Category: general

The other day, Sean and I went to Mikoto for dinner. It was really nice. Sean had his usual sushi with shrimp tempura appetizer, and I had shrimp tempura and sashimi, and we split a dragon roll to see how that was.

I also got it into my head to drink some cold sake. I have no idea why. I remembered how it was to drink it when I was in Akita–I took a sip of hot and a sip of cold, and liked the cold better. But I didn’t really remember anything else about it.

So we ordered a bottle. It had a little over six ounces in it. It came with cute little cups. Sean and I aren’t big drinkers, so we had no idea how we were supposed to drink it.

So, we took each ounce like a shot.

And ugh, did it ever taste terrible.

Sean liked it, actually. He said it was very smooth and there was little aftertaste, unlike other hard liquors. But I thought it was awful. “Bleah,” I said, “this is worse than medicine. And it does nothing for me.”

Which was true. I felt no effects whatsoever.

We each had three “shots”, and then I let Sean have the tiny bit that was left.

When our waitress was clearing our table, Sean told her we were done with the alcohol, and she said “…wow, fast.” So I’m pretty sure we were supposed to sip it. I don’t know if the experience would have been different if I’d done that, though.

I have always been afraid to drink alcohol. Alcoholism runs in my family, and I already have a weakness for food. I was always afraid that I would like alcohol too, and that I wouldn’t be able to control my cravings for it. So I don’t know why I suddenly decided I wanted to have some sake. It was totally random, and the feeling didn’t just come over me and pass…it settled. Maybe I had just hit the point in my life where I felt confident enough in myself to try it.

But obviously I needn’t have worried, because alcohol is nasty ;>

The car next to ours in the parking lot had a hilarious hood ornament. “It’s too bad you don’t have your camera,” Sean said.

“Actually, I do.”

“I hereby give you permission to take a picture of that.”

Then we went home.

I went to Riverwalk before and after work last Friday, and took pictures.

Now, I’m going to pout until someone posts a comment (other than “I have nothing to say”. Understand, AJ? Will? ;P).

*commences pouting*

Got up early today, expecting to do some work for my side job, but ultimately spent the morning watching Touch. That’s not a bad thing, really, except that I wish I’d stayed in bed instead. I feel pretty wasted.

Today, Marie Mockett writes about why “getting dressed is hard“.

Apparently, to worry too much about “matching”, as in “matching in an obvious way” is considered very suburban and therefore not New York. Not at all.

[…]

The trick in fashion, apparently, is to buy things that go well together, but don’t obviously go well together. This is how you have style, how people look twice at your clothes and admire your ability to put an outfit together. It is what stylists do for starlets, what magazine editors seek out in the never ending quest to identify trend-setters. It is what makes someone’s personal style interesting. I guess that, in the language of a writer, avoiding matchy matchy is the same as an ability to write without cliches.

And to think, I just try not to clash. Remind me not to move to NYC.

(I might have to avoid Japan, too, since young women there are so fashionable :/)

AP: $10M Prize for Hydrogen Fuel Technology

Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

This is pretty cool! But what are they calling it?

The H-Prize.

XD

Legislation creating the “H-Prize,” modeled after the privately funded Ansari X Prize that resulted last year in the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice, passed the House Wednesday on a 416-6 vote. A companion bill is to be introduced in the Senate this week.

Via Slashdot.

My job is so fulfilling.

Today we all got free pizza for our hard work covering the Linda Schrenko trial. Later, I was told that the E-Alert I sent out concerning Schrenko’s plea bargain had made it out five minutes before the Chronicle sent theirs.

Do I rock, or do I rock?

It is so much fun working in the news.

And I love my position, because I have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men–err, you know, I run the website. I get to use what my boss calls my “expertise”. I’m not autonomous–I have to run changes past her–but typically my ideas are very well-received, and I’m free to implement them.

Our Schrenko reporter has showered me with praise lately, too.

I hardly notice when I work through lunch or stay late, because I’m good at what I do and I enjoy doing it.

It’s great. :)

And nor should it. It doesn’t cringe away from life. It’s real. It’s one of the most real anime I have ever seen.

Things aren’t black and white, and yet decisions still matter, and everything is a “what if”.

What if Tatsuya had run after Kazuya to give him the good luck charm?

What if he’d never admitted his feelings for Minami, even indirectly?

What if Minami had gone with Kazuya to the meeting?

What if she’d let him kiss her, even though she didn’t want him to?

They feel responsible, and because of that they feel they can’t be together.

