Looks like Webster's Books is folding tent. Something about being behind on the rent, "starting two years ago", whatever that means. Before it was Websters, it was Seven Mountains Books, then before that it was the Book Swap. Svoboda's got folded into the operation at some point during its existence if I recall correctly, which means that two families of independent booksellers are leaving State College's downtown this month. Supposedly there's another location out in Patton Twp somewhere, and I have to agree with the angry people in the comments, it isn't kosher to be opening new locations when you can't pay the rent on your downtown lease. Rather looks like a "strategic default" move from this remote vantage-point.

Look, the reason *I* stopped going there was the raging political polarization, their increasing prices, the stink of coffee (despite the smartass comments about hippie stench, I never noticed any such thing - but I can't abide strong coffee odor), and my having moved out of the immediate State College area some ten years ago. Websters long ago became... repellent to most of its potential customers. The only people they were interested in appealing to - fair-trade fanatics, localvores, leftie college professors, students, and hangers-on - are, as a rule, cheap, cheats, or contemptuous of the profit motive. That isn't a long-term path to profitability.

Looks like Fred's still alive - he was defending his former business partners in the comments. I wonder if they still have the warehouse under the block across the street - Fred used to say that the majority of the business's cash flow was in the mail-delivery online business through Amazon and other outlets.

"Sorry. That last paragraph was supposed to be in defense of the film, but I got distracted by the thought that someday, somebody might quote me on a DVD box."

Aw. come on, Howard. That's the sort of mishap that you can drink out on for a decade or two! Sort of like being publicly abused by Harlan Ellison used to be a badge of honor on the fan circuit.

Hrm, my tax refund finally processed. More than it should be - they apparently pay interest. What should I do with it? I'm thinking of plowing it back into the principal on my house.

So I was sitting in my basement watching Fringe last night when I started hearing these muffled booming noises. Apparently Bellefonte was celebrating the Fourth of July on the First again. So I walked down Crawford Street about a quarter-mile until I could see the fireworks in the distance. Must have been setting them off from behind of the high school or from the fields around Governors' Park. Not bad for a podunk little burg like ours, I suppose.

Fringe is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's going to turn into another overwrought J.J. Abrams MacGuffin-chase like Alias. First three episodes were pretty OK, and it has a strong sense of place in its Boston setting.

On the subject of microfracking chemicals, my father forwarded this link to me last night. I was looking through the list, and X-Cide 207 caught my eye - it's an industrial microbicide and fungicide, and is pretty nasty. It's explicitly labeled for fracking, and most of the rest of the chemicals look like similar biocides, industrial solvents, surfactants, and the like. Hrm, also Bio Clear 1000 and its relatives, which are also nasty microbicides - "slimacide", "algaecide", etc. Various caustic and acidic agents....

The nasty stuff looks like it is used to keep algaeal blooms from forming in the fracking circulatory system.

For the nasty stuff, it depends on concentrations, I suppose. This sort of stuff will be present in industrial brownfields. But as the article points out, these are all essentially trace substances in a slurry whose vast bulk is composed of the pure drinking-class water the Marcellus operators are extracting out of my industrial park's pumps. The list includes a number of rather dubious-looking environmentally-sensitive replacements for dirtier compounds. I say "dubious" because these sorts of substitutions tend to be less effective than the old poisons.

Eh, it's possible that somewhere down the line some of this stuff could get out into the general water table. But keep in mind that the old mines are volcanoes of nastier stuff all over this state's minefield regions, and all of them were cut right into the water-table, open sieves of heavy metal seepage. Even the worst case isn't going to be anything like the old mercury poisonings of the "golden age" of industrial mining operations. Heck, there are flooded, abandoned quarries all through this region with crystalline-clear water the color of nothing in nature - crystal-clear because nothing can live in the waters. I've been told that if you go swimming in some of them, you're going to get skin burns.

Did y'all know that indie comics god Wil Eisner wrote a Vietnam-era illustrated maintenance comic for the M16A1 assault rifle? It's very distinctively Eisner-esque. I knew he wrote some sort of book about the war, but I never got around to reading it. His best book is still probably A Contract With God... but this pamphlet is surprisingly engaging for something about equipment maintenance.

h/t

If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna!

Likewise, if you have to buy a "bimbo box", buy one. Don't try to cushion the blow to your manly ego by buying something some idiot in marketing decided to label a "man van". Hell, I kind of like minivans. They aren't wire-rimmed milquetoasts playing cowboy dress-up like your average SUV, or pickup trucks languishing in two-car garages like big sheepdogs stuck inside a bachelor box with their townhouse-dwelling overcompensating owners.

h/t, although I'm seeing this one everywhere today.

