A presidential order to stop whining has apparently been taken as an invitation to snivel instead. If only all opportunities for schadenfreude were so harmless...

You know, at this point, just assume any smartass link-based comment is due to an Instapundit h/t unless otherwise noted.

Huh. You learn something new every day. Apparently Germany's been paying off its Treaty of Versailles war debt for the last twenty years, or more accurately, paying off the bonds that the Weimar Republic issued in the early 30s to settle their war reparations obligations. The bonds were repudiated by the Third Reich, sat around until the West German government agreed in principle to resume payment after reunification in the early 50s, and the reunited Germany started actually paying the debt in 1991.

That's... very German.

Noticed via Red State, of all places.

Meh. In this situation, I think I believe inter arma enim silent leges - "In times of war, the law falls silent." Anwar Awlaki might be an American citizen, but he is self-exiled, in rebellion against constituted authority, and actively plotting to murder his fellow citizens. He can either surrender himself to said duly constituted authority, or die screaming in some Yemeni shithole.

Really, it's his choice.

I like this:
If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state.

Via Instapundit, although I'd probably have come across it myself later in the day.

During the weekend, I walk around Bellefonte while reading. I see most of the streets in town once or twice a month during the sunny season. I've yet to see a single political sign in town since they pulled down the primary signs, and only a single new political bumpersticker, an ant-Jim "raging anti-Semite" Moran sticker on a car with Virginia plates. But it does look like somebody from the Sestak campaign did a pamphlet drop in Rainbow's End this morning. Not a very efficient one - I saw a couple stuffed under windshield wiper blades here and there.

I'm reading a book on the Lindsay years in New York City, called the Ungovernable City. A little slow going, and intermittently *very* irritating. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers of a certain age, John Lindsay was the first "the next JFK", a tall and stylish liberal congressman from Manhattan's only Republican district, who successfully rolled into the Mayor's office at the head of one of those typical Gotham "fusion" tickets which regularly leverages left-ish Republican politicians into office at the head of coalitions of irate "reform" democrats. (See La Guardia, Mitchel and, I suppose, Bloomsberg in a sense.) He was the Fair-Haired Boy for about a year, mooted for the Republican presidential nomination for '68, all that. Very moddish, liked to walk the streets of New York's ghetto districts, surrounded by a swarm of Ivy League grads, liked to talk a good libertarian game.

Unfortunately, Lindsay's "libertarianism" was the sort that assumes a bloated government & believes that the way to control inequitable distribution of power is to enlarge the problem with bigger and bigger organizations & centralized, patriarchal authority. Not, in point of fact, actually any sort of libertarianism at all, but rather a recognizably liberal brand of fascism. His people were very fond of labeling all of their many enemies as "racist". Of course, back then, a number of those enemies actually *were* racist - look up what the acronym "SPONGE" abbreviates, if you care for a sample. But the Lindsay crowd was fond of stunts like trying to tie William F. Buckley to the Birchers... anyways, I think I would have gone batty dealing with that time. Liberalism was in the saddle, and beside it rode Riots, Rent Control, Youth Rebellion and Family Dissolution.

Is it pretentious to read xkvd even though you need wikipedia to get the math jokes? (Especially if you still don't get it after a quarter-hour reading & not understanding how Ackermann functions work?)

Oh, btw: another explanation I didn't get. (Having read through it three times now... nope, still not getting it.)

Hah! Such confidence in the campaign prowess of their bosses! I suppose it pays to think ahead, and prepare parachutes while you can.

I've been watching the Delaware disaster with a mixture amusement and horror. Prior to the primary election I didn't think much of O'Donnell, but the event has made me think even less of Castle and the NRSC in particular. This sort of feckless, squalid ineptitude is exactly why I've refused to give a dollar to that collection of grasping, sordid hacks, no matter how many times they hire out a call-bank to sweet-talk me into donating. Still and all, it's hard to take Delaware seriously; as far as I'm concerned, it's just three wayward counties of the Commonwealth that fast-talked themselves into a separate seats at the Continental Congress. Nowadays, it's the conglomerate capital of the country, more corporate lawyers per square meter than any place on earth, and proof positive that the modern corporation isn't synonymous with conservatism, Republicanism, or free-market ideology in general.

So, I've been quiet for too long. For the most part, I've just been walking and reading (mostly nonfiction - spent like three weeks on Caro's behemoth biography of Robert Moses) and working through my backlog of DVDs. I've been buying more than I have time to watch, and frankly, I've not the most active of social calendars to begin with. I had some old friends in from out of town on Labor Day weekend.

Hmm.

