Official cherry blossom predictions.

The extended forecasts have been getting warmer and sunnier over the past few days, so we may get lucky.

Thursday I had my car at the dealer’s for a slightly-belated 60,000 mile major service, and while they were at it, they replaced the wheel bearings on the right rear tire, which had been making some noise. All under warranty, no big deal. I drove back to the office, parked on the side of the building, and all was well.

Saturday morning, while waiting for our instructor to show up at the dojo, another student noticed the head of a 3-inch nail sticking out of the right rear tire. He figured vandalism, because it went in nice and straight, as if pounded with a hammer.

This morning, when I went out to the car, I happened to check the new tires, and found this:

Same tire, same kind of nail, pounded in nice and straight. Guess where I parked yesterday? Guess which side of the office building has no lights, no windows, and isn’t covered by our security cameras?

Grrrr.

You’d think that a publisher based out of Berkeley, of all places, would take care with foreign names, so that when releasing, say, a translation from the Japanese (such as the newly-released The Spirit of the Sword by Nakamura (family name) Taisaburo (given name)), they wouldn’t do something silly like putting just his given name on the spine.

It’s possible that the translator confused them by consistently retaining the Japanese name order, but you’d think someone would have noticed at some point before it went to press.

So if you find yourself looking for a copy in a well-stocked book store, don’t be surprised if it’s filed under “T”. Or just use the Amazon link above…

Not quite a year ago, Steven found some rather puzzling geometry on the Bentenmaru’s bridge. As I continued to rewatch on a big screen tonight, I spotted something: the bridge isn’t just two levels, it’s two parts, and the upper part has a very good reason to be mobile.

In episode 7, around 10:30, the Bentenmaru is cruising at FTL on its way to a Perfectly Ordinary Mission (coughcough); the level that the captain’s chair is on is much higher than the other, and you can see lovely streams of hyperspace through the giant wrap-around windows. Just after the eyecatch, around 11:40, they come out of warp and go to battle stations, and the top half of the bridge sinks into the body of the ship, covering the windows and bringing the two levels much closer together.

So, the normal exterior corridors either reconfigure themselves with the upper bridge, or else are blocked off to lock down access. And, of course, battle stations is precisely when you’d want it to be easier for someone on the lower bridge to directly reach the upper.

It’s still possible they failed to animate it 100% consistently, but they definitely thought about it.

Dude, she’s 13; could you hold off on the “abducted into the sex trade” photos for a few years?

…and she gets it from her mom.

I had planned to wait until the second Bluray arrived before re-watching Bodacious Space Pirates, this time with a big screen and a decent sound system, but I’ve been sick all week, and I couldn’t hold out any longer. Marathoning the first arc was a wonderful way to cheer me up, and the surround sound really, really works. The excellent background music fills the room, and even the OP song is now tolerable with the chorus balancing out the screeching of Momoiro Clover Z.

(and it’s still streaming for free on Crunchyroll…)

Spotted this one just now while using Google Translate on a store’s information page: 定休日 was translated as “Closed Sundays”, instead of “regular closing days” or something similar. If, like me, you expect Google to make a hash out of Japanese and are only using it to fill in the gaps, you’ll be okay, but not only is Chrome doing automatic translation, I’m running into more and more Japanese sites that supply an “English version” that’s copied from Google output, and if you don’t know you’re reading gibberish, you might end up thinking that the store really is closed on Sundays.

How did Google screw this one up? Well, 日 can mean “day”, “sun”, or “sunday”, distinguished by context, and both 定休 and 定休日 mean “regular holiday”, used by stores to indicate their regular closing schedule. Google picked the shorter match and then decided that the following 日 meant Sunday, which would make perfect sense if there were some punctuation to make it unambiguous (such as “定休：日・水” for “closed Sunday and Wednesday”). A human translator would have picked the longer match, and expected the next block of text to contain the actual set of closing conditions, which in this case was “third Wednesday of each month”.

Fewer desperate runaways and lonely housewives this month, and a whole bunch of ads for cable/satellite piracy (幻のカード = “dream card” for around 25,000 - 40,000 yen).

The other hilarious wrinkle is that one of the sex sites must have signed up with a new spam agency that’s used to selling something else. Here are some of the fresh women offering access to their sexy profiles, replacing the usual Yumiko, Akane, Yui, Miku, etc:

Everette Rosenberg, Hershel Holmes, Krystal Garza, Young Dixon, Russell Bryant, Sidney Ogden, Nolan Elder, Stuart Mclaughlin, Lilly Gillis, Clifford Jernigan, Kyle Brantley, Alicia Thacker, Norma Head, Dirk Woodard, ...

All is not lost, however; one of today’s is from a lovely young lady named “83/59/84のCカップ”, whose parents clearly planned ahead.