There's a competitive race for the Fifth Congressional District of Pennsylvania for the first time in twelve years. It's a heck of a mess over on the Red side of the aisle with nine contenders. Luckily, I got pissed off in the spring of 2003 & re-registered as an ass, er, I mean Democrat. This means that I only have to care about the *Democratic* primaries, and have no say in the other contest, and thus, justifiably, no reason to care until after the primaries are over. I've only got a choice between three candidates. They are as follows:

Mark B. McCracken. The only thing I know about him is what I've read in the CDT, namely, he's a county commissioner from Clearfield, and has an ill-thought-out "bring 'em home now" position on Iraq. I don't think so.

Rick Vilello, the mayor of Lock Haven. Again, never heard of him before now. And frankly? Mayors in Central Pennsylvania are nonentities. I couldn't tell you *Bellefonte*'s mayor without resorting to Google. (I checked, far as I can tell, it's still Stanley Goldman.) The point here, is that it isn't really a serious stepping stone. His position on Iraq is worse than McCracken's - glib, stupid, and dangerous.

Finally, there's Bill Cahir, my carpetbagging Iraq-war veteran neighbor. As expected, his position is solid and uncontroversial - like Hillary Clinton on a very good day, or a typical moderate-Republican office-holder on a terse day. See it through, political goalposts, training, don't leave chaos behind us, etc. Exactly what you'd expect from someone from the O'Hanlon side of the Party.

Oh, would you look at that - somebody's put up wiki pages on the candidates. Here's McCracken's. Hmm. Lots of stupid talk about fiscal responsibility. As if a freshman from the sticks would get on the Appropriations Committee. I mean, Peterson is, but he's been around for a good long while. They don't make you a cardinal during your first term, Mr. Commissioner! And frankly? A Clearfield politician pushing for *ethanol* is just a purblind fool. He should be stumping for coal-to-gasoline if he had his constituents actual interests at heart. Plonk.

Rick Vilello doesn't have a wiki entry, but he does have his own, awful-looking campaign site. He seems to think that lumber is an alternate fuel source. I'm not sure if that means methanol or woodburners. His issues page sounds like bad Obama - all cheap parallel rhetoric and airy assertion. The bottom-most part of the page actually *rolls off the template*. I'm still not sure what exactly he proposes for "Economic Development and Rural Development", except by that construction he considers them distinct and separate items...

Here's Cahir's wiki. Igh, he worked for both Ted Kennedy and Harris Wofford. That's not a good sign. Iraq proposals in detail... what's "Operation Homeward Bound"? That sounds fraught. Google brings up something which I don't think is the same thing, given the internal details. Economically speaking, he seems to be a big "government partnership" guy, which isn't good. I'd hope that we'd all learned better during the Nineties, but I guess statism and borderline corporatism is an occupational hazard among Beltway denizens, and one of Cahir's biggest weaknesses is that he is a Beltway denizen, first as a Senate aide, then as a reporter on the congressional beat. His big-brain interventionist healthcare proposals require serious tax increases, so that's a big "no". But at least there's some details here.

At first pass, looks like I'll be voting for my carpetbagger neighbor in the primaries, but I'd have to be offered a pretty repulsive or lunatic alternative to vote for him in November. He's too statist on taxation & government intervention for me to be happy with him given what I'm seeing, but he seems better than the other Democratic alternatives.

Now that's how you do a sex scandal. That's sin on a monumental scale. That's hypocrisy and chutzpah worthy of respect.

Oh, what would we do without the spinal-reflexive perversity and contrariness of Slate? Surprisingly, they found somebody other than Christopher Hitchens to write this week's poison obituary.

The moonbat nest on the other side of Trinity Methodist, next to the Presbyterian Church's little parking lot, has been decorated by a massive poster or tapestry of the Dear Leader in the front window. Big BHO himself, four times as large as life and staring out at the passers-by on Spring Street, like a poster of one of the "Four Beards" in some drear Orwellian square. What makes nominal Americans indulge in such cult-of-personality antics? Is the the instinctive need of the weak reed for the safety of a snug, well-bundled fasces?

Huh.

I read Under the Banner of Heaven this weekend, after running into a lot of recent references to it in online discussions of Mormon polygamy. What a disappointment! I don't believe I've ever encountered an allegedly mainstream book of nonfiction wherein the author thought it appropriate to accuse the founder of a religion of being a practitioner of "necromancy". Furthermore, the book is totally lacking in footnotes, and suffers heavily from "stuff some pissed-off ex-polygamists told me which I will now regurgitate".

Don't get me wrong, I suspect the premise of the book - that polygamy, and specifically patriarchal religious polygyny, is inherently destructive of societies, families, and individuals - is basically true. I'd like to read a balanced, well-researched examination of the thesis in the Mormon context. Instead I got a shrieking exemplar of "moral panic" journalism.

Looks like a new neighbor of mine, Bill Cahir, is moving back into the District to run for the Democratic nomination for Peterson's seat. He's a journalist and a Marine in the reserves, with two tours in Iraq under his belt. His pro-blog's here, I'm still looking it over.
I'm technically a Democrat, and there really isn't time enough to re-register Republican before the April primaries. I should probably do some research on the Democratic candidates for the seat.

Update: it seems more like a summary of his political reporting for a local paper the next district over than anything from his own political opinions or positions. A lot of stuff about US Rep. Dent, from the Lehigh Valley.

My new temporary crown came loose after a single day of wear. I guess that's one way to get me to stop snacking at my desk... where's that dental glue they gave me...

Nothing much going on in my world. I've been reading some new manga.

Suppli is a pretty-looking, well-put-together working-single manga, slice-of-life stuff. I'm not really clear on why it was shrink-wrapped and emblazoned with an "adult content" label, as I can't even remember if there was any nudity in it, let alone anything more racy. Red River, for an alternate example, had the usual bodice-ripping, and since our protagonist has been raped away to Middle Kingdom-era Egypt, there's acres of exposed breasts on every other page-layout. Anyways, Suppli: pretty good manga, at least for the first volume. Nothing much going on - it's just about a girl in her late twenties trying to figure out what happened and when it was that she stopped having a life outside of work - but it's a very lush, aesthetic sort of nothing. There isn't any fancy hook like Tramps Like Us had, no racy "keeping boys as pets" to catch the casual reader's attention. I'll give it another volume or two before I decide whether it's better or worse than Tramps Like Us, but for now it's pretty much on the same wavelength.


Wild Ones, on the other hand, is all high-concept, little execution. The hook is that our protagonist has just been orphaned, with no close relatives; she finds out that the reason she didn't have any close relatives was because her maternal grandfather is a yakuza don and her mother had cut all ties. She gets adopted into a compound of stereotypical yakuza males and wackiness is expected to ensue. Sadly, not nearly as much wackiness as one might have hoped - this is no Gakusen, and of course somebody decided that our yakuza princess needed an age-appropriate beau to play kishi to her hime - or ojou as the case might be. Eh, it's not terrible, and maybe it'll get better in later volumes.

SA is one where it *better* improve in later volumes, because the first volume is horrifically repetitive and the art frankly sucks. The plot is pretty much Kare Kano crossed with Ouran High School Host Club - a pathologically competitive heroine struggling to beat her ice-king love-interest within the context of a high school elite called "SA" or "Special A", in reference to the Japanese habit of segregating their classes by A-B-C-D-E cadres. It's got some spark of entertainment, and it livened up a slow evening the other day, but the mangaka can only repeat the same two-page rote introduction of the same caste of characters before I wind up for a quick cast of the book 'gainst the nearest flat surface. Also? if you're going to build up an accomplishment-gradient for your class structure, if you want *any* sort of suspense or tension - show some movement. Class isn't caste, and if you're going to fill a book with elite children of company presidents, I want to see one of those companies go down in flames and take the smug elite brat with it. Movement makes for drama - it's a character arc, not a line for the love of pete.

The manga for Welcome to the NHK is up to its fifth volume, and I'm now officially out of my comfort area. You can only do so many things to a character or set of characters before I get freaked out, and the protagonist's stubborn insistence on finding rock-bottom and then breaking out dynamite & blasting caps to see if he can get any lower - the scenes with him back at home with the folks - that, my friends, has helped me find my inner freakout. I think I've had enough of Welcome to the NHK and hikkikomori in general. It just isn't a good subject for fiction.

Ugh, thanks Iowa. A choice between the Christian socialist and an antiwar apparachnik wrapped in Horatio Alger clothing. I'd probably go with Obama, but only because I *don't* miss elections.

And I might change my mind if there were a single pro-war independent. No matter how crazy.

Now that I think about it, both Huckabee and Obama are Christian socialists. Clinton's pretty big on the social gospel herself, but she's got other things going on. For that matter, think of what happens in the Islamic world when an apostate becomes the most powerful man in the world. They're gonna go apeshit. Obama may not be interested in war, but war will definitely be interested in him.

Wait, Peterson is retiring? He's only been a US Representative for a dozen years or so. His predecessor in the district lasted eighteen years. Peterson's been a *good* congressman, and I haven't heard a peep about any challengers - we're as close to a pocket borough as you get in the US, even if he wasn't a pretty good fit for the region. Is he sick? Not seriously, according to the press release.

That'll throw the cat in among the canaries. I don't think anyone in the district was prepared to have a contested congressional election worth talking about, and at the same time that Peterson's been in a very public slapfight with the governor over I-80, at that!

