Just think, if it weren’t for their tough gun control laws, Canadian criminals would have access to dangerous weapons. Oh, wait:

Inside the van, police found 15 guns and as much as 135 kilograms of explosives. The firearms included automatic weapons, semi-automatic machine guns and handguns.

Extra credit to the ignorant or malicious reporter who wrote the absurd phrase “semi-automatic machine guns”.

Note that they don’t say why they think the van belonged to an organized crime group rather than, say, terrorists. It’s not like it was parked next to embassies or anything like that.

Oh, wait.

This is amusing for how it reveals the biases of (cough) “hip young media,” but outside of the context of submitting photos to them, it’s not worth much.

Many years ago, I got my hands on a few titles from the classic Rick Brant series of boy’s adventure novels. One that stands out in my memory (that I currently don’t have a copy of…) was The Egyptian Cat Mystery. The cat in question is a small stone statuette, the possession of which gets Our Heroes into the usual hot water.

Great fun, and as was typical for the Brant series, the science was both plausible and well-explained. I think it’s the only juvenile novel in existence that gives a decent explanation of how SETI works.

Anyway, a while back I decided that I wanted to have Rick’s cat sitting on my mantel, for the benefit of the six people in the world who might walk into my home and realize what it’s supposed to be. Every time I stay at the Luxor in Las Vegas, I check out the gift shops for an appropriate cat. It needs to be around six inches tall, plain (no gaudy gold paint, please!), and apparently constructed of smooth dark stone.

Imagine my joy when I spotted this in the bazaar last weekend:

Imagine my crushing disappointment when I picked it up and discovered that it was chipped in several places, and was the only one they had. Sigh.

[oh, and this is the first photo I’ve posted from my Motorola V600 cellphone. Reduced to 50% and Leveled in Photoshop to fix the low contrast, I’d say this is fair representation of the image quality.]

I wasn’t surprised to find that my receiver takes a second or so to sync up to a new digital audio stream; this is not an unusual flaw. I was surprised that Airport Express isn’t sending a continuous audio signal to the receiver when it’s active, and that iTunes sends each song in a playlist as a separate digital stream.

Net result? My Kenwood VR-407 loses the first second or so of every song unless I set iTunes’ crossfade option to at least four seconds. With that, the first song is still chopped, but as long as I don’t change tracks manually very often, the majority are ok.

This would be acceptable as a short-term workaround, even though I despise crossfade, except that the device isn’t terribly stable. Several times in the first hour, the audio stream simply locked up and had to be restarted.

Bottom line, until there are updates for both iTunes and Airport Express, it won’t get much use at my house. I could switch the connection to analog to avoid the crossfade, but that won’t do anything about the unstable connection.

Back from another quick road trip to Vegas, and I regret to report that the Las Vegas House of Blues is a terrible concert venue. Ten minutes into Liz Phair’s set, we walked out, and vainly attempted to find someone in a position of authority to complain to.

We weren’t the only ones. From my position on the side of the room (where I was trying to escape the sonic assault), I’d say that at least 10% of the crowd walked out before we did, after struggling through the relentlessly terrible sound of the previous acts (Charlotte Martin, Katy Rose, and The Cardigans). There was nothing wrong with any of the performances; it was all the result of the morons in charge of the sound, whose work would have been a disgrace in a high-school gymnasium.

Charlotte Martin was accompanying herself on the piano, with no one else on stage. Her music was, in theory, softer and quieter than the other acts, which explains why she occasionally had to ask the drunks at the bar to shut up. I say “in theory” because there were at least four distinct echoes on her vocals (along with an occasional vicious feedback squeal), the piano was amped so loud that you couldn’t tell what chords she was playing with her left hand, and the many out-of-tune high notes were loud enough to draw blood. I have no idea what the lyrics to most of her songs were; she sang clearly, but never had a chance.

Someone apparently persuaded them to turn the bass down from 11 to 10.5 for Katy Rose’s set, which was actually tolerable (if not by any stretch of the imagination good) if you left your seat and hid behind a column, watching her on the monitor. I’d like to hear her in a decent club, to find out what she really sounds like.

The Cardigans did their own sound check before coming on stage, but while this ensured that the inputs were working, the clown running the board apparently thought they weren’t loud enough, so he cranked it back up to 11.

There was a long delay before Liz Phair took the stage, with much rearranging of equipment and another sound check, but nobody tested Liz’s mike, so her voice was completely buried by the bass (now set to 11.5, if not higher). I gave up after the third song. I knew the words, and I couldn’t understand a thing she said. I risked a quick trip back to my seat to retrieve my friend (who was looking longingly at his bottle of ibuprofen), and we left.

Nobody was around who had even the vaguest hint of authority. They don’t have any form of comment card, either, so we were reduced to a quickly-scrawled letter of complaint and a promise to never return. I wouldn’t go back to that pit if Jesus were playing.

And that’s without even discussing the smell and the awful, cramped seating.

I guess you’d call these folks Geeks Against Democracy:

"We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in"

Acquired from the usual suspects (available online here), this stuff’s pretty good, and pretty filling.

It’s funny; after all the time I spent in college living on mac & cheese, pot pies, and ramen noodles, I was sure I’d never eat any of them again, and for twenty years I was right. Either the stuff has gotten a lot better since then, or I’ve finally gotten over it. Maybe both.

Okay, it seems a bit silly to review the ending of an OVA series that’s only three episodes long, but in fact the ending is the only thing that really stands out about Cosplay Complex… and not in a good way.

Based on the trailer and the fact that it comes from the director of Hand Maid May, I expected a funny, sweet, well-acted fan-service comedy with a plot that makes Kleenex look sturdy, and, sure enough, that’s what it delivers. They push the limits a bit with one character who can be accurately described as a lesbian pedophile, but while it may sound odd to American ears to say that her obsession is played for laughs, it’s true, and her most serious attempt at seduction ends in a failure that scars her for the rest of the episode.

The cosplay that is the heart of the show is taken very seriously and executed very well. The end credits are built around photos of real Japanese cosplayers, set to a bouncy ondo song that works perfectly. It’s also used for the special feature that identifies all of the costumes shown, and it’s quite a list.

The plot, such as it is? Think Major League with cute high-school girls instead of baseball players, and leave out the climactic victory. Our perky team of underdogs works to make it to the World Series of Cosplay, battling personality conflicts and bonding as a team, but we never see the payoff. We get to see a cosplay battle with last year’s big winners, but instead of the big game, the end of the third and final episode consists of events and new characters that are clearly intended to set up a second series.

Unfortunately, they really don’t have enough good material (or costumes!) to extend the story much, and the new stuff doesn’t even fit that well, so it’s unlikely that a sequel will be produced any time soon. So, if you enjoy well-drawn girls in and out of sexy costumes and don’t mind the lack of resolution to the story, it’s fun.

And who can resist Ikariya cosplay?