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.