Yes, they sell them. I think this would be the perfect tool for L. Neil Smith’s “niccer” movement.

Finished!

A lot happens in this one, ending with the arrival of the Christmas Tree. Excellent character development for Itokazu-sensei and Antonia, plenty of action (including a sadly-offscreen ass-kicking as Maya takes on Jens and her assistoroids), and a new villain who’s so nasty you want to take Jens into your arms, pat her on the head, and tell her it’ll be okay. Should there be a second season someday, I don’t think they can use the bulk of books five and six, but they’ll need to at least use major elements from them in a recap episode or two, to clear up the continuity a bit and introduce Nirumea.

And now I really have to go back over the previous books to clear up a few sections. After that, I think I need to read his first novel, just to be a bit less in the dark about the rather significant contribution by both Team Ichika and Team Kantoku. Ichika and her gang are definitely the core of the Shureio novel, but they have some sort of shared history with, and feel quite comfortable working alongside, wacky-pervert film-director Kawasaki and his associates.

[Spoilers, ho!]

more...

Now that the TV is capable of something more than movies and games, I’ve been leaving TV Japan on in the background to improve my ear. This works well enough that I occasionally have the urge to walk into the family room to see the images associated with something I think I just understood (such as the interview with Donald Richie, the continuing news about Fukushima, or the gradually-lengthening promos for Deka Wanko).

[Best so far was hearing a young woman walk in and tell her mother she had something serious to discuss, and then saying “I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me”; I understood the whole scene, and followed along fairly well when the mother tracked down the offending boyfriend and he confessed that while he loved her, he was an orphan with no family to offer her. Mom said, “just like me”]

But sometimes it’s just goofy. The kid’s shows are painful, most of the daytime stuff is aimed at housewives, and I swear that almost all female announcers and narrators drink the same kool-aid that powers Nina on The Good Night Show.

And then, Sunday afternoon, I heard a hoarse, heavily-accented voice shout, in English:

"I.... Can.... Speak.... Dutch!"

So, if buying the DVDs of a show you’ve already downloaded is a Guilt Buy, what do you call downloading something you already own on Blu-ray, because they left out features included in the region 2 release?

Rage Torrent, perhaps? :-)

Obviously, he’s headed off to meet up with the Cat Planet Cuties…

Then again, with a name like Alan Shepard, perhaps he’d be more interested in Jens…

[Updated with a static image after I discovered that Life Magazine has removed it from their archives. Pity, since you could buy a nice print from them.]

Catchy and eye-catching. Who cares what she’s singing about?

While giving me a tour of their new place, Beth sat down to play with Google+ for a few minutes, and said, “uh-oh, new 7.0 earthquake in Japan”.

We spent at least five minutes hunting for details beyond what the USGS site had, veryifying that it was indeed off the coast of Sendai where the monster had hit, but unable to get any solid information on possible tsunami impacts.

Five minutes after that, the story reached CNN. They knew less than we did.

[Update: tsunami heights of no more than 50 centimeters were predicted for the region, with the actual results being closer to 10cm in several port cities. Good news for now, but the big one in March had a 7.2 foreshock two days before, so keep your fingers crossed for a week or so.]

Please hire someone to clean up the hilariously bad computer-generated translations on your US web site. Trust me, there are plenty of recently-graduated liberal-arts majors eager to work with prose more complicated than “do you want fries with that?”.

When the pipe is running, you are holding in your hands every now and slowly count to six. If you succeed you can safely continue to smoke a pipe, otherwise you must stop until the pipe cools. Long waits are not necessary: it takes typically a few seconds of interruption and in most cases not even need to turn on the pipe. however, if the pipe were to be shut down, never mind: you again. Many burns are caused by smoking because they fear that the pipe goes out and then suck up too often.