I suppose I could talk about my recent Kyoto Animation binge. I had a fairly positive reaction to their galge (visual novel? I don't know, I sometimes have difficulty telling the two genres apart) adaptations Clannad and Clannad After Story. So, the next time I spotted them on sale, I bought their earlier Key adaptations, Kanon and Air.

Apparently some folks group them together as Key's "Seasons", Clannad being "spring", Kanon "winter" and Air "summer" - I don't know if one of Key's other visual novels is the missing "autumn" or if it's just the three. The seasonal themes of Air and Kanon are much more obvious and intuitive than Clannad's, which is more notational, and frankly, I think that somebody, somewhere just forced the "fit" by grabbing for the cherry blossom scene at the beginning of that later series.

Kanon turned out to be definitely worth the purchase, and was full of "scenery porn" and sharp writing. There's a lot of excellent animation in that show, and very little in the way of "kwality". Like Clannad, it starts out cheery and light-minded, with a lot of easy, cynical Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya-style humor, but it's all sandbagging in preparation for the mother of all tear-jerkers. The Kyoto Animation Kanon is like a fiendish, diabolical machine for the harvest of the tears of otaku, and it was wrought *very* cleverly indeed.

The strange thing is, is that the Kyoto Animation two-cour Kanon of 2006 was a remake of the original one-cour TV series from Toei in 2002. I made the mistake of tryng to watch Big Dave's archival copy of the fansubs of the Toei Kanon sometime last decade, and came across so utterly, completely repulsed and bored that I only got through the second episode by inventing monstrous serial-killer backstories for all the characters, effectively turning it into a filler-episode version of When They Cry. Even then, it was deadly boring, mutt-ugly, and pointless. The relation between the Kyoto and Toei versions is as that between the lightning and the lightning bug. Still and all, the story in Clannad is sharper, smarter, and more focused. Where Kanon is a exercise in magical realism, full of illogic and set in a town where winter is eternal and spring never comes, Clannad borders on science fiction, has a rigorous and logical underpinning below its leaps of fantasy, and occurs in an actual place, rather than the magical dying marchenland of Kanon.

So much for Kanon; Air is a different story, one of narrational failure and promising apprentice-work. If Kyoto's Kanon is the product of solid, accomplished, even inspired journeymen, and Clannad is a true masterwork, Air is the beautiful trainwreck which justified the resources the latter series were offered. And it is, intermittently, beautiful. You can see flashes of the trademark Kyoto "flushed" character animation, of gorgeous gem-like background art, of the occasional seamless, fluid action scene. But more often, the characters are flat over unincorporated backgrounds, floating, and erratically placed. The early episodes often feature the head-on square-in-the-frame staring-out-at-the-audience one-shots which are so stereotypical of visual novels and dating sim games.

Worse, the writing, which felt like a "rough draft" of Kanon 2006 in the first half of Air, went absolutely to hell in the last third, until at the end, I honestly couldn't tell what the hell had *supposed* to have happened, the emotional dissonance and apparent narration having so utterly derailed the presentation that I'm still not sure what I was supposed to take away from the experience. Happily, the US release doesn't end on the TV series' maddening note, but continues with the two OAVs Kyoto released, set in the middle of the narrative with the Heian-era characters on their fugitive journey through the mountains. A central part of the narrative failure of the TV series, which dropped the modern-day characters for two-three episodes for the adventures and tragedy of their ancient ancestors, was thus somewhat redeemed by the OAVs.

Anyways, Air will probably enrage you if you have any felt need for coherent narrative, but it still is pretty to look at & stops in some entertaining places prior to going smash in a truly spectacular trainwreck in the final episodes.

Kon's last testament, posted by his family and friends to his website. It sounds very much like his interviews in happier days, it sounds like him.

I will say this: by his own testimony, he was apparently going to an acupuncturist and a chiropractor for his pains, and it sounds (although he does not come out and say it) that he got to a doctor too late for a saving diagnosis. Did alternative medicine's quacks kill him by neglect? Maybe not, apparently pancreatic cancer is so deadly because it produces no early symptoms, and is very difficult to diagnose in time to keep it from going metastatic. By the time Kon was going to a chiropractor for bone pain, it was probably already too late. But the chiropractor was definitely the wrong choice. Doctors, drugs, chemotherapy and surgery done six months earlier might have given him at least a little more time.

h/t

Oh, man, this is a catastrophe for anime. Satoshi Kon was one of the real greats working in theatrical animation, fearless, brilliant and warm-hearted. It came out of nowhere, too - he was apparently diagnosed with cancer in *May*. He was so young...

