Fuck Censorship

I heard via Twitter this morning that Christopher Handley has pled guilty to obscenity charges related to his manga collection. Handley got in trouble when an Iowa postmaster inspected a shipment of comics from Japan and decided to involve the police.

Handley faces a $250,000 maximum fine, up to 15 years in prison, and forfeiture of property siezed in the case, which I'm not sure but could be his entire collection. What's more, before the trial Handley was harassed by the state: as conditions of his release (while still "innocent") he had to turn over his computer to the investigators, agree to random inspections of his home, and submit to periodic drug tests. When the prosecutors learned that he was still visiting anime-related sites on the internet and had viewed some cheesecake-level Japanese fashion books (with adult models) they ordered him to cut it out, and to submit to mental health counseling.

The problem with Handley's collection is that it included a few drawn images of under-age characters in sexual situations. This set off the child porn detectors, despite the fact that no actual children were required to create the material.

Handley's collection included 1,200 manga comics, plus hundreds of DVDs, laser disks, and video tapes. The case focused on a few hundred images - I heard 150 to 300 individual pictures - that were considered to be obscene. This guy was not a porn collector, he was a manga collector. I'm sure I have objectionable material of the same sort in my house right now, and probably at the same rate.

It should be said that icky sexual situations are not terribly uncommon in Japanese popular art. Seriously, schoolgirl sex, rape, some nasty stuff with tentacles (well, also some hot stuff with tentacles) - all are tolerated much more by Japan than we would do in the US. Especially in anime and manga, which can provide a completely fantasy-based environment. Why do they look at that stuff? I don't know. But you don't have to find it titilating to find it culturally interesting.

Neil Gaiman covers this pretty well in this blog post: Why defend freedom of icky speech? In this post, Gaiman responds to a fan's well-reasoned argument that simulated child porn is potentially damaging with examples from literature, history, and even the bible. Yes, it's basically the slippery slope argument, but it's well done.

So. This is dumb. It's not the only dumb thing our government has done, but it shouldn't happen. There are lots more stories of woe you can read at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and while you're there you should make a nice donation too.

Here's the CBLDF news releases about this case:
CBLDF Disappointed By Guilty Plea in Handley Manga Case (May 2009)
CBLDF To Serve As Special Consultant In PROTECT Act Manga Case (October 2008)

And here's some more information from another blogger: MangaBlog - Editorial: The Handley case and the slippery slope

Project A-Ko DVD sleeve image from Amazon.com - there's actually no sex in this film at all, but what's going on with that skirt?

One GoodThing About Philly

It's this guy: David Leonardi, the Sign Man.

(Photo copyright Getty Images.)

He's been doing this since 1972, when he got season ticket seats in the second row. The article and a link to a video interview are here on the Flyers website. (The video is worth checking out, it has his footage from the Flyers locker room when they won the cup in 1974 and shots of him and his wife showing up in their wedding clothes.)

He even came to Pittsburgh last year to mock the Pens in person during the Eastern Conference Finals (though he was presumably not involved in this legendary signage incident, one of my favorites). He taunted Fleury for "spin[ning] like a ballerina" during stoppages, among other things.

I love stuff like this. It takes effort. Unlike Philly's modern favorite, "Crosby sucks," you actually have to know the game and the players to come up with this kind of quality put-downs.

Vince Lascheid had it. The Civic Arena organist who died last month at 85 had a large repertoire of musical taunts, as well as pun-related theme songs for most of the Penguins stars. When the ref made a bad call, he threw out a few bars of the carol "Do You See What I See?" or, in extreme cases, "Three Blind Mice." (Back in those days of one ref and two linesmen this was an especially good choice.)

So it's great to see Leonardi going strong. This is old time taunting. The modern NHL could use a few more like him.

Great Balls of Fire

A few of my readers (well, actually I only have a few...at most) might remember that this blog title is based on a catchphrase used by Pittsburgh Penguins announcer Mike Lange.

