Okay, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest to see former Morning Musume member Asami Konno leading a parade of Pikachus, wearing a sash celebrating the success of the new Pokemon movie. Even if she weren’t an announcer for TV Tokyo, it’s the sort of thing you expect to find former idol singers at.

But what are she and her partner Moeko doing with their hands?

It’s not a one-time thing, either; there are half a dozen shots where they’re doing Babymetal’s signature fox-head gesture with one or both hands. I can only assume that Pikachu fans use it too. Which helps to explain this.

But nothing can explain this.

Then again, “kon-kon” is the sound a fox makes, although this Konkon usually makes more of a “boin” sound…

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Time to clean out the downloads folder. I’ve lost track of where I found most of these, but any collection of photos that includes Miwako Kakei in a teddy can’t be all bad…

This 7-11 only offers so much convenience:

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The Soberanes Fire is still going strong, with 95,716 acres burned, and still only 60% contained. Almost all of the active fire area is deep in heavily forested mountains, and for extra fun, there’s apparently a heck of a lot of poison oak in that area, which is affecting firefighters despite their precautions.

Still no word on catching the clowns whose illegal campfire started it.

Air quality is good in my area; I think everything that’s still burning is on the other side of the mountains now, and the winds are pushing the smoke and ash southeast.

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Once upon a time, there was a third-string idol group called Gal♥Doll. As you might expect from the name, it was a trio of pretty girls uglied up in Gal makeup and fashion. I found a few videos, which I won’t link because they’re terrible, but the only reason I know they exist in the first place is that AV actress Miharu Usa is promoted as a “former idol”. Very little digging (as in “reading to the bottom of the article”) was necessary to discover that Miharu was the “ace” of Gal♥Doll, Ryouka Nishinaga (center).

Honestly, if I’d seen this picture first, I wouldn’t have been interested enough to follow up on her, and the stills from her AV work are typically unappealing. Instead, what caught my eye was this (NSFW):

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[Update: now on CPAN]

There are multiple competing algorithms for converting latitude/longitude locations into something easier for humans to work with. Some of them are proprietary, which makes them pretty useless offline or after that company goes out of business.

Google came up with a plausible rationale for inventing their own Open Location Code rather than adopting geohash or something similar. It’s Open Source up on Github, and they supply APIs for several common languages.

But not Perl. Naturally, I had to fix that, so here’s Geo::OLC (compressed tarball). It has a full test suite, a simple command-line tool, and a CGI script that generates a dynamic labeled grid for Google Earth. I think I’ve about got it cleaned up enough to put it on CPAN.

For amusement, the sample location I use in the POD documentation, 8Q6QMG93+742, is Tenka Gyoza in Osaka, which is exactly the sort of place that you’d have trouble finding with standard addressing methods. Actually, you’d have trouble finding it with Google Maps on your phone, as my sister learned.

I tried not to go overboard with Perlisms, but the code still ended up fairly compact, largely because most of the existing APIs were written while the formatting was still in flux, so they’re more generic than necessary.

[Update: turns out someone did write one, but it never made it to CPAN: Geo::OpenLocationCode. Looks like he converted one of the other APIs instead of writing it from scratch, so he inherited the same bug in recover_nearest.]

…but goodness, what a pretty cosplayer.

In the following pictures, you see an elderly gentleman whose angry ranting about the destruction of his dock has suddenly been washed away by the sight of a 12-year-old 10-year-old girl. What is he saying?

1. You remind me of my granddaughter!
2. Damn, I'd like to see you all grown up!

The correct answer is 2: 「おお〜、8年後が楽しみじゃ」

The cane is a nice touch, don’t you think?

Youtube link, because Sony doesn’t like embedding.

Also, new slogan: “Stand up for Hillary! She can’t do it alone!”.

…so I let it go.

#1 with a bullet to the back of the head: “ebook sales declining”.

Maybe charging 16% more for the Kindle edition than they do for the hardcover has something to do with it? Note that the paperback edition is no longer in print.

I don’t remember what specific book this was. It doesn’t matter, because when the publishers set the price, the Kindle edition is almost always more expensive than the paperback, and pricing it above the hardcover isn’t rare.

And if you look at the reviews, the Kindle editions from major publishers are frequently riddled with errors, and illustrations are often misplaced, mangled, or just plain missing.

Because of the big power outage that we spent days cleaning up after, I decided I needed more protection at the office. Moa Metal couldn’t be everywhere at once. Until now.

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This sign spells out in detail the gender-based restrictions on eating at ConTERRAZZA in Shinjuku, claimed to be Japan’s first women’s restaurant. I suspect they’re not hip to the whole “57 varieties” self-labeling system(s).

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…is not to play:

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Stumbled on a Tumblr, 青臭い春, full of Japanese cheesecake from an earlier era. Easy on the eyes, and some pleasantly natural toplessness as well, to warn those for whom bikinis are worksafe but nipples are not.

This is Yumi Asō, an actress born in 1963 and still working a lot:

Aging nicely, too:

(via, promoting a drama that has some other pretty women, and four adorable pre-teens. [Side note: I was curious about the young Ema Baanzu, and wasn’t surprised to discover that Japanese Wikipedia included the details of her 25-21-26 figure; sigh])

Following the trail of Yumi’s bikini work led here, a fairly random assortment of bikini-clad cuties, and this one caught my eye:

But the caption gave her name as “木之内绿”, and the only things that came up in Google were a handful of Chinese blogs and some really obscure video sites that wanted to play three-minute ads. They clearly identified her as a Japanese singer, but even forcing Google to return only Japanese results turned up nothing. Turns out the Chinese fan sites were writing her first name in hanzi instead of hiragana, and fixing that returned a wealth of information about idol singer Midori Kinouchi. These days she’s apparently an anti-nuke activist.

Voice actress Ryoka Yuzuki (柚木涼香) keeps fairly busy, between video games, movie dubs, and obscure anime like Naruto, Nanoha, To Love-Ru, Queen’s Blade, and Kill la Kill. Publicity pictures show her to be an attractive woman, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Starting at 15, under the name Ayumi Nagashii (永椎あゆみ), she did some acting, then as Kanori Kadomatsu (角松かのり), she did a lot of cheesecake and nude modeling (NSFW: 1, 2, 3), as well as B movies and this cute little NSFW clip (removed from this video). She briefly used the Nagashii name again for some hentai anime, before settling on Ryoka Yuzuki for her quite successful seiyuu career.

To end on an amusing note, the #2 link above claims that the term coined in the Nineties for idols who did nudes but not porn was ヌードル, which Google associates exclusively with Cup Noodle. Wikipedia redirects it to Adult Model, which isn’t nearly as fun.

I just got an ore ore scam call at home, from someone with a thick hispanic accent saying “It’s me, grandpa, your oldest grandson”. I could hear other scammers working in the background, but the connection was so bad that I made him repeat it five times until he get the whole sentence across uninterrupted.

Then I yelled into his ear that he was a dumbass con artist and hung up.

Coming next year, a full season of The Tick on Amazon. The pilot episode was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to more.

I’m surprised no one has done a two-pack of melonpan with a bikini top drawn on the package. Or did I just miss it?

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