Man, this stuff is cool: the early Voyagers are reporting from the Heliosheath - the turbulent weirdness of the outer membrane of the solar system, where the solar wind runs out of gas & slabs up against the interstellar environment. I never thought of that chunk of reality as being much more than a good deal less than the usual not-very-much, but apparently it's a complex and strange nothingness about which Voyager 1 & 2 are proving that we know even less than we thought we did.

I gotta say, though - if Voyager 1 hits a crystalline wall & goes smash - everybody duck!

H/T Robert A. Hahn on RedHot.

I bought the first volume of an OEL comic called Ravenskull based on this review and the first dozen or so pages that the publisher maintains online here. The notion of a the Dracula Tapes-style continuation of Ivanhoe featuring the villain of that piece & the semi-tragic heroine struck my fancy.

I'd never actually read Ivanhoe before, but with a library within walking distance that was a problem easily remedied, and I read a library copy while waiting for Amazon to get around to shipping the comic. For those of you who've never read the Sir Walter Scott novel, it's essentially a nineteenth-century Marty Stu rehash of the Richard the Lionhearted/Robin Hood stories, with a lot of bollocks about Saxons and Normans and a tone peculiarly stretched between that of Scott's contemporary Romantics and the previous generation's skepticism and cynicism. As a romance, Ivanhoe is about four-fifths of a really great book, but the last fragment lets it kind of fall apart. Scott lets himself get pulled in different directions, and never can really decide whether he's writing tragedy or comedy, including bits of both, undigested and sitting side-by-side like Susquehanna valley rock formations. The best sections are those eventually-orphaned tragic moments, such as Ulrica's death-song immolation & the turret-top debate between the unbelieving cynic and false Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert and the Jewess Rebecca of York, his captive and object of obsession.

In the end, Scott drops the tantalizing suggestion that he was going to make a Miltonian project of Sir Brian's monumental pride and self-will, and lets him expire in a rather deflating and unheroic fashion in the climax, thus committing in the end to a sort of comedy. Rebecca, easily the most admirable and noble character in the book, is saved from a witch's incineration, only to be summarily drop-kicked out of the story into a Jewish form of nunnery which I strongly suspect is a product entire of Scott's overheated (or possibly overtaxed) imagination, leaving the rest of the ending to the less substantial, duller heroine & hero & numerous clowns and supporting characters.

I can easily see why Ivanhoe would attract authors of fanfic & glorified doujinshi, in which category I'd place Ravenskull. The dynamic of Rebecca and Sir Brian *screams* for a good het-slashing, the tension is palatable, and their respective endings so perfunctory as to almost demand a good re-write. In fact, I suspect if I dig around, I could find in the depths of literature and fanfiction some two or three examples of what I expected, based on the introduction, Ravenskull to be. A grand, baroque, dark, thoroughly Romantic spasm - self-sacrifice, guilt, witchcraft, a re-gendered Eurydice and Orpheus - a rich vein of deep potential, indeed.

It's rather a shame that Ravenskull isn't that story.

Oh, the art's there - a little shoujo-generic at times, there's something not quite right about the eyes at certain points, the occasional slight SD affection is off-tone for the material - but overall, for OEL pseudo-manga, it's quite good. The bizarre choice to mimic the Japanese style to the extent of following the unflopped back-to-front layout is, however, rather off-putting. You people aren't Japanese, this story wasn't scripted in that language, no-one involved seems to be Japanese, the source material is the product of a pre-Victorian Scotsman - stop trying to pretend otherwise!

But really, the problem with the comic is in the writing. I suspect the writer has no essential grasp of character conflict. The essential and sustaining conflict of any story based on the Rebecca of York and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert presented by Sir Walter Scott ought to be romantic tension. The text of Ivanhoe offers a Rebecca who explicitly despises her suitor, and a Bois-Guilbert who is enraged by his inability to rearrange the world and his love-object in line with his self-image and cynicism. The entire emotional journey of a proposed sequel based on their relationship ought to be between that impasse and the eventual resolution of happiness or self-destruction, or possibly both at once, in the spirit of Scott's own depiction of Ulrica's deathsong, perhaps. This particular journey is completed by the writer of Ravenskull in the first third of the first volume, at break-neck speed, skipping many steps, in a dream-fugue depiction of the road to hell.

Having broken the neck of romantic conflict like a farmwife breaking that of a chicken destined for the soup-pot, the writer then goes on to address what he apparently prefers - artificial divides between already-committed lovers and RPG-style macguffin hunts & generic indestructible villains of the most generic sort. You can see the artist struggling with the material handed him by the writer, and making the best of a bad script. But it wasn't really what I had signed on for, and I rather object to the bait-and-switch. I found myself re-writing on the fly, which is always a sign that the authors have lost me.

Such a shame. I really would have liked to have read the book in my mind, the anticipated story rather than the one delivered. Oh, well.

Hah! That's great - the ethanol replacing MBTE in gasoline has been scouring out the meters in the pumps, biasing the measures downwards so that consumers have been getting a hair more gas then they pay for, on average. That's a benefit of ethanol I hadn't considered! Although it'll probably bite us in the end as we pay for the increased cost of the gas inspectors' time & the early replacement of the eroded, damaged meters. Among other parts, no doubt.

h/t Gas Buddy, which is a daily, sick fascination. And a good source for energy stories.

Could someone in a position to do so remind Ma Nature of the existence of the calendar, and the fact that we have more than a week left in Summer according to that lovely invention? It's been chilly and overcast for three days or more, and I'm not ready for it to be autumn yet. I've still got all of these clean short-sleeved shirts, and somebody just gave me a pile of second-hand shorts that it's too damn cold to wear.

I recognize that nobody can do anything about the fact that dawn is creeping up on me, making my morning commute somewhat gloomy, but the temporary removal of the Grey Monocloud of Fall would definitely brighten up the few remaining days of "summer".

Oh my god, Hekmatyar? I would expected them to have captured bin Laden before they found that old fox. He's an old, old, old-line ghazi, who has fought the Soviets, the other warlords, the Taliban, and us in succession. At one point after the Soviet withdrawl, he was "Prime Minister", which meant basically that he was primus inter pares among the warlords, or at least claimed to be so. I'll dig up some material on him over the course of the day. That's a damned impressive catch.

(Wiki entry here. When I checked, some Wiki silverback was whinging that the only source for the capture was Roggio.)

The source seems to be Deutsche Presse-Agentur according to this Rantburg article.

Some first-rate ululating in this Rantburg article from late yesterday.

Inital link via Instapundit.

Update: Meh. Looks like Roggio is walking it back to just a prominent commander in Hekmatyar's organization. Oh, well.

Aiee! There's an insanely cheap Geneon sale over at Right Stuf, 10 DVDs or CDs for $50, or 25 DVDs or CDs for $100. Even after screwing up and getting normal UPS Ground instead of the el cheapo free shipping, that's not much more than $5/DVD, which is my kind of cheap. But don't forget the coupon - BOUNTY10 for the 10/$50, or BOUNTY25 for the 25/$100 - because that can be a difference of over $500.

It's definitely a chance to pick up all those Geneon series you were kind of on the fence about.

This seriously destroys my budget for the fall, which was kind of straining at the seams as it was...

Through a series of impulsive decisions not distinguishable from mere whimsy, I found myself reading two adventure novels set in the Victorian period narrated by self-professed cowards, Flashman by a twentieth-century Scotsman named Fraser, and King Solomon's Mines by an actual Victorian, H. Rider Haggard. I'd been recommended the Flashman books repeatedly by folks on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list and by Fred Ramsey, so I don't suppose that would be too unexpected a turn, though my perusal occurred solely because I passed by the book on the shelves at Schlow Libary while looking for the last volume of an eight-volume fantasy series by another Scotsman, Dave Duncan, of which I had in my personal collection the first seven, having somewhere through my travels since graduation misplaced said eighth volume into the darkening depths of oblivion. The Haggard novel, on the other hand, I came across the other weekend, while amusing myself by trawling through the "antique mall" over on High Street, the entrance of which I've passed on a almost daily basis these last six years, but never had until that day entered. That establishment calls itself a "mall" instead of the usual claim of "store" or "shop" based on the owner's habit of renting out (or lending, or extending on credit - I'm not exactly sure of the contractual details or the practicalities for that matter) segments of that vast and sprawling laybrinth, extending throughout portions of if not the whole volume entire, of three buildings between the Curtin Mansion and Petrikin Hall, to individuals or consortiums of individuals looking to sell curios, antiques, and the scrapings of their deceased relatives' domiciles. Said book has on its front leaf a plate indicating that it once belonged to the holdings of a public library in Erie, Pennsylvania, and I am not sure if it was stolen from that institution, or merely sold off & not properly voided in the transaction.

The comparison of these two views of the period from the view-point of fictive "cowards" is rather instructive. The protagonist and primary narrator of the Flashman Papers novels is one Harry Flashman, a villain from Tom Brown's Days, supposedly gone on to enjoy a great and grand career as one of the most-decorated of Victorian heroes, in truth a base poltroon & moral monster, turned honest solely in his final memoirs, allegedly reproduced in the novels. King Solomon's Mines, on the other hand, is a narrative allegedly recorded by that book's protagonist, big game hunter Allan Quatermain of the Natal Province of South Africa, for the edification of his son, a much more direct and yet less likely conceit - for what man would repeatedly proclaim in a memoir intended for the eyes of his progeny his self-described cowardice? The answer, most likely, is that we're intended to accept that the narrator and alleged author is professing a sort of self-effacing falsehood for the purposes of, indeed, false modesty. At points during the reading of Flashman, one is inclined to suspect something of the same sort, having been hammered repeatedly about the head and shoulders by the narrator of his self-declared worthlessness and cowardice, until one turns contrary and querulous through a sort of combative perversity, but in the end, the comedic effect of this is too overwhelming for such heroic doubts to survive intact. If the pretended coward of King Solomon's Mines is more of a liar than poltroon, the protagonist of Flashman is a plain-dealing villain, and his lies in his would-be memoir more for effect than against the substance so stated - Flashman is, indeed, a coward.

