Okay, in the op-ed pages of the Tacoma
News Tribune, some mother named Julie McBride-Wyatt wrote an
opinion piece, critical of the anime FLCL, so, to fanboys on
anime message boards everywhere, we're one step away from the "Supreme Court" banning anime (yes, giving the Supreme Court all sorts of powers it doesn't have, and, in any event, I'm in Canada) because one parent somewhere wrote an op-ed (admittedly a somewhat uninformed op-ed, since the show is rated TV-14, not TV-PG, though she might have gotten the erroneous rating information from
TV Guide) in a medium-sized, uninfluential newspaper somewhere.
It is the sort of reaction that makes me embarrassed to be an anime fan, knowing the paper will get all sorts of "OMG111 YOU SUK!!! TEH ANIME ISN'T FOR TEH KIDS!!! DBZ ROOLZ!!!" e-mails. Well, if you ask me, the reaction is really all "anime fan navel gazing" that, since a parent has sincere concerns about a specific anime, albeit one that airs late in the evening (but not in Canada...ahem...), we're on to something that the evil, square, conservative Christian Republicans want to supress. Well, I'm a realist anime fan that doesn't assume that the natural order of things is for everyone in North America to like anime, and if they don't, they're uninformed or ignorant. I just see it as a taste thing, that the anime fandom niche has tastes conducive to enjoying anime while most other people don't. So I fully expect to see negative opinions of anime in the press every once in a while, and, quite frankly, I respect their opinions and, even if I didn't respect their opinions, it's not like they affect me in the slightest.
And the hyperbole directed at the woman reminds me exactly of the time that Montreal science-fiction author Victor Shukov wrote an article called "Drawn by the Darkness" wherein he criticized the dark tone of many of today's comic books, so the leftist
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, always eager to trot out the old "Conservative/Republican/Christian comic book-burner" bogeyman, labelled his article
"Censorship"... umm, I don't recall Victor Shukov having the legislative powers to ban anything, even here in Canada. He's just critical of the dark tone of today's comics (as am I). Boo-fricking-hoo. Having a negative opinion of comics is not the same thing as censorship. It would be "censorship" if the government issues a decree banning criticism of comic books. Just because comic book "artists" love to label their works as "Art" with a capital A (I find the word "Art" so overused these days that I can't label even things I like for more supposedly "highbrow" reasons, like
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou "Art" except in the most technical of senses because the word "Art" just comes across as pretentious) doesn't mean it's immune from criticism, though some people seem to treat the word "Art" as a magical amulet of protection against all criticism. Meh...
Since I seem to have had fucked up my old template royally, so that the actual text of my blog was thinner than the links column, I decided to start from scratch (saving my old template as a .txt file, of course, so I could bring over the links). But they didn't have the same template I used before, and I'm not good at doing 'em from scratch, so... well, "Sand Dollar" was the closest one I can find (I like my text on the right, heh heh). I'm not sure I like the colour scheme, though... I like the red n' black.
Well, there seem to be a few issues in Netscape... damn! Ah... don't feel like tweaking it anymore tonight.
Hmm... is
Knights of the Zodiac, the edited-for-TV version of the anime
Saint Seiya (which will also be available in uncut, subtitled format on DVD from ADV Films), poised to be a bigger hit than I expected it to be? Just checking my hits from Google and other search engines, it seems about a third of them are about
Knights of the Zodiac in one way or another. Let's just say... I found the movies I saw really boring, but it could be one of those things you can't appreciate unless you watch it from the beginning, just like how it's pointless to watch the superb
Tenchi Muyo in Love film if you're unfamiliar with the characters.
Well, I'd like to think I could be of some use to you if that's why you're coming here... here's the
official DiC site for Knights of the Zodiac, and
here's the directory page for Saint Seiya at the Anime Web Turnpike. (I hate the new format at Anipike.com, by the way, having a special section for popular series, which is a good idea in and of itself certainly, but then not listing the popular series with the regular series as well...) You can also order a crapload of volumes of the manga, I think 28 are out, in French under the title
Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque from the
Renaud-Bray bookstore.
While I hope you bookmark this blog :) and come back frequently, to be perfectly honest, I don't think I will be talking about
Saint Seiya/
Knights of the Zodiac all that much, since it's really not the sort of anime that interests me. Yes, even though I'm a big fan of
Sailor Moon, and it's essentially the same sort of animated "sentai" series ("sentai" = a group of heroes in suits like on the
Power Rangers) except with girls instead of boys. Well, I like how the girls still have normal lives outside of their monster-of-the-week fighting; I find their lives interesting and amusing. As far as I can tell, the
Saint Seiya characters are in that Greek-ish god place all the time, and... meh.