Well, you can hear the illustrious Mr. Lange deliver his line here:
http://www.myxer.com/partner/7975109/
You can even buy it as a ringtone for your cell phone (though I'm sticking with the South Park Underpants Gnomes song, thank you).

In case you were curious. And never listened to Mike Lange call a Penguins game.

Confusingly, the URL is a different catchphrase, which isn't one of the ringtones. You can get the whole story here, in a strangely dated post from a time when the Penguins didn't make the playoffs:
http://sellmymonkey.blogspot.com/2006/02/she-wants-to-sell-my-monkey.html

Or-Durves

Why the heck do we use that phrase, hors-d'oeuvres? It's really hard. Every time I have to write it I have to look it up - and I actually know French.

Isn't there some other word we could call those things? Snacks? Sounds too "after-school". Appetizers? But that implies that more food is coming later, and usually if you invite someone for hors d'oeuvres you're not feeding them anything more.

What does that even mean? I think oeuvre is like a work of art. (I vaguely remember some pretentious use of this term to describe the entire body of work of a film creator, but film criticism has always had these French land mines like auteur and mise-en-scene.) Hors doesn't mean what it sounds like, it means outside.

So hors d'oeuvres are outside art. Does that mean they suck?

Seriously. It's just un-called-for.

Office Food Safety

Important rules from the Mythbusters workplace.

Lessons from LA

What I learned on my April vacation:

At "classy" hotels you have to pay $15/day for internet access. At "budget" hotels it's free. This is why nobody heard from me for three days while I stayed at the Biltmore and then I resurfaced when we moved to a Holiday Inn in San Diego.

Two-Headed Turtle
Originally uploaded by erink

Apparently two-headed turtles are not terribly uncommon. There's a little freak show on Venice Beach (an official one, I'm not just talking about the general ambiance). For $3 you can go into a little room with lots of displays of animals with extra limbs and such. They had a nice collection of cabinet cards, a bunch of skeletons (some gaffes) two two-headed turtles, a two-headed snake, a naked mole rat, and a dog with an extra foreleg. Oh, there was a sword-swallower too.

Seat covers are "provided by the management for my protection" - but against what?

Pinkberry is way good. They sell frozen yogurt with your choice of toppings, but the best thing is the yogurt tastes like yogurt! And it's not too sweet. Can we have one? I wouldn't mind a World Market in western PA either....

I've watched too much Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsey inhabited my body for a few minutes when our waiter (at a slightly pretentious place in San Diego) used some sort of torture device to decant our wine. It was a huge production. You had to put the wine in this frame, and light a flame underneath the neck of the bottle, and then turn a crank to make the bottle horizontal. (I'm not sure what the flame was supposed to accomplish, since it was on for about 60 seconds while the waiter decanted the whole bottle into a glass carafe.) The closest I can find is this. I just kept hearing Gordon's voice in my head - and he was saying, "Fuck me!"

Vaud and the Villains - way cool. Not sure they will translate well on a recording and I'm pretty sure they can't tour, but if you are in LA any time soon you must go and see them.

Our zoo is pretty good, but the San Diego Zoo is much better. All the enclosures are nice, they have more types of animals, and the critters are a lot more fun to watch somehow. I think they trick them into being active on Saturday afternoons just for us. There were a lot of baby animals, which helps, and a lot of "enrichment activities" going on - so the animals have things to do and that's a lot more fun than watching them sleep all day. One relative failure, though, the signage and documentation is better at Pittsburgh.

In southern California, rain is weird. It rained a little while we were in the slightly pretentious restaurant, and the staff warned us to "be careful" because of that when we left.

Pike Place roast sucks so much. It keeps me away from Starbucks in the afternoon. At Dulles I walked a mile to get to Starbuck's and all they had was Pike Place Roast (even though it was 7 a.m. - what's up with that?) But we got breakfast from Five Guys and it was very yummy.

Bird-of-Paradise
Originally uploaded by erink

Bird of Paradise flowers can grow in the ground. I thought they came from flower shops (for $15 a stem).

