Thought for the day:

Truth is only stranger than fiction because narrative is inherently familiar. Narrative is a creature of fiction. Actual strangeness is essentially alienated. Understanding comes with interpretation - re-writing experiences into a coherency which can only approximate the actual, in the creation of a personal narrative, the incorporation of the alien into your fiction, your version of reality. In this sense, the familiar is antonymic to the strange, as fiction is to truth.

Ugh. I just looked up the M3 money supply curve. That quantitative easing thing was bigger than I thought. Today, I feel punished for saving.

Hyperinflation, here we come!

An email, sent to my district's representative in the House:

Mr. Thompson, I did some campaigning for you during the election last fall, so believe me that I don't relish the need for this message. But I am deeply disappointed to find that you had a part in the recent passage of a bill of attainder against employees of the TARP beneficiaries. While no-one can be enthusiastic about the rights and privileges of overeducated, overpaid, arrogant finance professionals, especially ones employed by organizations enjoying the inappropriate benefits of government funds, that can't lead us into illicit, immoral, or uncivilized responses to provocation.

The recent bill is, in my layman's opinion, unconstitutional. Congress's constitutional warrant explicitly excludes the ability to pass bills of attainder, which I define as a class of legislation designed to confiscate the property of individuals as a punitive response to political actions. A bill designed to reclaim monies legitimately paid under legal contract via punitive taxation meets this definition by my lights, and I believe that I am not being irrational or excitable in making this characterization.

Furthermore, although post-facto taxation is not itself (so far as I know) unconstitutional, it is is immoral and unethical. The fashion in which this bill combines attainder and post-facto legislation with the expressed intent of an assault upon private contracts only makes the act the more inexcusable.

In a time of Democratic legislative dominance, the party of the opposition has an even greater obligation to defend both the spirit and the letter of the law. Such doors, once opened in the heat of the moment, cannot be so easily closed!

The constitution and the culture of the law which it under-pins must be our bulwark in times of crisis and emergency. Kindly stop knocking holes in our foundation!

And this one is literally about wealth destruction - a theoretical solution to the below-zero interest rate in which the Treasury announces the de-tenderization [sp?] of a randomly statistical sampling of currency in circulation at a set period, to discourage cash holdings in a time of sub-zero return on investment.

...who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by

- William Blake, America, a Prophesy

Just got some spam for St. Patrick's Day gifts. This is a holiday for giving presents now?

I thought it was a day for aspiring alcoholics to pretend to be Irish, wear green, and drink themselves cross-eyed.

Watchmen. In short? It's very much a Zach Snyder movie, despite what I'd heard beforehand. It's got interludes of brilliance, and is interesting even in its failures. I especially liked how they shifted Veidt's trendy lefty do-gooder conceits from the slightly artificial nuclear freeze one-worldism of Moore's now-archaic script to a contemporary 'watermelon' environmental extremism which expresses itself in what looked like the deliberate assassination of Lee Iaccoca. (This new trendy leftism will look as archaic and foolish in twenty years as Moore's original script does now, mark my words.) They even papered over the cartoonish bigotry of the New Frontiersman editor in the coda, who was gassing on about minorities in the comic book & was whinging about 'hippie communes' in the filmed version.

But I didn't much like the ending, which inverted the purpose of the big evil plot, and tore out the heart of the ending. The *point* of the comic book's resolution was a renunciation of superheroism in favor of Veidt's one-world progressive futurism. The filmed ending was a reversion to type, with the definite suggestion that the New Soviet Couple are cheerfully polishing new toys & new latex duds in the basement, getting ready to go out every night 'at 3 AM to do something stupid'. While I don't particularly *like* Moore's politics and ideas, it was his story.

The movie was too long for a theatre experience, and too short to invest the audience in the climactic disaster, which was reduced to a CGI annihilation of streetside ciphers, most of which they hadn't had time to introduce to us in an already-overstuffed narrative.

I liked 300 better.

So, I continue to be pure poison for automobile companies. First, I killed Daewoo by buying my first new car, a 2000 Lanos, from those poor suckers. Then, I went and bought a Chevy Aveo-5 from GM in December 2007. Result? Dead company walking. I zombify car manufacturers with my cursed cheques.