Though both books are striking in their picaresque effect of exoticism, King Solomon's Mines in its fantastic re-design of Zululand as the mythical Kukuanaland, Flashman for its of reproduction of the setting and events of the First Afghan War, the purposes of their authors, of course, could not have been more diametrically opposed. Haggard had set out to write a simple lost-world adventure, without serious satiric intent. Fraser, on the other hand, intended nothing if not satire, and a nihilistic assault upon the figure of the Victorian heroic figure itself, in all its self-effacing glory, while he was at it. He was writing in the Sixties, in post-colonial Britain. It's not at all surprising that a writer of that time and place would want to tear down the intellectual and literary memories of the Victorians, obliterate those elements and personages and ideas which supported colonialism - discredit the morals and virtues which made the Empire possible, and justified it. After all, if those were allowed to stand, then they would continue to embarrass those descendants who had let the Empire lapse, had wasted their patrimony. It was not merely necessary to critique the Victorian project - see Orwell's Burmese Days - it was necessary to *destroy* it. The author of Flashman, taking seriously that old saw about Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton, went back to the very roots of Victorianism, resurrecting a minor prep-school villain, proposes to drag him through every heroic moment of the period, rendering each one as un-heroic as mud in the process.

One thing that stood out, since I'm sensitive to such things, is the two books' usage of the word "nigger". [ugh] The narrator of King Solomon's Mines, written in 1885, uses that word exactly once in the introduction, then immediately discards it as unworthy, observing that he'd known natives who'd better deserved the designation "gentleman" than many an Englishman. The word "kaffir" is used throughout the text, and though I'm not exactly sure that this is much of an improvement over that prior epithet, given its current racist associations with Afrikaans and the memory of apartheid, it couldn't have been as offensive to Victorian ears as it is now, at least to me. Indeed, most of the cast of the novel are "kaffirs", including many if not the majority of the characters with demonstrated agency & importance in the novel. Not that I'm saying that the book doesn't display a certain half-blind patriarchal paternalism, but it's not a virulent or vicious sort of bigotry, being rather similar to the tone of many space operas which clearly descend from this exact book, via Edgar Rice Burroughs and many lesser immitators.

Flashman, on the other hand, is absolutely rife with the "n-word". There are few pages, once the narrator arrives in India, which is not disgraced by that epithet. Repeatedly. With contempt & intent. Mind you, as an American, in my mind that word doesn't apply in the way used by the author & narrator, that is, the British usage, synonymous with "wog" or "native", only more offensive. But that's the intention, I suppose - the point being how inhuman the narrator and his peers considered the Indians, Afghans, and other native inhabitants upon which they proposed to impose Empire, absent-mindedly or otherwise. The distinction, in the end, between the usages of the two authors, boils down to intent. Haggard's primary intention was exoticism and entertainment. Fraser's intent seems more nakedly didactic, if clothed in the fashion of humor and satire.

I was told by a mailman walking up the Stoney Batter on the way in today that I was the only person he'd ever seen stupid enough to walk and read at the same time who wasn't also a mailman. Am I to infer from this that mailmen make a habit of reading other people's mail on their routes?

Do other people get randomly insulted on the road like this? Admittedly, the usual insult is more of a there-there poor pauperish you, do you need a ride somewhere? than an insult against my intelligence. Of the two, I think I prefer the insult direct. No, you condescending do-gooder, I own my own car - it runs and everything. Even has multiple gears & a working parking brake! I walk so that I'm not as fat as you are.

Ugh. You know, when somebody calls me & asks for me to write up a bunch of descriptions, and promises to email me *what* he wants written up, I kind of expect to find an email with said information waiting for me by the time I walk up here. I can just randomly make up stuff - and I did, and just sent it to him - but that can't be actually, you know, useful.

And I don't know which departments have already delivered descriptions per their requests. They're the ones with actual knowledge of what they're planning, aren't they?

Four new Evangelion movies in the works? I guess those unnecessary Zeta Gundam movies must be making enough dosh to get *somebody* excited about film adaptations of old TV anime. But really, they've already done the movie adaptation thing for Evangelion. Just how many times are people willing to sit through dramatizations of Hideaki Anno's psychoanalysis transcripts, anyway? I just re-watched the Eva TV series a few months ago...

Bleargh. I now know why this Lipton green tea mix was half-off on closeout down at the Weis. Tastes like tap water strained through a clothes-iron & left in the crisper drawer for a week. *Smells* great, but the taste... If you make a mistake with a two-liter of soda, you're stuck with bleh for a couple days. Make a mistake with a box of tea mix, and you're up for a week or more of yetch. Thought that was too much of a good thing...

Sorry, sorry. Not really busy, just... meh. I was down in Maryland last weekend, touring the Antietam battlefield & Harper's Ferry with my parents for Labor Day. Things have been middling busy at work, but not insanely so, I don't think.

It's getting a little coolish, and it's been raining way, way too much for this time of year. The apartment still leaks, although the roof guy & I have agreed that it's probably the exposed, aging brickwork on the south side of the house, and not the new roof that's the culprit. Whatever it is, the apartment stinks of mildew & mold. I've been burning a candle someone gave me at ComCon to try to change the stink, if not eliminate it. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be one of those strongly-smelling candles.

Picked up a cheap copy of the first disc of Argento Soma. Cheap DVDs are neat and all, but once you get one of 'em in a series, you find yourself semi-obligated to go & get the rest of the damned series, which are rarely as cheap as the first one you picked up on a whim. The show wasn't as bad as I remembered it being, from having watched an early digisub of the first episode way-and-a-hey back when it was new and notable. Nothing great, but really well-animated, and not the usual run of mecha cliches. It's supposed to be a loose mecha version of Frankenstein, in the same way Infinite Ryvius was supposed to be a very loose space opera version of the Lord of the Flies. (Same production house, I'm told.) I've never actually finished reading Shelley's book, but I doubt it had quite such a prominent role for the little girl befriended by the monster as what's portrayed in Argento Soma. In fact, I kind of suspect that the flower-girl from the classic Frankenstein movie was an invention of the filmmakers. Eh, speculation from total ignorance - so illuminating! The Japanese writers of Argento Soma turn the relationship between the flower-girl & the monster into the typical miko-and-kami Japanese cliche. Think Neo Ranga.

Read the first volume of Drifting Classroom this morning. I don't think I'll be continuing that particular investment in historical manga-literature.

The art is extremely stiff, with characters who can't seem to run in a natural fashion, bizarre gape-mouthed expressions, and the designs in general give the impression of not particularly naturalistic drawings of dolls. Mind you, this isn't the sort of loose Disneyesque character design which Tezuka and his imitators used to produce - those are warm, charming, a little shabby at times, perhaps, jokey, yes - but not stiff.

The panel design suggests that the impression is intentional - very rigid, confined, ruled, patterned. Except when something violent or disturbing happens, then the gutters disappear, the panels fill up the whole of the page, and blood & violence is lovingly, delicately inflicted upon Umezu's doll-people, who suddenly come alive with fear, pain and horror.


I don't think that Drifting Classroom is my sort of thing. It seems designed to encourage all of my worst anti-social bordering on sociopathic inclinations. Not only could I not sympathize with any of the characters, but I found myself cheering up a bit when the little dead-eyed gape-mouthed doll-children started bleeding & wailing. That's not a good place to be going.

It's a little depressing that this is considered a classic.

Anyone have any idea whether this is any good? It sounds kind of generic, but my attention was caught by the Oz reference, which seems like a total non sequitor given the plot synopsis.

Drove over to Clem's in Bald Eagle Valley to pick up some T-shirts for the company just now. Remember what I was saying about the corn being high this year? Not so much in that chunk of Bald Eagle Valley. Wish I could say I was surprised. That valley really is the arse-end of creation.

Well, OK, the arse-end of Centre County. Swampy, trash-dump-ridden, pestilent, - trashy. Why do they *bother* farming that land? It always *sucks*.

Ugh. Should not have eaten those peanut-butter fudge "cookies". More like shapeless, tiny candy bars. Like a lead bar in your stomach.

So this month was volume 20 of Kare Kano, and second-to-last volume to boot. That manga had a pretty good run from vol. 15 through 19, and the first half of vol. 20 continued that run - great, right? It kind of deflates a bit after that strong start, though. And by the end of the volume - what, Arima wants to be a beat cop? Where the heck did that come from? - you can definitely see the seeds of why my Japanese-reading, manga-importing friend Bill warned me to pretend that the twentieth volume of Kare Kano was, in fact, the last volume. 'Cause there really isn't anywhere else for this story to go, other than limp bathos. In fact, I'd argue that it went there right after the mangaka led up to Yukino's grand reveal of the hidden Big Deal... and it fizzles like a pissed-on firecracker. That is to say, it manages at the same time to fail to catch fire, and stink horribly at the same time.

