This story about the “Cambridge Climate Congress” would be hilarious satire if it weren’t dead-serious social engineering. Click through to read the PDF about the “climate emergency” and the quest for “environmental justice”. Count the fluff-headed buzzwords scattered throughout. Picture their future, and when you’re through throwing up, bitch-slap a socialist.

I’ve always thought of the phrase “comeback album” as meaning “first release in a long time from someone who’s dropped out of sight”. In the K-pop universe, it apparently means something quite different. Girls’ Generation released two incredibly successful EPs last year, had a major concert tour, released a single with a popular boy band, is constantly on television in one way or another, and one of the members is even the lead in the current theater production of Legally Blonde.

Everywhere you look, though, you see talk about their eagerly-anticipated “comeback” album, Oh!. Just like the Fall ’09 Genie EP was their previous comeback, and the Spring ’09 Gee EP was the comeback before that. The anticipation makes sense to me; they’re talented and hot, and their label invests in quality songwriting, choreography, costuming, and career development. It’s just that “comeback” seems to have crossed the ocean with only its literal meaning.

So, on to Oh!:

They’re performing this song constantly on television, in all three of the outfits featured, as well as little white tennis dresses with knee socks (go ahead and look; you know you want to), but that’s not all. The fans had barely recovered from the surprise ending of the video when they started performing the second song from the album, Show! Show! Show!. I could do without the excessively curly hair extensions and the “hats”, and to be honest, it’s not my favorite musical style, but I can watch them all day long…

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Trains. They fix everything.

Underground tunnels, elevated tracks and even "stacked trains" running through Palo Alto are all options still on the table for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency charged with building a $42.6 billion high-speed-rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“I cried because I had no salt, until I met a man who had no entropy.”

You know, I’ve grown so accustomed to operating systems with native Unicode support that I’m still getting over the shock that Windows 7 still has I18N holes you could drive a truck through. And this time I’m not talking about the deep-seated belief that all USB keyboards have the same layout.

It would be one thing if you’d just chosen a different encoding, but no, the file system is UTF-16, text files open in UTF-8, and cmd.exe opens in ISO-Latin-1. I can switch cmd into UTF-8 with /u and manually change the output mapping with chcp 65001, but since I can’t select a font containing kanji, that’s of limited utility.

Thanks to the beta Console2 application, I can verify that it’s possible to get, say, a Perl script or a sqlite session to print kanji from cmd.exe, but since Console2’s developers circular-filed a bug pointing out that their app would be completely compatible with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean if the redraw code just counted characters instead of bytes, I don’t expect things to improve any time soon.

(Windows PowerShell, for all its apparent shell power, still runs in a window that can’t seem to display anything but basic missionary-position Western European characters)

I don’t want to layer Cygwin or Ubuntu on top of Windows, for obvious reasons, so I’m forced to resort to Emacs shell-mode to see gorgeous anti-aliased kanji on a bare-bones command-line (well, after I spent 45 minutes deciphering the poor documentation for the arcane font-mapping elisp commands…). Stone knives and bearskins, when any Mac or modern Linux distro supports nine billion languages out of the box.

Amusing note: did you know someone out there is trying to sell a C Shell port for $350 a seat? No, seriously. I’d have choked on my beer if I drank beer.

[and why am I trying to hack Japanese with Perl and SQLite on Windows when I have a perfectly good Mac or six, and a perfectly functional EeePC running Fedora12? Because the Lenovo S12 won’t melt flesh when the CPU gets busy, has a very nice screen and keyboard, and Win7 is in most other respects an excellent desktop operating system. I wasn’t kidding a while back when I said that Perl and Emacs are the difference between a computer and a toy; iPad enthusiasts take note…]

I mean, I didn’t see one catgirl in there. How can this be the future?

未だ筈は筈の儘 = “mada hazu wa hazu no mama”.

I came across this one quite a while ago, and all my teacher could say about it at the time was that she couldn’t think of a way to explain it in English.

Five people at the table. Two of them have never, ever heard the phrases “jump the shark” or “break the fourth wall”.

Why, oh why, if the pod people are here, aren’t they replacing my friends with alien zombie catgirls?