I went on a hell of a DVD-buying binge this last month, due to a confluence of online sales at Deep Discount & Buy.com. My "to-watch" shelves are groaning under the pile, and I'm spending a lot of time in front of the TV, alternating between the box-set of the Shield & various anime series. This week it's Clannad.

I never watched Clannad in fansubs, because I had a bias against Key visual-novel adaptations. I was so utterly bored by Kanon (the awful 2000 Toei version) that for the longest time I referred to the whole subgenre as "retard moe". But I've been favorably impressed by Kyoto Animation's production style, the roseate skin-tones and gorgeous backgrounds, and Sentai's ads on their other releases for Clannad made me regret my initial refusal. So, I bought it expecting "scenery porn" - which means I'd basically be watching it for the landscapes.

So far, the backgrounds are ok, but nothing quite as gem-like as The Second Raid; at least not yet. But the story and writing is unexpectedly amusing, and not nearly as emo & overwrought as online commentary about "Jun Maeda's sad girls in snow" leads one to suspect. The protagonist is a mischievous liar, who likes to amuse himself by staging manzai routines with his gullible nakama of haremettes & token beta-male sidekick. It's nothing great, but so far it's an amusing way to waste a few hours of my life...

Oh, BTW - "clannad" isn't a word - there's a Celtic band which abbreviated "an clann as Dobhar" into "Clannad" for their name, and somebody at Key decided it meant "family" in Gaelic. It doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. But apparently Key intends "Clannad" to refer to the protagonist's search for family via nakama formation.

Oh, and btw - Sentai? If you feel the need to bombard the viewer with heaping piles of on-screen cultural note subtitles, it'd be nice if you put them in a secondary subtitle track. It's a little intrusive, and since I've been watching these things for nearly twenty years now, pretty redundant. Especially all the blow-by-blow details about what the various politeness-level gags mean in the Kotomi arc.

Yeah, if Obama thinks that he's Lincoln, he's apparently settled on Petraeus as his McClellan. Is he going to run CentCom remotely at the same time he's directly commanding in Afghanistan?

The general should remember what happened to Our George. Petraeus' little fainting spell even has a small parallel in McClellan's repeated bouts with typhoid fever [?]

So, the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale boom has touched down here in Bellefonte. At least some of the microfracking operations north of I-80 are pulling some fraction of their millions of gallons of water needed for the fracking process out of two small pumping stations here in the industrial park I work in. These days, there's usually at least one tanker-truck topping off for the trip upcounty to feed the new well-systems, and this Tuesday when I was walking around the loop there were three tankers hooked up to the pumps, and a fourth one passed one of the finished tankers as I headed back to my office.

They must have made arrangements with the Chamber to buy water from the industrial park's permits. Since the park is, at best, one-third full, I guess they had capacity to spare. Freakily enough, one of the regular tanker-trucks was originally a milk tanker, and still has milk placards all over it. I guess the boom came on so hard and fast that they've been re-purposing equipment like the milk tanker.

South Carolina continues to appear collectively determined to prove itself "too small for a country, too large for an insane asylum". The last month's deranged pig-pile on Nikki Haley aside, it appears that an unemployed, incoherent veteran with an outstanding felony charge for mopery has become the state's Democratic nominee against Sen. Jim DeMint.

Oh, well, at least the state's offering a congressional run-off between the state assembly's arguably most conservative (and only black!) Republican and the son of the late Strom Thurmond, one in which said conservative black Republican, Tim Scott, at least has a chance to win, since he did come in first during the primary proper. I entertain myself with the mental image of the old Dixiecrat rotting in his coffin, at a loss on whether to spin clockwise or widdershins.

h/t

Update: Oops. I don't know why, but the fact that South Carolina's felony-charge senatorial nominee is black makes it less funny and a lot more sad. I guess it's easier to laugh at a crazy good ol' boy than a wrecked black vet. That's too much like a guy I knew in college...

Quoth the Professor:

Brooks writes: “If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.”

I took a BA in History from PSU over a dozen years ago. While I *did* read all three of the above, it wasn't because we studied them in class, nor did they appear on any syllabus of any class I took for credit. I had to seek them out and read them on my own hook, usually in between all the busy-work rubbish which clutters up the modern undergraduate experience.