He never made a bad film, or a boring one. He should have had twenty more years of great art ahead of him.

He was so *good*. The field is full of erratic geniuses, flakes and competent hacks - Kon was one of the few truly balanced, brilliant animators. He was too damn young to be taken like this.

He should have had productive decades of real greatness ahead of him. This makes Millennium Actress suddenly very... poignant. Like he had been trying to make the dozen films he somehow instinctively knew he'd never have time to finish.

And Paprika, and Paranoia Agent... so many of his anime were such headlong, desperately crowded races against the clock, filling every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds dreamt.

So, a fairly active weekend, at least for me. My Uncle Ron dropped by for lunch Saturday on his way back to Ohio from a meeting outside of Scranton, and I showed him around Bellefonte. It's been a couple years since I last saw him, and he looks good - retirement's been agreeing with him so far.

Sunday, Jason and Tristana held a garden party at their place out on Airport Road, and we got sozzled on mint juleps & played croquet on their vast half-acre lawn. There was a crowd of over a dozen, and only one person remembered the rules. We ended up playing well into the twilight, shifting the course under the flood lights out front by the garage in the early evening. I made a variant on my usual stir-fry, a mush of spinach, mushrooms, bean sprouts and pasta, *heavily* seasoned with a lot of garlic & rosemary, with just enough fish to keep it from being a vegetarian dish. It seems to have gone over well, so that worked out nicely. Mint juleps are a murderous beverage, by the way - one glass contained two to three shots of bourbon with a little water & some mint and sugar to flavor the mix. A glass and a half and I was quite wobbly for a while there.

This morning I went to pay my utilities, and discovered that it had been due a full week before they *mailed* the bill. The secretary down at the borough business office was quite resigned, and accepted payment with an apology - all the bills this quarter were issued with the same typo. Oops.

Saw someone run the railroad crossing on Water Street, just before a gravel train with *three* engines came rumbling across the tracks, while I waited in traffic, on my way to work just now. I've never seen a load that heavy come out of the Pleasant Gap quarries - they must have had a sudden upsurge in orders. But seriously, people. Don't run the railroad crossings like that. It ain't safe. If he had waited to do that fifteen seconds later, they would have been pulling his crossover out of Spring Creek with a crane.

So I played tour guide for the folks at Gettysburg last weekend. A co-worker who does reenacting occasionally recommended a tower on the south end of the field that I hadn't remembered. When we got there, I realized why - it was over seventy feet tall, and I'm more than a little acrophobic. So's my father, when it comes down to it. Add in my mother's issues with stairs, and it was kind of a stretch. I gave my description of Sickles' salient & the Longstreet assault at the top of that tower with my hands firmly vacuum-sealed to the railing, and we got down as soon as we could. Great view, though.

I apparently annoyed a Gouverneur Warren fan with my short-hand summation of his career while we visited Little Round Top. He turned around and gave us a Look. The next morning, I talked to someone at our hotel who apparently had been standing nearby with his family during the incident & had appreciated my gloss on the events. His daughter apparently wants to take a degree in history, and I explained the possible career-paths, or lack thereof, available for people who choose that particular major. The short-hand is "lawyer, history professor, or well-educated member of the general public". It really isn't a "technical training" degree. At best, it gives you some experience in writing and structured research.

The old Cyclorama building has become a real disgrace - not only do they have it sealed away behind a decrepit chain-link fence, but they've let all the lawn within a hundred yards of it go to wrack and ruin. This would be fine and all if it were in some distant field, but we're talking about four hundred yards from the Angle and right up against Ziegler's Grove. There are a dozen regimental monuments standing forelorn among the weeds and overgrown grass, and it looks like hell. I wouldn't object to them tearing down the Cyclorama building - it is a dump and all - but they ought to do something about the seediness of the immediate environs.

Hmmm. This sounds pretty important, and it maps to what I understand about the thought-processes of Europeans and Israelis (and, notably, which the writer doesn't address, why non-post-nationalist Americans are so much more likely to be pro-Israeli, for that matter).

The writer thinks in terms of Israel vs. the European Union model, but what immediately occurred to me is the collapse of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a multi-national empire, not a nation-state, but what impressed the European (and American!) by-standers was the racial-nationalist element of the borderline-genocidal fight between the Croats and the Serbs, both against the Bosniak Muslims, and the Serbs against the Kosovar Albanians. Where Americans saw *tribalism*, Europeans saw *nationalism* as the operative evil at work. The American solution was carving out viable nation-states for the various sides to transfer their tribal impulses into adherence to beneficial nation-state patriotism; the European impulse is to "enlarge the problem" by replacing the old multi-national empire of Yugoslavia with a south-eastern extension of the new multi-national imperium, the European Union.

h/t

Hey, we're all Spartacus Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals For The Ninth Circuit now!

