“A right that protects illegal guns and puts more people in fear, a right that escalates conflict beyond a point of resolution, and a right that interferes with another person’s right to live is not a legitimate right to be maintained. Your right to swing ends at my nose.”

— Jackson, MS mayor Chokwe Lumumba, hoplophobic tyrant

Mai Pudding


[Update: turns out she was in the Negima! live-action drama, as the ghost student Sayo. I knew his students would grow up cute.]

Amazon Japan recommended this DVD to me a while back:

Mai Pudding DVD

Her name is Mai Nishida, and she seems like a nice girl. The Mai/My pun is an old one in Japan, and as for pudding, well, Biyuuden made that one clear in the video for their song Ice Cream & My Pudding (warning: bunny girls!). That one has another pun, writing “ice” as 愛す = “to love”; putting it before a noun makes it an adjective modifying cream…

Back to Mai. The circled text on the front reads 可愛くて柔らかい = “cute and soft”. Not visible is the back-cover blurb, which reads, in part, 大胆ビキニから溢れちゃうぷるぷる揺れるGカップ! = “completely overflowing from daring bikini, jiggling, swaying G-cups!”.

As I said, she seems like a nice girl. Oh, and she was 19 when this was filmed. Five-foot-two. 35-23-32. Type O. Aries. From Kyoto. Details matter.

Student loans


Let me see if I understand the current situation:

  1. Tuition has risen dramatically in recent years, pretty much everywhere, and at a rate far higher than can be explained by an increase in the cost of providing the services.
  2. Many degrees can never produce income sufficient to keep up payments on the loans required to get them, even at relatively cheap public universities.
  3. The loan companies have successfully lobbied to stack the deck against students, making it very easy to accrue penalties that can double the principal of the loan, and offering no way out, not even death or bankruptcy. If you ever fall behind after your deferment ends, you're screwed.
  4. There is immense social pressure to go to college and do something, to the point that you're considered a failure if you don't, and many allegedly-intelligent adults insist that college is a right.
  5. Many employers require Bachelors/Masters degrees as checkbox items that are completely unrelated to job duties ("you must be this tall to ride the roller coaster"), as an alternative to the sort of applicant testing that gets them sued.
  6. Self-esteem-based public-school education has resulted in millions of teenagers who believe that "following your dream" is a valid career plan.
  7. A lot of 18-year-olds are signing off on $30,000/year loans to major in Underwater Basketweaving, etc, despite the demonstrated lack of demand for such skills.
  8. The percentage of students defaulting on their loans is going up fast.
  9. The loans in question are a mix of federal, state, and private, making it very difficult for any single goverment agency to simply "fix" them (or even find them), very much like bad mortgages.

A lot of people are writing to Obama begging him to solve this problem. “Cut the interest rate to 1%”, “abolish the penalties”, “let us declare bankruptcy”, or simply “forgive all student loans, period”. They look at the massive bailouts of mismanaged corporations, and ask where their bailout is.

I can sympathize with a laid-off engineer struggling to make payments on $30,000 in loans, or a single mom who got an accounting degree in night school and fell behind on payments because her kid had a big medical bill. I have no sympathy at all for someone who racked up over $100,000 in loans in order to get a low-paying “dream job” in Manhattan:

"I chose to go to a private school and I chose to work in a field where the starting salaries are low. Does that mean that I chose to live a life of struggle, wondering how I am going to pay my rent, afford the basics of living and still stay in my chosen career field…all while putting up with high interest rates and an amount of debt that brings me to tears?"

The above list includes some serious problems, and taken together they’ve created an awful mess, but it’s not one that can be wished away with a stroke of the presidential pen, even if Obama were interested. Solving the student-loan problem has a lot in common with trying to manage health-care costs and resolve the mortgage crisis, including the mis-regulation that created the problems and the mis-regulation that failed to solve them.

Melon Notes


Yesterday was Melon Kinenbi’s final concert. Nothing left but the farewell concert DVD in July. I’ve held off on my review of their final album, MELON’S NOT DEAD, largely because the label just released a B-side collection called URA MELON that included a new song and a concert DVD. Given that most of their concert DVDs have been fan-club-only, this was worth picking up, and I timed my Amazon Japan order to include it. So, double review coming soon. [Update! there’s also a new music video on the DVD!]

Pictures from the final concert show a certain still crazy after all these years aesthetic, not surprising after having spent so many years chained in the Hello!Project wardrobe dungeon. They did manage to get out of the goofywear at some point in the show, it looks like.

In memoriam, a fansub group has released performance and interview clips from Utaban, as well as a subbed PV for their 12th single. Amusing, although I do wish the folks at ProjectHello would fix their translation of Saa! Koibito ni narou (“sukima mite” (隙間見て)= “when someone gets the chance to do something”, literally “see an opening”; yes, I’ve told them several times, and Hana even admitted she wasn’t sure about that line, and yet…).

