Eugene Woodbury's Ooburoshiki Blog

"Sherlock Hound" on YouTube

2009-12-04T12:03:00.009-07:00

Sherlock Hound has its own--legitimate--YouTube channel. The series was one of Hayao Miyazaki's first directorial efforts. It's cute and clever family fare. Especially if you love dogs. I review the series here.

Unfortunately, unlike Monty Python (a recent example of monetizing YouTube content), TMS Entertainment hasn't kept the region 1 DVDs in print. Netflix has them, as does the Orem public library.

Beware the shrike!

2009-12-02T09:00:00.007-07:00

In the "cool things you learn while translating" category: 百舌の速贄 (mozu no haya'nie), "a worm or a frog impaled on a branch by a shrike," which can be literally translated as "the shrike's sacrificial offering."

According to Wikipedia, "Shrikes [or "butcher birds"] are known for their habit of catching insects, small birds, or mammals and impaling their bodies on thorns."

A great metaphor to use in a horror novel. And the appearance of this terrifying creature? All together now: Awww. Though that hook at the end of its upper beak does lend the cutie an edge of menace.

North America's Loggerhead Shrike will "stun or kill prey with its powerful, hooked beak before impaling it on a plant thorn or barbed-wire fence. The victim will then be picked apart over time, sometimes left there for months before being finished."

All together now: Ewww.

Digital hoarders and literary snobs

2009-11-30T09:05:00.021-07:00

Jane Friedman was CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide before becoming co-founder and CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, a new company that produces and market ebooks. She discusses the future of the ebook industry in this informative lecture and Q&A at NYU.

There's little for me to disagree with, except I think it's a mistake to try and compare the digital versions of anything with the "standalone" physical (paper) product. Though Friedman's suggestion of a trade paperback pricing standard is more enlightened than treating ebooks as hardcovers.

And she says up front she's open to changing her mind if market forces so dictate.

Compare an episode of House that you can watch for "free" on broadcast TV or Hulu. You can also rent it through Netflix for around $2.00. Or pay a ten dollar premium on top of that to own the DVD. Which lots of people do, even if they'll never watch it enough times to amortize the cost.

Renting's fine with me. Pretty much the only DVDs I buy are anime titles going out of print. The scarcity threat. I'm sure at the heart of this behavior is a primitive pack-rat mentality about hoarding and possessing. We happily pay a premium for "things." Not data. Owning data is like owning smoke.

If the typical trade paperback price is $15.00, then minus the ten buck "hoarding" premium puts the price at $5.00, or more in line with mass market paperbacks, which are also not intended to be hoarded. And that's non-DRM. There's also the "sharing" premium enjoyed by books and CDs and DVDs.

My local library rents DVDs for a dollar. Books and CDs are "free" (beyond taxes, but you bought a TV to watch "free" TV). When I was growing up, any book in the house would be read by everybody in the house, and then often donated to the library to be read by hundreds more.

And when I was in college (during the late Bronze Age), there was always a kid in the dorm who had a nice stereo system, including a high-end turntable and tape deck. So if somebody you knew had an album you liked, you bought a cassette, borrowed the album and made your own mix tape.

I wonder how much of such "borrowing" goes on with physical books, CDs and DVDs, versus the typical Kindle owner or iTunes subscriber (with and without piracy factored in).

But the most brutal realization for publishers may be that digitization has shifted the value of status seeking and signaling from the content to the device. Your album collection doesn't impress as much as your MP3 player. Your bookshelf doesn't impress as much as your ebook reader.

Being infinitely reproducible at almost zero cost puts the value of hoarded digital content at close to zero. Digital pirates hoard so much because the added value of each file--both in real and psychological terms--is so low, and so they end up hoarding more than they could possible consume.

Content sharing and social networking software could address that. But making that work would require a significant rethinking of the bad unintended consequences of DRM and the good unintended consequences of technologies like text-to-speech when assessing what people are really paying for.

Even the diehards at the RIAA won't deny that pretty much the whole point of a boombox is so that other people can hear what you are listening to.

For example, combine social DRM with managed file sharing. When enabled, anybody within WiFi or Bluetooth distance could preview your stored ebooks (or your marked selections). Free advertising for the publisher while broadcasting your literary tastes and marking your social status.

