The first time I realized that Amber Benson had more going for her than I’d been shown was when she opened her mouth during the Buffy musical and sang. Suddenly a decent actress who’d capably immersed herself into a minor supporting role in the series was now a singer with a lovely voice. The second was when I got a good look at her face when she wasn’t made up to look plain and a bit frumpy; she looks as good as she sounds. The third time was when Amazon recommended her novel Death’s Daughter, and I discovered that she had another voice worth hearing.

It’s not my usual genre of fantasy; at least, the things Amazon starts recommending once you buy it are the kind of chick-flick broody-goth romangst fantasy that have stronger ties to Harlequin than Tolkien. Fortunately, Death’s Daughter is neither dark nor brooding, and the world-building is first-rate. The supporting cast is only lightly sketched, admittedly, but the heroine makes up for it by being quite thoroughly developed, and carries the story along superbly. It’s a good book, and now she’s made another one, Cat’s Claw.

It’s a lot of fun. I don’t usually stop in the middle of a page, laugh out loud, reread it, and then laugh out loud again. Benson got me to do that in Cat’s Claw. I won’t say where; if you read it, you’ll know the spot.

We had a little contest tonight, to see who got the least comprehensible recommendation from Amazon. Here’s my best: The Complete Benny Hill, because I bought a crockpot.

Jenny McCarthy, outspoken anti-vaccination activist, is now furiously beck-pedaling thanks to the discovery that her child is not autistic, and likely never was.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled herd immunity.

…unless Jenny and the gang already killed you, of course.

Interested in Girls’ Generation, but don’t want to order CDs from YesAsia? You can buy their latest album from the US iTunes Store, but only if you know to search for “소녀시대”.

Interested in the extremely talented South Korean singer Younha, popular in both Korea and Japan? Don’t bother looking, she’s not there, not as Younha, ユンナ, or 윤하. On the bright side, if you search for “윤하”, you’ll find 윤손하, who is also a pretty, pretty good singer, although her Wikipedia page suggests that she’s a bit of a bridge-burner.

The following four images are the front covers of the Japanese editions of two well-known science fiction novels (two each, because novels are frequently split into two volumes in Japan). I have crudely blacked out the author’s name, so as long as you don’t sight-read katakana, you can examine the covers and try to guess which novels they are.

The Japanese and English titles are below.

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Please don’t pollute the well. Search results for the writer Masako Bandou return a link to an Amazon US product page for the title “13 of Pornographic Chica Japanese Language Book”. No details, no availability, no hint that the book has ever actually existed. Because it doesn’t.

The actual book sold by Amazon Japan is called “13のエロチカ”, which should properly be translated as “13 Erotic Stories”. The loanword used is “erochika”, which is not the nonexistent hybrid English-Spanish loanword “ero-chica”, but the perfectly ordinary “erotica”. The book even includes French on the title, “13 Histoires Erotiques”, just in case the casual viewer is confused.

The two possibilities are a lazy “self-publisher” using machine translation (of at least the titles) or a used book store that was trying to unload a bunch of used Japanese books, and was ambitious enough to hire someone who had taken a year of Japanese and could mangle the titles into Engrish, but didn’t bother including the ISBNs.

The only good thing I got out of this little adventure was the discovery that a Google image search for the acronym “asin” returns something far more interesting than publishing data.

After being kicked out of Hello!Project in The Grownup Purge, idol group Melon Kinenbi’s career initially didn’t look much different. The label had been grudgingly giving them occasional promotion and a single once or twice a year, and they had a monthly concert gig with guest performers, and that continued. In fact, things improved slightly, with the release of five indie singles collaborating with other bands, leading up to their just-released album and DVD, Melon’s Not Dead (even available on the US iTunes store), and an upcoming 10th-anniversary tour.

Their last tour, and last album as a group. When the tour ends, they’re disbanding, and the team of Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi will be no more.

My copy of the album arrived yesterday. I was already fond of Don’t Say Goodbye and Seishun On The Road, but some of the others don’t work for me, largely because the groups they collaborated with have very different styles. Review to follow.

I’ve been following Mari Yaguchi for some time, starting with her debut in Morning Musume, and I’ve been impressed at how well she’s diversified her career, enough that being kicked out of the band was only a minor setback to her plans for world domination. She’s well-established as an actress, writer, spokesmodel, tv host, and all-purpose talent, and she even still sings occasionally.

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a famous writer and actor, probably best-known in the US for his science fiction novella 時をかける少女 (“The girl who leapt through time”), the basis for the anime film of the same name. Pete and I have been trading notes on his work for a while, starting when he went looking for a short story he’d originally read in Russian. We eventually found the original Japanese version, and last week he sent me a copy, which I finished reading last night.

So what do I find this morning?

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