Microsoft Word has very good standards-based HTML import. It’s much more capable than OpenOffice, and advanced layout can be set with custom CSS. It’s robust enough that the majority of Word features will survive a round-trip through the HTML exporter. Your brain may explode if you try to edit the exported HTML, which IMHO is only useful for figuring out how to use their custom CSS; for sanity and source-control, write in HTML, layout with Word, print to PDF.

[and only use LaTeX if you need to do tricky things like post-process DVI and AUX files to generate cross-referenced vocabulary lists and delete content without repaginating…]

[Update: an odd limit to the importer is handling indentation of nested lists. At a certain point, it reverts to left-indented]

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Gaining new relevance due to his death.

(replaced with youtube embed to get rid of the long ads)

They had a DVD release of Megaforce.

The photographer and stylists responsible for this picture of Shizuka Nakamura (中村静香) deserve as much recognition as the model, but unfortunately, I don’t know which shoot it comes from. The artistic and technical quality remind me of Playboy at its (long-vanished) best.

Not nude, but still under the fold, just in case there are workplaces where pretty girls in bikinis are a bad thing.

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Nice cover work there:

Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a "Polish death camp." The White House later said the president "misspoke" and expressed "regret".

The linguistic faux pas overshadowed Obama's posthumous award of the highest US civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews.

Seriously, when can we just admit that his speechwriters are a pack of ignorant fools and Obama just reads whatever the teleprompter says, regardless of its content? He’s capable of delivering a well-rehearsed speech, but since the election he doesn’t take the time to rehearse, even for significant events.

…some assembly required.

You can also get a Chiaki-chan, a Lamp House waitress, and a Hakuou schoolgirl. And, coming soon, this.

(somewhat unexpectedly, Nyaruko has more merchandise)

I believe I’ve finally found a case where the above weak English pun on “martial arts” actually works in Japanese. Staff fighting in Japan and Okinawa is known as boujutsu, written 棒術 (pole + technique). Identical pronunciation with different kanji, however, yields 房術 (room + technique), meaning “the art of lovemaking”.

This appears to be a deliberate pun, with the more usual words for lovemaking being bouchuujutsu 房中術 (“within a room” + technique) or keiboujutsu 閨房術 (bedroom + technique). A bit of casual wiki-surfing suggests that the pun comes from the popular Naughty Ninja Girl genre of novels and movies (much the way that the words ninja and kunoichi are basically post-WWII creations, along with the scary-black-pajamas look).

Generally, I do not expect to learn about upcoming features in a video game from Forbes.