Trivia that matter
Miho and company are making a final visit.
Update: Girls und Panzer der Film has been licensed for North America.
Josh posted a list of his favorite books, which significantly overlaps mine. Wolfe, Chesterton, Dickens and Vance each appear twice.
… and I’m off to muddy Winfield.
So, as the USA lurches toward kakistocracy, I have a choice between gonorrhea and syphilis Kang 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.
My nephew left his guitar at my place, which gave me an excuse to play with focus stacks.
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.
There’s more information here.
Some miscellaneous nonsense to get you through the rest of the week. I forget where I found most of these.
Eve Tushnet on Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (recommended):
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.
Further reading: Tushnet on a rather different book, Florence King’s When Sisterhood Was in Flower (recommended).
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.
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A reminder from The Political Hat:
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.
… yet I still don’t understand how it is organized.
More fun with focus stacks in stereo. This one is composed from 58 images in two stacks. It’s a cross-view stereo, i.e., the right eye focuses on the left image and the left eye on the right. Cross-view images are not as comfortable to view as parallel-view, in which the left eye focuses on the left image,1 but they can be much larger.
You can view this at various sizes by clicking on the picture or opening it in a new window. At the largest size (1920 pixels wide) it probably won’t all fit on your monitor, but you will be able to see the upper half in great detail.
… and you can see this zinnia in three dimensions.
I’m currently dealing with an excess of reality, and I will probably continue to be scarce here. While I’m away, you can listen to about 30 hours of music for piano and orchestra for 10¢ per hour, courtesy of Amazon.com, here, here and here. There’s ragtime here, if you’d prefer that. (The last includes some Louis Moreau Gottschalk, for no obvious reason.)
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Which famous historical figure is this actor portraying?
Hint: here’s a contemporary representation of him. He’s the one seated in the middle.
The answer is here.
Underdue, adjective
An example of its usage from an Alan Coren book review:
MAXIMINUS NAPLES
The first Proconsul of what was, in the second century BC, still Calabrium, Maximinus is chiefly remembered for his habit of throwing political opponents into Vesuvius. His proconsulate was exceptionally stormy, corrupt and inefficient, and in 134 BC, Emperor Tiberius Gracchus demoted him to the proconsulate of Sicily, where he is chiefly remembered for his habit of throwing political opponents into Etna. His significance is minimal, and my own opinion is that this dreary account is long underdue.
The book in question is a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Coren’s review is based on the title on the spine. The review is included in The Sanity Inspector, the book I tossed in the camera bag yesterday to read while waiting for the cosplay contest to begin.
Coren on the Netherlands:
… it is an interesting country, sweeping up from the coastal plain into the central massif, a two-foot high ridge of attractive silt with fabulous views of the sky, and down again into the valleys, inches below. Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.
I was disappointed that Rory Mercury wasn’t at the anime convention today. Sailor Mercury was there, though, as was One Punch [Wo]man.
There are a bunch more pictures that will take some time to go through.
Update: I’ve edited as many as I’m going to. As usual, the organizers did their damnedest to make taking pictures difficult, and none that I took are any better than snapshots. You can see them all here.
… but worth stating anyway —
… often an artist’s storytelling capabilities exceed their own philosophical limitations and wind up being more universal than their idiosyncrasies. A good story tends to to be more universal than its philosophical scaffolding, which is why I don’t need to, say, find the political and social views of Asimov or Le Guin particularly toothsome to nevertheless find their works deeply meaningful for me.
… one of the beauties of our system of government, of how the rights we have are protected: we are free to disagree with the government. That robust and strong systems are able to tolerate dissent. And by extension, I suppose, the weak and insecure ones are those that work to quash it.
I may visit Anime Festival Wichita next week, after skipping it for several years. It’s kinda dinky and the halls in the venue are too narrow for all the cosplayers, but it is within bicycle distance. It would be helpful if its website were more informative. The “events” page states that “The full schedule will be available soon.” It has said that for months. Five days away, the schedule is still not online, which makes it difficult to plan my weekend. (Update: it’s now the day after the convention, and the schedule has still not been posted there. I did eventually find it on the official AFW Facebook page. (There’s another page that turns up first in searches, but it’s the wrong one.) I hate Facebook.)
If you have a hankering to attend an anime or anime-related convention next week, you don’t have to come to Wichita. There are at least ten others scheduled for the same weekend, from Illinois and South Carolina to Finland and France. There’s even a “Sailor Moon Celebration” in Toronto.
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So, what have I been watching lately? Mostly older stuff. I’ll marathon the rest of Ushio and Tora when I have the time — the word is that it ends well — and I might finish Tanaka-kun someday, but otherwise I lost all interest in the spring season. Nothing this summer looks very promising, but I’ll sample some first episodes when they’re available and see if there are any surprises.
What I have enjoyed re-watching: Redline2, UHF, Humanity Has Declined, The Wrong Box, Duck Soup, Shounen Onmyouji, Mouretsu Pirates3, Keroro Gunsou.
What have all the loud noises been that I’ve been hearing this stormy afternoon?
• Thunder?
• Illegal fireworks?
• Transformer-fried squirrels?
• Gunfire?
• High explosives?
• All of the above?
Probably the last.
I’m tired of seeing that ugly car first thing every time I check my website, so here is the last poppy picture of the year. Below is the first nine o’clock picture. (The common name of Mirabilis jalapa is “four o’clock,” but heat and daylight “savings” time means that they don’t open until around nine in the evening during Kansas summers.)
For those interested in technical stuff: the top picture was assembled in Helicon Focus from 36 separate f/11 images. The bottom picture is a single shot at f/16.