Is it just me, or is Glenn Reynolds starting to sound positively pissed-off about something? He doesn't sound quite like his usual "happy warrior" easy-going self. That bit's more of a bitter Lewis Black jab than the usual gentle Instapundit jibe.

Jason at Blogsuki summed up the knotted, spiked half-comedy and half-tragedy wonder of Clannad much better than I could. Even if he was a Kyou-fixated Obama-voting doofus.

I've been enjoying Clannad After Story an awful lot. I wouldn't have imagined that an animation team would take the after-the-resolution of a dating sim & make a family drama of it. The whole show is basically post-climax, except they're not treating it that way. The heroine is sickly, so she ends up repeating her senior year - again! She's actually a year older than the protagonist, because they met on her second go round at trying to graduate. He was a goof-off during high school - a self-described "delinquent" - so he ends up getting work where he can, and ends up becoming an apprentice electrician with a small local contractor. The show spends two-three episodes with the protagonist as he works his way into the honest-to-god Japanese blue-collar lifestyle.

The above was written before I watched the second half of the second season. Wow, what a series of gut-punches. The entire series, both seasons, are in retrospect *not* dating-sim stuff, but rather a rather sharp-edged family drama with magical realist overtones that just uses the *furniture* of moe dating sims. I can't believe I once dismissed this series as "retard moe". Sorry, Kyoto.

I still think K-On! is stupid, though.

Life and work on Cicero Street's "raper's row" in the Seventies. I'd never heard the term before, apparently it's Mametesque slang for a very Mametesque place, a no-hope used-car strip. The place the writer describes makes the dealership in Used Cars seem positively idyllic and idealistic by comparison. *Everybody* at this place was screwing everybody, and it worked, until the guy running it learned about the scams which affected him, and failed to roll with the revelations.

h/t

So TRSI cancelled my order for the latest Nodame Cantabile volume, and I hear they canceled a pile of other Del Rey titles. My newer order of Del Rey stuff - mostly Zetsubou Sensei, XXXHolic, and School Rumble books - is still active, and it looks like some of it is waiting on the next ship cycle to drop in the mail, so Del Rey isn't completely gone, yet. Heck, I'm not even all that upset about not getting the new Nodame, it hasn't really gone anywhere in the last three volumes at least, the mangaka's been treading water ever since she shipped all the characters off to Paris. It really ought to have wrapped up when the protagonist conquered his airplane phobia, the rest of it's just inertia and the attractions of a steady readership draw for the editors-in-chief.

But I don't like where this is going with Del Rey. They got the ground cut out from underneath them by Kadokawa, who hasn't really bothered to follow up with any significant new or active titles from their in-house label. It's been all back-catalog omnibuses and license recycling. Meanwhile, the companies which are increasingly uninterested in *selling* us manga have been cracking down on the pirate sites from whom folks can *steal* manga. I'm not really clear on what the financial advantage of suing pirates out of existence *is* if you aren't willing to provide the service being pirated.

All I know right now is that I'd kind of like to read the next volumes of Nodame or Kurohime, and nobody will sell either to me.

I believe for now I'll follow GayPatriot's line on the whole overturn-of-Prop 8 thing.

Personally, I'm thinking that gay marriage is a social experiment, and I prefer social experiments to be undertaken under controlled, limited, and voluntary conditions. If there were some way to break off the Bay Area into its own little administrative region, I'm sure that the locals would be happy to have their experiment - even the local conservatives have by and large made their peace with the San Francisco spirit, and those few hold-outs like Michael Savage seem to thrive off of being the counter-culture to the counter-culture anyways. But California is a bigger place than just the Bay, and apparently the majority of the state's voters don't want to be caught up in yet another state-wide social experiment. This idiot judge, by tying the rejection of Prop 8 into specious constitutional arguments, is threatening to produce a *national-level* social experiment. That's the opposite of controlled & limited, and by striking down all the extant laws, voluntary as well.

I don't know, maybe all this crap is for the best. Maybe it'll result in a Great Divorce of the state and marriage, sever the apparatus of no-fault divorces, tax status, "starter marriages", and all the rest of it from the serious social business of family formation. But the last time the social elites went off on one of these lets-meddle-with-divorce tears, the result was the Long Sixties, and I don't think I want to see that on a national scale. I kind of want to see what it does to a liberal city like San Francisco over a fifteen-year period, before I'll agree to subject the whole country to that sort of blind fiddling about.

h/t