This suggests a value in backlists and "classics" other than reading. I can't help rolling my eyes when people post those "favorites" lists invariably salted with the egghead titles everybody was supposed to read in college but never actually did. Or if they did, because they had to and never will again.

I cheerfully admit to being a cynical literary populist who puts a premium on "entertainment." But perhaps ebook publishers should stop treating their readers solely as consumers, and rather as status-seeking snobs at a tony cocktail party, who want their purchases to say (in part), "Look at me!"

And at the other end of the social spectrum, as introverted otaku desperate for electronically extroverted ways of sharing their obsessions with other like-minded geeks. Not to mention all those writers with their interminable works-in-progress who could now show, not just tell!

Tokyo Vice

2009-11-27T10:54:00.003-07:00

An interview on Fresh Air with Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.

I'm reminded of the old joke that Japanese law enforcement condones organized crime because it so dislikes disorganized crime. Adelstein says it's no joke. While it's tempting to praise Japan's overt lack of litigiousness, human nature is what it is. And the yakuza, going semi-legit, have stepped in to supply those missing tort services, though with brass knuckles instead of lawsuits.

This may explain why vigilante justice plots remain so popular in Japanese entertainment.

Jake Adelstein broke the story (covered on 60 Minutes) about how yakuza oyabun Tadamasa Goto and three mob flunkies conned the FBI and bribed the UCLA Medical Center to provide them liver transplants.

"Hellsing" closing theme

2009-11-25T08:36:00.001-07:00

The theme for the closing credits roll (called the "ED" in anime) of Hellsing (original series) is "Shine" by Mr. Big.

Hellsing

2009-11-23T08:38:00.012-07:00

Vampires used to be evil. Then they turned into bad boys (Spike), or good boys except when they were bad (Angel), or at least functionally amoral (Milada). Then Stephenie Meyer came along and her good-guy vampires out-Jack Weylanded Jack Weyland! I say it's time for some dark contrarianism.

Hellsing [sic] is as contrarian as they get. Granted, it's far from perfect. Newbie Scooby Seras Victoria deserves more character development, and I would put Integra Helsing's backstory up front. A little subtlety in the monster-killing department wouldn't hurt.

I prefer the 2002 TV series to the gorier Ultimate OVA, even though veteran screenwriter Chiaki Konaka is vilified in some quarters for his creative additions to Kouta Hirano's manga. In any case, both get way too carried away with the whole X-Files conspiracy meme (which Japanese SF writers love).

The Catholic Church is a big part of the conspiracy as well, but as with the Grand Inquisitor in Witch Hunter Robin, you never get the feeling it's all grudgy and personal. It's just that as a worldwide religious organization that's actually organized, the Catholic Church coolly fits the narrative bill.

(Though the Mormon Church is certainly "international," it still lacks its own Dan Brownish worldwide conspiracy theory. I vaguely recall an actioner written three decades ago that tried to tie the Mormon Church to Carter's MX missile plan for Southern Utah, but both fell thuddingly flat.)

I like the idea of a Buffy-type series where the vampire slayer allies, not with good Angel, but evil Angel. Plus the Miltonesque implication that Alucard isn't simply "devilish," he is the devil. Like Lewis's Screwtape (and Buffy's Spike), he's appalled by modern evil because it is so nihilistic and dull.

Lesser demons get dispatched with Victoria's 30mm "Harkonnen" shoulder-fired cannon or Alucard's distinctive .454 Casull Longslide. It takes a real villain to amp him up to full-vamp mode.

The anime series could be easily stripped of the more flagrant anti-Papism and reset in the U.S. It would work well as a live-action series with the same irreverent tone as Reaper (the most theologically sound show on television), which also features a devil (the delightful Ray Wise) you love to hate.

And now that I mention it, Reaper is out on DVD. Once you get past the first couple of monster-of-the-week mode episodes, it turns into one of the smartest religious satires since The Screwtape Letters.

[Both editions of Hellsing are out-of-print due to a monumental screw-up with licensing assignments after Pioneer's U.S. publishing arm went out of business, but remaindered and used copies are available through Amazon and The Right Stuf, and Netflix still carries the full original series.]