The Glories of Regent Square

My neighborhood's a great place to live, so I'm sure its reputation will survive the teaser description for this story:

A city police sergeant was wrong to cite a Regent Square man for flipping him off in 2006.

The whole thing: /www.post-gazette.com/pg/09083/957786-85.stm

Wonders of Canada

First, I found out a few weeks ago that you can get takoyaki in Toronto. Takoyaki, in case you didn't know, is a fried octopus fritter that you get as street food in Japan. It's yummy, as is its cousin, tako-sen (takoyaki squished between potatoey crackers with Kewpie Doll mayonnaise). Apparently this place is pretty good http://manpuku.ca/ and according to Chowhound (http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/100248) there are even more places that make takoyaki and such in the area. Thank heavens. I thought I was going to have to go to New Jersey.

Now I find out about another treasure they're hiding up north. They have special hockey-themed Oreos! Lucky I started following goaliegirl on Twitter or I might never have found out.

Here's a photo of the cookies themselves:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/squeakybear/3260541299/

Here's a portfolio web page from the company that did packaging:
http://www.davisdesign.ca/portfolio/promotions

I might have to start reading #nhlcookiesmuggler

Turning Japanese

I've always wrapped my bathrobe right over left. Don't know why, I always just felt right that way and wrong the other way. I mean, for years, my whole life.


In Japan, you always wrap your clothes left over right. I don't know why, maybe nobody really knows why, but that's how you do it. Like so many Japanese things, there's only one right way to do it. Supposedly, when you dress the dead you dress them the other way. (If I'm worried I did it wrong I ask my friends if I'm dead.)

So lately I've been playing a lot with my SCA friends, many of whom have Japanese persona or at least go that way once in a while (check us out at http://yamakaminari.com/). And we hosted a spiffy Japanese-themed event at the end of February. And I made a new Japanese outfit for the event, with real silk and brocade (and a new sewing machine), and it even matches my gender and everything.

And then I put my bathrobe on again. I go through phases of wearing it or not wearing it - in fact, last week I dug it out because I was watching It Happened One Night and I wanted to be like Clark Gable, all classy with my pajamas _and_ a robe. And last week, for some reason, I wrapped it left over right. Just automatically. Then I did it again the next time I put it on. And again.

Last night, I tried wrapping it right over left (the old "right" way) and it was really awkward.

So, something has changed. Am I turning Japanese? I have been eating a lot of pickles.... But for whatever reason I guess I'll be wrapping the bathrobe the other way for a while.

It's not a bad deal, actually. I found a whole breast pocket in this robe that I never noticed before!

Quest for Paczki - 2009 Edition

When I worked downtown, I learned about paczki from Jenny Lee Bakery in Market Square.

Paczki (the singular is paczek) are basically filled donuts. But they're special Polish Fat Tuesday donuts. The theory is that you have to make pastries to use up all your lard and sugar and stuff, because you don't use those during Lent.

Traditionally, paczki come in lemon, raspberry, sometimes custard, and - the best part - lekvar, which is prune paste. There's actually a great flavor interplay between the donut glaze and the mildly sweet prune paste. Also you can only eat one or two before you get full.

Last year Jenny Lee Bakery closed forever. I woke up this morning and heard New Orleans music on the radio and thought, damn, no paczki? (Well, even if Jenny Lee were open, it would have been too late to get any there by 9 a.m., but I would have gone before.)

So after an early appointment on the South Side I went on a quest for paczki.

First, I cruised part of E. Carson St., because I'd heard there once was a bakery there that made them. But even when I went there five years ago they weren't apparently open, and now it's gone completely.

I looped around and headed for Homestead.

Last year on a quest for donuts I'd heard of a place called A+B Donuts. It's on 8th Avenue in Homestead across from the Waterfront shopping mall - but you can't get there from the mall. When I went last year, the place was closed but promised it would re-open. So I drove by today. The cute little donut shop part is up for sale (which is unfortunate, I hear it's cool-looking inside), but the bakery side is open every day except Monday. No paczki, but I got some other awesome-looking donuts.