I got more out of my proximity to the library stacks & the bookstores in town than I ever did from in-class assignments. Penn State in the early Nineties had simply assembled the elements for a first-class auto-didactic experience. Whether you did anything with it was your own look-out.

There's a quote from Carlyle carved into the facade of Pattee Library on campus: "The true university is a collection of books". At times I think the faculty took that sentiment a hair too seriously.

I love these sorts of stories. They make me feel like it isn't all sliding into the sewers, and the pipes are starting to back up. Basically, there's a pan-Asian boom in "Gobar Gas", which is a cute South Asian euphemism for dung-fermentation engines which produce quality biofertilizer and limited biogas for home use. The Gurkhas, who are mercenaries recruited from the back hollers of Nepal for those of you who don't really pay attention to British regimental culture, got deployed to Afghanistan, and noticed that the locals, who live in pretty much the same sort of country as back home, hadn't heard of Gobar Gas.

There's a push on to get the Afghans started on a Gobar Gas installation path - if there's a place on the planet with a greater need for fertilizer, cheap local energy, and the preservation of what few trees remain, it's back-country Afghanistan.

Further note on Death and Life of Great American Cities - boy, Jane Jacobs hated cars. Not necessarily on an intellectual level - she tries her damnedest to be even-handed and fair - but you can just smell the fury burning off the paper. A smouldering stench of fried ink. She sounds like a farmer on the losing end of a range-war, seething about lawless cowhands and sheep-herding savages. Lots of bloody-minded fulmnating about "attrition of automobiles by city" and plots to deliberately obstruct vehicular traffic.

Just checking in, I've been pretty busy since Memorial Day weekend. I'm reading Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities which is interesting, but since I'm not finding much to argue with, there's not a lot I can fruitfully write about. I get the impression that she's too infatuated with pointless bustle for its own sake, and I'm not convinced that her diversity is proof against racial tension. I keep thinking that she under-appreciates the logistical horrors her beloved mixed-use economic chaos imposes upon city infrastructure, and I'm having difficulty disassociating my post-modern assumptions that small-scale city commerce is inherently expensive and inconvenient - my childhood experience of going into Pittsburgh and other big-city downtowns mostly in search of rare and old books & anime back in the pre-DVD days.

Also, I have the nastiest suspicion she's working her way into endorsing rent controls, but I haven't finished it yet, so maybe not. I'm still working my way into the opening chapter in the last section, on policy prescriptions.

Whenever you see a story about a politician, ask yourself: Where is the proof that this happened?. I think that's an excellent thing to do.

You want proof that Palin mowed the lawn?

Two comments on a culture-clash post by Althouse on the Palin's creepy new journalist-stalker neighbor.

Yeah, OK, that's it. Stop tasking the president with this oil spill crap. He's an [expletive deleted], but oil spills aren't really his direct responsibility, and the root of his whole faction's ideology is the nationalization of every issue, the governmental usurpation of every problem, every dilemma, every decision. We shouldn't be buying into this whole "the president was hired to fix every problem" delusion, even if it does make for a nifty hammer to batter our partisan opponent currently in office.

In cases like this where the solution isn't obvious or subject to brute-force methods, direct governmental intervention, or properly speaking, militarization of the response is counter-productive. Experimentation and new ideas bubble upwards - they don't seep down. I was intrigued by this idea, which they've been working on for twenty years now, and looking for an opportunity to try out, but I don't want the government grabbing a hold of it and running wild with it, either. Because it probably won't work. I am often intrigued by ideas which don't pan out. Most ideas don't. Small-scale failures are invaluable, because they reveal bad ideas in small crucibles without burning the whole damn lab down.

But government has a bad habit of reinforcing failure, because government operates by ego, not profit or logic. Small-scale offends the healthy ego. If you're going to win, win BIG, and of course you'll win - you're the GOVERNMENT!

Government solutions only really work when the problem is subject to suffocation by enormity. I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that the Gulf oil spill isn't really something that can be suffocated by burying it under with Big.

So PA-12 embarrassed and disappointed us all. Again. I'm done with the 12th, it's a mirage, a white elephant, a rocky shore upon which too many barques have broken. It will be broken up itself in the next redistricting, and hopefully the corrupted populace of that pork-bloated blot upon the landscape won't have too much effect in the politics of the neighboring districts that will have to absorb them.

Meanwhile, every newspaper site I look at this morning is coated in an infuriating slime of pop-ups, intrusively animated ads, and general irritation. Thank the hypothetical I don't have a sound card in this machine, I have no doubt my ears would be ringing with the desperate shrieks of marketing gone mad.