Who're the possible candidates? Corman's a joke, most of the Centre County state senators and representatives are Democrats except for Benninghoff, who's got some seniority but is too much of an old state bull to make the jump to national. Maybe James Rhodes from Clinton? Hanna's got the seniority for the Democratic side of things, and is conservative enough to be an old Democratic bull in a deeply hick-red district. Causer from Potter seems kind of young, but likely. What about Joe Scarneti? He's pretty loud on the subject of Fast Eddie's turnpike scam. Sam Smith from Jefferson, on the other hand, looks too old to be running for Congress for the first time.

So what are the great film renditions of Empty Manhattan? I can think of the following:

The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Anti-racism inversion of a deeply bigoted Victorian novel starring Harry Belafonte. Pretty damned good, and the Manhattan offered is stark, and modernist, and sleek, and utterly inhuman. The machine grinding on after its care-takers have left, still well-greased, oiled, and precise in the absence of any purpose.

The Devil's Advocate. It's a late-period New York-as-Babylon apocalypse, Gordon -Gecko-taken-to-the-fantastic-extreme film. A horror movie that uses surreality to emphasize alienation and grotesqueries, the empty-streets-of-Manhattan scenes are used to establish the end of the Masquerade, and the beginning of the End-of-Days. So, this movie's empty-streets-of-Gotham are intended to evoke anxiety - ye olde fear-and-trembling.

I'm having trouble thinking of other dead-Manhattan or empty-Manhattan movies. Anyone have anything to add?

Wow, the new "Viridian Collection" edition boxsets from Funimation are spectacularly cheap. Cardboard sleeves cheap. The Tenchi Muyo GXP set just showed up in the mail, and if I hadn't paid roughly $1.15 an episode, I'd be feeling a bit gypped right about now. Hope the discs don't come out of the sleeves auto-scratched, which I seem to remember was a problem with the similarly-packaged early PAL Buffy season 2 sets back in the early days of DVD. Those PAL Buffy collections weren't nearly as sleazy-cheap as this GXP set is. Mind you, I paid twice as much for the PAL Buffy set... which reminds me, would anyone want some decade-old Buffy PAL dvds? I've got the first three seasons sitting around gathering dust on a back shelf. Got an aging APEX DVD player chip-modded to play PAL discs, too.

I just read the novella "I Am Legend". The title makes a lot more sense for *that* story than for the movie. I'm not quite clear why they bothered hanging the title on the new movie - the movie's story had more in common with 28 Days Later and other modern-day zombie flicks than Matheson's story. I suppose there's the bacteriological explanation of the scourge, the madness of the characters, their inclination towards mad science, and their essential isolation. In the end, the novella is an ironic late-modern version of Lovecraft's "the Outsider", about the loneliness of becoming the monster. The Neville of the movie never explicitly becomes the scourge and monster that the Neville of the novella has already become on the first page. His monstrousness is less explicit, less textual, left to interpretation, and subverted by Smith's essential decency as a film presence.

I Am Legend isn't nearly as bad as the critics made it sound. It's actually pretty good - sort of like Castaway with monsters. Castaway's another movie that had an excellent first two-thirds, followed by a shaky final act. But to be honest, I didn't hate the ending of I Am Legend. I could have done without the nearly ten minute excerpt of Shrek - even Steven Spielberg shouldn't be allowed to get away with that kind of stuff any more - but in general I was able to suspend disbelief and go with the internal logic of the ending.

There's a lot of talk about how inherently likeable and amiable Will Smith is as an actor, but one of the marvels of the story was how aged and morally damaged his Robert Neville is by what he's seen and done. The usual moral calculus of zombie movies is inverted by the establishment of this Neville as a scientist and virologist. Despite some idiot claims by some reviewers, Smith's Neville doesn't start the movie hunting or slaughtering the monsters. Rather, he seems to be avoiding them as much as possible, and when he captures one, it's to test out a promising cure on the slavering thing which used to be a girl. Later, we see photographic records of each monster which he's captured and killed in the process of testing his serums. It's an unsettling moment, as you suddenly look again at your protagonist and see a mad scientist and borderline serial-killer in the place of a heroic castaway. It's all means to an end, but you can see that he's operating by habit and routine - that he's going through the motions of a plan, the soundness and righteousness of which he has mostly forgotten.

Smith's Neville lives so much on the surfaces of things because the depths have monsters. He moves from light to light, sealing himself up and locking down as the light goes away. He populates his locales with manikins, and carries on conversations, and has lost his way among them to such an extent that when one is moved out of its place, he becomes confused, violent, and makes a terrible mistake.

Smith's Neville is a man so morally fractured by his failures and successes that he's more a mosaic of partial personalities than a whole man. Inside his townhouse, he's a loving family man - to a family consisting solely of his dog. Inside his lab, he's a rigorous scientist. In his open-air office at the end of a dockside pier, he's a parody of a bureaucrat, waiting for other survivors, of whom he's given up all other hope except for those few designated hours by the river. When the shutters close, he hides with his dog in the darkness. The only thing holding his parts together is the only other person in his life - his dog Sam. Sam is the one thing holding his life together, and when she dies, then Neville goes smash.

The movie goes smash a bit as well, although not so much that I wasn't able to enjoy everything that followed. The CGI was terrible, not in that it was technically bad - although it didn't impress me all that much - but rather that it is a terrible temptation to cinematographers and directors. CGI is a cheat, a shortcut. It requires no discipline on the part of artists, and thus it relieves the pressure on decision-makers to make choices, to commit to one action at a time. CGI allows blazingly-fast action sequences, and the faster they go, the cheaper the cost, because all of that blur can hide all sorts of shortcuts and cheats and render-tricks. Instead of showing one single clash, with a small and well-defined set of actors or objects in motion, CGI allows and almost seems to demand a blur of mobs in motion. Blur isn't interesting, and mobs multiplied by cut-and-paste are basically expensive wallpaper, and about as threatening.

There are honestly cool things in the last third of I Am Legend. Every single one of them would have been better with at least half of the CGI animation cuts excised. I don't know why they thought they needed spectacle beyond the scenes of Empty Manhattan. Those were far, far more powerful than any of the swirling killer-zombie cuts of the last third. The head monster was most alarming when he was *still*. Whenever he moved, he became an effect, and then action wallpaper.

Too bad. American movies aren't going to get better until they fire half the animators, and send the directors off to make films with real-world special effects. Real explosive squibs and stuntmen teach a certain respect for the craft which isn't much different from fear. But fear teaches. Ask John Landis.

So I ended up buying a Chevy this weekend. I walked up to the dealership at the mall, and they happened to have a brand-new metallic-tangerine-orange Aveo five-door on the backlot still wrapped up with the shipping tape they use to keep it from getting banged up in the shipping racks. I got what I think was a fairly good deal; after I took it out for a test-drive, I tried to get out the door in enough time to catch the 11:08 bus from the mall into town, go check out some other dealerships on North Atherton. He pulled the usual "what can I do to get you in this car" routine, and I said, wildly, "$1000 off the sale price" in an attempt to get away without offense. They coughed up, mostly, and it was a good enough price to make up for not being a Honda or Toyota. To be honest, most of my reasons for getting a car from the latter was tied up in maintenance and quality concerns, and multiple thousands of dollars less than I would have been paying otherwise tends to make up for the difference.

So, Aveo. My mother called it "cute" when she looked it up online while I was talking to her on the phone, and I can't deny it. I was greatly amused by the color, as my father has a golf cart in that exact color, which is supposedly the same color as the Charger he owned when my parents met. It's a small car, but remarkably high off the ground - the driver's seat is higher off the pavement than any previous car I've owned. We'll see how good it is in ice and slush; Saturday wasn't nearly foul enough to provide ideal crap-weather driving conditions for the test drive, and no tractor-trailers appeared conveniently on the stretch of I-99 we took for the highway test-drive, so we'll see just how much buffeting this little hatchback can take from the big trucks moving fast. I've never been much of a leadfoot, anyways, so it seems like enough car under the hood to get me where I need to go.

It's an automatic; sorry, Jessica. ^_^

I'm in the market for a new economy subcompact, preferably something small, efficient & low-maintenance, which isn't likely to be blown off the interstate by an aggressive semi or a strong winter cross-wind.

What do you think about the Toyota Yaris, Honda Fit, or, oh, I don't know, the Suzuki Reno? Does the Toyota reputation for being a good snow-pig include tiny little micros like the Yaris?

(Although I have to say that the State College Suzuki dealership *reeks* of "fly-by-night", and the Toyota dealership doesn't have any three-door Yaris automatic transmissions on the lot, which is off-putting.)

Shameful confession time: I've long confused Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer. It appears that I've never read a thing by Norman Mailer.

I've gotten some complaints that I've failed to check-in recently. Sorry about that, it's a little busy here at work.

Mostly it's that I'm not an interesting person these days. Last week or so, I've been watching Legend of Galactic Heroes and reading Girl Genius. I quit the Con, and only really see people every other month or so.

I've got a good bit saved towards a down payment on a house, but the market is a dog's breakfast, and everybody says I'd be a damned fool to buy, or even think of buying. I know *two* people with surplus houses in Massachusetts they can't unload, for instance. (Not that I'd be in the market for a house in Massachusetts - my savings would disappear like snow on a lavaflow if I threw it into *that* market.)

Be seeing y'all around, but frankly I don't have anything much to say that I haven't said once or twice in the archives somewhere.