As I was pulling out from my illegal parking space in front of A+B, I noticed there was a Shop N' Save across the road. There is actually a whole little "locals" mall there on the other side of the tracks from Waterfront, with a Rite Aid, and a Big Lots, and a Shop N' Save. It's hard to find Shop N' Save in the East End, which is overrun with Giant Eagle, so I went in to have a look. Paczki! But no prune. I settled for a box of raspberry, but my quest continued to find the one true paczek.


Oh yeah, I got some wasabi peas there too.

Saturday night we'd come through Homestead on our way back from a strange theater (we had to go out to Century III land to see Coraline in 3D) and passed Nancy B Bakery (actually a sign saying that the closed road was open as far as the bakery) so I was thinking to stop by. I was not really expecting paczki, but they have "world renowned chocolate chip cookies" and how bad could that be? Unfortunately Nancy B's is always out of chocolate chip cookies unless you pre-order. I told the lady at the counter that I'd never had one, and she went looking in the back and brought me a "second" - free! It is yummy. They also have other good cookies too - those crescent-shaped nut cookies are pretty awesome. So I bought some cookies there.


Last stop: Giant Eagle. Giant Eagle tries to be all things to all people, and I'm people, so I thought it was worth a shot. Actually I'd found prune paczki there before, last year or the year before, but different stores get different baked goods, so I wasn't sure the Edgewood one would have them. It did, and even had a sign about what they are and how to pronounce them! But they were out of prune, so I didn't buy any. But here's a picture of the display anyway.


So, no lekvar, but I will manage a fair amount of lard and sugar today, and even eat some "official" paczki. Though they're not as good as Jenny Lee's.

Finally, Exercise for Geeks.

Star Wars Yoga.
http://youwillnotbelieve.typepad.com/ywnb_the_blog/star-wars-yoga/

I like TIE Fighter (advanced).

Okay, I just looked at the pictures.

Hometown Fail

Hometown Fail
Originally uploaded by erink

Saw this today on the Hot Metal bridge. (It was after 2 p.m. so I had plenty of time stopped on the bridge to take a photo.)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that if you really want cred with the locals, you probably should spell the name of your town right.

There is another possibility, but I find it very unlikely that this plastic license plate frame was produced between 1892 and 1911.

I left half the license number on because it's a happy coincidence that it almost spells "hick."

If Yellowtail Sushi Fought Katsuo Sushi, Who Would Win?

Came across this blog entry from a Japanese woman who got a fresh whole yellowtail from Hiketa fisheries. (The photo of Hiketa fish boxes is from this blog.)

It makes me hungry.

But when we were in Japan I was kind of disappointed in the yellowtail we got there. In the US, yellowtail sushi is always soft and buttery and delicately flavored. The yellowtail I had in Japan was often bland, and occasionally tough. Do we get better yellowtail here or was it just the wrong season?

Now, to be fair, we didn't always go to the best sushi places. Frequently it was just some restaurant we saw on the street. We did hit one really good place.

The best sushi fish I had in Japan was katsuo. Katsuo is cured and shaved into stinky flakes and used as a flavoring and soup base. (Apparently in English it's called skipjack, and the flakes are also called bonito but I don't know if that's Japanese or not.) I never had the fresh fish before, and it was awesome. A bit like tuna, but very savory and a little sweet. And good. It's dark red.

One thing that I thought was strange, in Japan it's not unusual to have tough bits in your fish. I came across many a tough membrane running through my nigiri fish, even in the good restaurant. Apparently that's not a dealbreaker. In the US that never happens. US sushi and sashimi is always soft and yields easily. (Ika, which is detailed below in the "stuff I don't like" section, is an exception.) Maybe because they think we're so easily grossed out by raw fish we just couldn't take it if it was difficult to eat.