Sonic X does look pretty sweet, though... I've been a Sega fan since 1987 and a
Sonic fan since 1991, but I never got into the cartoons, but this cartoon is from Japan, so he's going back to his roots, heh. I'll definitely try watching a few episodes.
Apparently, I'm not the only Canadian out there that could
recognize an older-but-familiar face in the current wave of Future Shop commercials. Yes, I did a Google search to confirm my suspicions, and, sho'nuff, the Future Shop clerk is played by none other than... Adam Reid! Who? Why he was
Adam (one of 2 Adams, actually) on the Ottawa-produced children's TV series
You Can't Do That On Television, for those of you that watched CTV on Saturday mornings (in Canada) or Nickelodeon (in the United States) in the mid-80s, or whom caught the reruns which aired two or three times a day on YTV in the early years. He's also, apparently, currently seen on one of the Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale commercials (with the Scottish guy) and was on the Canada Heritage Minute spot about the creation of
Superman.
Speaking of
You Can't Do That On Television... my brother, John, almost made it onto that show. He went to an audition in 1989 and was one of the last kids left in the audition, but they chose one of the other kids and the show only lasted a few more episodes before it got cancelled...
Also, since
Burger King made an announcement about a Hamtaro-related promotion, so
AnimeNewsNetwork.com forum gadfly
GATSU started a thread about how it's appropriate that Burger King is doing a
Hamtaro promotion,
"considering BK's burgers taste like rodent meat". Well, I, as
Tenchi, couldn't resist inserting the obvious
You Can't Do That On Television reference:
Random kid 1: Didn't Barth say they were having some sort of Hamtaro promotion? I don't see any Hamtaro toys anywhere.
Random kid 2: Oh, but Hamtaro is here... what do you think's *in* the burgers?
Barth: Duh.... I heard that!!!
Yes, someone did get the joke. :P
No, I haven't abandoned this blog again, just it's the middle of hayfever season and I'm feeling physically quite miserable, and I'm doped up on Benadryl right now (nothing non-drowsy works; I need the big guns) and the hot weather is giving me a headache (well, at least I'm not in Europe, I know). I have been working on one of those things that is so long that I have to write it in a separate program (which only a few people that read this blog will appreciate), but it's taking me a while... probably, I'll have it up by this evening.
NETSCAPE USERS
Hmm... sorry, I didn't know the formatting of this blog sucked so badly on Netscape Communicator. I'm not that good with templates and such (how would you have ever guessed?), but I fixed it so you don't have to scroll right anymore just to read the items.
Okay, now that I think about it a little, I have received some visitors from military domains before, but they were normal-sounding military domains like NAVY.MIL or USAF.MIL, so I assumed it was just servicemen or pilots (hopefully pilots; pilots are cool) on their breaks at the Internet caf� at the base comissary coming across my blog using Google.com because they're fans of anime or whatever else I write about here. NIPR.MIL was the first really spooky-sounding military acronym I've had visit since I put in the first counter (I just added Bravenet, so I can see more details), and I was thinking about the silly conspiracy theories about Denver International Airport I wrote about yesterday, and, okay, I admit, I tried to put two and two together and got a bit spooked.
About Denver International Airport... can I believe that there is some sort of top secret military installation there? Yes, somewhere on the DIA grounds. It's very possible, since Denver is the second-largest administrative centre for the American government after Washington D.C. Am I concerned by this? Not really; I presume it's just some sort of bunker... possibly to be used by the Air Force in the event of a national emergency should they ever have to use the airport as a base of operations of some sort. Or, it could be something to do with NORAD. However, it is a huge step from believing there is some sort of top secret military installation with a few rooms and maybe even a hangar and a garage and believing there is an 8-storey underground city under the entirety of the airport grounds with a United Nations concentration camp for "patriotic" Americans... that's just silly.
Okay, I decided to check which entry page the NIPR.MIL (a general proxy for all computer systems in the Department of Defense, by the way) was looking at, and it seems to be the page for
the week of Sunday, January 26th to Saturday, February 1st, so I hope the military bot enjoyed reading my reviews of
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and
Shanghai Knights. Also, I wrote about the reaction to the disintergration of the Space Shuttle
Columbia and must have used many of the red flagged words on their list.
It has probably happened before, I just didn't install the Site Meter until the beginning of this month, so I wasn't aware of it before...
Well, see! See Leftists! The military computers spy on unabashedly right wing, pro-American, pro-"War on Terrorism" blogs too.
Since what I wrote about the Denver International Airport won't be cached at Google for another day or so, I can only presume that the military bots found this site because of what I wrote about
the Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta last week.