My Esperanto Club dues are unpayed for the last four years. They keep dunning me. In English.

Best line of the week.

Wait a minute... there are 73,000 UAW autoworkers supporting 340,000 retirees & surviving spouses of retirees? There's a five to one support ratio for workers to pensioners in the unionized auto industry?

I'd *heard* that there was an impossible situation brewing among the Big Three, but I'd no idea it was so apocalyptic. I can only hope none of my 401k mutual funds have anything invested in those companies...

I should mention that the work in Tallyrand turned out to be a sewage construction project - they're laying a sewer line under Spring Creek and the whole of the park, going I know not where - there once was a CDT article, but it's been devoured by the CDT's contempt for public archiving.

They're dredging the pond between the footbridge & the dam in Tallyrand Park. They've got barriers up & have opened the spillways into the millrace, and the only thing running in the lower bed of Spring Creek is the runoff from the Big Spring. Very odd looking, but I guess they had to do it - the aquatic weeds were over over the surface of the creek in July, and it would just get worse. But it looks like heck for the time being - they've torn up the grass in Tallyrand something fierce, and there's construction rubbish all over the place.

On the other hand, they're also cleaning up the mess from the Bush House ruins. Not sure if they're going to rebuild, or just extend Tallyrand along the site of the old building. At this point, I'd wager "more park". There just isn't that much demand for buildings in downtown Bellefonte - the Bush House had been mostly unoccupied when it burned, anyways.

For that matter, I see that the developer pulled down his sign with the five-story "Academy Heights" condo fantasy on the grounds of the old burned-down Academy slums. It's a season for the end of dreams & the demolition of uncapitalized wishes unfulfilled.

Winter is coming.

BTW, Valentine Hill Road is a remarkably different place at 1 AM at night than it is in the light of day. The stretch through the Kelly Springs to the Willowbank bridge over the Logan Branch in particular has a creeping freakishness which wouldn't be out of place in a Pennsylvanian "Legend of Sleepy Hollow", especially that place beside the hillside where the factory floodlights across the merging creeks cut golden slashes through the dark trees and mist. I've never made the trip down the hill in quite so short a time, feeling quite the Ichabod as I bolted for home.

This extended series of essays on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce is easily the coolest thing I've seen this month. It's not so much a series of essays as the outline of a extended bout of serious research on Bierce, the circumstances of his disappearance, the events of the Mexican Revolution, and the various personalities writing about Bierce & using his disappearance and apparent death for various reasons. It's about half-way to a dissertation, but written in a much more lucid and open style than that scholastic accusation might lead the cynical to suspect.

Anyways: keen longish chunk of text on the mystery of Bierce.

Via Dimitri.

(Sorry if this is cryptic & weird, it's getting busy here at work. Rushed.)

Interesting post on St. Cyprian of Carthage, who's apparently been confused with a less-well-known St. Cyprian of Antioch in the Spanish-speaking world and thus has an undeserved following among 'white witches' and other practitioners of Catholic-flavoured magic. Not the kind of blog I expected to find, trolling an unvisited section of the otakusphere - a bit overly Catholic for my tastes, but intermittently quite interesting.

Huh. I'm getting a *lot* of corn out of the Delta this year, in areas which are traditionally primarily cotton growing centres. I guess all that palaver about ethanol crowding out foodstocks & starving the world might be a little overdrawn, if the cash crop getting displaced is heavily-subsidized, inedible cotton. Of course, this isn't good for our direct customers, who make a lot of money supplying cotton needs, and not nearly as much on corn.

$80 to cross Pennsylvania on I-80? Good God, that's extortionate! All of you dingbats who voted Rendell back into the statehouse? Yes, you, over there, you too. You're all to blame for this. You can be damned sure that Swann wouldn't have attempted to beggar the north half of the state to fund SEPTA.

Look, I like light rail. I take the MTA every time I go down to Baltimore. But I like it because it's monstrously subsidized. If the Hunt Valley-BWI line charged what it actually cost to run, there's no way in heck I'd bother, no matter how exorbitant downtown Baltimore parking fees or BWI long-term parking got.

I'm reading Fleming's Washington's Secret War and I came across the chapter on the great fraud, "Lieutenant-General" Baron von Steuben. I can't for the life of me make out why this grand comedic figure has never been the subject of a slapstick movie. He's such a histrionic buffoon, that you'd think the big comedic actors would jump at a chance to play him. Is it his initial inability to speak English? You'd think it would have been a natural subject for the silent-film comedians, a pompous junior Prussian officer pretending to be a lieutenant-general & shaming all the officers of the Continental Army by lowering himself to drill troops like a common sergeant, all the while ranting profanely in three languages through a series of quickly-exhausted translators.

There's also that bit about him quickly rattling out a manual of arms overnight - I guess that's where Bujold got the "does this make me a space pirate?" scene from the Warrior's Apprentice.

While I was down in Maryland last weekend, my friend Bill loaned me a copy of a book on hikikomori, parasaito, and other Japanese social maladies, entitled Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. It proports to be a book on how Japan is wrecking its recent generations, but the book actually delivered is not quite what was promised.

For one thing, the author isn't very good. He's the very model of the New Republic-style neo-liberal - shallowly pro-market in a dogmatic, narrow, and unconsidered fashion. A ship without ballast & a shallow keel, he gets blown about by sudden gusts, more enthralled by metaphor than details or depth. In comparing Japan and the Japanese with the West & Westerners, or even the Japanese & the Koreans, he exaggerates differences. The Koreans aren't nearly as individualistic as he portrays, the Japanese not as conservative. He has a remarkable blind spot for politics & leftism in general. To read his take, you'd think the political riots & unrest of the sixties hadn't happened in Japan. I was amused when he obscured the political affiliations of a prominent female Japanese politician (presumably a higher-up in the Socialist Party, from context) who kept divorcing her long-suffering husband for bureaucratic reasons.

As Bill warned, the author doesn't spend nearly as much time as you'd expect on the actual social issues in question, preferring to regurgitate shallow and biased pomposities about Japanese business practices at considerable length. The research is shallow and bare-boned, and I left the book with no more confidence in the common wisdom about hikikomori than I had beforehand. And really, that's all that's offered - a regurgitation of common wisdom.

In the end, it's a crap book. It gets worse as the book gets closer to the end. You can really tell that a journalist wrote it - it's essentially a very long thumbsucker with random factoids thrown into the text to fill out the length, stitched together with poorly-thought-out opinions, prejudices, bias, and over-worked metaphors. I wasn't surprised when he mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments that he's worked in Northern California all of his life. And that last revelation about his pet hikikomori having retreated to his room, drugged to the gills by his overprotective and hostile mother - good lord, what a thing to drop in passing as you're leaving the book! Very "Carrie" or even "Misery" - something Stephen King at any rate, and it left me wondering what these parents do with their hermit-children when nobody is looking.

One thing in passing - using Takashi Murakami as your example of popular anime "cool"? How sodding San-Fran/NYC effete snob can you possibly get? This is the Warholesque tool who picked up the big-eye technique to wow the gallery-folk. Real people don't care about what the Andy Warhols do in their expensive little lofts. Murakami isn't an "anime artist", he's the art-world equivalent of Ben Dunn.

Mind you, a good part of this is my loss of enthusiasm for anime fandom in general. They aren't growing up, Martha. Or else, they're in that awful, awkward, unpleasant phase which seems to go on way, way too long. The charm of cute, bubbly female anime fandom has long since worn off. Between the petty thieves in the dealers room, scam artists ripping off the terminally clueless, the horrible 4-chan horde, and general mild lawlessness and ugliness, I'm ready to toss the whole stinking lot out of Eden. It doesn't help that no-one can properly define what good an anime con is for, anymore. I spent AnimeNEXT playing poker or working, and I spent The Con just plain flat-out working, 7 AM to after midnight for the whole weekend. I'm not seeing why these things are worth attending, which makes it harder to explain to a family on a Sunday morning why they're paying $60 for the three hours or so before we close shop and blow away with the tumbleweeds.

I've badly burnt out on The Con again. I can only take so many years of playing glorified hall monitor for the world's largest and freakiest high school before I break. I could do the job again if pressed, but I don't want to associate with the people who run things, I don't want to have to implement their idiot over-complicated schemes for joyless beige panopticon classification, and I'm tired of the crap in general.

Your average con staffer has an enthusiasm half-life of about three years. It's been about five years since I re-joined the Con, which means I'm about due to flake out.

I'm thinking that unless somebody comes to me with hat in hand to say "please stay with the con, and no you don't have to force people to sign their real names to their badges, get rid of Free Sunday Afternoon Con, explain why we're getting rid of the multiple badge designs, enter at-door registrations during the convention, assign members their over-eighteen stamps/wristbands at the door, and implement all the rest of our brilliant, mind-meltingly impractical schemes to make your conlife miserable & you, personally hated by the membership, Mitch" - well, then. Find somebody else to waste their vacation time working far harder than they do at their actual for-pay jobs.

BTW, it appears that the British *are*, in a sense, indirectly responsible for the recent plague of badgers in the Basra area which the locals are loudly denouncing them for. The badgers are fleeing the once-drained salt marshes north and east of the city, which the coalition has been re-flooding as part of a restoration project for the Midian saltmarshes. Sounds as if the badgers originally came from the north, and thus are unusual critters in the Basra region.

Not that I give two figs for the destroyed habitat of a species which has only been in residence for a dozen years, but it's amusing that a pious ecological restoration project (which, note you, I fully support) is causing politically significant ecological disruption of its very own.

Hey-ho. Yes, I'm still with the living. It's just the busy season here at work, and somehow I ended up volunteering for two different cons this month, which means I ended up taking a lot of vacation time during the busy season. Ooops.

I'm mostly using this post to clear out some of the old links on the right hand side.

Geez. Everybody and their brother are watching Shingu now. I suppose I ought to keep an eye out for the next time it gets discounted on Right Stuf. To be honest, I've got viewing material piled to the ceiling, more than enough for the next several months. Heck, I've even got Stellvia in the pile, thanks to the latest Pioneer Geneon 10/25 disc sale.

Bwa!

I have to back him up on that - the anime fan gets conditioned to take video in twenty-three minute chunks, and watching a live-action TV drama at forty-five minutes or an hour - if you're watching it old-school, with commercials & all - can be kind of unbalancing.

So I'm trying to hide from this year's Bellefonte Cruise. The last two years, I staffed a convention in New Jersey to avoid the 'Cruise; this year, that convention is running first weekend in July, so I'm kind of stuck here. We went over to a guy's apartment in Toftrees to watch the last three Star Trek movies, but that was over too long. I'm sitting here at work, trying to kill time. At home, it's like I'm under siege by the car savages from the Road Warrior. Revving engines, fumes, lily-white, tattooed, pot-bellied crackers as far as the watering eye can see. At least they don't have the car stereo contest on my block this year. No, it's just the food court right outside my door. Fried bread and grease stink bad enough I closed my front window.

Meh. I prefer it when they're just burning the dearly departed in the crematory across the parking lot. It's quieter, and smells less.

I guess I'll go home & play anime loud enough that I can't hear the barbarians hammering at the gates.

OK, two volumes into the Dark Horse manga Reiko the Body Shop, I'm giving up. I had heard that it was worth the preposterous Japlish title & gore factor, and the first volume gave me some reason to think there might be something there. The grotesque violence and blood-splatter came with a certain vicious-minded willingness to follow through, and I kind of respected that. On the other hand, the artwork was bad enough that a friend, upon looking at it, asked if it was American, and the writing wasn't exactly brilliant.

The second volume, sadly, drops everything that made the first volume marginally interesting. The protagonist is no longer an ice-blooded money-grubbing mercenary who barely cares about the living, nor are we expected to sympathize with the victimized, risen dead as they tear apart living villains. Instead, it's a fight-the-evil-wizard slog of the most generic, cliche-worn thread, teeming with one-trick necromancers & their pet, customized zombies. The zombies aren't aggrieved characters with their own emotional arcs, they're grotesque Pokemon. It's lame.

It's kind of shocking just how lame the second volume is in comparison with the first. Even the way that almost every new character introduced in the second volume is gorily dismembered during the course of the book doesn't make up for the lameness they sprayed all over the walls in their death-throes.

I'm finally reading Albion's Seed. Interesting material, reads very much as the summary of an entire school's worth of research, rather than the product of the sort of solitary hero-historian stance you usually encounter in Civil War history. I suppose that's due to the statistics-heavy cultural/demographic nature of the material, which is inherently dense and intensive on the sort of heavy-duty archive gruntwork for which grad students & doctoral candidates employed en mass are best suited. The author is quite harsh on late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth colonial-history revisionists, especially those who campaigned against the notion of Virginia being led by "distressed cavaliers", and he directly dings some of them for having pushed their thesis without actually having done the heavy lifting in English archives that would have disproved the revisionist argument that the Virginian founders were plebian and commercial pretenders to gentility.

Also started reading the first volume of the Del Rey re-translation of Parasyte. Excessively literal in places, I suppose to compensate for the very, very loose translation of the old Tokyo-Pop version. Still a lot of fun, teeth-grindingly literal sound effects and all.

Wow, Spiderman 3 was bad. Like, walk-out-in-the-middle bad. I didn't bother to look up any reviews because the second movie had been so good, but I should have remembered the sequel half-life rule. The chances of a good second sequel following a good first sequel is vanishingly small... It was as if they couldn't find a decent script, and just took the first three off of the top of the pile, dropped them into a blender, and poured a glassful of the results into a mug. It was about twenty minutes too long, was full of logic flaws & deus ex machina, and was over-crowded with villains. It certainly didn't help that the writers included almost every bad idea ever inflicted on the Spiderman comic, though they managed to resist the Gwen Stacy clone thing. I guess they needed to hold something really bad in reserve for the inevitable direct-to-video fourth movie.

Oh, and Stan Lee? Go home, and stop inserting yourself into Marvel franchise material. I know it's the only thing left to you after the suits bounced you out of control oh so many years ago, but I'm tired of seeing, and worse, hearing from you.

Ugh. The downside of online banking - one mistake, and you're hemorrhaging overdraft fees left and right until the offending bank posts the correction. *That* CD wasn't worth the $32(d4) worth of overdrafts it accidentally generated by being drawn from my checking account instead of my savings account... Not even when you count the extra 0.75% APR.

Meanwhile, my company is moving from a Simple IRA retirement plan with American Funds to a 401k plan with another mutual fund family, and the paperwork got messed up in my case. Monday night I had to talk someone from American out of her plan to mail me several years worth of accumulated retirement savings at my home address. Yeah, that wouldn't generate a massive tax event, thanks ever so much. They told me it was fixed yesterday here at work, and then I got home to another answering machine message last night with the same girl burbling about "not being able to hold this cheque after [today]". The front office says they'll talk her down from whatever new insanity American was about to inflict upon my karma-whipped financial corpus.

Beh. I'm in a mood to go get drunk or something. It'd help if I actually had something to do here at work other than sit and stew. Whenever things get really mangled, the calls stop coming and I temporarily have nothing to do while the customers deal with their immediate issues. Then everything comes down like an avalanche. I hate this sort of silence. It always portends bad things.

Went to see 300 on its first (and probably only) weekend at the Garman Opera House. Saturday afternoon matinee - just me and another middle-aged guy. The hard-left owners of the Opera House could *not* have been enthused at this turnout. I can't imagine why they scheduled it - clearly their usual art-house crowd wasn't up for what Fred called the other day "fascist warporn", and the extensive nudity and violence wasn't going to bring in the family audience which is the other mainstay of the Opera House's traffic.

Not that I can argue with Fred's description. Frank Miller has always flirted with fascistic imagery and the logic of fascism. Lots of emphasis on physical perfection, warrior ethos, blood-and-soil, a nihilistic fixation on "good deaths", a distrust of traditional elites & elders, elected or otherwise - all of this was in The Dark Knight Returns, it's just a lot more obvious when he's playing with Spartans & right-wing mythmaking than back when he was cracking on Reagan & Superman.

It was probably the depiction of the physically deformed Spartan traitor that tipped things over the brink for me. The use of the deformed to represent moral depravity & social weakness is an old, bad habit of the fascistic and the old right, and it would be kind of ugly to find it in a movie made in the second half of the Twentieth, let alone in 2007. I'd say the same thing about the leprous-looking ephors, except that Mel Gibson pulled the same stunt with the literal leper-father of Robert the Bruce back in Braveheart.

All that aside, as far as fascist warporn goes, 300 is pretty cracking good. I fear that film is an inherently irrational medium, and that you can only choose your irrationalities when it comes to works of art in that medium - do you want your warporn to be communist, pacifist, or fascist? Of the three, I'd probably prefer fascist in a time of war. It's less demoralizing. But it isn't really a good set of choices, is it?

OK, I'm about ready for Bleach's Soul Society arc to end.

Finally.

I appreciated the manga's initial punk aesthetic & monster-of-the-week plotting. It wasn't substantial, but it was interesting and entertaining. I was even willing to put up with all the archaic half-translated Japanese gibberish - ryoka, zapakoto, etc - as part of the ambiance. What I'm increasingly unwilling to put up with is the ten volumes or so of glacial soul reaper quarreling, posturing, and meandering about, destroying spiritual architecture in the Harry Potter-meets-Kyoto-of-the-dead dramatic wasteland of the Soul Society. Enough already.

There's like a thousand members of the guards companies, and I swear the mangaka is determined to make every single one a character, complete with backstory, motivation, and moral arc. Not that I can tell them apart - they've all got peculiar archaic Japanese names, and half the time I can't even guess right about the sex of a particular individual. The author gives them numbers and rank, and I still get confused about which one is which.

I'm ready to see the whole damn place burned to the ground and re-populated with hollows. Which is another thing - what happened to fighting the hollows? They were kind of neat, in a chilling, the-abyss-stares-also sort of way. We haven't seen one except in flashbacks for lord only knows how many chapters.

Doesn't help that the effect that the mangaka is going for - Soul Society order bad, hulk smash! - is kind of... obnoxious. The "good guys" are, objectively viewed, anarchist scum. They're invading a sovereign state with the aim of abducting a duly convicted condemned criminal who's admitted her own guilt, and are provoking a rebellion & civil war among a military force which clearly was designed to keep individuals with appalling intrinsic power & violent instincts from rampaging about, destroying everything around them. The soul reapers are dangerous, morally suspect, and difficult to control even under a ferocious and unforgiving system of discipline. I shudder to think what they'd be like in a Hobbesean state of nature.

I'd be more sympathetic to the newspaper claim that we lost a "landmark" in the accidental burning of the Bellfonte Victorian Manor if it hadn't been one of five bed-and-breakfasts on Linn Street alone. Two of which are for sale, last time I looked. Walked past the gutted remains yesterday, and yes indeedy, it is quite gutted. But, seeing as it's a brick victorian, I suspect that they could rebuild it if they were so inclined with their insurance money. It had been a fairly nice house before the fire.

As for the historical landmarkiness of the place - this is Bellefonte. You can't walk your dog without it pissing on a Victorian. Often one that's worthy of being pissed on by a dog - we've got a lot of crap old Victorians. Not so much on Linn Street, but then, Linn and Curtin Streets are the heart of gentrified Bellefonte. Go one block over to Lamb Street, and you're looking at a much more representative selection of surviving Victoriana. Although it seems as if the gentrified and the ghettoized buildings burn down at about the same rate of flamage. Being a gentrifying yuppie restorer apparently doesn't mean much in terms of fireproofing your property.

I noticed a team of Amishmen pouring concrete for the foundations of a new set of those crap townhouses going up at the top of Valentine Hill Road. They had a token English to operate the concrete mixing truck. The very fact that Amishmen, those paragons of handcraftmenship, are involved in the construction of those aesthetically revolting monuments to the Quick Construction Buck, let alone in a concrete-pouring capacity, has boggled my mind.

I read an arrogant article in a frou-frou magazine while I eating lunch in a Chinese buffet in Baltimore last summer, just before the Con. The writer went on for many pages about the disappearing Amish heartland, buried under by gentrification, expanding sprawl, and the dreaded McMansion plague. I now find myself wondering just how many of the foot soldiers of that invasion of the Mennonite Paradise Lost were, in fact, well-bearded Amish mercenaries, cashing in on the boom & plowing under their "heritage".

Oh, well. Just my post-modern moment for the month.

To carry the story over from Thursday... I ended up driving into State College to pick up the last few weeks' worth of manga from the 'Swap and ate at Ponderosa. Steak & a good, long ransack of the buffet. Five courses of beef!

Skip Beat volume 5. They're now advertising it as "by the author of Tokyo Crazy Paradise". That's great and all - I've heard good things about Tokyo Crazy Paradise & even read a couple scanslated chapters of it - but that itself is the problem. I read them in scanslation. Nobody's published Tokyo Crazy Paradise in English, although there was a rumor for a while that Viz had the license. Why are you advertising a manga in its fifth volume in the English market with a comic which isn't even available yet? Oh, well. Maybe it's a hint that they're getting ready to publish. Tokyo Crazy Paradise looks like fun - it's sort of like Burst Angel with a cross-dressing heroine & bishie yakuza.

Last volume of Please Save My Earth. Eh, it doesn't end all that well. All that drama & elaborate Rashomon-style flashbacks, and it all kind of deflates in a trainwreck of a climax. It bore more resemblance to a classic Takahashi pileup than the conclusion of a proper reincarnation drama. The coda was fairly sweet, though. If the author had only resisted the temptation to have the whole cast in on the climax, it would have been a much, much better finale. As it was, she managed to make the ending of a series in the twenty-first volume feel rushed and slap-dash. Meh.

Well, heck. I almost forgot. Today's the fifth annual International Eat An Animal For PETA Day. I'll have to stop at the Burger King tonight & get myself around a triple-decker.

Walking in to work earlier this week, during that last semi-big snowfall, I made the discovery that while rain might roll proverbially off the back of ducks, snow does not do the same. It's somewhat odd to discover the local waterfowl happily paddling about in Spring Creek during a snowstorm, backs heaped about an inch high with piles of fresh fluffy late-winter snow. Shame I didn't have a camera with me...

I don't really do ACW blogging much anymore, but since Dimitri doesn't have comments and I don't have his email address on hand, this is the only way to comment on a recent item on his blog, which notes a letter-writer's peculiar quote of Lincoln claiming to have incited the war, and an even more peculiar quote from Karl Marx describing the war as "a tariff war", and turning upon a "Northern lust for sovereignty". I don't know about the Fox letter of Lincoln's quoted, but the Karl Marx cite is a deliberate distortion. It's from one of Marx's wartime newspaper essays, and as I thought when I read Dimitri's post, the sentiment is not Marx's own. He was characterizing the view-point of a class of London newspapers, noting contemptuously:

It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place.

Karl Marx was strongly pro-Northern in sympathy, as even a cursory reading of his wartime writings on the subject will reveal. He considered it a war of capitalist against feudalist, and naturally chose to approve of the more dialectically advanced antagonist.

Wow, this is pretty ugly stuff - the Cherokee Nation is threatening to purge its roles of Cherokee "freedmen" - members of the tribe who draw their line of descent from freed ex-slaves of Cherokee ownership. I honestly thought we were past this sort of stone racism. Admittedly, it seems tied up in petty tribal politics & it looks like the main goal is to narrow down the number of people with a claim to a part of the gambling pie, but come on, really.

I didn't think the Cherokee were all that big into gambling, though - isn't there too many of them for something as inherently limited as reservation gambling to pay off? I mean, the economics make sense when you're talking about a pocket-sized tribe like the New England remnants, but a three-hundred-thousand-member group like the Cherokee? The money'd be like a drop of ink in a rainbarrel, even if they did purge everyone with a slave ancestor.

Wheee. Obama's descended from slaveholders. Whoop-de-friggin'-do. I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% of all American blacks are descended from slaveowners. The only novelty in Obama's case is that the lineage is from his white, American mother, and not the father from which he gets the pigmentage which makes him "black" by racemongering standards. The discovery of slaveowning ancestors probably gives his "blackness" more cultural credibility.

I haven't found any evidence of direct-ancestor slaveowners, but some of the New York Thorns in the richer, Episcopalian families were. The New Jersey line we're descended from were modest country folk, and were lucky if they owned land, let alone other people.

Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.

Huh. The Pakistanis coughed up a Taliban minister. If they're going to produce an al Queda or Taliban target every time a prominent American official visits, then we need to send Cheney over there at least once a fortnight for the foreseeable future. Well, at least until they run out of ISI-subsidized malefactors to sacrifice on the altar of false-hearted alliance. Not as if the vice president seems to be doing anything else of value these days, other than playing clay pigeon for opportunistic Afghani terrorists.

There's something about the Right Stuf's 25-for-$100 sales that brings out the bumbling moron in yours truly. Last time around, I screwed up while ordering & forgot to ask for the free shipping, and had to beg and plead via email to get that amended. This time I missed the coupon code box (where you're supposed to enter "abundance10" or "abundance25" to get the respective 10-for-$50 or 25-for-$100 deals) and ended up ordering almost $700 worth of DVDs I only sort-of-wanted for full price.

Damn, I hope they straighten that order out. It'd be nice if their ordering interface was a tad more forgiving of errors & mistakes. Betcha they'd have less of a customer service load if you could cancel or amend orders prior to processing. As it is, if you've given the system your credit card information, you're stuck until the customer service staff get back to you on your problem.

Bonfatto's down on Zion Road is doing a free poker tournament series. I walked down there from work yesterday, since the weather was so nice & all. A dachshund was running around in the slushy snow in the meadow the next block east from the National Guard barracks, and I thought it had gotten away from someone walking it. Nobody was around, though, and after a minute or two it ran back to a bloody lump of fur over by the trees, which turned out to be a freshly dead rabbit almost as big as the weiner dog itself. Said dog proceeded to drag this enormous leaking hunk of meat off into the treeline, clearly concerned with protecting its kill from the big threatening predator-shaped animal walking towards said dinner. IE, me. One of the players at the tournament told me later on that dachshunds are particularly vicious hunters, and described some alarmingly alpha-male encounters with the little monsters. Who knew?

Well, I'm now the proud owner of a slightly foxed grey Camry station wagon. It'll need some work, but not too much out of pocket, once the insurance pays off on the totaled Lanos. Emergency averted. Yay?

So I was about to write up a great big "yay, Captain Herlock: Endless Oddssey" rave about said thirteen-episode OAV series, and then the last minute or so of show dropped a big ol' pile of WTF in my lap. Somebody fell asleep during "Introduction to Foreshadowing 403" at screenwriting school. Not only did it come out of far left field, but it underlined just how useless and passive one of the core characters had actually been in the course of the series.

Don't get me wrong, Captain Herlock is 90% of a really cool series... argh! Can I digress for a second to express just how annoying that officially-endorsed misspelling is? It's stupid - the character is clearly being called Harlock, same as he's always been, and every other translation has *always* used "Harlock". Er, except for that one company that used "Warlock". Anyways, there have been more than a half-dozen different companies that have turned out Matsumoto anime and manga in English with the Harlock character, so the trademark issue is almost certainly not a valid factor. What the heck was Geneon thinking?

Ahem. Right, the semi-compromised coolness of "Captain H[e]rlock". The animation is top-notch, if a tad dark and murky at times. The usual gang of Harlock cronies are about, and it's a real nostalgia-trip for those who remember the old TV series with any sort of affection - and I did like what little I've seen of the old Fuji subs, which is to say, about a dozen or so episodes. The villains are nigh-Lovecraftian in their Elder Godness, full of menace and honest creepy-crawliness. It's an honestly dark show, bordering on outright horror. Rin Taro's talent for set-pieces and striking composition is here in full form, and there's a lot to keep attention riveted fully to the screen. On the other hand, I have to wonder who hired Nobuteru Yuuki for this project, as his "natural" character-design style is not at all similar to the classic Leiji Matsumoto look, and the clash is expressed in a certain plasticity and rubberiness around the eyes which takes a bit away from the presentation.