I also made a point of trying things I didn't like in the US. See, I've never liked anago, saltwater eel, which shows up raw on nigiri sushi in a slimy sauce that resembles thickened formaldehyde. (Anago is very different from unagi, freshwater eel, which is served grilled and delicious even when done badly.) Then my beau had anago in Japan (in a very posh company cafeteria) and said it was pretty good. So I figured when I got to a good sushi place I had to order the stuff I avoid. The result:

• ika (squid)
  Much better than the US, but still kind of gross. Ika typically has a hard ridge along one side that makes it hard to eat, and the consistency is very gluey. The flavor is okay, not very big - but it's the texture that puts me off. In Japan it was less gluey and had a slightly better flavor.
  
  
• ama-ebi (sweet shrimp)
  Almost worth eating. These are tiny shrimp (like 1/2" long) that are marinated in a kind of sweet and sour sauce.
  
  
• toro (tuna belly)
  Now, I don't dislike toro, but I avoid it because it's considered "premium" and it's extra-expensive (the phrase "market price" gets used on menus), and I don't particularly like it. It's wasted on me. I like regular tuna for the meaty flavor, and toro has a fatty, buttery flavor that kind of turns me off. Usually it just tastes greasy. I'm certainly not against grease, but I think that greasy taste goes much better with pork flavor (bacon, pork chop) or a pot roast.
  
  So I had toro twice in Japan and once I thought it was actually better than the regular tuna. (I also had some tuna that was not that great, but it wasn't the same place where I liked the toro.) I think the one toro I liked was meatier than usual. Also, in Japan there are two kinds of toro, chu-toro and o-toro, with chu- ("middle") being less fatty and less premium than o-. (Sometimes I think o- should be translated as "super-good".) So I didn't even try the o-toro.

I did not manage to get anago. So that's for another trip.

I hear that katsuo turns up occasionally around here. I hope it comes near me!

Best Fake Sudafed

Target beats them all. 20 tablets of 12-hour (generic/Target brand) for under $5!

I used to swear by Rite Aid's fake sudafed. Or Eckerd when they existed. Same product, different house brand, about $6 if I remember right. But lately they've been having trouble getting them from their supplier and they're frequently out of stock. When you can only buy one pack per visit, availability is important.

Today I stopped by Walgreens. They just built one in my neighborhood - literally; they bought and demolished my friends' house to make room for their drive-through pharmacy. I'm not a big fan of the strobe light that flashes on the outside of their building all night, but otherwise it seems like an okay place. They had a decent stock of their house brand 12-hour, but it was $7.50! Also, instead of scanning my ID they had to type in some information, so it took a lot longer.

For the record, I tried the Sudafed brand 24-hour pills when they first came out. They just don't work. I don't know why, maybe it doesn't release the way it's supposed to. I haven't seen a generic 24-hour, maybe it doesn't work on them either.

But Target rules.

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

Though I still have guilt about failing to blog more Japan stories, I have an out. The new Top Gear episode that just aired Monday on BBC America features a race across Japan. Jeremy Clarkson drives a souped up Nissan while James May and Richard Hammond take trains from Hakui (Ishikawa Prefecture) to Nokogiri mountain (Chiba Prefecture), south east of Tokyo.

On the way, they have several standard tourist experiences.

• Yes, it is rude to talk on a cell phone on the train! A very strange concept for us. You also don't eat or drink on commuter trains or the subway (long-distance trains like the Shinkansen are different), though we saw several women doing makeup and other similar grooming tasks.
  
  
• The manhole covers are awesome.
  


• The trains stop precisely so that the doors are lined up with the lines on the platform. That's why people queue there to get into the train, but you can sort of stumble in after them if you weren't lined up.


• There's no point in working out how to ask a question in Japanese if you aren't going to understand the answer. Hammond and May find this out while trying to buy snacks from a pushcart on the train. (Incidentally, we are big fans of that Toppo that Hammond chose. It's like pretzel Pocky - tiny pretzel rods filled with chocolate - but a little softer and better.) Their electronic translator asks how much it costs and the snack cart woman tells them it's 250 yen - at which point they realize they have no clue what she said. They're still near Hakui at the time, which is fairly remote, but in areas that get a lot of tourists most merchants use pocket calculators to show prices. Also people tend to assume that caucasians don't speak Japanese, which is sometimes helpful.