I was out profiting from the anime industry's agonies this weekend. Best Buy has mostly given up on selling anime DVDs, and they're liquidating their anime sections in most of their stores, starting the first of March. I went over to the Patton Twp Best Buy & grabbed a pile of stuff I wouldn't normally bother with if it weren't at least 60% off MRSP. As usual, it turns out that at least some of the stuff I hadn't bothered with up to now was pretty dang nifty.

Case in point: Negima!?. I avoided the manga originally, because it seemed like anything other than original. A Ken Akamatsu harem comedy with a prepubescent harem lead and thirty-some utterly interchangable girls? It seemed like there'd be better "girlswarm" stories out there, so I passed. The word on the first anime adaptation of Negima, sold as Negima! in North America, was even worse - that the character designs were literally interchangeable, the story tedious, and the fanservice bizarrely nonexistent - for a harem comedy!

Apparently the Japanese license-holders noticed that the first try by Xebec was a dud, but decided that the Akamatsu brand was worth a second go with another studio, and they opted for Shaft. You hear a lot of trash-talking about Shaft, but they've got a creative team somewhere in the bowels of that operation which is just boiling over with hyperactive style. The closest thing I've seen to the new version, sold confusingly as Negima!? in North America, was the fansubs of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei (aka "Goodbye, Mr. Despair"). It's got the same hyper stylism, although Negima!? tends more towards turbocharged 60s New Wave splitscreening than Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei's skeezy Japanese noir. It's also got the eruption of chalkboard message non sequiturs, which I always thought was the factor which would have made SZS unlicenseable, due to its rapid-fire pace and potential for frying subtitling crews; although Negima!?'s chalkboard non sequiturs are much less rapid-fire than SZS's, it still broke the subtitler a couple times in the first couple episodes.

But anyway, Shaft's Negima!?: excellent. Also, fun! The only real problem is that there are far, far too many characters, and I found I couldn't remember the names of more than a half-dozen or so. It's literally a girl-swarm, a mob of characters, introduced in a swirl which leaves you the impression that there are people out there, but far too many to take in at once. The gag in the opening credits is that the girls are all labelled by roster number - and only roster number, their little seat numbers cryptically floating along behind them in a surreal sepia-tone landscape constructed of stacked school-desks.

Quote of the day:

I suppose once you get locked into a serious sword collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

I guess there's just something about anime cons which invite Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas references.

So, Herr Deutsches Finanzspam has prompted me to dig up my Haloscan account password and edit out his mindless comment spammery, something I haven't bothered with no matter how pissed off I've been on political occasions. Congrats, D-F! You've figured out how to fruitlessly spam a journal with a readership in the low dozens, all of them in a language other than German!

Bah! Europeans!

Some manga turn into a chore, or a slog, after a dozen volumes or so. Bleach, in particular, lost headway about volume nine or so, and degenerated into a flashy recitation of incomprehensible half-translated archaic-Japanese called attacks which was tolerable only because the layout and style is so slick and breezy that the story is over before you can really get up a head of "I don't care about these people", thus leaving *just* enough good-will to not take the next three volumes off the pre-order list.

Other manga go through phases of the moon, in turn bland, self-plagiarizing and repetitive, and light, airy & delightful. The Wallflower is my exemplar of this elliptical class of comic. Some of the mid-teen volumes were flat and undistinguished, but the latest, volume 18, has suddenly blown the doors off the morgue, leaving a set of wildly-swinging chrome hinges rattlingly metallically upon the door-frame. Suddenly Takenaga-the-dark-haired-bishounen is an actual *person* instead of a hair-colored cipher; the goth-loli tertiary characters return and prove that a "rule of four" works even better in comedy than hoary old "rule of three" gags, and Sunako returns to her proper central place in the chaos. The Wallflower is suddenly, giddily *fun* again. Wonderful!

Now, one can only wish that Skip Beat can pull off the same trick. Because I'm getting tired of the narrow rut that particular comedy manga has gotten locked into.