"Angel" and "Twilight" (part 2)

2009-11-20T11:23:00.005-07:00

Doug Gibson has posted a longer version of his earlier essay comparing and contrasting Twilight and Angel Falling Softly.

Thinking more about hyphenation

2009-11-18T09:20:00.005-07:00

Microsoft Reader is the only ebook reader that automatically hyphenates, a feature that really improves the "book feel" of the display in full-justification mode. It probably leverages the hyphenation module from Microsoft Word, but I wonder (linguistically and typographically) if purely algorithm-based hyphenation would be "good enough" for devices like the Kindle.

Such an algorithm would look for common prefixes and suffixes and double consonants and the like, and then use a few arithmetic formulae to calculate the maximum kerning and word-spacing boundaries and a simple decision matrix to decide if and where to throw in a hyphen.

Japanese character fonts are non-proportional. "Lined paper" for writing kanji is slightly modified grid paper. When typesetting Japanese, justification (the bottom margin) is by default. "Words" can wrap anywhere. You just keep reading characters until you hit a punctuation mark. It's not as confusing as you might imagine.

(This is due to the orthographically cataclysmic decision a thousand-plus years ago to import Chinese characters into what was the world's most elegant syllabary. The clear kana/kanji "word" boundaries and the use of explicit case markers makes parsing the written language fairly straightforward.)

My own feeling is that other than the most glaring violations of the basic syllable structure of the language, most readers would scan right through a "misplaced" hyphen and not notice it unless they stopped and thought about it.

"Angel" and "Twilight"

2009-11-16T09:47:00.007-07:00

Ogden Standard-Examiner editor Doug Gibson analyzes Twilight and Angel Falling Softly from the perspective of Mormon literary culture and theology. He concludes (try to ignore the spoilers if you haven't read my book yet):

Questions of redemption dominate the climax of both tales. In Angel Falling Softly, young Jennifer is clearly a vampire. Rachel's choice will lead, it seems, to her losing her daughter. Milada's decision to help her is as much for having another eternal companion as it is for pity. She's lonely. In fact, Milada sensibly asks Rachel why she worries about Jennifer's death if she knows they will be together after death. In Twilight, Renesmee's birth in Breaking Dawn underscores the big question: If a monster creates life, isn't there a creator for the monsters?

Angel Falling Softly can be read online (free), or purchased as an ebook or paperback.

How to bow to the Emperor

2009-11-14T11:49:00.004-07:00

If you're a foreign head of state. Say what you will about his abilities to conduct free and fair elections, but Hamid Karzai knows him his diplomatic protocols. Besides, as Billy Crystal would put it, he looks marvelous.

As I recount here, once he got all that war stuff behind him, even Emperor Hirohito wasn't a very uptight guy.

MS Reader vs. Kindle for PC

2009-11-13T09:30:00.008-07:00

The Kindle for PC is designed as an desktop interface for the Kindle device, so when it comes to displaying PRC and MOBI files for non-Kindle owners, it is definitely NOT user friendly. However, I found after installing it that it had reassigned the PRC and MOBI file associations from the MobiPocket Reader, so double-clicking opened them in the Kindle.

Kindle for PC is a really a stripped-down MobiPocket Reader with a cleaner look and the DRM stuff. The interface is so minimalistic as to be fairly pointless, except, I suppose, in order to demo for non-Kindle users the look and feel of the physical device. This is a "1.0 Beta" with emphasis on the "0" and the "Beta." There isn't even a find function.

Kindle for PC, like MobiPocket, renders everything in the same font. As a test, I set an <H1> tag to sans-serif using an inline style. The style displays in MobiPocket but is ignored by Kindle for PC. It implements a KISS strategy to the max.

For the time being, unless you need the DRM, I'd stick with the MobiPocket Reader. (And if you are using Kindle for PC to preview a file you intend to upload to the Amazon DTP, like the MobiPocket Reader, set the horizontal width of the window to the minimum size.)

Recompiling the LIT for The Path of Dreams reminded me that while the orphaned Microsoft Reader (last updated in 2005) lacks the bells and whistles of the Mobipocket Reader (the "find" function is particularly clumsy), and its neglected compiler is still stuck on version 2.0, it remains the most visually "elegant" of the desktop ebook readers.