Amusing note from the Utaban videos: they label the girls Sexy (Saitou), Fairy-tale (Murata), Boyish (Ootani), and Natural (Shibata). Personally, I’ll always think of them as Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi.

Dear Ai Kago,


[Update: Okay, now that my ears have recovered from the assault, I can say that 17才よさようなら doesn’t suck. I barely reached it the first time I listened to the album, because everything else is so awful. This one has better voice processing, better use of your range, a less amibitious vocal style, and, yes, you know how to deliver lines in Japanese far better than in English. The worst part about the song is actually the part where you’re not singing, so go ahead, do more like this one.]

The title of your new album is “Ai Kago Meets Jazz”. In line with my policy of supporting the segments of your career that do not involve truly dreadful photo shoots, I included it in my latest order from Amazon Japan. Thirty seconds into track 1, I began regretting this decision, as I realized that they never said anything about singing jazz.

I knew your voice was thin (but occasionally pleasant), I knew your English was weak (in an often-amusing way), but I admire the way you’ve managed to build more publicity and success after being kicked out of Hello!Project than most of the other girls will ever get while they’re members. So I bought it, and, well, it sucks.

I mean, really sucks. Halfway through, I found myself hoping for a duet with William Hung, so my ears would stop bleeding. And I liked your previous single “No Hesitation”, and even the b-side “Children of the Night”, despite its painful Engrish interlude. It wasn’t that you were singing in your own language, just that you were working within your limits. Jazz, particularly in a language you’re not comfortable with? Forget it; you simply don’t have the skill and confidence to deliver the lines.

[okay, there are some non-painful moments, when you stick to your lower register and don’t try to jazz it up, but they don’t last long; honestly, if you’d just done it as a standards album, sung straight and pitched for your voice, it might have worked]

Dear Apple,


I see that you’ve replaced all of the category links in the App Store with nebulous fluff like “creative editing kit”, “apps from tv ads”, “new home”, and other non-categories. In addition, you now devote a substantial percentage of the front page to a list of top grossing apps. Please, if you would, explain how this list has any value to a consumer? Isn’t it just a way to tell potential developers “there’s gold in them thar hills!”?

Seriously, am I, as an app buyer, supposed to be attracted by the fact that some people were willing to shell out $899.99 for copies of a surveillance-camera viewer? Could you maybe take some of the money you’re getting from these top grossers and spend it on making the store searchable and browsable?

ポイ捨て & ポイントメーク


Found in the voting page on engrishfunny.com:

Tabako no poisute kinshi

It was posted there because of the odd English translation, of course, but I was more interested in the Japanese: タバコのポイ捨て禁止!, or, for the kana-impaired, “Tabako no poisute kinshi!”.

The interesting bit is poisute, ポイ捨て = “littering”, for a literal translation of “cigarette littering prohibited”. The first half comes from the mimetic adverb poito = “carelessly”; the second half from the verb suteru = “to throw away”. Hadn’t run across poito before.

While looking it up, I came across an amusing loanword: ポイントメーク, pointomeiku. Care to guess the meaning?

more...

Caption the squirrel...


squirrel sightseer

“Day three: still no sign of the bunnykin army, and my hay fever is killing me.”

"It's the End Of The World!"


…at least, that’s what the usual suspects are screaming about Arizona at the moment, for having the temerity to claim that existing laws governing illegal immigration should be treated as if they were, well, laws.

There are people making careful, reasoned arguments about the constitutionality of duplicating federal laws at the state level, some quite cogent, but they’re not driving the argument. Indeed, they’re not even allowed onto the bus, as the headlines shriek “racist!” and “police state!”, pretending that border control is a Republican invention not practiced anywhere else in the world.

It reminds me a great deal of the hysteria over shall-issue concealed-carry legislation. There, it was “gun-nuts blowing away anyone who cuts in line at the grocery!”; here, it’s “racist nazi cops going after everyone brown!”. I expect the long-term results to be pretty much the same: little or no abuse of the new laws, less crime, no loss of civil rights, and more states jumping on the bandwagon as they observe the results.

The hysterics labeled Florida “the gunshine state” for passing CCW reform. It didn’t happen. Now they’re calling Arizona the new Nazi Germany, and that’s not going to happen, either.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Arizona, which has always had open carry with no need for a license, and which quickly adopted shall-issue carry with reciprocity, recently went to concealed carry with no need for a license. Allowing any adult to carry a concealed handgun doesn’t square up with the “papers, please” future promised by the pro-illegal pundits, not that they’ll notice.

[Note: any comments attempting to equate “immigration” and “illegal immigration” will be deleted unread; they’re quite different things, and opposition to one has nothing whatsoever to do with opinions on the other]

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”