipedia. And then there’s YouTube, where I got trapped this weekend. I wondered if I could find some of the barely-remembered songs I heard back in ancient times. Many hours later, I had located quite a few. Here are some I unearthed. You can judge for yourselves whether these were buried treasures or something else.
Snapshots, with Bach
The renovations at the Catholic cathedral in Wichita are finally complete, and it reopens Saturday. Here is a slide show of some recent pictures I took there.
The music is from the Open Goldberg Variations.
Update: Here’s the cathedral with people inside: