Catchy and eye-catching. Who cares what she’s singing about?

While giving me a tour of their new place, Beth sat down to play with Google+ for a few minutes, and said, “uh-oh, new 7.0 earthquake in Japan”.

We spent at least five minutes hunting for details beyond what the USGS site had, veryifying that it was indeed off the coast of Sendai where the monster had hit, but unable to get any solid information on possible tsunami impacts.

Five minutes after that, the story reached CNN. They knew less than we did.

[Update: tsunami heights of no more than 50 centimeters were predicted for the region, with the actual results being closer to 10cm in several port cities. Good news for now, but the big one in March had a 7.2 foreshock two days before, so keep your fingers crossed for a week or so.]

Please hire someone to clean up the hilariously bad computer-generated translations on your US web site. Trust me, there are plenty of recently-graduated liberal-arts majors eager to work with prose more complicated than “do you want fries with that?”.

When the pipe is running, you are holding in your hands every now and slowly count to six. If you succeed you can safely continue to smoke a pipe, otherwise you must stop until the pipe cools. Long waits are not necessary: it takes typically a few seconds of interruption and in most cases not even need to turn on the pipe. however, if the pipe were to be shut down, never mind: you again. Many burns are caused by smoking because they fear that the pipe goes out and then suck up too often.

From the Denver Post:

A Colorado teen is recovering from serious burns he suffered when the fireworks he was attempting to mix in a coffee grinder exploded. ... the teen had read online about how larger fireworks could be made from smaller ones

Perhaps he should have stuck to online tutorials about how to smoke at home without getting busted?

Tip for the day: if you’re an underage cigarette smoker, and you need to search a wiki for instructions on how to sneak a smoke at home without getting busted, consider getting out more. This also applies to the entry on how to bum a smoke…

Clearly, the oracular bird at the school lied to conceal the identity of the demon king.

more...

Pete has shared the good news that Asobi ni Iku Yo! has been licensed for a US release. Also the bad news that it will appear under the title Cat Planet Cuties. This is not necessarily more accurate than the title Crunchyroll chose to stream it under, Bombshells from the Sky, but it’s definitely not worse.

Given how little is left of the R1 market for anime, I’m surprised they didn’t just go with the original title, though. Cat Planet Cuties has a certain pulp SF sound to it, perhaps leaning a bit more towards Leather Goddesses of Phobos than Flash Gordon, but I don’t see it drawing in more potential customers than the original. Perhaps the best solution would be to use both.

Could be worse, given the history of anime in the US; we could have ended up with Fur-st Contact! or Tails From Outer Space!

[At the moment, Funimation’s site is just a cast picture, with a release date that suggests a dubbed box set, hopefully including the OVA]

Every school festival should include clever little robots, sinister secret agents, heavily-armed maids, crazed cat-ear lovers, surprisingly-capable friendly strangers, and several dozen flying catgirls.

Lots of little bits of character development, mostly in the supporting cast. Jens, Muttley, 6-chan, Sada-yan, Kuune, Chaika, and Director Kawasaki all get some very interesting moments, and Team Ichika is building up into a major mystery. Jack shows up but doesn’t do much; in fact, Aoi’s old handler Endo has more of a part than she does.

There’s no obvious organized opposition in this volume, just the inevitable consequences of having A Real Live Alien at a high school festival. Plenty of build-up for the next one, though.