I’d like to support Fuji TV’s pet idol group Idoling!!!, and it’s true that with sufficient voice processing, their singles are pleasant to listen to, and quite catchy, but I could never watch their show. Never never.

This video explains why. Be sure to watch the high-quality version to get the most out of the eye candy, and keep your hand near the mute button to protect your ears. There’s no voice processing for the show, you see, so you hear what the girls really sound like. And most of them are awful, making the worst of Hello!Project sound good.

In their defense, the show is pitched as a boot camp for aspiring idols, and they spend more time getting hit in the face with pies than they do singing. None of them have solo CD releases, but several have DVDs and photobooks, and there are a few calendars as well. Unlike Hello!Project, the girls are from a number of different agencies, and most of their promotion isn’t tied directly to their presence in Idoling!!!.

In looks, they range from cute to stunning. Two of the first-season girls who stand out are the tall, Western-looking Rurika Yokoyama and the short, busty cutie Erika Yazawa (who must need an icepack after every performance; honey, if they won’t buy you a bra, bring your own. Then again, you’ve got three solo DVDs, two photobooks, and a calendar, so “never mind”).

[Update: that wasn’t the worst costume; link below the fold, for your protection]

If you’re a fashion designer whose specialty is putting outrageous costumes onto models, things no one would ever possibly wear in real life, and you need women to wear the stuff, who ya gonna call?

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Last week I signed preliminary paperwork to refinance my house, saving about $300 per month. Tonight, my mailbox contained letters from seven lenders offering to beat the deal offered by CitiMortgage. Also the usual weekly credit-card offer from Capitol One, and two “helpful reminders” from my current credit-card companies about their extremely low balance-transfer rates.

It seems when banks can’t figure out if other banks are worth lending money to, they fall back to something more reliable: gainfully-employed consumers who pay their bills on time.

“​…Kanna Arihara, and on behalf of the Hello!Project costume designers, I’d like to ask you all a few questions.”

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Last night I dreamed I was looking something up in Wikipedia.

The page had been vandalized, and was now about various sex toys and how they’re used.

I had planned to take a few days off work to relax, maybe do a little cleaning around the house, catch up on my Japanese studies, pay a few bills, perhaps even watch a little anime. Your basic five-day weekend.

Then I caught a cold, and by the middle of last week, was feeling pretty miserable. I spent the first two days of my mini-vacation lying around the house with a box of tissues and my last remaining caffeine sources. On Sunday, I finally managed to get a start on my spring cleaning. Spring 2007, that is.

Good thing, too, because I’m refinancing the house, and the appraiser was going to show up on Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t need to impress him with my housekeeping skills, but I did need him to be able to get into every room without tripping over the clutter or sneezing himself to death in the dust.

I’m not a very good housekeeper, you see. I’m a clutter-slob, and my usual practice is to let the stacks of books and piles of clean laundry accumulate until I can’t find a path from A to B, then spend a day tidying and call in a maid service to do the actual cleaning.

Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty busy at my current startup (now in 250 Best Buy locations, arriving in all Micro Center and Frys Electronics soon!), my office is 75 miles from my house, and I rarely have the (sweet, satisfying) luxury of telecommuting. The house has basically become an oversized hotel room that doesn’t have a housekeeping staff. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it didn’t smell; I can tolerate almost infinite clutter, but I can’t stand a mess.

[this, by the way, made life interesting in my rental days; clutter-slobs should never share a place with mess-slobs, but even worse is having two clutter-slobs reinforcing each others’ behaviors]

All told, I did about 24 hours of tidying, cleaning, and honest-to-gosh scrubbing around the house. By the time the appraiser arrived, I was getting unnerved by the sheer wrongness of having so much open floor space around the house, and I’d burned out most of the cold.

If I ever get the chance to retire, I’m hiring two maids. A sturdy middle-aged woman to do the cleaning, and a hot cosplaying coed to tidy up the clutter. Or maybe two of each.

No, this is not the cast of the live-action Negima series, although it might be amusing to map one onto the other. This is Tsunku’s Army, also known as Hello!Project, in their mid-2005 lineup. Yes, some of them really were as young as they look.

Most of them are still associated with the organization, at least on paper. Six are gone for good (three quit, two switched agencies, one was kicked out), but at least a dozen only perform at concerts maybe twice a year, and are otherwise not well-supported by H!P. The two teen groups get most of the promotion, with Morning Musume now third on the priority list.

Tsunku’s attention seems to be focused on bringing in new talent before they need training bras, which may be very Japanese, but doesn’t do anything for me. The only over-25 member who gets any significant promotion is Natsumi Abe. She’s also one of the few who occasionally manages to go on stage in costumes that aren’t hideous or unflattering, so I think she must know where the bodies are buried.

While sorting through old paperwork (pronounced “shredding the bills and pitching the rest”), I found a double-sided glossy color flier from the peak of the local housing bubble about 2.5 years ago, advertising my next-door neighbor’s house for the sweet price of only $815,000. The realtor even registered a domain name for it and everything. Not that he expected me to buy it, of course. He was letting me know it was a seller’s market, and time for me to jump in!

No, it didn’t sell. Not even when he brought in an entire freakin’ tour bus full of potential buyers (which blocked my driveway for about an hour).

It finally sold two months ago, for $429,000. I don’t know what he bought it for, but I’d guess that my neighbor lost at least $150,000. I’d feel worse for him if he hadn’t asked me a few years ago if I had any good ideas for investing half a million dollars.

Amusing thing I hadn’t noticed before: the ad says “large yard - space for RV or boat”. This is a bald-faced lie, and the realtor should be bitch-slapped for making this claim and backing it up with a deceptive photo. Without a cargo helicopter, the only way to get an RV into his back yard would be to knock down the fence, pave over about six feet of my front lawn, relocate the utility box at the curb, and then very, very carefully squeeze it along the side of his house. Which would be illegal, because it would be visible from the street.

You might be able to get a small boat back there by only paving a few feet of my lawn, but you’d have a helluva time getting it back out again.