Meanwhile, on the anime front, I'm enjoying the early episodes of Shakugan no Shana. The first dozen or so episodes are gorgeous, beautifully animated, and dark, dark, dark. The show lives in an existential abyss, with an undead protagonist who's literally a thing (mono), a walking magical shell designed to keep the universe from imploding around the sudden absence after a monster ate the original person (hito) - devoured his "existence". Now he's watching his romantic interest fight said monsters. Said romantic interest is herself an emotionally undeveloped cipher who doesn't really think of herself as a person, having been Raised-by-Wolves to the point where she doesn't really have a name - just a sword and a mission. He names her after her sword. This is a strange foundation for what eventually turns into a tsundere love comedy, but there you are. It doesn't live up to the early episodes, from what I remember of the fansubs, and rumor has it that the second, unlicensed season is a trainwreck. Oh, well. The beginning is a gem, and the ending credits absolutely rock.

Kessler Syndrome warning, part three. Although it sounds like this wasn't so much the *result* of incipient Kessler, as it is yet another contribution towards the eventual onset of Kessler Syndrome, namely, a chaos of untrackable self-propagating debris fields which makes the maintenance of any sort of useful orbital infrastructure impracticable.

It's a shame the Planetes anime was so annoying, because Kessler Syndrome was the core high-concept behind the story - the protagonists worked in a "debris section" which was dedicated to staving off KS by cleaning up debris fields before they start to cause chain-collisions in the first place. Manga was ok, but incomplete.

When I saw this 1/10 Gundam model, a small voice in the back of my head whispered "lawn jockey".

Although I'm not sure that the plastic or vinyl it's made of would be weather-resistant. Hell of a thing, to waste 3.3k on a five-foot-plus novelty lawn-jockey and then let it rot to pieces in the front yard.

Viz's Otomen is as inconsequential as everybody's been saying. The schtick is that the protagonist is a boy with a 'feminine heart' - likes cute things, has the skill-set and hobbies of a yamato nadeshiko, reads shoujo manga, etc etc sexist blah; his father abandoned his family to work in a tranny bar, so the protagonist has been emotionally crippled by his damaged mother & is fixated on being 'manly', largely through being stoic & mastering every martial art out there. It's bloody 'orrible. The author has absolutely nothing of interest to say, and everything done in the comic has been done better in School Rumble, Ouran, Gatcha Gacha or a hundred other high-school romantic comedies. The protagonist is a walking ready-made pansy-hardass cliche, his love interest is a tomboy cipher, and the loki character - a teenaged male mangaka writing award-winning shoujo manga under a feminine pseudonym - is an undermotivated, impossible contrivance who comes off less realistic than if he had been a talking dog or a magical girl's mascot. It's not worth another volume, series dropped.

Oshinbo, on the other hand, was a joybomb surprise. I bought the first volume mostly out of cultural obligation - it seems like it would be a weaboo check-point rather than anything particularly exciting in and of its own merit. Boy, was that wrong. I'm about the polar opposite of a 'foodie', one of those gastronomic obsessives who constantly go on about their cooking habits. I eat out of cans & a microwave. Still, Oshinbo makes a rollicking good time out of that exact sort of niggling technical obsession with food, food preparation, and presentation.

It's a series about cultural status anxiety, and how that false consciousness which comes with status anxiety wars with the actual authentic practice and experience of a practical art like cooking. The details of the art in question is a matter of execution & technique rather than essence, which is the constant struggle between wanting to do something, and wanting to show off how you do it. The stories picked out for the American edition of Oshinbo - the ongoing comic in Japan has been on-going for decades, and the publisher decided to just print highlights instead of pretending to print the whole massive series - are focused on what the writer calls 'washoku' - a sort of denationalized Japanese cultural/culinary spirit. The two antagonists of the story - the punk Yamaoka and his curmudgeon father Kaihara - are respectively a journalist and an artist-artisan who compete in a series of face-offs over the composition of an "ultimate menu" of the Platonic ideal of the Japanese culinary art.