One of its neatest features--that other readers are inexplicably yet to implement--is built-in hyphenation. This allows the MS Reader to avoid the gaping white spaces produced by full justification and appear more "book-like." I think that even a simple algorithm-based hyphenation system (as opposed to dictionary-based) would be preferable to none.

The Microsoft Reader (X)HTML is more CSS-friendly than MobiPocket and is less reliant on proprietary tags. The compiler could easily be modified to crank out ePub. With a little investment, Microsoft could produce a cross-platform ePub platform that could turn every Windows Mobile product into a universal ebook device based on open standards.

Microsoft might be thinking along those lines, as it recently updated the Reader for Windows Mobile (not the desktop version). Moreover, the announcement of a partnership between Tokyo-based publishing giant Shueisha and Microsoft to distribute emanga on mobile phones suggests Microsoft is taking the platform and the market seriously this time.

Creating a Kindle ebook

2009-11-11T11:30:00.015-07:00

The place to start with ebooks is the Amazon Kindle because, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, that's where the monopsony is. And because it's so easy to get your ebook listed on Amazon (though Amazon takes a huge commission).

The Kindle is based on the MobiPocket platform, which Amazon owns. In terms of "look and feel," the MobiPocket Reader emulates the Kindle fairly closely, as does Amazon's free "Kindle for PC" desktop reader. But not exactly.

The "Kindle for PC" is still classified a "Beta" product, and is indeed very beta. If you don't actually own a Kindle, I'd recommend sticking with the far more flexible MobiPocket Reader.

The MobiPocket Creator can convert a "readable" ebook from a Word file, but it'll probably look ugly. Except for PDF, ebook readers are just proprietary web browsers reading a stripped-down version of HTML. No WYSIWYG here!

The ebook reader sets the default font, font size, leading, and margins. The less you try to boss it around the better. That's why working with a bare-bones (X)HTML text file delivers the most predictable results.

Mark Coker of Smashwords has a good rule of thumb: "The more complicated you make the formatting [of an ebook], the more trouble you'll run into later."

But getting from complex Word to simple HTML isn't easy. At one point, I wrote some crude macros to convert small Word files, but not novel-length documents, and I don't know Visual Basic well enough to bother going further.

Word has a "Save As Web Page, Filtered" option, but the output is awful to the point of being useless. Google "Word HTML cleaner" to see what I mean. You'd think Microsoft could come up with an easy, styles-based converter.

Here is a web-based app that cleans files up to 1 MB in size. It does a pretty good job. My only complaint is that it converts to numeric character references. I prefer named HTML entities. Here are the ones I use the most:

&ldquo;     “
&rdquo;     ”
&lsquo;     ‘
&rsquo;     ’
&mdash;     —
&copy;      ©

Zapadoo looks intriguing, but it's too expensive. I haven't tried Open Office. I use a free command line tool called the CleanWordHtml console application. It doesn't handle upper-ASCII characters well, so I replace them first.

My Rube Goldberg approach:

1. Run a Find & Replace macro in Word to replace upper-ASCII characters (like smart quotes) with named HTML entities.
2. Save as "Web Page."
3. Run CleanWordHtml (a batch file makes it simple).
4. Import the converted file back into Word and run another Find & Replace macro to tidy up the results.
5. Save as a plain text file.

Then I customize the HTML with the MobiPocket proprietary tags like PAGEBREAK. I've created a sample template. The template file can be viewed with an HTML or text editor and compiled by MobiPocket Creator.

Because it's an HTML file, it can also be viewed with a browser. Keep in mind that standard browsers like IE and Firefox do not display proprietary tags like PAGEBREAK and attributes like HEIGHT and WIDTH the same way.

I haven't yet attempted to master more complex stuff like a table of contents.

Once the compiled MobiPocket PRC file is polished and ready (select standard compression and no encryption), upload it to the Amazon Digital Text Platform to create the Kindle file. The results can be previewed on the Amazon DTP before being listed on the Amazon storefront.

Dracula

2009-11-09T09:02:00.005-07:00

Dracula belongs to the corpus of "classic" literature that people don't bother with because they're so familiar with the larger body of derivative work it inspired that they think reading it would be redundant and boring. In some cases, the derivative work has indeed obviated any pressing need to labor through the original work--Michael Mann's remake of The Last of the Mohicans, for example.