And there is such a long road to redemption ahead.

Minami has to grow too, and become less of a cheerleader and more self-reliant.

And Tatsuya has to give up on chasing a shadow and be who he is.

And you’re left wondering…would either of them have grown, had Kazuya lived?

Did he die so they could mature?

Do they feel responsible for that, too?

I know Tatsuya grows, and works hard, and learns who he is, and is finally able to separate his identity from his brother’s. And he’s finally able to accept Minami’s love, and she’s finally able to give it. And through their ordeal they bring another man back from the brink of self destruction.

I know it gets better.

But that doesn’t erase what happened to Kazuya.

I realized the other day that I hadn’t uploaded photos in over half a month. My mom was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me.

Never fear! I was still taking photos; I just hadn’t gotten around to uploading them.

That situation has been rectified.

2006/04/18 – Lunchbreak in the park near work

2006/04/18-2 – Greeneway after work

2006/04/27 – Greeneway and Hammond’s Ferry construction

2006/05/03 – Back roads near Georgia and Knox Avenues, North Augusta

There are also some pictures of the apartment you might not have seen, starting here with our second set of dishes. They match the kitchen!

And the lemons are nigh.

There is an amazing amount of foreshadowing that I never noticed before, too. A glance between characters, an offhand comment…

I understood Tatsuya well enough before, but seeing his decisions again with the knowledge of why he’s making them adds a whole new layer to the experience.

I wonder how things would have gone if he’d joined the baseball club despite Minami being the manager. Would he have become the backup pitcher? The regular pitcher?

Would Kazuya have left earlier or later the day of their first Koushien?

Does Tatsuya ever think about this? Does he regret?

He already regrets so many things.

It’s going to be painful to get there and watch it all again.

It always surprises me to see how my blogging style has changed (for the better) over the years. Today I reread my Pulp Fiction post in the process of writing about movie memories, and it really drove that point home.

Back when I first started blogging, I would mix topics and go off on tangents that were mainly uninteresting and didn’t even relate to the rest of the post. As essays, these posts clearly fail. I’ve noticed that nowadays, when I’m writing something and a new idea occurs to me, I think about whether or not it will fit in the current post before I add it. Two examples: my Kyou Kara Maou post from last night (which, admittedly, isn’t very well-written) has a tangent that I didn’t think detracted too much. The subject wasn’t meaty enough to warrant its own post, but I wanted to mention it. And today, while writing about movies, I wondered if I should include my thoughts about my personality, how I’m afraid I’m too naive in many respects, how I subscribe to the “Shibuya Yuuri school of diplomacy”, how these thoughts relate to my reaction to the Moussaoui verdict, and what kind of president I think I would be. Obviously these things stray wildly from the point at hand…so I chose to reserve them for later.

I see my posts now as individual capsules. If I link to one of them, I’d like for people to know immediately why there was a link, and not have to stumble through random remarks about what I’ve eaten that day and references (without links!) to other posts. Reading that Pulp Fiction post really made me cringe, and I’m terribly tempted to go back and edit it.

But I’m the type who likes to leave things as they originally existed, “for the record”, so if I ever do edit that post, I’ll leave the original up too.

Andy Gray asks, “What was the first movie you ever saw? And the first time you experienced terror in a movie theater?”

I remember wanting to see a movie in the theater, and not being able to, but I don’t know if I had seen a movie before that time or not. I think the movie was Snow White, and Mom and I (and the boys, probably) were walking in a mall, and I saw a poster for the movie and asked if we could see it. It’s hard to remember exactly what the place looked like, but I think we were in Turfland Mall, because Mom used to always take us to the Walgreens there.

She said no, and I thought it was unfair, but the truth was we really couldn’t afford to go to the movies, and we probably didn’t have time, either. What with Mom’s 36-hour weekend work schedule and Dad’s inconsistent journeyman wireman jobs, it was hard for us to get out a lot.

I do know that one time we managed to see E.T. at a drive-in. I think we had the station wagon at the time, because I remember lying on blankets in the back. You could lower all the seats behind the driver into a flat surface, so I think that’s what we did. It was late at night, and I fell asleep. Years later, I finally watched E.T. in its entirety on TV.

There is one other movie memory from my youth that is also my scary movie memory. Mom took us to the theater to see Baby, a movie about a baby dinosaur. Only there were dinosaur hunters in the movie, and during one scene they attack and kill the baby’s mother. The scene was so upsetting that we left immediately; I have never seen the whole movie, nor do I have any desire to.