It's *fun*, kind of silly, and very, very open-hearted. It might just have been the editorial choices made in publishing an American edition, but half the stories in the first volume are about Western weaboo types showing up snotty or arrogant or mistaken Japanese about this or that aspect of the true art, about foreigners being more open to washoku, being more willing to learn.

Oshinbo's art is very simple, but tasteful. The emphasis is on the food, and on things rather than people, who by and large are relatively simple cartoons existing to express attitudes, comedy, and passions in an efficient manner. I found myself regretting somewhat the choice to present high-lights, but I can see why they thought they couldn't get away with publishing 102 volumes of food-snob comics in the current market.

You know, unnamed webcomic artist, when you beg for money on your front page, and then I find that you've let most of your back-log go out of print, I suffer a sudden lack of desire to pay for your free ice cream, no matter how much I believe in the freeware concept.

The Long Tail helps those that help themselves, Mr. Unnamed Webcomic Artist. Maybe I ought to go help Howard Taylor, who *doesn't* waste my time with unfunny, labored, interminable Harry Potter parodies. And more to the point, is capable of keeping his overpriced comics in stock on Amazon.

On second thought, no. I've been seriously overconsuming on pop crap recently, and it sounds like I have to take my car into the shop again, for the second time in three months.

Read through Kyle Baker's Nat Turner last night. For those who have never heard of Baker, go read Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show, they're two of the best books to come out of the Eighties indie comics scene. He's mellowed a lot since the cynical misanthropies of those two classics, but he's still an interesting and fearless artist. He went through a rather Chuck Jonesish phase in the late Nineties (You Are Here and King David are highlights, if seriously different in tone from each other.), and later kind of went avuncular, writing "life with the family" Dave-Berryish autobiographical stuff like the Bakers. So, I knew that a Nat Turner comic from Baker would be *interesting*, if nothing else.

It's certainly that. The book is more in the style of his Eighties indie stuff, all painterly sepia-tone browns and tans, more in the style of an illustrated chapbook than your standard gutters-and-word-balloons comic. The text is a series of excerpts or highlights of the pamphlet "Confessions of Nat Turner", published right after his execution & written in a typically turgid pre-Victorian style. Baker's native style was perhaps an unfortunate fit with the Nineteenth-century pomposity of the text, as the two tend to emphasize each others' tendencies into faults, inflating Baker's visual wit into buffoonery and the text's attempts at dignity into pretension and bombast.

But Baker doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, or make allowances, or excuses, any more than the original "Confessions" did. It's all there, in bloody, violent, merciless browns and tans. The second half left me wondering why anyone would find Turner an inspiration for anything other than regret and horror. The first half, on the other hand, almost elevated the subject into a religious figure. The text and the imagery lead me to compare Turner with his contemporary prophet, Joseph Smith, who was going through much of the same plow-side revelation at about the same time. The parallels are striking, if probably not intended by the author. Religious radicalism was in the air in the 1820s and 1830s, there's no doubt about that. He sort of steals a base by starting the book with the capture, enslavement, and middle passage of Nat Turner's grandmother, since it isn't covered, properly speaking, by the text, but it's some of the most compelling imagery of the book, and worth the diversion from the subject matter. It probably would have been more appropriate to a book on the Amstad mutiny, though.

What I kind of lost the track of in the course of reading was how the first half led somehow into the second half, how Turner's religious revelation turned suddenly into an exterminationist rebellion. Because that was, indeed, what the prophet Turner delivered - a determined slaughter of every white within axe-reach, from infant to invalid. Baker papers it over with some wordless montages of broken families, but there isn't enough middle here to satisfy my questions. This is the point where Baker's choice to rely on text and images rather than traditional comic-book stylings causes a narrative break-down. Who's that losing his children? Is it Turner? Was Turner married? Or was that a flash-back? Too many visual cues from traditional comic visual syntax are missing in the style Baker is using, when he needs to play these sorts of narrative tricks it causes confusion in the reader, or at least, this reader.

And when I said earlier that Baker doesn't paper over the bloodshed, he certainly doesn't. It occupies a good third of the book, and it's horrible. He doesn't shy from making the insurrectionaries look like monsters, and shows un-named whites suppressing the armed slaves in a fairly heroic light, which you wouldn't expect in a modern adaptation aimed at the guilt-industry crowd. He even throws in the old stand-by of post-bellum nostalgia, the faithful house-slave desperately trying to save his family, comically shucking-and-jiving for the bloodthirsty band while the whites run for it.