Bah!

On the other hand, I bought all of those volumes about the future pop-star siblings-by-marriage romance in the early teens, and those kind of stank in their own feeble sort of way. Kare Kano is definitely one of those manga that blow hot and cold. It's just that I've been warned that the end of the series doesn't really blow any warmer than this, and may in fact freeze solid before the pagecount goes to zero.

I will say that I liked the dead-trees ghost imagery in the first half of vol. 20. Stretching bare limbs across the characters, entrapped in the grasping deadwood tangle whose roots aren't visible, because the artist has only drawn the top halves of the scenery. Tsuda does have a way with subtle imagery. Or possibly the sort of blatant imagery which strikes clods like yours truly in a memorable way, I suppose.

Oh, BTW? The corn? In excess of ten feet in the fields around Governors' Park east of town. It might have been higher in places - I don't carry a tape-measure around with me on my walks - but it was hard to tell up around the soccer field, which is entirely surrounded by cornfield. Up there, wind gusts and the stalks' own inability to support themselves have caused large swathes of overtall corn stands to collapse in on themselves. I wonder if those are harvestable, or are they basically wastage? I think those fields are taller because they're silage-specific seed varieties - few if any had more than one ear, which suggests that somebody had been monkeying with the genetics to favour stalk and height over grain and volume. But, since that farmer didn't care to brag about whatever seeds he or she planted this year via the usual seed-sign-posts, I can only guess.

I picked up a pile of closeout-cheap DVDs in a just-before-opening raid on The Best Anime Dealer On The Circuit, dashing in and out quickly during the Con. That best dealer on the circuit? BuyRiteDVD, although they never, ever identify themselves as such. In fact, the only thing I've ever seen them post in the way of signs are these "$5 DVDs!" banners, which I do admit, is pretty nifty advertising, because - hey! $5 DVDs!

This year, they also had el cheapo box-sets. I went to the con looking for cheap Fancy Lala DVDs, after picking up a very cheap first volume of said Fancy Lala at a local Dollar General. BuyRiteDVD was selling the Fancy Lala brick for $15. Dude.

I should be ashamed to admit publicly that I bought & watched this series. For those not up on the details of Japanese girl culture - and I don't claim to be an expert, but - "Fancy Lala" is a sort of Japanese Barbie doll. I'm watching the anime equivalent of Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus. Or more accurately, Barbie Meets Jem. (How is it that they never did any sort of Barbie: Rock Star cartoon? Is it just that Amazon is letting me down, and I really ought to be searching elsewhere for my examples? I don't know, I'm allergic to polyurethane pink. I've spent more time semi-googling for Barbie crap than I wanted to already, give me a break, imaginary audience!)

Right. Back on track. Fancy Lala. It's an exemplar of the "magical idol" sub-sub-genre of mahou shoujo or "magical girl". Instead of prepubescent little girls transforming into various roles of adolescence and adulthood (traditional "magical girl", like Minky Momo) or into a fighting-hero (like Sailor Moon or Wedding Peach or any of dozens of similar bishoujo sentai), "magical idols" are little pre-pubescent girls who use their magery to become disposable entertainment figures, aka, in the Japanese parlance, "idoru". Nobody ever recognizes just how inappropriately childlike and callow these fake idols are, because one of the primary points of idolhood is the coy affection of aspects of childhood by adolescent or just barely post-adolescent girls who are themselves not all that far from the longed-for-state of innocence. If you haven't seen Perfect Blue yet, this is the point at which I urge you to go and see it, because it'll explain more about the "idol" industry than I could in fifteen paragraphs of tedious otaku blather.

Anyways, "magical idols". There are a lot more of these titles than you'd think. Fancy Lala is probably the best of the bunch, if only because it doesn't spend as much time on the main characters dreams and aspirations as is usual. In fact, the protagonist, Miho, never really wanted to be an idol at all. She wanted to be a mangaka, a comic artist. She gets the usual magical-pets and magical-tschoktes, turns into her grown-up self, and goes wandering around one of the trendier sections of Tokyo, where she's scouted as a model by a shoe-string production team who've just lost their model & were in desperate straits. One thing leads to another, and thus the accidental idol star, "Fancy Lala" is born.

But this accidental beginning isn't just contrivance, it is also theme. Miho's story is one of giri, of obligation and acquiescence. She goes through a lot of adventures more because it's what she's expected to do, or because of prior promises, prior obligations, and the natural logic of prior successes.

I suppose I'm making it sound a great deal more dreary and unpleasant than it actually is, so I should row back a few strokes at this point. Only about half the episodes are concerned with ldol-industry romping about. The show finds plenty of time for ghost stories, her school-friends, neighbors, and relatives, and all sorts of goofing around. Combined with the show's retro-Eighties charm - the character designs are by Akemi Takada, who was pretty old-fashioned even by the standards of 1998 - is a solid run of good writing and fine animation, by television standards.

Now that Ag Progress Days are behind us, it's time for Bellefonte's Arts and Crafts Fair, today and tomorrow. Unlike State College's Arts Fest, Bellefonte's emphasis is more on the crafts than the art. It's mostly tschoktes and the sort of pseudo-rural and actual-rural kitsch that some of my female relatives have been fond of.

Not really my thing, although I might toss the old wax-covered pinecone & get a new one.

Back from Ag Progress Days.

Talked to some seed company reps, and it looks like the avalanche of new seed traits may have slowed down - nothing really outrageous or novel in the works for 2007. For the years 1999-2006, it seemed like every year we'd get a new cluster of genetic modifications - first Yieldgard (Bt cornborer insecticidal) & Roundup Ready (herbicide product-specific resistant), then Liberty Link (another class of herbicide resistance), Clearfield (yet another class of herbicide-resistance), then Yieldgard-RW (Bt rootworm insecticidal), Herculex I (the next generation of Bt-like insecticidal, cornborer), Yieldgard Plus (Bt stacked both cornborer & rootworm), Herculex RW (see above, for rootworm), Herculex Extra (Herculex equivalent of Yieldgard Plus), and then more triple- and quadruple-stack varieties than you could keep track of in spreadsheet format.

It's getting increasingly hard to keep track of which varieties are trait-stacked with which varieties, as every company has its own nomenclature. But it seems to definitely be slowing down. No new traits, and the companies with Herculex are starting to retire their Yieldgard varieties. But that barely makes up for the confusion which is Garst. They started out with a slate of generic sort-of traits which mimicked the trademarked, IP-protected traits from Monsanto - Roundup Ready became GT, or Glyphosate Tolerant, Agrisure CB was synonymous with YG1, both of them being Yieldgard (Cornborer), etc. Then a bunch of company mergers brought the two lines of IP into corporate contact, and suddenly Garst is selling seeds for both sets of IP side-by-side. It's enough to give one a headache.

There was a stand selling Ribeye sandwiches and steak-and-egg sandwiches. The steak-and-cheese-and-egg was great, especially after an hour standing under the noon sun in a cornfield listening to a presentation on no-till & methods for measuring crop residue & soil field quality.

The corn and soybeans are doing insanely well here in Pennsylvania. I literally did not recognize the soybean fields at first - I've never seen them this high, this perfect-looking. Not only are the corn stands running between eight and ten feet, they're doing so uniformly. We didn't get all that much rain - Spring Creek is alarmingly low - but it all hit at exactly the right time for really, really pretty fields. Gorgeous.

Oh, great. Some Islamotard fascist hacker cracked the websites for AnimeNEXT and MangaNEXT. Until they get it cleaned up, two of the cons I volunteer for have had their advertising hijacked by semi-literate anti-Semitic agitprop.

Schweinehund scum.

It's Ag Progress Days here in the valley. We're sending people from work in groups today and tomorrow for "educational purposes", which I'm reading as organized tours, which is a bit of a shame, as Ag Progress Days is like a carnival, with tractors. I managed to talk them into letting me go along tomorrow, after promising I'd take it seriously and be a good boy.

[Party!]

They had a German brass band down at the gazebo in Tallyrand on Sunday. Boy, was that annoying. They were actually wearing lederhosen. I could have sworn that most Pennsylvania Dutch were from northwestern and southwestern Germany, not Bavaria or Austria. Lederhosen are an *anachronism* for Pennsylvania Dutch.

You know, Germans have one of the least amusing and most embarrassing agglomerations of low culture in the world. Other cultures might have bagpipes, fiddles, clever oddly-named pipes & quaintly-formed stringed instruments. What do the Germans have? Tubas.

At least we have chocolate.

Good God. I apparently had upwards of thirty heatstroke casualties on my prereg line at the Con on Thursday, which was a hundred-years record day for heat in Baltimore. The line control folks asked me for permission to open the doors early in order to get at least part of the line indoors - I can't fit the whole of a Thursdays' prereg line inside of the lobby we use, because said line might contain as much as four thousand competitive line-squatters, but we can probably get nearly a thousand in there - and I said "yes" as quickly as they would let me. For some reason, that decision didn't make its way back up the line of command particularly quickly, and since I had my own department to get organized and moved forward, I didn't personally move the line inside, as I might have if I'd had time.

But I did know there was some sort of a problem out there - everybody and their brother was talking about the heat wave, and every station on the dial was chattering about the heat advisories on the way down from central PA the previous morning. It couldn't have been any sort of surprise to anyone paying attention. Furthermore, my reg line is not a slow-moving one, nor does the Con have a reputation for slow Thursday preregistration - we have cleared our line by the end of the night every year for the previous three years on Thursday. There was no earthly reason for anybody to be waiting all day out there in the record heat and sun. Thirty-some sunstroke and heatstroke victims, and three who had to be hospitalized. Worse than I thought, but no great surprise. My people processed somewhere just south of nine thousand that night, and cleared the line before 9 PM. No reason whatsoever for people to be waiting on line all day. Good God Almighty.

