If there were any functional difference between scary evil assault weapons and acceptable civilian firearms, her big press conference wouldn’t feature a laundry list of names and numbers:

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Hunting for interesting excursions in the general vicinity of Kyoto, a small marker on Google Maps caught my eye: ポンポン山. Now why, I thought, would a mountain, even a small one, have a katakana name? The Japanese Wikipedia entry says that the sound of footsteps is generally accepted as the answer, but also that the name only dates back to the Meiji era, and before that it had the more prosaic name Kamoseyama.

Note that searching for ポンポン山 will find many pictures of the sign at the summit announcing its height of 678.9 meters, but also pictures of large-breasted women (“pom-pom mountains”). Honestly, these days I’d be disappointed if a search in Japanese didn’t include pictures of large-breasted women, because Japan.

When, and more importantly why, did Russian spammers decide that “cune” was an English word relevant to the performance of sexual acts? Recently my spam folder has been filling up with messages of the form “Russian slang-for-woman want/are ready/wanna to sexual-act for/with you”, and one of the randomized values for sexual-act is “cune”.

It could be a simple typo, but I prefer to think that highly-educated Russian women are offering to write on clay tablets in Sumerian. Talking dirty, as it were.

The global warming social engineers have been pretty successful at marginalizing anyone who dares to question their ever-changing definition of The End Of The World, so I think it’s only fair that we adopt their methods and refer to gun-control supporters as Civil Rights Denialists.

The fact that warmologers and gun-grabbers tend to flock together just makes it all the more appropriate.

So, a trope-aware Magical Girl-Girl show where the lead character channels Recette? I’m in.

Ah, Amazon recommendation system, how I’ve missed you.

Why is it that when I have a block of text selected, and I wish to drag it somewhere, that you insist on having me click on a pixel that’s part of one of the characters in the selection. Not “inside the bounding box”, not “inside the enclosed area”, but actually “on a pixel whose color was set by drawing the character”, so that with black text on a white background, only the black pixels count. And not just for dragging a block of text around, but for dragging a dozen messages to another folder in Mail.app, etc.

I’ve been fighting it for years, but the simple shapes and bold strokes of the latin alphabet are fairly easy targets, so it used to be a minor nuisance. But with kanji, it’s a real pain in the ass. Well over half the time, when I try to sort email with kanji senders and subject lines, attempting the “drag to folder” action will instead result in the “extend selection range” action. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Ordinarily, I’d expect that the lessons learned working with the crude accuracy of poking an iPhone with a finger would have taught you something about requiring excessive precision in selection, but I’ve actually used an iPhone, so I know you haven’t figured it out there, either.

I…, I…, I have no words.

(below the fold, to protect the weak of heart)

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