In the case of Dracula, though, adaptations early on introduced an invidious element of dramatic corruption into the core structure of the story. The mutation has by now contaminated the entire lineage, so that the ubiquitous meme of Bela Lugosi in a dinner jacket has become about as terrifying as a Sesame Street Muppet. Attempts to repair the damage--like putting Gary Oldman in a dinner jacket--only perpetuate the original mistake.

That mistake was to give the Count top billing. It's an understandable one. Playing evil (plus lonely and misunderstood) is much more fun--and tasty, given the scenery to chew on--than playing the virtuous good guy. Milton, as they say, gave the devil all the good lines in Paradise Lost. But Milton did it on purpose; it wasn't a hack screenwriter's attempt to mollify the casting director because The Big Movie Star didn't want to end up with a bit part.

Because, the way Stoker wrote it, Dracula is a cameo, not the lead, and never the controlling point-of-view. Though his mere existence threatens and so must be mercilessly extinguished--no sympathy for the devil here--he nevertheless spends most of his time off-stage while more important things are going on.

To understand how it is supposed to work, we need only turn to the one writer/director who got it right: Joss Whedon. Consider the story's basic formulation: an eccentric professor of the dark arts plus a couple of associated geeks and some useful imported muscle gather around a tough woman, her dorky boyfriend and ditzy girlfriend, and end up pulling off some major vampire slayage.

The devils don't get the best lines. Mostly they get summarily dusted.

You can get carried away with this kind of thing, but the parallels are easy to draw: Mina/Buffy; Professor Van Helsing/Giles; Jonathan Harker/Xander; Dr. Jack Seward/Willow; Lucy/Cordelia. Quincey Morris is a Texan in London; Spike is a Londoner in California (though Quincy Morris is perhaps closer to Charles Gunn in Angel, and Lucy's fate is more similar to that of Lilah Morgan at the end of the 2002-2003 season).

That's right, Stoker created the first Scooby patrol, and Joss Whedon's 21st century version proves a surprisingly faithful homage. Buffy, to be sure, has more Quincey Morris in her than does Mena, although Mena certainly has more Buffy in her than does her squeeze Jonathan. Mena brings to mind C.S. Lewis's quip, "They don't make great aunts like they used to."

Another unfair assumption about Dracula is that anything written a century ago must surely be slow going. In the category of dense Victorian literature, Dracula can be honestly described as a page turner. As an author Stoker deserves comparison to Michael Crichton. Much of the fun arises out of his eagerness to incorporate the very latest in late 19th century high-tech with the graveyards and Transylvanian castles.

Telegrams fly back and forth like email. Quincey Morris packs the latest Winchester repeaters from America (and a Bowie knife, natch). Dr. Seward records dictation using just-invented phonograph technology, and performs so many blood transfusions that in The Dracula Files, Fred Saberhagen had his 20th century Dracula complain Lucy died because blood typing wasn't discovered until 1900, three years after the publication of the novel.

So much gets read into Bram Stoker's Dracula and its offspring in the name of tedious literary (and psychological) analysis that generation after generation pushes it aside without discovering what a thumping good read it is. It's time to rescue the novel from the musty mausoleum of "literature" and call it something far worse in the eyes of academia: entertaining.

The church of the obvious

2009-11-02T10:13:00.005-07:00

A snarky review of Stephen Covey's latest tome in The Economist concludes:

If management could indeed be reduced to a few simple principles, then we would have no need for management thinkers. But the very fact that it defies easy solutions, leaving managers in a perpetual state of angst, means that there will always be demand for books like Mr. Covey's.

The secret to Covey's success is the same for anybody packaging advice that most people would instinctively recognize as commonsensical, but have great difficulty adhering to. Hence diet books and Dr. Laura and practically all political punditry.

In fact, you could quickly get to the point where simply listening to the advice--let's call it a sermon (Covey is a Utah Mormon, after all)--becomes the whole point of the exercise.

Perhaps there is utility in being reminded (say, every Sunday) that a particular set of ideals exist and you ought to be working toward them, even if you don't plan on arriving at the destination anytime soon. Church as self-help window shopping.

