The Agents of SHIELD series has been weak from the start, with actors not fitting into roles, characters not coming together as a team, and second-rate stories being told badly. And after taking a week off, they came back this week to show us that they knew how to make it worse.

I can’t even count how many ways this episode sucked. Most of the actors looked like they were playing their characters for the first time, reading their emotions off of conveniently-placed sticky notes. And whoever was responsible for Coulson’s green-screen driving scene should be banned from the industry for life. Was there anyone on set that day watching him frantically jerk the steering wheel like he’s riding out a storm on the high seas, while the projected background has him driving in a straight line down a perfectly uncluttered suburban street?

And there was nothing about any scene that involved flower-dress-evil-chick that wasn’t stupid from scalp to ankle.

Worse, the preview for their triumphant return in January made this episode look good by comparison.

Lots of press about the “Hour of Code” campaign recently, which has the goal of briefly exposing children to computer programming. Money down the drain, since most school curriculums still don’t include Hour of Basic Logic, Hour of Problem-Solving, or Hour of You Are Not A Precious Snowflake.

[Update: a number of the discussions of this are linking to Jeff Atwood’s Please Don’t Learn to Code, and wow did that attract hundreds of comments from people who completely missed his point. I agree completely with Jeff, and a lot of the reason is that I remember exactly what it was like when we did this back in the Eighties: put a bunch of kids in a room and try to teach them to program, and 60% will pretend interest and parrot what they’re told, 30% will be too bored to pretend, 9% will be actively hostile, and 1% will be excited about the opportunity until the other kids bully them into doing all the work. Bottom line, if the school curriculum included critical thinking skills in all courses, an “hour of code” would be as necessary as giving floating lessons to ducks. No offense to any ducks among my readers…]

[12/13 Update: apparently the folks at code.org think being exposed to computer science is like being exposed to radiation: “More students have participated in computer science in U.S. schools in the last three days than in the last 100 years”. They are so completely full of shit that I’m surprised my browser didn’t turn brown.]

It is now obvious how Lam-chan fits into the ending. Also, I was right about Blaze and Klein, Raul’s former classmates that were added for the anime; I didn’t want to say more at the time, but it should be pretty clear now.

They’re definitely tracking the Ecchi manga, despite things being reordered to accomodate the Amada story. They even had Lam flip up Elza’s skirt to show off her sexy panties, although they changed the reason and the audience.

It looks like I was wrong about Shell, though; he’s in it pretty deep.

After several months of teasing, a new EP from Younha. The only real disappointment is that track 3 “features” a rapper, which is invariably the same as pouring used motor oil onto a fine steak, but the music business continues with the odd belief that rap is the perfect accompaniment to any genre. Truth is, most rap doesn’t even go well with other rap, much less the sort of pop that’s focused around someone with a good voice and the training to use it.

Stylistically, her performances suffer a bit from her time belting out showstoppers on the I Am a Singer TV series, as well as a few rather busy arrangements, but only the ruined-by-rap track is a waste of time. Pre-release track Home is pretty good:

(oh, and thanks to her label for making the album available online in multiple countries on release day)

Waking up with frost on my lemons (not a euphemism), a warm breeze comes from Lion.

Well, technically, he ordered extra-dimensional animated naked electro-girls, but I choose to respond with… something else.

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My leftovers didn’t come from no bird:

(sadly, while Costco usually trims the silverskin, they apparently got too busy the day before Thanksgiving, so while these are delicious, the smoke didn’t penetrate the underside as thoroughly as I’d like)

[Update3: just rewatched the episode and there’s another translation that doesn’t work; I didn’t comment on it earlier because at the critical moment, I wasn’t looking at the subtitles. At 17:35, Elza flirtingly asks Raul to take her picture, insisting he’d do a better job than the customers. But what she says is “you’d take me properly, wouldn’t you?” and “(I) want you to take (something)”. His blood-starved brain wasn’t capable of handling the omitted word “photographs”, which explains his panicked reaction, something that the translation obscures. You can see that she’s being “haha, only serious”, but his hysteria doesn’t make sense if you follow the subtitles.]

At 15:15 in episode 8, Lam announces her intention to help improve sales, translated by Crunchyroll and those who copied their work as “Lamdimia do Aximemor will just have to get hot and heavy…”. Raul then says “hot and heavy?” while looking her up and down, which leads her to clobber him. Unfortunately, the “hot and heavy” choice doesn’t really work for either her meaning or Raul’s misinterpretation. It’s easy to forgive, though, because it’s a bit tricky to match the idiom.

Her exact words were “hitohada nuide”, from the verb 一肌脱ぐ = “to pitch in and help”, but literally a compound of hitohada (skin) and nugu (to undress). Raul, dazed from the heat (or a lack of blood flow to the brain from all the eye candy), heard only the literal meaning and gave her bikini-clad body the once-over.

[Update: to clarify, there are two different words read as “hitohada”: 一肌 and 人肌. The first (“one+skin”) means to help out, the second (“person+skin”) means skin. JMdict doesn’t list 一肌 as a standalone word, and uses both versions for the compound hitohada-nugu; my good dictionary separates the two. ]

I think I might have gone with “give it her all”; it changes her intended meaning a bit, but works in both contexts.

[Update2: Actually, it looks like the key piece of the idiom is hada-nugu, 肌脱ぐ; alone, it means “to take your shirt off” or “to work with great effort”, and in addition to hitihada-nugu, there’s also katahada-nugu, 片肌脱ぐ “to bare one shoulder” or “to lend a hand”. Lam-chan’s shoulder was already bare, so that expression wouldn’t have confused poor Raul the same way.]