Fans!

Hey, back from The Con, apparently I worried some folks by not posting. Mostly intact aside from a minor scalp wound. Apparently my poker face doesn't survive exaggerated face-faults into hardwood table-tops after a particularly frustrating bad beat.

I started watching my DVDs of the first season of Ranma 1/2 last night, as sort of a preparation for the Con, which is coming up next week.

I have an attachment to Ranma 1/2 which is oddly disproportionate to my respect (or lack thereof) for the show. I recognize its flaws, and its inherent limit - how it degenerates so quickly, how it operates almost entirely at the surface, how essentially sexist and borderline racist it really is. But it was the first anime I really connected with in an emotional sense. It really blew my mind when I encountered it at the end of my freshman year of college, and it dominated my attention for months afterwards. I went out & rented a VCR before leaving for the summer, copied a new friend's set of episodes, and watched them into oblivion during that summer. I almost have the dialog memorized - and I don't [technically] understand Japanese!

For me, the first season of Ranma is like the nostalgia equivalent of crank. It gives a memory buzz stronger than the remembrances of lost landmarks, first loves, and great accomplishments. I recognize that these emotions are transferences - the associations and displacements of friendships and worlds for which this goofy fighting-harem show is just a sort of signpost and stand-in for the thing itself.

But even signposts have a sort of value for those who find themselves in strange and lonesome places, mindful of the distant roads that lead us, someday, home.

Have you ever heard of the Buckshot War? This came up in the course of a discussion over whether an incumbent governor of Pennsylvania had ever been voted out of office. In short, yes, such an event took place, in the election of 1838, when the Whig-Anti-Mason Governor Ritner was defeated by his Democratic rival Porter, and the lame-duck governor tried to seize the arsenal in Harrisburg, made faces at crowds of Democratic activists, and tried to talk Captain E.V. Sumner of the Carlisle Barracks into calling out the Dragoons in support of his version of the new State House of Representatives. (Yes, that Sumner.) For an alternate version of the Buckshot War, see here.

I had no idea that the commonwealth came that close to an armed outbreak. It seems, if less violent than the periodic outbreaks of public disorder in Allegheny County (IE, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Battle of Homestead, etc), somehow more alarming in that it was the sitting governor attempting to overthrow the duly-elected legislature by resort to force of arms in the capital. Indeed, the second account almost reads like an alternate-history version of the pre-war machinations in the spring of 1861 in Missouri and Kentucky, with Sumner standing in for Lyons and - hrm, who was the officer in place in Kentucky?

Which really sends me off on another wild-goose-chase, because I just don't know much about Kentucky's early-Civil-War history. I can find an equivalent of Jim Lane or Sigel - that would be Lovell Rousseau. Hrm, this suggests it would have been William "Bull" Nelson, although I don't quite see how a naval officer had control over state arsenals - he wasn't commissioned in the Union Army until September according to Wikipedia.

It's the week of the San Diego Comic Con, and thus new-license time. A lot of the CMX releases sound promising, especially Canon and Variante. But you know what gets my goat? Del Rey went and grabbed up Parasyte/Kiseiju after TokyoPop lost the license. Damnit, I spent a ton of money last year picking up the crummy half-arsed flopped versions. Don't make me go and spend a similar wad of cash to get 'em done right *now*. Well, I never did get the first volume...

Just as a by the by, Skip Beat is just as nifty as I was promised by Big Dave. For all those who've been grousing about the anti-feminist tendencies of shoujo heroines, I offer you Skip Beat's Kyoko.

Kyoko starts out as a sweet-tempered milquetoast worker-bee doormat for her would-be pop-star drone of a boyfriend, Sho. He essentially ran away from home & his parents' attempts to get him to marry some dull girl & take over the family inn. His purpose in doing this was to become a "celebrity" (damnit, I can give you odds that this term was almost certainly "idol" before the translator got a hold of it). As he left his hick town, he idly managed to talk childhood friend Kyoko into running away to Tokyo with him, inspiring her to drop out of school and work multiple jobs in support of his pretty, indolent, rather insolent self. She's his biggest supporter, and aside from a certain manic intensity, is your basic self-sacrificing shoujo heroine.

That is, until she overhears him bragging to his manager how he basically considers her a "servant", is kind of contemptuous about how little effort it took to talk her into leaving with him, and drops the news in passing that he's getting the education she's denied herself & that *she* was the "dull girl" his parents were trying to get him to marry. At this point our heroine kind of suffers a full-on psychotic break, and transforms into a *much* more interesting character, one organized around rage, vengeance, and irritability. All while striving to become an idol/celebrity herself, mostly just to spite her ex.

It's a ball, and I can only hope the mangaka doesn't let her revert *too* much to her original self-denying sweetness, although there is some suggestion that this will be the essential thematic conflict. That is, our heroine is a bitter, enraged, alarming personage attempting to make it in a career which rewards sweetness, inoffensiveness, and lovability. The people at the talent agency find themselves stampeded a little bit by the sheer intensity of her new-lit bonfire of a personality, but at the same time quite professionally certain that she'll never make it, because she refuses to be "loved". It's a promising train-wreck, if the author can pull it off.

OK, I admit it, I mostly posted this just to get that new Greg Mankiw blog link up on the blogroll. But Skip Beat is pretty keen.

I'm reading the Hagerman book, which isn't as revolutionary as I had heard, but then, older books of analysis can be somewhat underwhelming if you've read the works written since then in reaction. You're getting the points already processed & denigrated or taken into account by those who've followed in the writer's foot-steps.

More striking is the significant number of minor errors of fact, the text often mistaking one river for another - saying so-and-so discussed a 1863 campaign from the Rappahannock to the James, where I'm pretty sure the author meant Rappahannock to the Potomac, or talking about Lee planning a move from Gettysburg to the Rappahannock, where the logic and the actual planning was for a movement behind the Potomac & into the Valley, confusing references to a "Fourth Corps" at a time when there was no such organization with the Army of the Potomac, floating discussions of a "Second Division" without indication of which corps said division belonged to, etc etc. Well, that and all of the nonsense on stilts about Chancellorsville demonstrating the inability of offensive tactical use of artillery & Buford's delaying action before Gettysburg demonstrating the fading of cavalry notions of shock tactics, but those are matters of analysis and not fact.

The reason I bring this up is that Hagerman mentions in passing that Lee was a member of Mahan's Napoleon Club, and this challenged my notions of Lee & my understanding of the events of Lee's life and career. So I went looking online, and the most authoritative online reference I can find is this passage from Freeman's Lee biography. All the other online references are brief notes airily asserting Lee's membership or "sponsorship" in his capacity as West Point commandant. Since those references also erroneously assert that the Napoleon Club was founded several years after McClellan graduated from the Academy, I think I can safely discard them as less than authoritative.

Freeman essentially says that he doesn't know that Lee attended meetings, although he believes that it occurred - the records had been destroyed in a fire, and he spends most of his discussion of the period listing the books Lee took out of the West Point library on military history, instead of on Mahan or the Napoleon Club.

I don't know - the Freeman biography is very old at this point, and perhaps somebody somewhere has done some more work on the subject, but if so, it doesn't show itself online in a quick google. Are there any monographs on the Club, particularly on this alleged sponsorship by Lee as commandant?

Sorry about the radio silence. All of the work I wasn't getting last week due to the holiday doldrums came crashing down on my head like the much-recently-threatened-hereabouts flash-flood of legend.

In other news, the landlady's contractor[s] have started working on my roof, in a peculiar and drawn-out fashion, which seems to feature a scrawny guy in a mustache and no shirt climbing around the outside of my apartment & asking me questions through the open windows, and randomly tearing off strips of the roof in no particular order, in obedience to no particular scheme that I can detect or deduce. I'd complain about it choosing to rain just as they started this process, except it's been raining every other day regardless of what we mere mortals have been choosing to do with our time, so it was going to happen whenever the process started, regardless of timing.

Went off to go swimming last Sunday. The pool at Governors' Park is $4 per day for adults, $3 for children, and is open, theoretically, noon to 8 PM. Dunno if that's just the weekend, or weekdays as well. So, I swam. Not as much fun as I remember it being from my childhood, but then, I think it had something to do with socializing and goofing around, and I'm a bit old for that sort of thing, given the age of the crowd, such as it was.

This article in the New Scientist seems to argue that the North Atlantic Conveyer Belt is *not* the primary driver of northwestern European climatic mildness, but is rather dwarfed by atmospheric warming (having to do with patterns driven by the Rockies) and northwestern Europe's natural enjoyment of a "maritime climate". In other words, western Europe has mild weather because the wind comes from the west, over the massive heat sink of the Atlantic, and from the south, due to the atmosphere rebounding from its prior subarctic swing over southeastern North America.

The *logic* seems solid, although I naturally know next to nothing about the model-work, nor do they really offer any details. But essentially, they're arguing against the idea that a sort of Young Dryas redux is anywhere in the cards, and seem to suggest that any modern shut-down of the North Atlantic Conveyer by global warming will be swamped by the accompanying warming itself, leaving western Europe pretty much at scratch.

Link via Jonah Goldberg at the Corner.

