Something a little different: a Russian version of The Little Mermaid from 1968. The subtitled version isn’t ready yet, but you all know the story, right?
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
Hmm
An interesting observation from Jane in Anchorage:
Our Latin Mass choir here has, counting myself and my husband, three men and eight women. The oldest person in the choir is about 40, or not much older, four of us are in our 20s, and four are teenagers.
In contrast, there is currently no one in the parish choir, that sings at the main English-language Mass of the day, who is under 50.
Pigs can fly
Here’s some nonsense to amuse you while I’m busy not writing.
Missing link discovered: Magical girls perform functions in Japanese society similar to those of superheroes in America. I’ve wondered whether if this is an example of parallel evolution or if there is a common ancestor. A recent discovery suggests that the latter may be the case. The protagonist of Ai to Yuuki no Pig Girl Tonde Buurin is essentially a superhero. However, she has a henshin sequence that is unmistakably that of a mahou shoujo. (The show is on the border between silly and dumb, and I don’t recommend it except as a curiosity.)
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Um, no comment.
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European history, according to freshman papers:
The Reformnation happened when German nobles resented the idea that tithes were going to Papal France or the Pope thus enriching Catholic coiffures. Traditions had become oppressive so they too were crushed in the wake of man’s quest for ressurection above thenot-just-social beast he had become. An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients. Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic. Monks went right on seeing themselves as worms. The last Jesuit priest died in the 19th century.
I spent ninth grade at a Jesuit high school. Either I’m older than I had realized, or I was educated by zombies.
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Let’s intellect: Is this a parody, or for real?
A community where all angst struggling writers and poets can intellect. We are not only spiritual and constructive in our writing. We are serious, hardworking writers. We have given perspiration to inspiration; We have strived in our thrivations. We have lived to build our living characters, penciled through every constructive detail in our realms filled in sorrow, death, birth, hardship, and pain. Our imaginations entwined to unfurl past a world of hope, a universe of dreams, fairies, trolls, gas- breathing dragons or three-warped witches, tales of Heros, and stories of legend all capsized into an outlined story draft. Words strumming onto a page of pure magic; and it is magic. Our work is engraved in our names, stitched into our bloods, ravenous through our ink-coursed veins that defines the artistic process. Join us and forever hold your peace in The Ambitious Writers, The Children Writers, The Erotics, The Romances, The Horrors, The Fictitious, The Poets, The Westerns, The Adventures, The Mystery, THE STRUGGLING WRITERS
Oh, yeah: Rule #1 is “No negative critiquing.”
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Would you buy it for a quarter?
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What the hell —
I posted a couple of pictures just before I left the office today. When I checked this site an hour later, the post had reverted back to “draft” status, with most of the text missing. Later during the evening, the post reappeared, but now it’s gone again. I’m guessing that there are some problems with the server that hosts my site.
Here are the pictures, again. We’ll see if they are still here in the morning.
All the scaffolding that filled the Wichita cathedral for much of the year is gone now, and you can see the work of the painters. There are 280 rosettes in the church, each one freshly gilded.
Odds and ends
I noticed recently that Funimation is now streaming a couple of essential anime series, Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei. The latter will finally be available again on DVD next month, and for a very good price, but as far as I know, there are no plans to reissue Lain.
Update: As Mikeski mentions in his comment, Lain will be available again in November, possibly in much higher quality than the original release.
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Quotes of the week:
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Hollywood is the wrong place to look for heroes worth emulating. Try anime, instead. Seirei no Moribito is a good place to start.
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Jack Vance’s novel The Chasch is free for the downloading during August. (Via Aliens in This World.)
Mt. Doom in the news
New Zealand’s Tongariro, where parts of The Lord of the Rings movies were filmed, erupted briefly yesterday. ((Some accounts state that this is its first eruption in over a century. That’s not strictly accurate. The particular crater might not have been active since the 19th century, but other vents in the Tongariro complex, which includes the photogenic Ngauruhoe, have erupted as recently as 1977.)) About two inches of ash are said to have fallen three miles from the volcano. There are no reports of damage or injuries. Things are currently quiet, but that can change rapidly.