I was always the type to be very sensitive to what happened in the story. Many things scared and upset me. As such, I have avoided standard horror movies into my adulthood.

During college I did discover that I enjoy some thrillers (Breakdown), gory action movies (Desperado), and dark comedies (Grosse Pointe Blank).

It’s only in recent years that I’ve seen films like Carrie (and not in its entirety), Event Horizon (terrible–and not because it was scary, it was just stupid), and Piranha (which was hilarious). As longtime readers know, my attempt at watching Pulp Fiction was unsuccessful.

It’s been interesting to see the name spellings in the Geneon DVDs as opposed to the fansubs.

I’ve mentioned Conrart Weller and Dorcas/Dakaskos before, but I don’t think I commented on Khrennikov/Karbelnikoff yet.

But the real point of this post is that I just got three more DVDs, and that means I’ve gotten to later characters.

Rinji von Wincott is now Lindsay, which I guess is okay except that he’s a boy. I don’t think ji sounds very much like the zi in Lindsay, but it’s possible that’s what they were going for. (The Japanese language doesn’t have a /zi/ sound.)

And “Flurin” (the fansubbers’ version) is “Flynn”. In the roundup episodes, I noticed that the katakana is furin, which would make “Flurin” wrong anyway. I would think “Flynn” would be furiin, but what do I know?

Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC agrees that rinjii is “Lindsey”/”Lyndsay” and furin is “Flynn”. Do the Geneon translators use the WWWJDIC to help them, or are these pretty standard name transcriptions?

Regardless, I think I do like “Flynn” better than “Flurin”.

But Wolfram’s name for Pochi was “Liesel” in the fansub, and on the DVD it’s “Reese-aire”. Surely that‘s a mistake, right? “Liesel” is so much better…

Other changes:

Big Shimaron => Big Cimaron
Saralegui => Salaregui
Bandarbia => Van Da Via
Yozak => Josak

There are more, but I’m tired of writing this post. You can see a few of them here.

I like that the DVDs translate soukoku as “double-black”. So many of the scenes make soooo much more sense that way.

Tangent: There’s a Kyou Kara Maou RP Livejournal community, and the players’ names are hilarious. I mean, you’ve gotta love someone called “knittingismanly”. And don’t forget “hero_in_a_skirt”.

(By the way, I don’t really recommend actually reading that RP…unless you’re into gratuitous pairings-off, and the fanfic “escapades” thereof. I’ll just say this: ShourixYuuri = ick. However! Anissina’s journal is fairly interesting, and well-written.)

People keep saying things like the jury “spared his life” and that they decided “he didn’t deserve” to die, making it seem like the decision was favorable to Moussaoui. But I’m not so sure it is. Wouldn’t he have preferred to die immediately, to be martyred for his cause? Won’t he suffer more now, living out the rest of his life locked away from the rest of the world?

Moussaoui’s mother and Judge Leonie Brinkema seem to agree with me.

Brinkema firmly refused to be interrupted by the 37-year-old defendant as she disputed his claim that his life sentence meant America had lost and he had won.

“Mr. Moussaoui, when this proceeding is over, everyone else in this room will leave to see the sun … hear the birds … and they can associate with whomever they want,” she said.

She went on: “You will spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison. It’s absolutely clear who won.”

And she said it was proper he will be kept away from outsiders, unable to speak publicly again.

“Mr. Moussaoui, you came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory,” she said, “but to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper.”

At that point, Moussaoui tried again to interrupt her, but she raised her voice and spoke over him.

“You will never get a chance to speak again and that’s an appropriate ending.”

[…]

Moussaoui’s mother Aicha El Wafi, pressed for her country to intervene, CBS News correspondent Elaine Cobbe reports. “Now he is going to die in little doses,” she said. “He is going to live like a rat in a hole. What for? They are so cruel.”

And so is he.

Because

a whetstone is no kervyng instrument, yet it maketh sherpe kervynge toolis.

From Chaucer’s blog, GALFRIDUS CHAUCERES LYNES OF PICKE-VPPE.

Yf thou were a latyn tretise ich wolde putte thee in the vernacular.

[…]

Woldstow haue me shyfte thyne voweles?

[…]

Makstow a pilgrymage heere often?

[…]

By my soule, thou art a verye mappe of helle. For thy face lyk the rivere Styx wil make me swere oothes neuer to be fforsworn, and thy embrace lyk the Lethe shal make me foryet al else, and lyk vnto the Flegeton thyn arse ys ON FYRE!

XD