I guess I've seen much, much worse anime from the Leiji Matsumoto oeuvre. I just wish that ending had been handled better than it was. Maybe another episode? Better foreshadowing? Some more adjustment to the character dynamics to lay a better foundation? Something.

So we're supposed to call fujoshi "otome" now? I call bull. If you see a fan self-appellation and it isn't derived from something derogatory, it isn't legit, it's some sort of marketing gag traveling under false papers.

[BTW: fujoshi ~ "rotten women"; otome ~ "maidens". Roughly.]

Of course, I could be misreading the situation. After all, there are lunatics running around the States these days talking about "princess culture", although that seems to be a mainstream mundane sort of thing. If this otome business is actually legit, then... nosir, I don't like it. One of the things I've always found refreshing about fan culture is its collective tendency to not indulge in excesses of self-esteem. There's very little I love less than self-congratulation.

H/T Brigid.

Mm. Car's been written off by the claims adjuster, I've got the license plate in my office now. I have a line on an under-blue-book '89 Camry wagon that a woman in State College is selling, but I haven't seen it yet & she doesn't want to go outside until next week - "it's so very cold outside!" We'll see, the mileage is low, but a lot of things can happen to a car over eighteen years, and the automatic transmission is worrisome in such an old car.

So I was discussing the likelihoods of my car getting repaired with Jason G. in front of the guy at Catherman's along with a random cop hanging out at the counter. Like a pair of comedy sidekicks, the Catherman's guy cracks "It's a Daewoo, of course it's totaled", and the cop commences to busting on my poor violated chariot o' kimchee. I'm feeling a tad oppressed, people.

Sadly, Jason G. agreed with our group consensus. It's a write-off. I walked around parts of Bellefonte looking for tell-tale damage. Less car damage out there than I'd expect. I suppose I've been mis-led by all those years living in a college town, expecting a quarter of all vehicles on the road to have visible damage.

Well, heck.

Last night I lost that long-running long-odds bet called "parking on the street". I was woken up by my neighbors hammering on my door to inform me that some drunk in a light sedan had slammed into my little Korean putt-putt and smashed it around the street, then driven off. The "driven off" part made me wonder how much the neighbors saw, because it's hard to picture a small sedan doing that much damage & driving off under its own power. You'd think that the gas cut-off would have shut down the vehicle at the least. The whole left rear-end was folded back into the trunk, right up to the wheelwell.

Called the cops & had Catherman's tow it away to their wrecked-cars storage lot. It's probably totaled, given that it's seven years old, Daewoos aren't really all that common, and as a modern subcompact, the frame is probably compromised.

Crap. I wanted another two or three years out of that car. Throws a right spanner into my down-payment project, too. At least I structured my savings in preparation for this sort of emergency. But damn, I didn't want to divert house savings towards a new car. Not when I can get by without a car for, like, two hundred sixty days out of the year.

[Edited to reflect the proper name of the towing service & the damage. Got them confused with a customer of ours here at work.]

Setsucon was a success by backcountry one-day event standards. Lots of kids in costume, with a dusting of college-age kids & parents keeping an eye on the herd. I ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with the Duartes from the Con, who were taking out the traveling cosplay photography suite for a test-drive at a local convention, since they live in State College, doing postgrad studies in their respective fields. That seemed to be more of a success than I would have predicted - perhaps that particular budget item *won't* be the dead loss I thought it would be. I ended up getting the "elder statesman" treatment by a few of the staffers, which was kind of peculiar. Oh, well. I've spent worse Saturdays. I expect they'll run another one next year - perhaps they'll be able to get the hotel rooms to support a full weekend next time, assuming they can find a weekend without some sort of athletic event soaking up all the loose hotel space in town.

There's going to be a one-day anime minicon in State College tomorrow, something called Setsucon, run by the anime club on campus. It doesn't seem to be much of a muchness, but I wasn't going to be doing anything this weekend but playing Campaign: Vicksburg, reading Basara, and watching DVDs, so what the heck. At-door registration is $15, and they are running in the Days Inn Penn State, which was the location of the first anime con on the east coast back in '94. So: nostalgia time!

The Days Inn has gentrified a bit since the period when it was the typical venue for comic cons and similar planned, fannish affairs. It was quite posh the last time I stopped in. I had heard that they didn't "do" fan cons anymore, but the anime club people talked their way in - at least in part by agreeing to not run a con suite, if I understand correctly. So be prepared to feed yourself without aid of free con-provided potato chips and soda. The time I ran a con there, we got too much of the stuff and ended up grazing off of the leftovers for two or three months afterwards... the days when you could actually run con suites for anime cons has been long gone, at least for my crowd. Oh, well.

Don't expect any sort of extravaganza, and I doubt there'll be all that many people from outside of the county, knowing the current anime scene. But if you're in town, I'll be around. Look for the heavily-bearded guy in flannel and jeans. If the clutch of cosplayers who seem to be planning to come show, I should stand out by failing to stand out. Like a big ol' blotch of grey in the middle of a Jackson Pollack.

Man, Skip Beat rocks. I started reading the fourth volume over breakfast and was almost late to work because I sat & read it all the way through. The "Secret Language of Angels" story wrapped up about like I expected, if a bit more upbeat than it could have gone. The rest of it was fun with variety show chaos, which isn't something to spit on, really. Who can hate Japanese variety show wackiness?

I've not been saying much, and I'm sorry about that. It's the dead of the year, and I just don't have much energy left after work's done and what little exercise I get in.

I end up deleting most of what I have to say for the high sins of tediousness or ill-consideration. Most days the sun is a rumor, appearing in breaks in the monocloud during office-hours spent in my windowless cubicle. The weather is oddly mild, unwelcome warmth in the Christmas-solstice season. At least I can now start counting the days until daylight will stretch far enough to light my way back down the hill, and put myself back on a walking regimen.

But, it's not all gloom and drear. I bought Gun Frontier cheap from Right Stuff, and it's a grand lark of a series: Leiji Matsumoto characters shanghaied into The Old West. And not just any version of The Old West, but a darkly comic, bitter, late-Sixties version, full of racism, ill repute, sudden violence, and dubious heroism. Harlock as a laconic doofus of a gunfighter is particularly impressive, but the real hero of the story is his lecherous sidekick Tochiro, searching for the scattered remnants of the massacre at Samurai Creek. Their dynamic is roughly similar to that of Eastwood and Willich from the Dollars trilogy, but with the addition of the third character, maiden of negotiable virtue/conspiratrix Sinunora, it becomes clear that the model we're looking at is that of Paint Your Wagon or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Matsumoto anime shouldn't be this much fun - they're supposed to be all long-faced and virtuous and noble in that typical Japanese nationalist fashion. They're not supposed to have episodes featuring riflemen fatally giving away their positions with rainbows created by pissing into the sunrise, or having the protagonist arrested & sentenced to hang for the high crime of public urination in a particularly starchy town.

Also, the Japanese creators seem to know more about the period than the American adaptation crew. There's a mention at one point about knowing that a character hadn't been with the cavalry because he was lugging around a converted Springfield '61 - an infantry weapon, not a carbine. Or, at least, there was in the original Japanese - the translator got confused and had the characters talking about a "Calvin cavalry gun". No, guys, that wasn't "Caluvin", that's "carubin[e]".

Photoessay about the postapocalyptic remnants of Detroit's State Fair neighborhood. I didn't quite buy the essay's line until I pulled up GoogleEarth and found the neighborhood, which appears from the air to match the essayist's descriptions. This is a knock-on essay from this inital article, which features more of the downtown Detroit wildernesses you've probably seen in mainstream articles before now.

Via Bruce Sterling's blog, which I'd read more often if it wasn't such a glitchy disaster area in its own very special way. Why is it that Wired's blog layout is so very technically incompetent? This site might not look like much, but at least it isn't an eyesore.

Someone claims to have engineered a flying full-size version of Nausicaa's flying wing. Eh, I'm not convinced. Looks like they've built a large kite which can carry a human being, but I betcha if you dropped that towline & let it glide, you'd see that sucker flip end for end until the pilot fell or the vehicle hit the dirt. It looks like it's getting all of its pitch and yaw axis stability from the towline.

Via Chizumatic.

Scientists in Toronto may have made a major breakthrough on both type I and type II diabetes. At any rate, they seem to have found out how to cure the diseases in mice. It hasn't been tested in humans yet, heck, there hasn't been time for other scientists to replicate the results with mice, and there's always the chance that they're blowing smoke, but damn! Interestingly, the line of approach is neurological, attacking pain neurons in the pancreas instead of the usual gland-oriented approaches. Immunologists are harumphing furiously, so who knows?

But I've got a number of relatives with type II, and any prospect of a serious cure is heartening.

Via the Instapundit.

Phhpbt!

Fred asked me for a list of recommended manga the other week, and things have only just now slowed down enough for me to look around and try to put something together. Here's the first five, in no particular order:

1) Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket, from TokyoPop. I was just reading someone's comment on a liverjournal decrying how angry she was that this title was commonly denounced by people who had read it as "commercial crap". If you ask me, this attitude is preposterous, because Fruits Basket is glorious, brilliant crap of the highest calibre of commerciality. It is perfectly constructed to offer truly mass-market appeal - it's sold ten million copies in Asia, and another two million in North America - while also managing to be clever, aesthetically charming, and subtly disturbing all at the same time. The plot, described baldly, is ludicrous - a saintly orphaned girl's interactions with a rich family cursed to turn into the various animals of the Chinese zodiac - but the story hung on that silly notion manages to be in turn sprightly and tragic, without either element undercutting the other.

