Over the past few years, the best hotel experiences I’ve had have come from Holiday Inn Express. Well-appointed rooms, comfortable beds with pillows in an assortment of firmnesses, towels that haven’t had all the softness laundered out of them, a desk I can work at, decent cable tv and a DVD player, and solid, free high-speed Internet access. Some of them also have a decent free breakfast.

Last weekend, I decided to spend Saturday up in San Francisco, before heading to a friend’s house in Campbell on Sunday, so I booked a room in Redwood City for two nights. I’ve stayed in that particular HIE before, and gotten good service.

Unfortunately, Saturday morning, there was no hot water anywhere in the hotel. They were sorry about it, and had it fixed by mid-day, but by that time I was already up in SF, enjoying the taiko drumming in SF Japantown (part of a film and cultural festival I hadn’t known about). [side note: pretty girls banging on big drums appeals to me…]

Last night, my mailbox contained a Starbucks gift card, the hotel manager’s business card, and a humble apology for their failure to provide perfect service.

[oh, and the Holiday Inn membership rewards system feeds directly into the JAL membership rewards system, building up miles for a seat upgrade on a future trip to Japan]

Safari 3.1 has added CSS downloadable font support, so I went looking for some decent fonts with less ambiguous availability than the often-linked hgrskp.ttf. To my surprise and delight, I found that Epson hosts a free download of a nice collection of fonts, including a Kaisho, a Kyoukasho, a Gyosho, a Mincho, and a Maru.

The only thing wrong with them is that the embedded font names are not encoded in Unicode (probably Shift-JIS), so the names show up as garbage in font menus. Easy fix with a font editor.

[Note: kanji fonts are in the neighborhood of 50 times larger than a standard font, and you really, really don’t want to embed them into a web page except as a test. There’s a reason Adobe PDF uses font subsetting, and I suspect people will insist on similar tools for web fonts, even the standard ones. Also, Safari 3.1 doesn’t cache downloaded fonts at all…]

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Love the outfit, but… bananas?

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Another random discovery in Kinokuniya: 死神とチョコレートパフェ. Three light novels, adapted into a manga series. I have no idea what it’s about, and yet, I do.

The first light novel looks like this.

The phrase “voted best punk band by Shoujo Beat” pretty much sums up this song by Ketchup Mania. I think it’s a bad sign when you can listen to punk rock and visualize the anime series that it would make a good opening-credits song for.

[Update: animated music video for another Ketchup Mania song.]

A frequent annoyance for manga and anime fans is the inevitable loss of information in translation. Little things like the use of -san, -chan, -sama, -dono, et al can be simply left in or explained once, and if you’re watching the subtitled version, you can pick them out of the original dialogue.

Often, though, cultural context means that a single line of dialogue can’t be fully understood without half a page of explanation, but sometimes it can’t, or shouldn’t, be explained. One of the dumbest things I’ve seen a fansub group do was fill the entire screen with a detailed explanation of a very small joke that added almost nothing to the story.

What we see a lot of today, though, especially with the insane pace of manga translation, is information lost because the translators didn’t have the context themselves; either they’re not native speakers who grew up in Japan (as pointed out in this Amazon review), or they’re not reading an entire story before translating a chapter (too many to list…).

So, here’s my tiny joke of the day, courtesy of a manga volume I spotted in Kinokuniya: 酒のほそ道. It’s the story of a salaryman who loves to drink; I can’t tell you any more about the story, because it’s entirely lacking in furigana, and I didn’t buy it anyway. It’s popular enough to have 22 volumes out, though.

Anyone familiar with classic Japanese literature will get the title immediately, and wonder just where the author is going to go with it. “Sake no hoso-michi” translates literally as “the narrow road of sake”, but it’s really a reference to “Oku no hoso-michi”, a very famous book written by the haiku poet Bashō.

Yuuko’s outfit is simple, and her hair is for once a color found in nature. Okay, she’s wearing a nightie, but that’s not a bad thing. But when I look at Nacchi, I just have to ask, DEAR GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?

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