This is sad. The people on Hello!Online are surely well-versed in the ways of fashion disasters, but this is the picture where they finally decide to complain about the outfits? Is it because there aren’t enough colors? Is it the lack of feathers?

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It began with this, discovered through an email that led from failblog to Engrishfunny:

This was not some ancient one-hit wonder, cruelly abused by Youtube. No, Dschinghis Khan had quite a success after Eurovision, and they’re still big in Japan. How big?

This big:

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[if you don’t play WoW, you won’t get the joke…]

I’ve been leveling up a Death Knight in World of Warcraft. Like many people, I put most of my talent points into Unholy, so I have a ghoul pet. They’re pretty disposable, and they get random NounVerber names from a relatively small list of thematically appropriate elements. I’ve had a few amusing names show up, but today’s was absolutely perfect.

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I’ve been reading Girl Genius since the first issue came out (on actual paper!), and it’s easily Phil Foglio’s best work. I knew he’d done a lot of design and plotting work before starting the comic (some of which can be seen in the very entertaining card game), but until yesterday, I hadn’t really appreciated how far it went.

I’d read the whole thing several times over the past few years, without ever realizing exactly what happened in this scene. Oh, my.

I recently read the two new pre-Ringworld Known Space novels by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds. Very short summary: Fleet was pretty good, Juggler less so.

The big difference: Fleet is a standalone novel set in Known Space. If you have a vague memory of Ringworld and the short stories, you’ll be fine. Juggler, on the other hand, is not only a direct sequel to Fleet, but also to more than a dozen Known Space short stories (including everything in Crashlander), which are air-dropped into the story at seemingly random intervals. The “big surprise” is also so poorly handled that for several chapters you can’t be sure that a major character wasn’t just another reference. On the plus side, it gives a faint nod to the old “down in flames” story idea, which was more fun than most of the backstage views of decades-old stories.

I’ve read all of the Known Space stories several times, so I got most of the references, but the secret history of the secret history of Beowulf Shaeffer just got tiresome after a while, and it took up space that would have been better spent expanding on the interesting new characters who were the focus of Fleet. They’re pretty much reduced to spear-carriers in Juggler.

Fleet stands alone quite nicely, and adds some real depth to the Puppeteers, both individually and as a race. I didn’t dislike Juggler, but I doubt I’ll reread it.

Hello!Project is kicking out the grown-ups to make room for younger idols. Among those being cut loose is solo singer Aya Matsuura, known for the goofiness of her early work and a recent shift to a more adult-contemporary style.

Her latest release?

But hey, it’s a start.

Last week, I got a letter reminding me that my 2002 Lexus RX-300 was due for its 200,000-mile service. Monday, I called the dealership near my office to schedule it. The service tech asked for my phone number, typed it in, and said:

S: Wow, you’ve got a lot of cars.

J: Um, no, just the one.

S: I see at least 50. No, wait, 115.

J: By chance, are any of them a 2002 RX?

S: No. Is your address 1721 Del Monte?

J: No. But you have the right name and phone number.

S: Um, okay, we’ll just schedule this manually, and I’ll tell someone about the glitch.

A few minutes later, I realized why the address he gave sounded so familiar: it’s the dealership I originally bought the car at, in Monterey. I figured he had just clicked the wrong option and ended up looking at their inventory.

No. When I showed up the next morning, they typed in my name and said, “wow, you’ve got a lot of cars.” I pointed out the address, and someone laughed and said he knew what had happened:

everyone has admin privileges in the system, and the last time I'd come in, the tech had made the "rookie mistake" of transferring every car at another dealership into my name instead of transferring my car's home dealership from there to here.

He was surprised that I hadn’t gotten 115 warranty service reminder calls.