The primary elections for Pennsylvania are coming up a week from today. I have a pretty good idea whom I'm voting for with most of the races - Corbett for governor, Toomey for the Senate, any tea party candidates available for the party functionary offices, and the incumbents for the state legislature. However, there's an unmanageable mass of Republican candidates for lieutenant governor, none of which I've ever heard of, and now I'm wondering if it's worth the effort to figure out which one's least objectionable.

Is the lieutenant governancy worth a bucket of warm spit? We survived five years of the grossly incompetent, senile, or just plain crazy Catherine Baker Knoll, and I see that she died three years ago & was replaced without my having even noticed it. On the other hand, it is useful to have a competent lt. governor on hand if something takes the sitting governor out of office - Schweiker was a better governor than the elected clod he replaced, to cite an example.

So, then, is there a Schweiker lurking in the pack of would-be lt. governors?

Update: Where the heck does the state party apparatus get off endorsing statewide candidates in the primaries? That's reason enough to *not* vote for Cawley. I'm starting to like Kennedy, although I don't fancy an "insurgent" candidate with enough money to air a lengthy radio ad like the one I heard going to lunch this afternoon.

Still and all, while ideological purity is tempting, state offices tend to be technocratic positions, demanding organizational and financial competence. Obama's myth of competence would have *never* have survived a term as governor of Illinois. He merely presents as a technocrat - he obviously has no interest in actual work. All this being a pretty good argument for Jean Craige Pepper, who seems to have decent financial management experience.

Of course, the worry with technocrats is that they'll turn out to be Herbert Hoovers - the Peter Principle writ catastrophically large. Also, you should watch out for signs of corporatist inclinations with candidates with big-business CVs. Are they the sorts that want to reduce governance to "bringing everyone to the table"? The bane of "reasonable men", really. And I don't like the whole paleofeminist come-on. It's tone-deaf and whiny.

Ugh. Kennedy seems like a crank.

Pixy went and challenged his audience to come up with a ten-most-representative list of anime from 2000-2009. First off, in order to come up with these representatives, you need to come up with proper categories for the period under consideration. Und so:

1) Magical Girl

It's debatable whether the Oughts were a good decade for Magical Girl. It's a shoujo category (aside from seinen parodies - see next catagory), and shoujo anime's had a bad, no-good, limping lame decade. The resources have been mostly sucked into otaku rubbish, and fujoshi are a distinctly minor and incidental audience for the anime studios. Furthermore, fujoshi couldn't care less about magical girls. There's something distinctly Showa or early Heisei about traditional mahou shoujo. As the decade wore on, the magical girl show went somewhat sideways - becoming increasingly baroque, odd, or just plain decadent - notable examples include ballet fever-dream Princess Tutu, the slow and cheerful-doomed fatalism of In Search of a Full Moon or the impenetrable, gnomicly endless Pretty Cure franchise. So, creeping in just under the 2000 start-line, I'm going with the final word in old-school magical girl, CLAMP's Card Captor Sakura.

2) Magical Girlfriend

(note, these are completely distinct and mostly-unrelated - see My Wife is a Magical Girl for exception to rule.)

Magical girlfriend, unlike magical girl, is a masculine, otaku-ish wish fulfillment genre - a literal Manic Pixie Dream Girl descends upon nebbish protagonist & makes him into a man. Our heroine is some sort of magical being - goddess, devil, fairy, ghost, etc, etc - who for whatever reason, appears to live with protagonist & make his life wonderfully awful. These are endless, and so forgettable that you find yourself forgetting the details before the DVD stops spinning in the drive, but notable examples include Crazy Shrine Maidens Kannagi, Steel Angel Kurumi, Mahoromatic, and an absolutely endless parade of their peers and lesser lights. This one has to be the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, wherein our protagonist discovers that God is a petulant, bored high school girl who must be entertained upon pain of Armeggedon; think of it as Kierkegaard in a moe moment, Fear and Trembling before the Demiurge in a sailor fuku.

3) The Reverse Harem.

Traditionally, the harem show is male-oriented, but the Oughts saw an influx of harems full of bishounen for the ladies, as the fujoshi cannibalized what remained of the dying shoujo anime market. And we saw a bunch of good ones, such as Pretear, Ouran High School Host Club, and the Wallflower. But as good as those shows are, the rose has to go to the original reverse-harem - 2001's Fruits Basket.