But the whole thing starts chasing its tail when workable solutions get rejected as heretical by ideological purists. As when the Freakonomics guys proposed a cheap fix for global warming. (I love Althouse's term: "Blasphemonomics.")

The question of whether a diet (economic or otherwise) works cannot be separated from the ability of ordinary people (and governments) to follow its strictures. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the ideal must inevitably yield to the pragmatic.

My experience at organizations where Coveyisms are freely bandied about is that the people regurgitating the sermons mostly do so to relieve themselves of the burden of applying the advice to themselves. Like driving a Prius while living in a mansion.

The same way it's easier (and more ideologically invigorating) to pass spankin' new health care legislation than reform Medicaid and Medicare. Or campaign against gay marriage than get all those ruttin' and divorcin' heteros to behave themselves.

That's how Emerson made a living. He talked transcendentalism. He wasn't so stupid as to actually live it (not like that nut Thoreau). Rush Limbaugh is honest enough to admit that he exists primarily to draw an audience and make money for his sponsors.

Because the only way to change the world is to change people, and that's pretty much impossible to do by shouting at them.

Angsty angst ruins everything

2009-10-30T09:44:00.025-07:00

As an addendum to my previous post, here Alfred (from Batman) gets to the heart of the matter (he's pretty much quoting C.S. Lewis verbatim):

Another good summation of the problem by Steve Sailer:

People used to like to read short stories because each one was a story and it was short. Now nobody reads short stories except other short story writers. And the stories always end with an "epiphany" in which the main character realizes his life is hopeless, as utterly doomed as, say, the contemporary short story author's life.

As a case in point, Chase's self-absorbed and depressing angsty angst on House is a slow-moving train wreck that as far as I can tell is only being dragged out in order to induce some ratings-inspired rubber-necking. But it's making me reach for the remote.

Long-running series get into this fix when they run out of new ideas and turn progressively soapier. My rule of thumb: the conflicts of the secondary characters shall never be more compelling than those of the main character for longer than a single show.

If they're trying to write Chase out of the series (which raises the same question I had with Eric Millegan on Bones--they handily got rid of him once, so why bring him back just to bury him again?), then get a move on. It's bumming me out. Worse, it's boring.

The illusion of authorial control

2009-10-28T13:20:00.009-07:00

In a discussion of L'Engle's memoir Walking on Water at A Motley Vision ("We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God, or we can write the great American novel"), Patricia comments, "And this is why art as self-expression is art of a lesser light."

I've come to a similar realization recently. Maybe it comes with passing the half-century mark, but I find I've grown tired of angst and self-revelation. What I really want to do is tell an entertaining story, and better it be trashy than chock full of earnest "meaning."

This is what I think Robert McKee is getting at: the artistic import you're striving for is never so grand that you can dispense with story. The story is in control, not your deep thoughts, and you must be prepared to move your ego out of the way and let it go charging on through.

"The Path of Dreams" update

2009-10-27T07:51:00.006-07:00

I've been writing a sequel to The Path of Dreams that involves time travel (from the year 1400 to the present and a year into the future) and a time loop (just one). Many key incidents happen again, albeit in a different order and for different reasons and involving new characters.

The sequel can more accurately termed a "second iteration." This required addressing some minor continuity problems in The Path of Dreams. In the process I found myself paying closer attention to the fundamental conflicts and made several other subtle but substantive changes.

"Road testing" a set of already-defined characters under different conditions and constraints turns out to be a good way of elucidating their underlying motivations.

I also added smart quotes to the web and ebook versions. I've updated the online, PDF, Mobipocket and LIT editions on my site and at Smashwords. I'll update the Amazon versions once I'm confident I've wrung all the bugs out.

They're free downloads (except the Kindle, though Mobipocket is Kindle-compatible).

Gang rule

2009-10-21T08:22:00.012-07:00

Japanese television has a whole genre devoted to the revenge drama. It might more accurately be described as the "all your problems can be solved by beating the crap out of somebody" genre. The show must feature a bunch of loser teenage rebels without a cause and/or an ex-yakuza or ex-gang member who's "gone straight" but isn't above using his (or her) fists and past criminal connections to see wrongs righted.