Here's the AoD blog round-up on licenses. What's that Honneamise thing? Bandai Visual? Whoever they are, they're idiots if they think that anyone will find Wings of Rean interesting. It's been a really long time since the original Gunbuster was available, though. That might be a good 'un, although perhaps it's the sepiatones of nostalgia speaking, there.

Hmm. I really liked what I've seen of Black Lagoon, not sure what I think of Geneon licensing it. They have a nasty habit of refusing to release bricks & thin-paks until their stock ends up in the hands of liquidators. Eh, we'll see. Maybe ADV and Bandai'll chase 'em onto the thin-pak bandwagon.

I had been thinking when I heard that Right Stuf snabbed the second season of SuperGALS out from under ADV, that it was a show made for rental, but then I noticed that they're releasing it sub-only, in a single brick for under $50. Maybe I can talk Big Dave into buying it, since he picked up the first season on the cheap way back when... y'know, to complete his collection. I mean, I'd like to see the rest of it...

Yeah, if you're finding subversion in Aishiteruze Baby, you're looking too hard. I won't say it's all surface, but that mangaka isn't really one for deep thoughts or elaborate games. She's set out to draw out a triangle where the essential emotional arc isn't romantic, but rather parental. Kippei demonstrates his worthiness by being a good mother to poor abandoned Yuzuru, and thus attracts Kokoro, whose traumatic childhood loss of her mother couldn't be more obviously Grown Up Metaphorical Yuzuru if the mangaka had hung a sign to that effect around her neck. It's about as family-values as shoujo comics get.

Well, ok, maybe it's a little subversive. But only if what is being subverted is the notion of romantic love as the be-all, end-all of narrative. And really, that's a pretty abstract sort of subversion.

I read that $.25 copy of Forrest Gump I picked up in a bag-sale at the Bellefonte library a while back. The first page reminded me of something I had read once, but had forgotten until now: the book and the movie are wildly divergent works of pop art. The only appearance of the "box of chocolates" metaphor in the book is on that first page, where Forrest informs the reader that "Bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates". It's really quite amusing for the first third of the novel, like a smartass fanfic version of the movie, full of snark and meanspiritedness and general ill will.

Winston Groom's original Forrest Gump is a polar opposite of the dunce-saint I remembered from the movie. He's faintly bigoted, has actual political views (everytime someone asks him about Vietnam, he says "it's a lot of shit"), smokes so much pot that he gets addicted to the stuff, is enough of an idiot-savant to play chess grandmasters, screws around, and in general behaves like a regular, fallen member of mankind. In many ways, this alternative Gump is barely any kind of idiot at all, which I suppose is where Groom was going with the final message-line of the book, having Jenny say something about everyone being some kind of idiot or another.

The Gump of the novel gets around a lot more than the movie-Gump, pelting the Clerk of the Senate with his Metal of Honor, saving Chairman Mao from drowning, becoming an astronaut, and spending four years as the slave of a tribe of cannibals in New Guinea, picking cotton. Did I mention the racism? Groom seems to be a real piece of work, and I swear this novel set back my opinion of the "New South" at least fifteen years.

At first I was delighted with the differences from the movie. The book reads like a meanspirited *satire* of the movie. However, by the time this Gump had gotten back from Vietnam and was auditing a Harvard literature class on "Idiots in World Literature" I was kind of pining for the Tom Hanks fool-saint and his passion-play decency. The difference between the movie-version and the book-version of Lieutenant Dan really brought home the difference, illustrated the *value* of Hollywood moralities. All of the pathos, the moral stature of the Lieutenant Dan arc had been an invention of the screen-writers, and the original Dan, stripped of all of that inventive family history and sense of destiny denied, turned out to be nothing more than a legless, drunken scumbag. There's no redemption in Groom's Gump, and that kind of sucks.

Wow, Drifting Classroom dates to 1972-74? I had been going back and forth on whether to go for this one, but that sells me on it, at least for Viz's first volume. We don't get nearly enough old-school manga over here. Who knows, maybe they'll finally give us some Rose of Versailles some day!

Um, it is back to Zombie Powder again? I thought it had gotten goofily re-named "Zombie Power"?

Maybe it was a leftover title ganked from TokyoPop's ashbin from when they retitled Power! to Girl Got Game?

Oh, well. Regardless, I don't know that I'm willing to spend time and money on a series which got cancelled mid-run. BTW, is there a link out there to the AICN story from which the Zombie Power renaming thing came? It *is* AICN, after all. Wait, here it is. Along with the image of the first volume with the original title right there on the cover. Um, how confident are we of anything in this article? Seriously?

At least the bit about it being four-volumes-then-cancellation seems to be on the up-and-up, according to the current version of the Wikipedia article.

Verdict? "Zombie Power" was an artifact of an AICN writer being full of it.

Wow. You know the wave of bankruptcies and near-misses in the anime industry is really cutting deep when three-dollar DVDs start showing up at the local Dollar General - and you end up spending significant sums of unbudgeted money on 'em. Now, admittedly, I'd not normally bother with Fancy Lala or Spirit of Wonder - while they're probably worth $3/disc, I don't think I'd spend $5 - but I've now seen multiple discs which I've paid, if not full price, then a significant fraction thereof, languishing in the three-dollar-cutout bins. Good shows, too, like Cowboy Bebop and Vandread. Meanwhile, I *almost* coughed up for a box set of Angelic Layer I saw at Best Buy the other day for south of $35, and cringed to see a modified brick of Escaflowne for $33, brand new.

It's brilliant times for the penurious and miserly, but are all the companies going to scrape their way out of the other side of the bog? CPM seems to be trembling on the brink, for one.

Reading Simpson's Grant biography, just finished the section on Vicksburg and the immediate aftermath. One of the things that comes out crystal-clear in Simpson's account is Grant's proclivity for recruiting stalwarts among those set to spy & monitor him. One after another - McPherson for Halleck, James Wilson for McClernand, Olmstead for the Sanitary Commission, Dana and Thomas for Lincoln & Stanton - those sent to spy on Grant, check up on him, or possibly relieve him outright in Lorenzo Thomas's case, became instead advocates, cronies, or supporters once they came into Grant's presence.

Grant showed no sign of any personal charisma or magnetism prior to the war. Where and when did he develop this ability to corrupt and convert his would-be minders to his cause? Why didn't it work on newspaper writers?

All joking aside, this is quite clever, and exactly what I used to expect from the gentleman who used to call himself Tacitus. Good to see him back on RedState.

A riot is an ungly thing... undt, I tink, that it is chust about time ve had vun.

Who's up for a little ceremonial sacking of the New York Times printing presses? You know, no bodily injury, no tarring-and-feathering, just demonstrate a little disregard for editorial capital equipment, remind them that if they want to revert to antebellum journalistic standards we as the general public can always respond in the manner of Lincoln's Wide Awakes.

Huh. ING finally de-inverted their CD ladder curve. Oh, well, no real incentive for me to get anything over a 12-month. Done and done.

One-quarter of the way through Project Down Payment. So far so good.

I lost power on Saturday morning. As I was getting out of the shower, I heard this loud detonation and all the lights went out except for the emergency pack left over from when my apartment was a doctor's office. I went out looking for the exploded transformer, but none were obviously out. The whole block lost its cable, but only a few buildings around me actually lost power. When the cable guys came, they immediately spotted the problem - a big ceramic breaker hanging from the transformer behind the crematorium, and a very fried, very dead squirrel lying on the other side of the brick wall behind the library on the other side of the alley. Suicide squirrel. The one guy said they do this occasionally, "but usually only once". I said I hoped so, and pictured electrified, zombie squirrels vengefully waging war on humanity via the electrical grid, one little squirrelly shahid at a time.

Finished reading Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men yesterday. Not much to say about it - I had encountered Foner's notions of the centrality of free labor ideology in the early Republican Party before, in his book on Reconstruction. This book is more of a useful taxonomy of early Republicanism than a comprehensive history of the party like Holt's Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, but as a taxonomy it is fairly engaging. His section on what he called "Democratic-Republicans" was particularly informative, and his description of the geographic organization of the various strains of Republicanism was interesting, and I could wish for more on the subject.

The more I read about antebellum politics, the more I see the familial patterns, and the more striking how important certain clans were. Most striking has been the Washburnes, the Blairs, and the Sherman/Ewings. I wonder if this is just an artifact of my reading, or possibly emergent from scholars using the surviving archives of certain prominent families? Would we care as much about John Sherman if his brother hadn't been the mad general? Would I have ever have heard of Elihu Washhburne if he hadn't been Grant's patron? Dimitri Rotov & the political-military school would have it that I've only heard of the generals *because* of their political sponsors.

While we're on the subject of sponsorship, the more I hear of Dennison & Chase, the less I understand how it is that the Whiggish-conservative McClellan got his leg up by their backing. Chase especially seems to be the exact sort of political animal which the Webster-worshipping McClellan would just as soon see drowned like a cat in a sack.

Saw a new biography of Chase on the shelf at Websters along with the rest of that ACW collection. Maybe I'll stop by next month & see if it's still there. Meanwhile, on to the Simpson biography of Grant.

&#%$! The dropped ceiling in my spare room collapsed *again*. I'm getting so that anything stored in there is pretty much written-off & half-way out the door to the trash pile. Oh, well, at least it isn't the bed room or the living room.

And the cocoa shell manure the landlady used to landscape the property has sprouted orange mold. It better not spread to my apartment interior.

Bah. I got spoiled by the dry spring. Summer seems determined to make up for lost time & moisture.