• Clarkson joyfully crunches all manner of dried or fried sea life as snacks while driving. He eats little dried whole fish (we had some, mainly as bar snacks or garnish) and these tiny crabs (we didn't see these but they looked good). Hammond, on the other hand, has some issues with the food. There's a great line when he and May are in a convenience store trying to find snacks for the train:

  Hammond: But it's all fish. I don't like fish.
  May: Then you've come to the wrong country.

Since we didn't drive on our trip, we didn't get to experience a Japanese service station, though they did look impressive. It's great to see one in action in the video.

Here's a link to the episode description. There are also two videos from the segment that you can watch online.
http://www.topgear.com/us/the_show/more/season-11-ep-4-nissan-gt-r-vs-bullet-train/

Share and enjoy.

RoboOrange

RoboOrange
Originally uploaded by erink

My orange has a barcode.

That never happened before.

Life in Pennsylvania

You don't see this headline every day:

Police say buggy driver drunk in crash that killed horse

Apparently a 19-year old "man" was driving his horse and buggy, ran a stop sign, and hit a car. I feel bad for the horse, but it does seem like the driver deserved some penalty. And the horse probably could have been smarter about that, now that I think of it...though maybe it couldn't see the car. Or maybe the horse was drunk too. Now there's a picture.

Fractured French - Mise En Scene

Fractured French - Mise En Scene
Originally uploaded by mthaeg

Another find from the scary-good Dinosaurs And Robots blog. This is a great photoset of vintage cocktail napkins on Flickr.

I like the French ones.

Peri Peri

My new favorite song.



This is a keychain toy that mimics the sound and feeling of pulling the tab on a cardboard box or envelope.

The song has a lot of onomatopoeic words, which are particularly Japanese. For example, it rhymes "peri-peri," the name of the product (after the sound of opening a box tear strip) with "doki-doki" which is the canonical sound effect word for a pounding heart. In the Kansai airport on the way home I bought some cider soda that said "With KiraKira Sparkle" which was ironic because "kira-kira" is the canonical sound effect for sparkling (like light reflecting on water). Yes, they have a "sound effect" for something that's not a sound.

I found this video while Christmas shopping, but while in Japan I did buy the sibling product, Bandai Mugen Edamame, which is a rubbery soybean pod that you can pop the beans out of over and over again. You can find these wondrous things and many more at Strapya World, (http://www.strapya-world.com).

More and better Japan stories are in my brain for you, but I had to start on Christmas cleaning and such and I got distracted. That part might be getting under control now.

Not Japan, But Worthy of Note

We interrupt my vacation stories to bring you two relatively unrelated items of news.

Muslim Scientist Leaves US Over Security Clearance

How often do you get to invoke Cartman's catch phrase to describe a serious news story? Basically this guy, a physicist and a naturalized US citizen, suddenly lost his security clearance and his job because the acting deputy energy secretary decided he was a security risk. The evidence was never presented and he never had a chance to refute it. 

Here's the story:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08333/931314-82.stm

He has appeals pending, but he also has a new academic job in Egypt. Too bad "home" is probably actually Pittsburgh, where he's lived for 28 years (longer than he lived anywhere else).

Awesome Glass Sale Next Weekend

Riverside Design Group, which makes many awesome things, is having its annual warehouse sale. We went last year and bought many beautiful glass things (and some metal ones, I think). Some are seconds or discontinued, but lots of stuff is quite fine. The sale is a benefit for Persad Center, which is a counseling center specializing in queer issues (sexual orientation, gender expression, HIV disease). Some other artists are selling things too. The sale is at Riverside's studio in Lawrenceville. Details here: http://www.persadcenter.org/events3.htm

One hint, though; if you buy gifts at the sale you might want to re-wrap them if you don't want your mother wondering why the newspaper on her dishes is advertising mens' dating services. (Though she thought the photos were scenic.) (No, this was not my mother, who I think went to the sale too and would have known why.)