Gokusen is a high school melodrama in the Dragon Zakura vein, casting a woman in the in loco parentis role. Kumiko Yamaguchi, the daughter of a yakuza crime family, becomes a teacher in the roughest, toughest school in town. What make the manga and anime great are her efforts to "go straight" while not abandoning her past, and her ability to outsmart her scheming students as well as outfight them.

The television series, though, quickly falls into a repetitious rut where a bunch of teenagers--as mind-numbingly stupid as they are violent--get themselves into serious trouble every week and their teacher bales them out in an identical--and eye-rollingly implausible--fight sequence every week.

But, hey, what do I know--the third and most painfully tedious season was the year's highest-rated drama series.

Salaryman Kintaro moves Gokusen into Japan's business world. Anybody who crosses Kintaro or his company gets whupped. And there's somebody crossing them--resorting to extortion, assault, murder, arson, bombing--every darned week. Beyond the absurd plot turns and scenery-chewing acting, Salaryman Kintaro distills down to something between adolescent cliffhanger melodrama and violence porn.

Seriously, I don't get this attitude where showing an attractive naked woman is verboten (Japanese television has actually grown more conservative in this regard over the past quarter century), but beating somebody unconscious is prime time excitement.

The Rookies wants to be the baseball version of Dragon Zakura, except that with all the teenage gangbangers (identified as anybody with spikey dyed hair and tons of angst) on the team constantly going off on each other, the question is how they manage to field a team. The lesson, as Salaryman Kintaro proves, is that with a big enough animal id, you can recover from any life-threatening injury in a week.

The only series I've seen so far that was worth watching is Yasuko and Kenji. The goofy premise has ex-biker gang leader Kenji (Masahiro Matsuoka) abandoning his old life and becoming a manga artist to support his kid sister (Mikako Tabe). Tabe and Matsuoka possess honest-to-goodness comic chops, and the story is funny and inventive. But even that can't stop the contrived fight scenes from getting boring and repetitious.

Period dramas can't resist the formula. The Killers is about, well, a bunch of "good guy" killers, a star chamber like the gang led by David Soul in Clint Eastwood's Magnum Force. It's got a decent cast (Masahiro Matsuoka gets to ham it up some more, though not as much as in Yasuko and Kenji) and great costumes. But what it boils down to is a bunch of nasty people being better off dead every week.

This is not a recent development. From 1962 to 1989, Shintaro Katsu made twenty-six Zatoichi films (including Zatoichi meets Yojimbo) and a two-year television series. A well-received 2003 revival cast Takeshi Kitano in the lead. Each Zatoichi installment involves the titular character running into a gang of ne're-do-wells who need themselves some killin' and who get their comeuppance by the time the credits roll.

The movies are made watchable by Katsu's acting and the twists and turns in the subplots. The same can't be said for the dozens of B-grade copycats spawned during the same period (some of which were made by Katsu), which compensated for a lack of creativity with sex, nudity, and buckets of fake blood.

"Getting even" seems a sure-fire formula in Japan. But watch too many of these shows--practically anything from the insanely prolific career of Takashi Miike (a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino)--or simply the nightly news, and you can start believing that Japan is a crime-ridden no-man's-land straight out of The Road Warrior. When it's still one of the safest, calmest countries on the planet.

Bilingual golf

2009-10-19T09:41:00.011-07:00

Following up on Thursday's post about "borrowed" English words in Japanese, NHK covered the Japan Open over the weekend. Here's a list of English words (pronounced using Japanese phonetics) I heard after watching for about an hour, after which I gave up keeping track.

approach
bunker
chance/big chance (as in: "He's got a birdie chance.")
club
cut
driver
eagle/birdie/par/bogey/double-bogey
gallery
green
hole
iron
lead/leader
major
nice (as in "Nice shot.")
over/under (for single digits, scores reported using English: "One over," "Three under," etc. I wonder if the dividing line is six.)
pace
par three/four/five (English numbers)
pin
pitch
play
pressure (the commentators loved this word)
putt
ranking
score
shot (English numbers, single-digit)
stroke (English numbers, single-digit)
tee shot
tie
top (of the leaderboard)
tournament
try (as in: "Birdie try.")
up/down (as in "He's one stroke down.")

Oh, and the "open" in "Japan Open" is, of course, "open." At least the holes are identified using Japanese numbers and the ban counter (ichi-ban translates as "number one").