Fred gave me a heads-up the other day that Websters had bought a collection from a local Civil War buff, so I dropped by yesterday on my bi-weekly trip through State College. The history section had burst loose from its usual back-corridor location to take over two additional bookcases by the cash register, the operator of which was clearly not thrilled with the situation as such, although she was more disparaging of the apparent excess of WWII carnography than the more elderly, and thus more respectable, ACW material. I relieved their crowding situation a tad by picking up second-hand copies of Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, that book of Hagerman's that Dimitri is always on about, and Brook Simpson's biography of Grant up through the end of the war.

In Foner & Hagerman's cases, I'm not going to fret about buying used, because they're both tenured professors whose opinions I could give a pinch of owl dung - especially since Foner started acting the ass in public on current affairs, and Hagerman got into the business of retailing Korean-era ChiCom propaganda to trash on the US military. I'm a little more ambivalent about buying Simpson used, though. On the one hand, nobody gets royalties from used sales. On the other hand, I wasn't about to buy the book new regardless of where I might pick it up royalty-free.

I started in on the Foner book on the way into work this morning. Interesting so far - a little alarming how much I find myself in agreement with that Stalinist SOB when it comes to discussing the sociology of ideology.

How exactly do fundamentalist pro-lifers square Exodus 21:22 with their view that a fetus is indistinguishable from a child in Christian moral terms? I can see how non-fundamentalists can square it - the laws of the Torah are historical and the moralities revealed in the Bible advance with time, from old to new testiment - and I can see how Catholics can square it - the laws of the Church supercede those of the Torah via the Patrimony, etc - but I'm not really clear on how the hard-core by-scripture-alone folks can get away from this:

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

as an establishment of the fetus as an entity of lesser value than a child, implicitly taken under the following "life for life, eye for eye" passage.

None of which gets away from my increasing suspicion that abortion is a worldly evil on a strictly policy level, issues of religion and belief notwithstanding.

Thought encountered via David Plotz's fascinating Blogging the Bible column.

Back from New Jersey. Got talked into helping with their MangaNext project, which is coming up quick in October. Dave & Eugene Cheng were trying to talk each other into being con chair, which is more common on the scene than you'd normally think - people who are good con chairs are rarely eager to take on the job, and people who are eager to be con chairs are rarely good at it if they talk their way in.

MangaNext is a side-project of the non-profit that runs AnimeNext, set up as a "light" or "relaxicon" event in a smaller venue with less intensive programming and, of course, a manga orientation. The big convention has been talking about doing a minicon like this for years out of mind, but it never really got off the ground aside from the comcon, which isn't really open to the public. I think it was because the big honking convention absorbs every resource it can get its tentacles upon, and is more prone to burn out staffers than inspire them to run little versions of the big show. I also sort-of agreed to help with another con down in northern Virginia the month after that, although it isn't certain & set as of yet.

I was working registration like usual, and a girl came up with a copy of her birth certificate as a form of ID. I looked at it, and exclaimed in outrage when I realized that she had been born about three weeks after my first initiation into anime fandom, the end of my freshman year. She was literally younger than my otakudom. An entire generation of cosplaying teenyboppers has spawned since I first had my tiny little mind warped by Ranma 1/2 and Laputa at a PSSFS party.

Ha! American Pie was the only rock album other than Jesus Christ Superstar my parents owned, and I must have listened to that record a hundred times or more growing up. If you get all of the gags in the parody, you badly need to get a life.

Hee hee hee...

Oh, h/t spacemonkey at IMAO.

Really good month for Del Rey manga, BTW. The second volume of School Rumble has made me a real fan of the manga. I mean, I kind of liked the anime, but the material which was just generally OK as animation really shines in the original manga. Jin Koboyashi's art is at the same time cheerfully old-fashioned and highly polished, and the style parodies are broad enough that I can get most of the aesthetic jokes, while still marvelling at the crisp shounen and sports-manga action. It's both a parody and a pitch-perfect exemplar of the styles at the same time. I'm now really looking forward to all of Harima's mangaka scenes in future volumes, now.

While we're on the subject of crackerjack Del Rey manga, ES (Eternal Sabbath) is pretty damned exciting in its own right. I really, really liked mangaka Fuyumi Soryo's melodramatic Mars, but to a certain extent I have written off that enjoyment as an artifact of it being the second shoujo relationship-comic I had read after the extremely ordinary Peach Girl. But ES (Eternal Sabbath) has that same crystalline, chilly high-drama harshness that made Mars so striking, so entertaining, so... brisk. Soryo has a bitter, Puritan sensibility, an alienation and skepticism about human motivations which flirts with Hitoshi Iwaaki's open sociopathy if never actually embracing the darkness of Iwaaki's Parasyte.

ES is technically science-fiction, about a young man (variably named, and I'm not sure which name they're going to settle on past the first volume...) who can read and "hack" human psyches. He uses this talent to slip through society, inserting himself into the lives of people, and living parasitically off of their ideas of who he is. At the same time, he does indulge in mostly-benevolent manipulation of those around him, and Soryo quickly introduces a "moral centre" character in brain physiology researcher Mine Kujyou. But even Kujyou is presented as an alienated individual, one of those borderline-Asberger types who often gravitate towards the hard sciences. Not so much unsympathetic, as half-clueless and totally lacking in social skills - the type who's prone to cheerfully rattle on about reproductive strategies in lions (IE, males killing their young) at an omiai.

The art is striking - especially the pages dealing with "ES"'s perceptions and manipulations of the minds of those he interacts with - but not particularly brilliant or outstanding. Exactly what was required for the subject-matter. A lot more interesting-looking than Mars, but then, Mars was a romance manga with the occasional knife-fight or motorcycle accident thrown in for spice. Apparently Soryo has the chops for ES's more-challenging material. I'm really looking forward to the next volume.

Between a busy work season and a general re-direction of my energy towards small ends, I've been kind of slacking around here, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Sorry about that.

I got talked into going to that charity poker tournament at the State College Knights of Columbus yesterday. I ended up doing really, really poorly - went out inside of the first half-hour with an all-in on "Broadway" - a 10-J-Q-K-A straight. Wouldn't you know that those two kings that came out on the flop matched the two "cowboys" in the other guy's hand, meaning that I had been betting into a perfect four-of-a-kind. Gotta love that "walk of shame", when you're one of the first three or four to walk out of a room of ninety, complete with running camera from one of the local TV stations recording it all for posterity. Oh, well. It was "charity". Although I was told that the Knights do this every month. Dunno what their legal excuse is when they don't have a kid who fell off a balcony as cover.

No, I'm not bitter. A little rueful, maybe. But not bitter.

The Bellefonte Cruise is coming into town this weekend, which means that I'm leaving town. One of Bellefonte's relative virtues is that it's usually a quiet town, aside from the occasional aging biker gang's funereal roar. The Cruise is a definite exception to that general rule. Racing engines, loud PAs, Fifties-revival bands playing in front of the courthouse, and... the stereo contests. The stereo contests right across the street from my apartment. My thin-walled apartment.

See y'all. I'm going to Jersey to staff a convention in Secausus. Don't bother breaking in, I doubt you could get a fence to buy anything in my apartment, unless your fence is a thrift store with a side-line in anime DVDs, SF novels, manga, and Civil War history.

Jason & Dan Wolfe talked me into going along on a caving trip last night, to a place called Tytoona Cave down southeast of Tyrone in Sinking Valley. It's a pretty wet cave in a part of the state which has been honeycombed by quarries & open-pit mines. For some reason I expected it to be slap up against a mountain, but instead we ended up down a nondescript back country road, and a bit of a steep walk down a deep, fairly scenic sinkhole facing a limestone rockface.

You can see the pictures on that website, Tytoona is a flat, horizontal cave of about six hundred feet on a single level, before it "sumps out" and turns into a water-cave where the cave divers *used* to go diving before a woman got turned around & drowned a number of years ago. We were not, of course, cave diving, but rather just splashing around in the safe section of the upper cave.

We were promised "stooped-over" wetness, but it turned out that the last few years of deluges - Ivan among others - had changed the cave a bit, and it turned into a stomach-crawl through chest-deep water about a hundred feet in. I kind of freaked out the first try through, mostly due to Dan's remarkably gonzo approach to the challenge - he porpoised right on through. The prospect of having to do that, in the chilly shock of actually getting down into the water, was a bit much. After I calmed down a bit & followed directly behind him along the sharp pebbly shallow section instead of trying to swim around the other way, I got into the spirit of thing.

There aren't any really grand stalactites, but there was some "flows" that Jason was excited about. There were a number of side-holes going off the main chamber which we passed by on the way in to the back of the cave, the "sump". This is where the air pockets run out, and all the floating crud caught in the cave's creek floats along the surface in a mildly nasty agglomeration of scum. Since we were relying on headlamps, it wasn't too foul, but the scum kept us out of the sump-water, even though Jason and Dan thought that there was a couple dozen more feet to the cave further on, due to slight changes in the lay of the rock.

We found a lost, miserable toad and a bullfrog in this last sumpside gallery, washed downstream along with the rest of the rubbish. We supposed they were surviving on the random bugs also washed into the cave. Other than those, the only living things we encountered were good-sized brown and orange salamanders, which weren't afraid of us. Too blind to see our lights? I didn't bump into any fish, although they must have been in the water.