4) Juvenile Delinquents

We don't tend to see many of these over here, because the art-style is generally ugly, the sentiments rather barbaric, and the comedy brash, brutal, and kind of insular. But there were a number of these which worked pretty well in the Oughts - the yakuza-schoolteacher school comedy Gokusen, the magical-girlfriend fusion Midori's Days, the thugs-and-Freddie-Mercury-do-Azumanga Daioh comedy Cromartie High School, and even the much-maligned street-fighting comedy Air Master. But the show to watch in this category is 2002's Tenshi na Konamaiki, whose manga was released in the states by Viz under the name Cheeky Angel. Yeah, I was just saying over on AoD that there isn't a chance in hell of it ever getting licensed in North America. I don't care, it's funny as all heck.

5) Real Robot mecha

There are generally two types of mecha shows, semi-realistic "robots are pilotable tanks", and the broad-wild-crazy "robots are Gods Upon The Earth". This is the former, and as it sounds, it tends more towards the realistic. Mecha doesn't really go out of fashion, but sometimes the fashions take certain fans out of what they're doing in Japan at the moment. I thought about giving this palm to Kyoto Animation's Full Metal Panic: the Second Raid, but that show's a sequel, and its original just didn't have the steam to bring a new fan into the spirit of the thing. So I'm going to go with the glorious, mad, Lord-Byron-beautiful Code Geass, which took an alternate-universe political soap opera, filled it with roller-blading mecha, and put a swanning teen-aged Magnificent Bastard anti-villain at its manic core.

6) God Robot mecha

And while we're on the subject of the two types of mecha, here's the other side of the coin - the giddy, testosterone-poisoned God Robot genre. The Nineties were a better decade for God Robots than the Oughts, what with Evangelion, Rahxephon, Neo-Ranga, and the like, and I could have been convinced to leave this category out for lack of good examples; the only specimens were dripping with irony and the stink of sweaty fanboy parody.

Then Gainax made Gurren Lagann, and all of a sudden we're in the midst of a minor Go Nagai revival. Hot-blooded raging giant robots are back, and they've beaten irony to death with the backside of a ten-ton drill.

7) Psychic Fightin' Teenagers

Now we come to a genre I don't have much use for - Naruto, Tokyo Underground, Tokyo Maijin, Bleach, etc. I thought of going with A Certain Magical Index or its yuri-iffic sequel A Certain Scientific Railgun, but they're neither particularly good nor particularly representative.

Psychic Fightin'Teenagers shows are kind of eh, but it's the sort of eh which people - other people - love the heck out of. But, I do have a fondness for the Bleach manga, and I discovered last year that my father watches it on Cartoon Network. That's enough to pull you out of the pack of shounen jive, Bleach. Congrats, you suck a little less than your peers!

8) Moeblob

Moe is ineffable - to define it is to kill it. I am ashamed to admit that I watch far more of it than I'd like people to think, because it really does sail way, way too close to lolita-complex skeeviness. The Oughts are pretty well dominated by the Reign of Moe, from Azumanga Daioh to Lucky Star to K-On!

I'm tempted to be obnoxious and cite the killer-loli slasher-moe that I'm watching right now, When They Cry, but it isn't all that well-animated, and really, why go for the shock value? So I'm going to grab for something from Shaft and Akiyuki Shinbo, the King of Moe. It has to be Hidemari Sketch, a completely and utterly platonic ideal of moe.

9) Kung Fu, Gun-Fu, and Contemporary Hardasses

Criminals, kempo masters, cops, and gunsels - there's a lot of this going out there; Nabeshin when he's being all serious and calling himself Shinchiro Watanabe is a past master of this sort of thing - see examples like Samurai Champloo, Michiko and Hatchin, and Cowboy Bebop. But this decade's most essential gun-fu calvacade of badassery is Black Lagoon, with its black-and-coal-black morality, corrupted view-point protagonist and his Ax Crazy/Heroic Sociopath kidnapper-slash-love-interest. It really is essential viewing - just don't watch it with children in the room.

10) Weaponized Women

Girls with Guns is *so* Eighties. The Oughts' innovation along these lines have been crudely called "Pokegirls", but I prefer the old gag translation of Saikano, "Weaponized Girlfriend". Sometimes it's literal, like the fighter-plane-legged heroines of Strike Witches, sometimes they're mutated escapees from the magical girl ghetto like Nanoha, and sometimes the badassery is bionic and all on the inside, like Kiddy Grade, but mostly it's cute girls with the individual destructive capacity of a mid-range Third World Military and the aerial agility of aerobatic stunt squadron pilots. This one is definitely going to be One Maiden Army Corps exemplar Mai Otome.