…or will be in the state of New York, if the dumbest state legislators in American history can manage to pass their new bill.

Not kidding:

"No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises."

The “in any form” really puts the crown on these king-sized asshats. It’s amazing they managed to write a complete sentence, much less an actual bill.

One should never take this sort of story at face value, so I looked it up on Amazon, and my jaw dropped for two reasons.

1. The linked disclaimer that the contents of The Federalist Papers "does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today".
2. The publisher's claim of copyright on the material.

Both are most likely boilerplate, but they’re deeply clueless boilerplate. And they do indeed reflect a certain kind of modern values…

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I was looking up a Japanese word. I knew what it meant. I knew how it had been formed from the parent word. I knew the writer had used it correctly. It just wasn’t in my usual dictionaries, and I wanted to see if there was some nuance to the usage that wasn’t obvious from the construction.

The word was 偉大さ (“idaisa”). Idai by itself is in most dictionaries. As a noun, it means greatness, mightiness, grandeur; as a -na adjective, great, mighty, grand. The -sa ending converts adjectives to nouns, so idaisa should end up with exactly the same meanings as the noun form of idai, but it could emphasize one in particular, or it could simply be more formal. In this case, I think it’s a bit of both; formal, because it’s the foreword to a book about her youth, and emphasizing mighty, because her story is about Ultraman.

But the reason I’m writing is to mention the one dictionary entry that did list idaisa, and included among its meanings a word forged from the purest Scrabbleite:

honorificabilitudinity

Yeah, that helped, thanks.

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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