2) CLAMP's XXXholic, from Del Rey. My copy of the eighth volume just shipped from Amazon, and I'm looking forward to it as the only CLAMP title I'm currently reading. Now, CLAMP in the aggregate isn't the best story-telling or character-creating four-headed artistic team in creation. They're not really brilliant at plotting, and their style is so consistent and prototypically shoujo (even the ones that are technically shounen, like Angelic Layer) that I've heard half the shoujo titles in print mis-identified as "CLAMP" by the ill-informed.

All that aside, XXXholic is pretty damned nifty. The art style is severe black-and-white - I've yet to spot a ziptone or shade in the seven volumes released in North America. And it's a story that belongs in black-and-white, all harsh supernaturally-themed lessons in right and wrong, and the karmic price of weakness and the inevitable cost of human fraility.

Watanuki is a gifted medium and spirit-magnet who gets tricked into a state of indentured servitude to the proprietor of an improbable shop somewhere deep in the depths of Tokyo. The protagonist exists to be amusingly cantankerous and to act as foil to his employer, the decadent and striking Yuko, as she tells her various customers how doomed they are, what they need to do, and then to smirk sadly as they fail to appreciate her advice and stumble off to their aforementioned dooms. About the only downside to the manga has been the ill-advised crossovers with another concurrent CLAMP manga, RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE Tsubasa, which if you ask me, sucks, and its suckiness drags down the rest of the chapters in which the characters of said sucky manga appear or are mentioned. Eh.

3) Saki Hiwatari's Please Save My Earth, from Viz. The biggest shoujo SF manga of the early Nineties, it's one or two volumes away from completion here in the States, and I've enjoyed every volume so far, which is better than what I can say of certain other long-running manga - Kare Kano, your ears ought to be burning right now. The art isn't always gorgeous like the two previously mentioned manga, but it hits the high points on a regular basis, and when Hiwatari's on, she's on. If only she could have resisted throwing in fannish piffle and marginalia about Saint Saiya in the early volumes...

Please Save My Earth is a reincarnation romance, following the last survivors of an extinct race through their deaths in a research facility on Earth's moon through their reincarnation as schoolchildren in Tokyo. (Why Tokyo? Hell, it's where the audience is located...) There's lots of soap opera, a reticent, passive-aggressive heroine, a mad, bitter, compromised hero reincarnated as a puckish eleven-year-old boy, cross-gendered reincarnated unrequited love for the shounen-ai crowd, and enough angles on the fatal final days of the doomed aliens to make Rashimon raise an ambiguous number of limbs in surrender.

However, fair warning: this is not the shoujo manga for those who demand assertive heroines and politically-correct, or even particularly moral love-interests. Alice is a pretty, sweet wet noodle, her prior incarnation was more outgoing but still a ditz, and Rin was a obnoxious little cuss even before he remembered that he was a bitter, contrary, mankilling bastard named Shion in a previous life. Still, it's one of the few titles I usually read twice, once to tear through the new volume, and the second to savor the story and the execution thereof.

4) Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte currently from TokyoPop, soon to be properly re-printed by Del Rey. A horribly violent, ugly, semi-nihilistic cannonball of a manga, Parasyte suffered mainly by being one of the first comics out of the chute in the early Nineties, just before TokyoPop got its stuff together & started printing unedited, unflopped material. The new release from Del Rey ought to be everything Parasyte should have been the first time around, except for the proper name, Kiseiji. Or, heck, just plain old Parasite - the "y" was so very, very... ugh. My probably-spoilery thoughts on reading the last volume are here.

Parasyte is an alien-symboite story in the vein of Hal Clement's Needle or James Triptree, Jr.'s "The Only Neat Thing to Do", except that every other version of the buddy-symbiote's race are what they were supposed to have been - man-eating intelligent monsters, with our protagonist escaping having his brain eaten by his particular parasite by successfully trapping it in his hand until it was "set" and stuck in unnatural symbiosis insead of where it belonged, in the driver's seat behind the hero's face. The art is rough and harsh, but the story is set in a rough and harsh and unforgiving world, and the roughness perfectly compliments the highly kinetic, sudden bursts of appalling violence. I'm seriously thinking about buying the new editions when Del Rey starts rolling them out.

5) Takeshi Obata's & Tsugumi Ooba's Death Note, from Viz. This is another one of those series which sounds kind of nonsensical in brief: a high school student finds the notebook of a shingami, a Death God, with which you can script the deaths of others, adhering to a certain set of proscribed rules, which becomes increasingly elaborate as the protagonist becomes increasingly megalomaniacal, brilliant, and oddly appealing. The fun of Death Note is the amorality of the basic story - you can't help but find yourself rooting for the sociopathically brilliant Light Yagami, as he slaughters everyone he can't fool or outwit. The body-count is quite impressive, and the celerity with which characters are lethally shuffled off stage once Light discovers their vulnerability is breathtakingly swift.

Death Note at it's best is a puzzle-book, in which various antagonists are pitted against the anti-hero in games of wits. Authority figures and geniuses maneuver to figure out who Light is before he figures out that they're on to him - and kills them in a way which doesn't reveal his ownership of the "Death Note". There are some parallels with Obata's other North American-published work, Hikaru no Go, even though he's only the artist on both titles. Wonder if he's drawn to battle-of-wits sort of stories, or if that's just what he's been assigned to by the Shounen Jump editors? Either way, Death Note's sharp art, intricate logic-puzzles and Jacobean savagery make it an enjoyable bimonthly romp.

Stuff like this makes me go absolutely mataglap. Edward Kennedy is so much like one of the cardboard Washington villains of a Tom Clancy novel that it isn't funny. He probably thought he was playing both ends against the middle, but one of those ends were the enemies of civilization itself. And we were in the middle, with Damocles gone thermonuclear and half-spastic.

This man was almost a presidential candidate, and is still a senior US Senator. How can we be sure he isn't playing games with the Iranians or, gods forbid, some well-mannered salafist front? I really, really hope he's bugged and wired to an inch of his life, but knowing the modern intelligence community, I fear that's wishful thinking.

Well, it's Florida time again here at Blogfonte, wherein your faithful hero goes venturing into the land of retirement, relatives, and excessive flatness. The way which yours truly chose to beat southwards was somewhat more convoluted than last year's, suiting the current season's parsimonious & farthing-pinching mood better than the previous attempt.

Left the Korean putt-putt in a park-and-ride north of the city by the bay (eastern edition), and took the light rail to a new airport, which likewise has a newish monicker, borrowed from a respected, historical, and newly-defunct SCOTUS member when I wasn't looking. The light rail operator kept talking about the line terminus being "Thurgood Marshall", which was terribly confusing while examining the map, which had two termini listed, neither of which being named after the region's most recently famous son. I suspect that if I were a member of my greataunt's generation, I would still be talking about people flying in and out of New York City's Idlewild Airport.

A businessman was barked at by a uniformed TSA type for carrying a bottle of water through the security station, wherein I damn near stripped naked in an attempt to get my metal into the scan-bin. Meh, taking boots off in public is entirely too much of a spectacle for my sense of self-worth.

This year's flight was actually a pair, with an hour-and-a-half layover in Atlanta, waiting on the connecting flight. Both seats were in the rear of each respective plane, which made for much more lively airtravel than I've come to expect. More like a roller-coaster ride, less like a glorified seat on ye olde Greyhound of the Sky. By the way, what exactly is the point of automating the trash recepticales at Atlanta-Hartfield, which make impressive mechanical sounds every time someone shoves a bit of rubbish inside, presumably compacting each empty fast-food bag in real-time? This cannot be particularly efficient. Is it that hard, getting the janitors from one part of the stretched-out string of Atlanta sub-terminals to the others?

The second flight, from Atlanta to Orlando, was both more crowded, and much more impressive. The difference between a 757 and a 767-400, is the difference between a airborne bus & an auditorium on springs.

All in all, the trip was quite long, and I'm pondering just driving down next year. The extra five to ten hours might be worth having mine own transportation oncet I arrive. Course, it would completely negate all the pretty promises I've made to mine honorable auto insurance agent about how few miles I'll be putting on the Korean putt-putt, in exchange for this year's much lower premiums...

There's a new martial-arts supply shop in Bellefonte, located behind the Jabco Millrace Cafe on Dunlop Street across from what used to be the Bush House & is now a rubble-lined hole in the ground. Presumably they're aiming at the traffic from the Tae Kwan Do parlor the next block over on High Street. I'm not so much into the kung fu or the kendo, but at least now I know where to go if I ever feel the need for a bokken or a nifty pair of Seventies-style spangled nunchuku.

So, Skip Beat volume 3. I had been worried that the artist, Yoshiki Nakamura, was going to ease up and let her saint-gone-sour protagonist, Kyoko, revert to saintliness & sweetness. As of the third volume, that threat has not yet materialized. Our heroine, having been provisionally accepted into talent agency LME as a member of the cloyingly named "Love Me Section", is obliged to prove that she can both elicit, and accept, affection. The flamboyant head of the agency believes that the most bedrock requirement of "talents" who work in the entertainment industry is this ability to be lovable. Kyoko, whose whole life up to the point of the beginning of the story was a sort of rigorous ryokan-themed training in this exact sort of self-denial and hospitality, is thus emininently qualified to do what is required of her - be what the "customer" wants to be, by engaging the core emotional needs of the "customer" - but her radical alienation means that she harbors the worst possible motivations for said performance.