In the end, it's kind of chaotic, and mournful, and strange. Certainly haunts you afterwards, I'll say that much for it.

Oh, BTW, my formerly-moonbat neighbors have finally taken down their Obama drapes. As an act of reciprocity, I vow to no longer call them "moonbats", "personality cultists", or "fascists".

I felt 35% less oppressed this weekend. Life's looking up!

AAUGH!

*This* is why federal pig-slopping "stimulus" spending is INSANELY inefficient. What does a school district with sharply declining enrollment, recently constructed buildings, and a preposterous *FOURTEEN* unoccupied school buildings need? Eighty-some million federal dollars for yet more unnecessary and un-needed construction!

Maybe Milwaukee will import some career arsonists from Detroit so that they can collect the insurance on their new buildings, because I can't fathom any other benefit to this particular scheme other than keeping Wisconsin construction employees fully employed. Why not just go whole-hog and just start burying bundles of hundred-dollar bills for people to dig up again?

I ordered the first disc of Nerima Daikon Brothers to fill out an order the other month, having not heard much of anything about it - or at least, not much of anything which stuck. It was stuck in among a hundred other C-list titles that ADV dumped into the market like a freighter full of cattle in shark-infested waters - apparently on the theory that if you throw enough of 'em in there, the sharks will eventually get too full to eat at least *some* of your beeves.

Uh, anyways - Nerima Daikon Brothers. It's a Nabeshin late-night anime, and not one of his hack-work directing-for-some-studio-spark make-work shows, like the Wallflower or Tenchi Muyou GXP. Remember Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi? Yeah, that level of hyper bad taste. Except as a musical. A really sketchy, slapdash, cynical musical about the dreams of a suburban radish farmer, his host-club loser of a brother, and their gold-digging over-the-hill-former-idol cousin from Okayama. All of them dressed in a loose Nabeshin-eque approximation of the traditional attire of "Hassidic diamond merchants".

The show goes like this: introductory half-assed musical number in their daikon radish field. One or more members of the 'band' gets scammed by the bottom-feeding predator-of-the-week, via one or more short, hyper musical numbers; this is usually punctuated by a song-and-dance number from the loan-shark kanban musume dancers & their portable-shrine ATM of Doom. The Brothers escape, go to a back-alley pawnshop, to rent a preposterous weapon or device to defeat the villains (and rob them of all their ill-gotten gains), which they inveigle via song from "Oyaji", a shadowy figure with the traditional Nabeshin afro voiced by the director himself. One more violent song-and-dance routine later, justice is served, and Oyaji's pet "pandaikon" shows up with all the other victims-of-the-week, who walk off with all the Brothers' stolen wealth, leaving them destitute in their radish field to song-fight with their annoyed neighbors who probably thought that living next to a daikon field in sleepy Nerima would have been *quieter* than some more urban ward, right?

The songs aren't particularly brilliant - Sondheim isn't exactly quaking in his boots - but it's all delivered with a cock-eyed sloppy enthusiasm which makes it impossible to hate. The subject matter is pretty damned sketchy - the first episode is basically an extended homosexual casting-couch gag - which probably explains why it didn't get more notice back when it first came out. But it isn't all making-fun-of-teh-gheys, and the rest of the first disc mocks Korean pachinko parlours, predatory hospital operators, and mobbed-up cops. I was a little disappointed the Korean pachinko episode stayed within the relatively safe confines of "boy, the Koreans love their kimchee and cosmetic surgery, don't they?" and "housewives love them some Korean prettyboy actors", when I, personally, would have gone with the obvious North Korean commie-gangster line. But hey, it's still pretty funny, if kind of bigoted.

And damn, are there a lot of extras on the first disc. I started watching the disc, and just kept going and going until hey! Time to go to work! I'm definitely going to have to get the rest of the season the next time I make a TRSI order; we'll see what the next sale is coming up this Thursday.