I kept waiting for something impressive to happen.

This is not a good sign when you’re dealing with a troupe whose reputation is built on delivering something impressive. Kà is entertaining, but if you’ve seen any of the other three Cirque de Soleil shows in Las Vegas, it’s a bit of a letdown.

What’s wrong? First, the lack of any “wow” moments; they deliver a number of decent pieces, loosely strung together by a half-page of storytelling, but nothing that really stands out. Second, the attempt to pass off the usual acrobatics as stylized combat; half a dozen scenes were marred by dreadful “fight” choreography. Third, the balance between technical gimmicks and artistry was weighted heavily toward the former; it looks like the production was built around the hardware, not the other way around, and much of it seems to be used simply because it’s there.

It can’t be a coincidence that the director of O and Mystère was off working on a show for the new Wynn Las Vegas casino…

Did it suck? No, it’s just not worth planning a trip around yet. There are plenty of talented performers in the show, and the sets are technically impressive; once they arrange a proper marriage between the two, they’ll have something. Except for the combat scenes; those really did suck.

[other shows this trip? The reliably terrific Blue Man Group, and the mostly-amusing George Carlin; his political material has always been weak, but the farther the rest of us get away from the early Seventies, the harder he tries to drag us back there. “No thanks, Uncle Dave”]

The most obvious stumbling block for westerners learning Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean…) is the large number of seemingly indistinguishable symbols they’re written in. For Japanese, basic adult literacy requires 2,324. I’m about 10% of the way there, and have been for a while now.

I’m pretty good with the ones I know, enough to puzzle out many book titles and store signs, and I can read short blocks of text with the help of my dictionary, but the real pain was writing each new character out about 100 times. Many years of computer work has left me with both RSI and a lack of “pencil stamina”.

So I switched workbooks. Instead of the solid but strenuous A Guide to Writing Kanji and Kana, I’m now using the Basic Kanji Book. Con: less repetition might make for sloppier handwriting. Pros: less repetition makes my hands happier, it includes reading and writing exercises that put each character in context, and, perhaps most importantly, there’s almost no Rōmaji; it’s assumed from the start that you’ve mastered hiragana and katakana.

With this book, I very quickly learned that my ability to write the characters I had learned degraded rapidly. Even some kana required conscious effort to remember, despite my ability to read them. So, switching workbooks has helped me out even more than I originally expected.

For additional practice, I went back to Level I in my Rosetta Stone courseware and switched to the writing exercises. It doesn’t support a real Japanese Input Method, but it does have a very good sentence-assembly drill, sort of a Kanji Scrabble quiz (see a picture and hear a phrase that describes it, then select the right characters to transcribe the phrase from a set of tiles). It’s quite effective.

The only problem with it is that they don’t use your platform’s native font rendering, so you’re stuck with bitmapped fonts at specific sizes, and even at the largest size, it’s difficult to differentiate between 一 and ー on the tiles. Yes, they’re different, and yes, the software will beep haughtily at you if you pick the wrong one.

…half-step back. I’m a big fan of the increase-text-size button in Safari, so while I appreciate the definite improvements in the version included with the 10.3.9 update, I have some…issues:

This anime review site displays just fine at the normal text-size setting, but Safari 1.3 persistently hoses the images if you’ve hit the increase-text-size button. Sometimes a forced redraw fixes it, sometimes I have to decrease text size and then increase it again.

The state of California insists that rattlesnakes have a right to self-defense. What a pity they don’t extend that same right to law-abiding citizens. Perhaps we’re not considered “important members of the community”. (via lgf, etc)

No, I’m not going to send you an additional $35,000 dollars for my 2003 taxes. Do you people even grasp the concept of stock option sales? Did you forget that we just went through this for 2002, and you didn’t get the money that time, either?

Love, J

[kind of makes me glad none of my options were worth selling in 2004…]

…I don’t sit twenty feet away from my laptop, and the subject line gives it away as spam anyway:

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Alleged cat-lovers in Wisconsin are up in arms over a proposed law to allow hunting of feral cats. The web site for their campaign is dontshootthecat.com.

Sadly, shootthecat.com is a slow-loading artist’s site that has no connection to this issue, and doesn’t even seem to have any pictures of cats. Pity. Maybe some bird-lovers should buy the domain from him and highlight some of the unrealistic arguments being made against the legislation.

Personally, I’ve had run-ins with feral cats, and they ain’t the family pet Fluffy. They’re carnivorous wild animals, which makes them at least as big a pest as the gophers and skunks that are already legal to shoot in Wisconsin. More so, probably; I don’t think Wisconsin’s skunks are killing tens of millions of songbirds each year.

I love their support for “trap, neuter, and release”, by the way. If the estimate of two million feral cats in Wisconsin is even vaguely correct, the best they can hope for is weeding out the stupid ones, leaving only the cleverest cats running loose to breed. That’ll fix things for sure!

[Disclaimer: I like cats, enjoy seeing them roaming through the jungle that is my back yard, and once adopted a semi-feral cat who was in danger of being shot by a local farm-owner. I still think it’s stupid and irresponsible to allow them to roam free without a collar or neutering, so I have no sympathy for people who do so.]

M-Audio has announced this custom controller for it, with matching faux-wood paneling.

I’d love to see the market numbers that drove this decision. Macs have always been big in the creative market, but making custom hardware for an application that comes free with the OS? Hmm…

Update: I’m not exactly a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but any band that releases a track from their upcoming album in GarageBand format for their fans to play with is officially cool.