I’ve made a lot of progress learning Japanese with the Rosetta Stone software, but I decided that it’s time to work on the area that it helps least with: speaking. Since I’m working in Palo Alto again, taking a class seemed like a good idea, and Foothill College seems to have a good program, with flexible hours. Sort of.

Their first-year class is offered in evenings, which will work great for me. The second-year class appears to only be available at 8am, three days a week, which is not so good. Even without taking into consideration the fact that I live 75 miles from the campus, I’m not much of a morning learner.

Worse, the Intermediate Conversation class that can be taken alongside the second-year class starts at 8pm on the same days. If this isn’t an error in the online course catalog, it’s pretty stupid. They don’t have the schedules for Winter and Spring online yet, so I suspect I’ll have to talk to someone in the department to find out if this is typical. If I can continue their program in the evenings, or even later in the morning, I will; otherwise, I may have to drop it after the first year.

Saturday, a friend was flipping through channels and left this running. I’d never gotten around to seeing it, since I generally consider Tarantino an overrated hack. After a few minutes, I was mentally apologizing to George Lucas for the things I’ve said about his ability to write dialogue. Fortunately, we were soon able to get back to something more interesting.

Last night, I got bored and found it on cable again, and watched some more. I felt like I was slowing down to watch a train wreck. I didn’t enjoy it at all, but a question just kept running through my mind: “has it hit bottom yet?”.

The answer was always “no”.

While in the book store last week, I picked up A History of Japan, by Conrad Totman. I didn’t make it past the preface before the bullshit was too deep to wade through. Quoting:

Today we find ourselves at a point where the level of human exploitation of the ecosystem appears to be throwing the entire global biome into crisis. The Earth is now home to well over six billion people, but in fact this small planet's current biological production is not remotely capable of sustaining those people in the manner to which they are accustomed, much less the manner to which they aspire.

This, he says, is why he decided to write a book about Japanese history. Skimming ahead and checking the reviews, it appears his “ecological” approach to history taints the contents from cover to cover, coloring both which facts he chooses to include, and how he interprets them.

I have rarely felt the urge to return a book to the store based on its content, but a historian who so thoroughly injects his personal politics into the material simply isn’t worth reading.

I’ll be watching it through again once I’ve recovered from the first time, but meanwhile I can’t help thinking about it. Much of my speculation is sure to change as I watch again and argue with others (coughcough), but this is where I’m going with it now.

Beware! Spoilers abound.

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Got three of these today so far:

Subject: Best prices for complete Thundercats and more
Subject: Sabrina the Teenage Witch DVD giveaway
Subject: Whole series of transformers on dvd

They’re selling bootlegs, obviously, but there were no concealed URLs, no viral attachments, no embedded images. For junk mail, they’re positively wholesome; the closest thing to obnoxious porn was that they listed “The Nanny” as an available series…

If you’re wondering where the DVDs of Haibane Renmei went, they’re being closed out in anticipation of the box set release in October. So, if you don’t want to wait six weeks for the $120 set ($90 at Amazon), and you haven’t already bought most of the discs for $30 each, you can currently get the entire series at Anime Corner Store for $30 plus shipping.

Me, I’m stuck looking for disc 2, because I already have the others…

[Update: Cox & Forkum agree…]

What could possibly go wrong?

Scientists are proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago.

My favorite line is this one, which tells me that they’re shoveling elephant dung disguised as “science”:

Reintroducing the modern relatives of the Late Pleistocene losers to North America could spark fresh interest in conservation, contribute to biodiversity and begin to put right some of the wrongs caused by human activities.

No mention of the fact that elephants are incredibly destructive to the environment, and that their populations are exploding in parts of Africa that forbid hunting.

No, wait, I lied. This is my favorite line:

"Free-roaming, managed cheetahs in the southwestern United States..."

Sounds like they’re really trying to manage the ecotourist population. :-)

By golly, the collected propaganda of the North Korean news agency really does sound like the stuff you hear from the American Left. Sample quotes:

The South Korean authorities will face a stern punishment of the nation for their flunkeyist deeds.

Minju Joson today exposes an ulterior intention of the crafty Japanese reactionaries to legalize overseas expansion for aggression under the pretext of "coping with emergency on the Korean peninsula."

As already reported, the U.S. State Department in a recent "annual report" on the world human rights slandered the DPRK again. The "annual report" does not deserve even a passing note as it is full of absurd view on value and logic reversing black and white. Because the United States is not qualified to say anything about the human rights situation in the world.