Coincidentally, White Island had a small eruption a couple of days earlier. Like Tongariro, White Island is part of the Taupo Volcanic Zone. It has been quiet, and a tourist attraction, for about a decade.
Update: Further information about Tongariro. There’s also more information at Volcano Café on Tongariro and White Island.
Comparatives
Bad: 106°F (41°C).
Worse: Riding your bicycle home from work in 106°F.
Worser: Discovering that the air conditioner has quit working.
Worser still Rotten: Finding that the landlord is not answering the phone.
I am sitting in front of a fan, dripping sweat. I am not happy.
Update: The air conditioner decided to start working again. This is fortunate; the predicted high for tomorrow is 113°.
Still waiting
Miscellaneous notes:
A few months ago I cancelled my minimal-speed DSL connection and signed up for cable internet. I am supposed to get downstream speeds of 18.5 megabytes per second, and according to online speed tests, I do. In fact, I can download a gigabyte-plus torrent in the time it takes me to shave and brush my hair. However, surfing the world wide wait web is still an exercise in patience. No matter how fast your connection is, a page that is assembled from 150 little items stored on several sluggish servers will always take forever to load, even if you have ads and Flash blocked.
By the way, if you are building a website and want to add comments, please don’t use Disqus. It takes far too long to load, if it loads at all.
21 years ago
I pulled another Newtype out of Richard’s box. This one is from July 1991, by which time the Japanese had discovered the steampunk aesthetic. Here are some of the images that caught my eye.
Kansas weather
This is what the sky looked like just before I left work.
It’s been a rather chilly day today, only reaching 99°F, instead of the predicted 108°. It’s even cooler now — not that I’m complaining.
Episode two
In the pastel future depicted by Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, a.k.a. Humanity Has Declined, we can expect plucked, headless, scheming chickens
What’s Don listening to these days?
Nothing special — just plain, ordinary gypsy metal and the like.
Obstacle course
I get around town primarily by bicycle. Since the city planners have made it nearly impossible to travel any distance greater than a half-mile in Wichita without using arterial roads, I often ride on sidewalks. This can present difficulties. Here’s what I encounter when I go the the grocery story:
Badly-placed banners.
Today’s puzzler
Piano mysteries and more
Here’s about two week’s worth of accumulated trivia.
I lost patience with radio years ago. The only time I listen nowadays is during storm warnings. Consequently, I never knew the Piano Puzzler existed until Angela at Mommy Bytes recently mentioned its tenth anniversary. Each week, pianist Bruce Adolphe arranges a “familiar” tune in the style of another composer, and the contestant’s task is to identify both the composer and the melody. I can usually identify the composer right off, but naming the tune is often difficult. What makes the segments memorable is Adolphe’s fantastic ingenuity in devising his arrangments, which must be heard to be believed. He does things like combine Schubert with Gershwin, Gershwin with Copland, The Fantasticks with Berg, spirituals with Handel, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” with Brahms, etc., and makes each combination, no matter how unlikely, work. You can stream the programs or download them here. My favorite so far is the April 6, 2011 program.
“Dosuloli”
The Japanese have a word for it. (But do the Japanese have a word for “missing nose”?)
I had some unexpected free time this weekend, which gave me an opportunity to watch some first episodes. While nothing I saw astonished me, there are a few shows this summer that might be worth following.
Dog Days 2 (I’m sorry, but Dog Days’ just looks stupid) started off well, and it might be the most entertaining series of the summer if it doesn’t lose its way. It looks like the anime staff has something better in mind for Becky other than having her hang around Shinku and get in the way. Now if only the designers could find something more fitting for someone of Leonmitchelli’s status to wear than jean cut-offs —
— and if only they would drop the Most Common Special Attacks and general boinginess. The first Dog Days was a very good children’s show that I can’t recommend for children because of the frequent, irrelevant fanservice. It looks like season two will be the same.