On the way back, people went crawling into the side-holes, one of which featured a tiny little stream, a remarkably long run of at least fifty feet, and more mud than I had really counted upon. I didn't get all the way back - by the time Dan went in, we realized that it was past sunset & was getting dark outside, and we broke for the exit. At first we forgot about Dan, and I had to turn around & yell that we were leaving. There's a section in this side-hole where the person climbing through either dams up, or pushes forward, the flow of the stream in a quite striking fashion - the first time it happened, I mistook it for the sudden onset of a rainstorm upstream, until someone reminded me of Archimedes' Law.

All in all, a lot of fun, but massive, massive amounts of dirt. Not a clean hobby, spelunking.

[Some history on the cave here.}

No great depression of the 1870s? That's mindwarping. Where's the link, damnit! I want to read more about this, but Google is being obstinant. Here's a review of the most recent book by the author, Charles R. Morris, apparently a financial expert of some repute. He's clearly talking about something which isn't great news to someone literate in economic history, but it isn't something I'm too familiar with, and everywhere I look, people talk about the great depression of the 1870s - even "The Long Depression of 1873-1896"!

Link via the Corner.

The North Aral Sea is coming back, in spite of all predictions. Apparently a reasonably rational government & some well-thought-out engineering work still can work miracles, given a bit of grace. On the other hand, the much larger southern half of the Aral has the misfortune of lying within the bounds of Uzbekistan, and has little to no prospect of returning.

Via Lawrence at the Argus.

This report on the National Guard side of Katrina unexpectedly makes Gov. Blanco sound much, much more competent and sensible than she appeared at the time, or afterwards, for that matter. It's testimony against interest, since RCP is kind of right-of-centre. Basically, the argument is that Blanco was inclined to resist federalization because she was tied into the state National Guard communications network, and was aware that they had things under control, no matter what fantasies the national press and Mayor Nagin were feeding us & the federals here in the outside world. She sounded incompetent, because our view of the disaster and the response was catastrophically inaccurate.

Link via the Instapundit.

Huh. The anime club at Penn State is talking anime convention. I've never been very involved with any of the incarnations of PSAO - I seem to remember that there was an organization of that name in the late Nineties, but the current one suggests that it was founded in September of 2001(!) on its website.

The various conservancies held their annual "Big Spring Festival" yesterday down at Tallyrand Park in Bellefonte. Attendance was kind of low, probably due to the miserable rainy morning and the many recent firehouse carnivals, but the afternoon was a bright, blustery blue-skied wonderland, so it was nice for the few of us who came by. They had a band - a pretty good one, too, a blues-rock quintet whose drummer kept crediting the sound folks, but never mentioned the name of the band. They had a young, tiny little frontwoman with an enormous, bluesy voice - I ran into her proud father afterwards. Even he didn't know the band's name.

About four o'clock they held a semi-ceremonial restocking affair on the High Street bridge over Spring Creek, one guy dipping trout and other big fish out of a truck into buckets, and a line of guys through the bushes down to the wall to hand them down to a guy who was showing them to the kids before emptying the buckets into a temporary sluiceway the last twenty feet into the creek. I kept expecting one of the kids or a member of the bucket brigade to overbalance and fall into the creek, but luck was with them, and the only victim was an especially large rainbow trout who was too big to fit into a bucket, and got handed down in the net, bounding out of the sluiceway before he got a foot and a half down, thus plummeting over a dozen feet into the water. Nobody saw the trout float to the surface, so the assumption was that he survived his plunge.

Later that evening I walked to Milesburg along the railroad. It runs along the far side of the water gap from Rt. 150/144, and I had never gone down that side of the creek before. Turns out there's a surprisingly large switchyard down there, with about a half-dozen sidings and thirty or forty empty cars sitting on one track or another. The fishermen were plentiful as well, no doubt getting their first crack at the newly released fish, although the one man I talked to, walking along the track towards his favorite spot, hadn't heard about the restocking when I asked. There were at least a dozen flyfishermen enjoying the early evening weather, in the creek between the mouths of Buffalo Run and Bald Eagle Creek. Not a bad walk, if a trifle uneven in places. Railbed gravel can be a little on the rockish side of big for walking.

Dimitri wonders in a comment on David Woodsbury's post on the Sultana why so many men who survived the initial explosion failed to find the river-bank and drowned in the Mississippi. Dimitri allows as how Andersonville survivors might have been physically weakened. I would add on top of that the fact that the explosion occurred in the darkness of early morning, and that many no doubt couldn't even find the river-bank. Additionally, we're talking about the middle river in the late Civil War, in a period of civic neglect, even by the 19th century's less-than-rigorous standards of civil engineering. It was no doubt a riverine wilderness, and in the middle of the spring flood at that! What's amazing is that they pulled as many living men from the river as they did.

On the other hand, I don't quite see what's obscure about the Sultana disaster at this point. To put it in Dimitri's terms, the Sultana is the last stop on the Centennial Andersonville narrative, and almost no modern writer who writes anywhere *near* the subject can resist throwing in something about the last, final act of the tragedy, where those who survived battle, capture, captivity, privation, and the many indignities of Andersonville, were killed by such an ugly and massive and stupid accident on the way home.

Huh. That's unexpected. The Crowbar is gone. It was a dive, and other than going to see a Pink Floyd cover band with Ben Hauger a few years ago & playing poker last fall, I never went there. But it was the kind of dive which I would have expected to have made money hand over fist - I wonder if live music for the kids is doing poorly with the university crowd?

Woohoo! Jubelirer is out on his can! Good job, Jessica!

There was somebody at our ward trying to get Democrats to write in Benninghoff. I still don't quite get why this was a worthwhile use of that somebody's time.

We were given a choice between the computer poll & an optiscan system, both of them new to this district. I went with the optiscan, since there were four booths, and just one computer. I managed to mess things up two different ways - by handing the ballot to the lady without the stub sticking out, and inserted upside-down such that you could see how I voted if you really cared, but neither was a vote-wrecking sort of error.

But dang, I miss the old needle-punch and card.

For the Fallen

What need of hope when on two proud feet
We stand safely on home ground?
What need of wealth has the solvent
Whose well-financed business thrives?
What need of might has the strong
Health for the hale, the rested for rest,
The clear-eyed for clarity, the clever for wits,
The knowing for knowledge, the wise for wisdom?

Seeing far with clear-sighted eyes
None blink away tears of regret or pain or sadness.

It is only after a fall,
Having stumbled,
Having been pushed,
Having fallen
By malice or illness or ill wind
Or sickness or the chill hand of death near at hand
That frustration, tears, fear and prayer
Come as the answers to our need

These are the children of pain and need
Of that lineage of age and misfortune
Whose ancestors were locked beyond the gates
From which, with our ancestors naked and shivering
Were expelled, were flung upon the world,
Who peered one last time
Beyond the flaming blade
That barred the way.

That blade comes again with every misfortune
As a memory of the fall
As a fall in itself
And like each fall,
It comes as pain and anguish
And a rush of naked need:

Clothe us,
Who having been warm, are naked
Feed us,
Who having known plenty, are starving
Heal us
Who having been whole are now hurt!

But while there is life
Man is more than his earth
More than the dust
More than that which rests in the grave
And even before the grave itself
Is hope
And man is a beast that
Having fallen but still having hope
Will rise again
Having tripped, will find his stride
Having found his knees
Will try to gain his feet

Having fallen,
Being now, as we are,
Fallen
In this time that has been given to us
In the hope that we might
Stand on our feet again
In whatever time we have remaining
Let us then put our faith
In the rising.

5/17/06

I picked up the first paperback volume of Tezuka's Buddha last week at the 'Swap. While I like Tezuka well enough, I don't like him enough to pay hardback prices for his stuff. I hadn't realized that the US version of Buddha had been flopped Studio Proteus-style until I cracked it open the other night. One character lost a couple of limbs, and *which* limbs kept varying from page to page, and even panel to panel, as the retouching crew were selectively flopping on a panel-by-panel manner in an attempt to match flow & layout, instead of just mirror-flopping everything regardless.

It's really kind of disconcerting. Fans have refused to put up with this sort of thing on doofy junk titles like Naruto or Sgt. Frog for years, but the hoity-toity art-comix and academic crowd which snabbles up high-tone projects like Buddha are apparently cool with the American publisher diddling the artwork on one of the God of Manga's flagship projects. I mean, Buddha is regularly recommended to the non-fan market in mainstream publications like Entertainment Weekly. The story and the background art manages to mostly overwhelm the flopped artwork mess, and I'm even kind of cool with the bambi-and-thumper-get-disemboweled cognitive dissonance of the cartoony art style and the gloomy-religious subject matter. I wasn't ashamed to be seen reading it while sitting around waiting for things to start up at the History Day festivities.

What I was ashamed of was the computer-marketing-sales-professional office dropping who decided to plug in his earpiece right there in Finlay Commons & loudly conduct his business in public, like he was doing high-pressure sales out of office at home or something. I don't think he was a judge - probably some poor kid's workaholic father. Jerk.

Oof. I love Penn State dorm food, but I think I'm too old for such shenanigans. They fed the run-off judges for the History Day thing out of the Finlay Commons for lunch. Two cheeseburgers, some fries, juice & milk, way too many chocolate-chip cookies. Now I can barely move, I feel like a rattlesnake on a chilly, overcast October afternoon.

