When I turn on Japanese support in Word, that means that I want to enable features like vertical text and kanji grid spacing. It does not mean that I want to format all new documents for A4 paper.

While we’re on that subject, thank you for changing the Language Register application into something that you run in Office 2008, and no longer something that you drag other Office apps onto, as in previous versions. Also, thanks for no longer switching the input method from English to Kotoeri every time I launch Word; that was always a real pain in the ass.

After the second time she was caught behaving like a typical girl her age, Hello!Project broke Ai Kago’s contract, and she dropped out of sight. Apart from an alleged sighting in New York City and the claim that her mother would pose nude for a photobook, she’s managed to stay invisible for the past year.

…until yesterday, when a six-part interview started appearing on a Japanese news site, which was promptly pounded into the ground by the traffic. Her new publicist has also created a stub of a fan club site, promising real content soon.

Naturally, Hello!Online is all over this one.

Safari now uses a completely different method of storing cookies, which unfortunately means that the only decent management tool I ever found, Cocoa Cookies, doesn’t work any more.

So I rolled my own:

(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c print
~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist |
awk '/Domain = / {x++;print x-1,$0}' |
awk '!/mee.nu|amazon/{print $1}' |
sort -rn | sed -e 's/^/delete :/';
echo save;echo quit) |
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy
~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist

Note that you really don’t want to run this as-is, and probably want something more robust than a shell one-liner anyway. The bits that matter are:

1. run "/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c print" to dump all your cookies in an easily-parsed format.
2. The array of cookies is zero-based.
3. The array shrinks as you delete things from it with "delete :N", so you want to start at the end and work forward.
4. The original file isn't altered until you send a "save".
5. Safari seems to write this file out whenever you get a cookie, and notices when it's changed on disk.

1. Pizza Hut's new meat pasta is pretty good. I'll be eating it for another two days, since they only deliver a family-size portion with breadsticks, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
2. I always thought the name "Rune Soldier" was an invention of the team who translated the anime for the US market, since "Magic Soldier Louie" sounded too similar to "Magic Knight Rayearth" and similar series. Nope, page six of the first novel glosses 魔法戦士 as ルーンソルジャー. Pity, really, since the change ruined a decent joke in episode 18.
3. Constructs of the form AたるB, where both A and B are nouns, are a bit of grammar that's hard to find a good explanation for in English. Historically, there were three different conjugations for adjectives, but for the most part only the -i and -na types still exist; there are only a handful of true -taru adjectives in modern Japanese. This does not stop people from occasionally attaching -taru to a noun to make an "A-looking B" or "A-like B" expression.
4. Speaking of -taru adjectives, I find this one charming: 死屍累々. Shishiruirui, it's like the "que sera sera" of carnage. I don't think I'll ever be able to sing the correct lyrics to that song again.
5. Speaking of songs we'll never be able to sing correctly again...
6. Nobody ever told me that Pixel Maritan had a webcomic.
7. On a vaguely related note, the trading figures for Moe yo! Tank School are, um, interesting.
8. And while we're following dirty links at Amazon Japan, I can see where the artist was going with this covergirl from MC Akushizu ("the hyper bishoujo military magazine"), but, anatomically speaking, he made a wrong turn.

[Update: holy crap, they’re doing a second season. WTF?

… Okay, having followed the scavenger-hunt instructions on ANN, the only verifiable fact in their story is this line on the next-to-last page of the just-released chapter of the manga: 「ＴＶアニメ第２Ｓ制作決定!!」, which does in fact say “tv anime #2S production decision!!”. Their “announcement” link just goes to the publisher’s flash-based home page, which doesn’t seem to mention this. I’m wondering if it’s just obsolete news based on the publishing cycle of a monthly magazine.]

[Update: nothing on the anime’s staff blog, but there’s a similar one-liner on their news page. Also, a lot more merchandise, including an original novel, a school uniform, and a special edition of the DS game that comes with an original comic. Again, WTF?]

Out of morbid curiosity, I downloaded episode 13. Pretty thorough spoilers follow:

more...

The word for the day is “fungai”. If you search a dictionary, you’ll find it written as 憤慨 = resent + lament = “indignation or resentment”. My shiny new copy of Kenkyusha’s Bilingual Dictionary of Japanese Cultural Terms has another: 糞害 = feces + harm = “problems with damage caused by bird droppings”.

In our parking lot at work, there are several spaces that Spring has rendered unusable due to fungai over fungai.

…or they picked the wrong day to announce this:

From: PizzaHut@getmore.emailpizzahut.com
Subject: Pizza Hut is now Pasta Hut!

Our new Tuscani Pastas are so good, we decided to change our name to Pasta Hut. Try both delicious flavors - Meaty Marinara or Creamy Chicken Alfredo.

Finally, restaurant quality pasta delivered right to your door! Feeds 4 and comes with 5 breadsticks for only $11.99. Dinner’s done!

They updated the web site, too, but I’ve seen that trick before!

[Update: their web site is still Pasta Hut, so it was just their total lack of awareness that “April 1” means something other than “beginning of new fiscal quarter”, especially on the Internet]

When I was reading the star-crossed-puppy-love story 野菊の墓, I found myself wondering if the editors at Ask had over-simplified the main conflict, since it boiled down to “you two can never, ever marry, because she’s two years older”. Skimming through the original version (a much slower read, even though it’s easier to look up vocabulary with cut-and-paste), it looks like that really is the reason the whole village is upset about their budding romance, to the point that she’s forced into an unhappy marriage with someone else. Pause for mild culture shock.

One thing that caught my eye, though, was this passage:

僕は小学校を卒業したばかりで十五歳、月を数えると十三歳何ヶ月という頃、民子は十七だけれどそれも生れが晩《おそ》いから、十五と少しにしかならない。

Roughly: “Having just finished elementary school, I was 15, or if you counted months, 13 and some change; Tamiko was 17, but since she was born late, she had just turned 15.” [note the use of Aozora Bunko’s 《》 convention for furigana, in this case glossing the character for “evening” with the word for “late”]

The Ask version just gave their ages as 13 and 15, respectively, but clearly there was something going on in the original. I noted the multiple ages as something to look into later, and then spotted the answer by accident while flipping through my collection of reference books: 数え年. In the kazoedoshi system, you’re 1 at birth, and gain a year on New Year’s Day. These days, the most visible use of this system is probably the Shichi-Go-San festival.