Joshiraku is probably hysterically funny if you know Japanese and can catch all the puns. Monolingual Americans could use some footnotes. Even so, enough of the gags survive translation to make it watchable.
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita combines the twilight of humanity theme of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou with the nightmarish nonsense of Hare & Guu in deadpan fashion. It will be a long time before I want to look at a another loaf of bread. If I watch the next episode, I might not be able to eat chicken ever again. Dare I risk it?
Moyashimon Returns looks to be much like the first season: seriously quirky characters, lectures on fermentation, an elegant gothic lolita, and cute microbes. It’s missing Polysics, though.
All of these — even Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, despite the risks — I’ll watch at least one more episode of. I also saw Campione, Sword Art Online, and Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, which impressed me less. I might watch more of the first two, but “yaoi sticks” disqualify the last from further consideration.
Seasonal yawn
Gee, it’s summer already, and I haven’t yet finished ignoring the spring anime season. Is there anything coming up that’s worth my attention? Let’s see. Moyashimon Returns and Dog Days’, probably. I might check out Sword Art Online, Joshiraku and Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined), ((Speaking of decline ….)). And that’s all that looks even slightly interesting.
Out of morbid curiosity, I watched fifteen minutes of Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse. Pros: Girls in skin-tight uniforms. Cons: Everything else.
I did watch the first episode of Chouyaku Hyakunin Isshu: Uta Koi all the way through. The art is low-budget but pretty. It looks like the emphasis of the storytelling will be on romantic intrigues, which is not of great interest to me. What did catch my eye was the botany in the opening, in particular what looked like Epiphyllum hybrids. This is curious, because the parent cactus species come from Central American jungles and were not likely to have been cultivated in 13th-century Japan.
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I recently finished the first season of Dog Days, by the way, and it was good. I wish I could recommend it for youngsters, but there is a little too much fanservice.
I also finished Soul Eater, finally. At the two-third’s point, it looked like it was going to be a very good series, with Vast Conspiracies Revealed at the end, and Everything Explained and the World Put to Rights. But the plots fizzled out, and the rest of the show ended up being mostly just a lot of fighting.
Which is not to say that it’s a bad show. It is always entertaining, with effortless transitions between violent action, horror and farce. It just could have been more.
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I see that Haibane Renmei will be available in September for a very good price.
Fireworks
My father was a clarinetist in his college marching band. He frequently played recordings of band music at home while I was young, with the result that I grew up allergic to John Philip Sousa. Over the years I’ve acquired some tolerance to the genre — though I’ll never be a fan — enough so that I can enjoy stunts like these.
(Several hotshot young pianists play Horowitz’s transcription on Youtube, if you want to hear it with better sound. To my ears, Volodos is the least unsatisfactory. If you want to understand why it is so difficult to take Lang Lang seriously, this will make it painfully clear.)
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I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, but it amuses me that the best-known of all mahou shoujo is clad in red, white and blue.
Hot times in Hokkaido
Tokachi has roused itself from its nap. Its eruptions are usually “mild-to-moderate,” and I’d be more concerned with what El Hierro is going to do next, but any erupting volcano presents dangers. There are pictures and videos here, ((Update: as far as I can tell from the Giggle translation, the pictures are from five years ago.)) and a webcam here (the fourth on the list).
At the southwest end of Japan on Kyushu, Sakurajima remains its usual explosive self. If your local authorities forbid fireworks Wednesday because of fire danger, you can always watch the show here and here (fifth from the bottom).
Update: Since I grabbed the screencap of Tokachi, I haven’t seen any incandescence in the webcam, and there might not be anything of significance going on, after all. It’s not mentioned in the Japan Meteorological Agency’s list of warnings. You might want to keep an eye on Popocatéptl, instead.
