Koutarou Nanbara says:

「あのロボットオタクのお宅に女がいるなんて、あってはならんことだ……」

I’m halfway through an attempt to read the first Hand Maid May novel without a dictionary. I’m missing quite a bit this way, but I know the story well enough to fill in most of the missing pieces, and 100 roughly-understood pages are more fun than 10 carefully-translated ones. When I go through it the second time, the story will be fresh enough that stopping to look things up won’t interrupt the experience as badly. I tried to do this with the Louie novel last year, but I was missing too much grammar and vocabulary.

The tagline: “Powered by Really Cute Asians”

Out of nowhere, I remembered her first name, and Google turned up a solid link to her last name: Jennifer Collins. Sadly, her career in the circus arts doesn’t seem to have prospered enough to turn up any news since 2003. I don’t know how she compares technically to other contortionists, but as an entertainer, with a warm, funny stage presence, she’s top-notch.

WTF is this? Sherlock Bond?

I get it, I do; you felt it was necessary and cool to have little video clips playing on the System Preferences panel for the new trackpads, to show all the cool multi-touch gestures.

But did it ever occur to you that the videos keep running as long as System Preferences is open to this panel, even in the background, even when the app is hidden? That’s 15-20% of one of my CPUs devoted to showing off multi-touch, when what I really care about is that you keep resetting the tracking speed of the trackpad whenever I plug in an external mouse.

Could you take some of that effort you put into the first five minutes of the user experience with a new piece of hardware, and maybe spend a little of it on how the device behaves for the next five years?

I’m transcribing lyrics from an album I found in the discount bin at Kinokuniya, 草原の人. It’s the soundtrack from one of Hello!Project’s musicals, featuring Aya Matsuura and Melon Kinenbi, and the songs are short and mostly missing from the Project!Hello lyrics site.

I’ve done this a few times before, and the hard part is figuring out the names of the songwriters and arrangers. They’re usually printed smaller than the lyrics, and my usual electronic dictionary doesn’t have names. I can get placenames and family names on my Sharp Papyrus, but first names are tricky, and in one case, the reading was so unusual that Enamdict didn’t even have it (知枝 as かずえ instead of ちえ or ともえ).

My fallback solution in such cases is Google, doing mixed searches of the kanji, kana, and romaji until I find a person who appears to be in the correct business. Instead, I found two partial name matches in an adult video titled 巨乳携帯ショップ (NSFW! NSFW!). It’s not what I was looking for, being the erotic adventures of the busty staff of a cellphone store dedicated to support and アフターサービス, but it’s amusing to come across. By the way, the store’s called PAIMOM, from the slang phrase パイ揉み.

(I wouldn’t buy it, because Japanese porn tends to focus on domination, but I might look up the pretty girls in the cast to see if they’ve done anything less explicit)

[Update: Amazon has one that is trending toward five-bladed razor territory for fetish overload: 巨乳女子校生中出し, Volume 4]

Browsing the folder all my spam lands into, I find the subject line 「お食事のお誘いです♪」, which can be translated as “this is a meal invitation”. The URL in the message is randomstring.com/sexcircle, which sounds a bit more… filling.

Best spam subject line I’ve seen in weeks:

Stimulez votre baby-maker

And here I thought the French hated the creeping spread of English…