Things went about as well as such things do these days. There seems to be fewer and fewer actual educational professionals judging at these things - last year there weren't many in the papers judging panels, and this year, I didn't work with a single teacher in either one of my panels. Yesterday was Judge Brown, me, and a lady from the documents section of the PSU main campus library - all of us from Bellefonte, BTW, we got into a big gossip section about my one-time landlord & all the fires we've been getting in town. Today was Bruce Teeple, the guy who's working on the Prince Farrington history, and a lawyer from Southeast PA who does a history column on the side. We seem to be doing OK, but where are all the folks with pedagogical training? Off doing the "fun" subjects like performances & documentaries?

Jim Cleaveland, a PSSFS alum from the mid-Nineties, used to do a comic for the weekly newsletters that Bernhard Warg put out for the club, the Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. Jim's starting up Bob again as a webcomic, here, starting with the original run of comics from the newsletter, which was called, er... You know, I don't remember what the newsletter was called when Bernhard was editing. It was Dangerous Advice when I took it over, but that was my name. Anybody remember?

Finally got around to reading that copy of Sterling's The Zenith Angle that I bought back before Christmas. It was a lot better than I had feared - funny and strange in that late-Bruce-Sterling sort of fashion. Sterling always has been the starry-eyed optimist of the cyberpunk set. He really believes in the innate decency of mankind. Of course, the cyber-war global-dot-com plot of the book was a complete and total misreading of what was going on in 2001 and 2002, and the book's constant administration name-dropping was rendered even more peculiar by Sterling's failure to mention Dick Clarke, the actual, goofy-ass proponent of cyber-terrorism and computer security who turned into such a walking embarrassment during the 2004 elections.

I kept expecting something horrible to come of the dropped thread mid-book about the elk with Mad Cow Disease, and the fact that they were feeding them to the astronomers. It seemed like the sort of thing which would have fed into the whole isolated-hiding-from-the-big-bad-world academics-unable-to-deal-and-hiding thing that Sterling was flirting with mid-book. Especially given the 2003-2004 vogue for "BDS" - Bush Derangement Syndrome. But, since the book reads as if it was mostly composed in mid-late 2002, I suppose that's a little ahead of the political curve, chronologically speaking. Although Sterling throws in a bit about "web logs" as the wave of the future in the last few pages.

Anyways, definitely better than Heavy Weather or Holy Fire, not quite as good as Zeitgeist. About on the level of Distraction.

Walked up to the mall to watch United 93 at the multiplex on Saturday. Not much to say about the movie - it was worth the twelve-mile round-trip - but I did spend a good chunk of the "there" part of the walk wondering if I was trespassing on State Penn land by walking along the side of the Benner Pike past all the "No Trespassing - Violators Will Be Prosecuted" signs. I had forgotten about all of the no trespassing signs - they go by pretty fast when you're driving past them at 55 MPH - but walking along the pike gave me lots of time to ponder the legalities. On the one side, there's the whole "public thoroughfare" thing - if it's legal to drive along the Pike, why the hell couldn't I walk blameless? - on the other side, there's that whole "this means you" every-two-hundred-yards thing shouting in my face in all-caps institutional-green lettering. Saw nothing but road traffic, distant cows, and Rockview's horse herd, so it didn't come to cases as I half-feared. On the way back, I walked along I-99 instead - louder, but probably safer & definitely not trespassing by any interpretation I'm aware of.

I spent the trip reading a Rosemary Edghill Regency romance in the style of Georgette Heyer, Turkish Delight, which really was a quite excellent pastiche. The one complaint I had about the novel was that the heroine, who supposedly spent her late childhood and adolescence in the harem of the Ottoman Sultan, speaks exactly like every other Regency romance heroine who isn't a French guttersnipe (These Old Shades) or Spanish newlywed (An Infamous Army). That is to say, full of early-19th-century slang and dialect, of a certain class and sophistication. If you're going to make your heroine a Turk who occasionally communicates in Turkish or swears by Allah & the Prophet, be so good as to actually use the language. It adds a bit of color, you see. And no, the occasional use of "hareem" and "houri" doesn't count. For one thing, I'm pretty sure both are Arabic, not Turkish.

Oh, and don't have your heroine dis on Mansfield Park until you have more than one book under your belt. You have to earn that sort of snark.

Yikes.

Er, to unpack that a bit, the link leads to an alleged description of Elvis's allegedly lethal diet. I don't believe he actually ate it, at least not more than once. The "Fool's Gold" sandwiches in particular strike me as gastonomically impossible. No human being could successfully eat entire jars of peanut butter and jelly spread on a full baguette, let alone two instances of such a concoction, let alone as part of a daily diet.

We went hiking yesterday afternoon trying to find the burnt section of Bald Eagle Mountain over west of Milesburg. We failed. We did, however, manage to scrabble up to the top of the ridge via a gas-line firebreak. Bald Eagle Valley looks positively bucolic from a thousand feet up. At close range, it's another story. Nittany Valley, on the other hand, looks like what it is - an enormous construction site. Progress ain't pretty at a distance, but it is progress. I'm much happier living on *this* side of the mountain.

Comment from other office worker: "this has enough salt to kill a horse!" Also much discussion of tofu's amazing ability to soak up flavor - being a sort of flavor vacuum itself, and bearing in mind nature's well-known abhorence of vacuums, it makes a certain sort of metaphoric sense.

Tofu jerky, by the way, bears a strong visual resemblance to chocolate wafers, or "one of those bricks of pioneer chewing tobacco".

Officemate brought in his tofu jerky. It isn't half-bad, but salty as all get out. Not the sort of thing you'd want to make a full meal out of, I think. The office vegetarian was delighted. Yet again with the vegetarians delighting in fake meats... if you want to eat meat, eat meat. If you don't, don't play foolie-foolie games with your palate. Not that I'd turn away the tofu jerky. In suitably small quantities with lots of soda-pop to wash it down.

And speaking of pop, Diet Dr. Pepper Berries 'n Cream is a trainwreck of a soda. Cream flavor does not belong in a carbonated drink. Oh, well. I can deal with anything for a two-liters-worth of time.

Saw my first tentworm nest on Sunday behind the Willowbank building. Now there's nests scattered up Valentine Hill & every other tree along the upper reaches of Valentine Hill Road. The entomologists say they're just nuisances, but they're ugly as sin. Hope the dry weather keeps 'em under control.

My officemate just announced that he makes tofu jerky. I inquired whether this was tofu & jerky or jerked tofu, and he admitted to the latter. Thus followed a conversation on the subject of what exactly was the process for jerking tofu, and what was added to make it taste like anything at all - a marination of soy sauce, honey, and garlic being key, apparently. It still sounds like a punchline waiting on a nonexistent joke.

These are the days I'm proud of not tolerating a stove or other cooking implements in my apartment. They almost always lead one into all sorts of culinary abominations, kitchens. Leave the cooking to the professionals, says I.

I was looking at John Scalzi's Whatever blog while pondering placing him on my blogroll as a replacement for some others whom I've stopped reading with any degree of interest or enthusiasm. Then I came across this post. You see, the thing I dislike the most about fandom - and I dislike it quite strongly - is the uncomfortable and overly close relationship it breeds between artists and their audience. I'm a strong advocate of the fourth wall being, if not impenetrable, then at least a functional one-way mirror for most of its operational lifetime. I don't want writers to be my friends, or mentors, or, heaven forbid, siblings parents or spouses. I don't want to consider their feelings when reading their output, and in fact, as I read an awful lot of fiction, oftentimes I don't want to think about them at all, if at all possible.

The internet & blogs in particular have done a lot to break down these barriers between the artist and the audience, and I can't say I'm too happy about it. I'm a nasty piece of work, to be honest, and it freaks me out when I say something about a writer out of the blue and he replies in email. It's all a bit "Kent, this is God" for my tastes. It's even worse when a writer I sort-of know & otherwise respect lays a massive turd of a book, and then I find myself tip-toeing around the subject. I *like* there to be a distance between me & my writers.

So I may or may not go back to Scalzi's blog. He's an amusing guy. But I've got this issue to work out on the subject.

Huh. There's another fire in the valley, or more strictly speaking, over in Penn's Valley. You can see a big honking column of smoke rising over Centre Hall Mountain, although I was just informed that it's Tussey Mountain on the other side of the valley that's on fire. Must be a heck of a fire if you can see it from over here. Nothing in the CDT as of this moment.

Our representative in Congress here in Bellefonte, John Peterson, is generally a colorless sort of fellow, neither warm nor cool. There seems to be one thing that gets him going, and that's drilling for American oil. He is pissed about Castro opening up potential offshore oil resources for exploration when Florida politicians refuse to allow the US to do likewise. Sen. Nelson of Florida was likewise pissed, so he's trying to get Castro to stop. Peterson, surprisingly for a politician, showed a great deal of common sense and inquired if we were going to stop the Canadians from doing the same thing. I think I'm proud of Peterson this week.

The cool thing? Central Pennsylvania has almost no direct economic interest in the oil industry. Our gas prices aren't even particularly high by national standards, although we're not an island of cheapness, either. Peterson isn't playing to the home folks, far as I can tell. He doesn't even have a serious challenge to his seat.

Well, Big Dave is moved down to Philadelphia, we finished clearing out his storage locker on Saturday, and he drove his belongings down Sunday morning. Gonna miss having him around town. We both got invited to a friend's wedding in November. I realized yesterday looking at my suit that I've shrunk right out of it. Wonder if you can get a suit re-sized downwards like that? A rented tux would be, hrm, a bit much, and I only wear that suit for weddings - the last time I had it on was for the Nadzams' wedding several years ago. They've got two kids now! It's definitely been a while.