After the climax of the story which covers the last half of the second volume and the first half of the third, Kyoko comes to an interesting revelation: the horrible realization that she is hollow. Everything she ever did for others, especially for the cad Shotaro who betrayed her selflessness in the manga's inciting incident, has been entirely *for others*. She was a shell of performance - of doing things for others, with a reflexive smile and outward happiness, and an internal, manic sort of grasping desperation. Admittedly, it was a cheerful, happy-eyed sort of grasping desperation, but even in the initial scene of the first volume, the allegedly-happy Kyoko, slaving away at multiple jobs to support the selfish Sho, briefly breaks out of her working-happy shell to race madly and maniacally off on a poster-hunt. This sort of outburst is not the behavior of someone living her ideal life, although this is allegedly what she was doing at that moment. When an unintentional revelation shows her that her self-sacrifice has only earned contempt and betrayal, this shell of selflessness and outward cheer is shattered, exposing what was supperating below. This new Kyoko is a personification of the grudge, with a comedically-themed mania for curses, voodoo, and scorned fury, but what we're seeing is the energy of desperation directed outwards for the first time, the little that was left of the heroine which hadn't been dedicated to the shell of performance.

The second volume was kind of uncomfortable, as it cut a little close to the true, core theme of desperation, as Kyoko, rejected from her attempt to spite the now-hated Sho by outshining him at his own business, tries to crawl back into her shattered shell, to be other than what she is - to heal her "inability to love" by main force. The irony is that everything the agency president wants her to do, she could, and can, easily do, if she was willing to deceive herself & crawl back into the shell.

Once the stories shift to her direct interactions with other artists at the agency, this discomfort fades, because it's the other artists who are being discomfited, instead of the audience. Or, perhaps, just me. You see, I prefer to identify with Kyoko-the-terrifiying-truth-revealing-monster, scaring the crap out of her peers & fellow entertainment-workers, over suffering with the comedically abused Kyoko-the-desperate-victim, scrabbling after her false, lost sainthood. This is why the next arc, which covers the last few chapters of the third volume, and extending into the yet-to-be-published fourth volume, has my rapt and urgent attention.

The story rotates around the rehersal for a performance of a play at the agency's acting school, where the theme of the play - the effect of a mother's death on a child and her family - echoes the emotional trauma of the president's difficult young granddaughter. The granddaughter's problem is that she doesn't want the happy words and fake optimism of the play's script and her grandfather's artistic dogma - she wants to be told the things she fears. It's a true bit of characterisation - nothing is as infuriating to a depressive personality as to be fed aphorisms and happytalk. The granddaughter is looking for catharsis, and her grandfather's philosophy only allows for empathy. Nakamura brings us to that moment of catharsis, with a perfect look of appalled shock on the president's face as Kyoko inverts the schmaltz and pollyannaesqueries of the script into something ugly, and dark, and real - and then Nakamura drops us into the gutter between volumes. See you in two months! Argh!

On another subject, while I agree with Jarred Pine about preferring heroines who are self-motivated & empowered over the self-sacrificing types who exist to motivate or control a strong love interest, I have to think that Night of the Beasts is shaping up to be one of the worst possible examples of that particular post-modern impulse. The protagonist of Night of the Beasts, Aria, starts out as a kick-ass man-thumping brute who has literally never lost a fight with anyone, and gets into enough daily street-brawls to make that more than an empty boast. But the conflict and ongoing centre of Night of the Beasts isn't Aria vs. demons or thugs or whatever, but rather Aria's ability to redeem her morally-precarious, demon-haunted love interest Sakura, to keep him from going wild & killing innocents in the heat of a beserker demonic episode. So far, her toughness has only been of use in fueling her ability to get close to the out-of-control Sakura & bringing him under control - to tame him. This is classic romance-novel wish-fulfillment, acted out with a big-boned busty tomboyish thug of a heroine instead of the usual big-eyed demure wisp. I don't know, maybe Night of the Beasts will go in a different direction from the one I'm anticipating, but it doesn't feel like it'll be a Devilman Lady or cross-gendered Bleach, with growth-through-fists-of-fury character-development.

Instead, it scans like Red Sonja cast against type as Jane Eyre.

Picked up the second and third volumes of Dokebi Bride from NetComics based on the impressive first volume, and found that, while the story and art continues to impress with a flair for the low-key and the mildly grotesque, the translation and lettering is getting increasingly nonprofessional and intrusive. Somebody needs to do a bit more polishing to their scripts - there's a lot of bad grammar and worse English. And the font they're using in the word balloons? Even *I* find it ugly and coarse, and I'm not exactly a font snob.

Robert Gates? Who the heck is Robert Gates? How is an ex-CIA guy SecDef material? Is this Harriet Miers Pt. II?

Aigh. Waited for twenty-some minutes outside the polling place in Bellefonte West before they came out & said that they couldn't say when the machines would be up & operational. Had to get to work, so it looks like this evening instead.

Idiot technophilic optimists. Yeah, we can set up a commonwealth-wide secure network in an hour! Bah!

OK, that was the shortest Fall, ever. I just got snowed on, while walking over to the main building to pick up some packages. There's still leaves on the trees...

Oh, wow:

...when someone says he's a Green and wants to "save the planet", that translates to me as:

"I am a puritanical killjoy with no concept of the scientific method and a burning desire to decimate my fellow-men so that the ugliest remnants of humanity can live the short, miserable, disease-ridden, brutal lives of medieval peasants in a spirit of smug self-satisfaction born of the sense that we have condemned billions of tediously aspirational humans to poverty or death"

Ironically enough, that also perfectly describes the plot and general spirit of S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire novels. The sad thing is, I consume those books like bon-bons. Just finished reading A Meeting at Corvallis the other week.

Via Andrew Stuttaford on the Corner.

Rightprof asked in the comments to this post if Bono was actually an evangelical. (Tried to respond in the comments, but Haloscan is being obnoxious this week. Thinking about dropping that service.)

Evangelical? Bono?

Sort of. By Irish standards. There's this interview with BeliefNet. There was mention back in the late Eighties that most of U2 were members of a Christian fellowship of some sort which sounded evangelical.

This article talks about that group, Shalom, and has a quote from Bono that he is sort-of-maybe Catholic, at least to the extent of raising his kids "technically" as Catholics. There's a chunk here that describes Shalom as charismatic & non-hierarchial, which definitely matches my informal definition of "evangelical".

This article seems rather definitive, though. They left Shalom in the Eighties over the whole rock-star thing, but are still pretty much believers in that tradition, just unchurched.

BTW, lesson from Tuesday's Halloween barbeque-and-potluck, to which the new CEO brought a bunch of candied carmel apples:

Don't eat a carmel apple when you're wearing a full beard, especially not when you're due for a trim. At least a quarter of the carmel will end up in your mustache or beard instead of in your stomach.

If anyone could argue me out of my agnosticism back into the Faith by negative example, it would be John Derbyshire. What a shallow, cretinous fool. "Mysterian" my arse - if you want to totter through life a deist, use the proper terms. His reasons for losing faith are variously foolish (human minds being wired for religion is an argument neither in favor of, nor in contradiction to, the propositions of any particular religion) racist (blacks are religious! east asians aren't! I hates me some blacks, and love those Chinese!) and ignorant (dur, never did understand biology, but now's I've been edujumicated on my Darwin, I sees as how religion is bunk!).

I mean, he's still more religious than I am, even on a good day, but I can't help but feel contempt for his irreligiosity. And I suppose you can't possibly find a better argument for man's essential irrationality than that admission right there. Or at least, my essential irrationality.

Oh, well.

Utter, vicious nonsense.

The actual article - which provides the detail which Noah fails to supply - namely, that U2 was relocating to a country which *doesn't* impose an arbitrary and obnoxious windfall tax on royalties, in addition to the usual income taxes. Furthermore, Bono and the rest of the band will continue to pay their normal income taxes within Ireland proper. Nothing illegal or even particularly immoral is going on here, by rational standards.

Noah's predicate - that if someone crusades against poverty, then he can't have his own self-interests at heart when conducting his own private business in a tax-minimizing fashion - is utter, miserable, ill-thought-out horse radish. Real anti-poverty activists - from the early Victorian bourgeois to Carnegie to Melinda & Bill Gates - have traditionally been wealthy, canny capitalists with a perfectly rational commitment to not wasting their private resources on non-tax-optimal behavior.

Bono is merely the latest in a long string of wealthy evangelical Christian do-gooders. To denounce him as a hypocrite for not behaving as an economic martyr is just foul.

On another level, U2 is just the latest rock band to become tax emigres due to confiscatory European taxation policies. Were all of those hedonistic Seventies hard-rock outfits like Led Zeppelin hypocritical for bailing on Laborite England's obscenely high top tax rates, even though that money theoretically financed the era's progressive permissiveness in some sort of roundabout fashion? Of course not.

I wonder how much of this is just a push to tar Bono as a nasty, hypocritical evangelical neocon. He's said a few too many nice things about American Republicans recently. Time to cauterize the wound, soldier! Burn him!