A lot of code switching went on with the non-golf terms. "Third shot" in one sentence became "Dai-san" in the next. I wonder if this linguistic "contamination" is endemic to international sports commentary.

Do the French stick to French when they're just winging it? Perhaps such terminology is more accurately described as a pidgin or "trade language":

A simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups [of people] that do not have a language in common . . . constructed impromptu or by convention.

One other thing I've never seen on the PGA Tour: fluorescent red golf balls. Aesthetically speaking, though, a red golf ball sitting on a green green is harsh on the eyes.

Linguistic heads in the clouds

2009-10-15T10:30:00.003-07:00

The Wall Street Journal documents the comically absurd lengths France's General Commission of Terminology and Neology will go to in order to purge those ugly Anglo-Saxon Americanisms from the mother tongue.

Before a word such as "cloud computing" receives a certified French equivalent, it needs to be approved by three organizations and get a government minister's seal of approval, according to rules laid out by the state's General Delegation for the French Language and the Languages of France.

The Japanese, in stark contrast, borrow English terminology with such carefree abandon that at times even I wonder sometimes why they didn't stick to the Japanese equivalent.

Consider the kanji for "out" (外). Appended to the kanji for "appearance" and the compound means "facade." Appended to the kanji for "person" and the compound means "foreigner."

There are thousands of such "外" compounds in Japanese. Still, it is quite convenient, especially considering the surfeit of homophones in Japanese, to have "out" words whose meanings is confined to a specific cultural context.

The English "out" (アウト) was imported with foreign sports popular in Japan: an "out" in baseball, a ball that is "out" in tennis, the "out nine" (and "in nine") of a golf course. And spread like wildfire. Eijirou lists 846 corpus citations.

In Japanese, though, the phonetic "spelling" of kana forces a vowel after every consonant (except /n/), and thus distorts the pronunciation of "borrowed" words so much that they are mostly unrecognizable to foreign ears.

But here the French simply need to understand that any Anglo-Saxon word spoken with a sufficiently snooty French accent will be assumed to have been etymologically French all along. Voilà! Problem solved!

By the way, "cloud computing" in Japanese is "kuroudo konpuutingu" (クラウドコンピューティング).

Somebody knows something

2009-10-12T11:03:00.010-07:00

Kouji Taguchi, a producer at game developer Square-Enix, claimed at a convention appearance that none of their anime products "has lost money in eight years." In the fickle entertainment industry, about which William Goldman famously stated that "nobody knows anything," this is a remarkable track record.

Budgets for television series made in Japan are a third of those made in Hollywood. Hayao Miyazaki makes feature films for a tenth what Disney typically spends. It's the content that's selling, not the wrapper. Taguchi's expertise is making sure the content is delivered to the customers who want to consume it.

Comparing marketing to fishing, Taguchi says that

[I]t is essential for the [production] company to first search for where the fish are (search for a popular genre), then decide on a lure that these fish would like (deciding on the work to adapt), and finally get the fish to bite on the lure (selecting the anime studio).

Making his formula work in the U.S. is more challenging. Manga are twice as expensive in the U.S. as in Japan, making it difficult to achieve volume sales and overcome the narrow margins. Another critical factor explaining lagging manga sales in the U.S. is population density and ready access to retail outlets.

Taguchi observes that a "typical Tokyo resident can reach about three bookstores by bicycle." Consequently, marketers in Japan can use anime to directly push manga sales. In the U.S., the only way to get access to a wide variety of manga is through online bookstores, making impulse sales problematic.

An American kid can't watch an anime and then run out and buy the manga with his allowance. (Incidentally, this is also a product of the schizophrenic attitudes Americans have toward the commercial sector: we claim to want "walkable" communities but are loath to zone for them.)

A bigger problem that Taguchi doesn't touch upon is that U.S. licensing is so haphazard and slow there's often no way that a distributor can count on the anime and manga being available at the same time. However, it is possible that in the future, the "PlayStationing" of manga publishing could alter this equation.

Doctor Heli

2009-10-08T10:12:00.009-07:00

A recent episode of The Professionals on NHK World featured an ER doc who works for Japan's helicopter emergency medical service, known as "Doctor Heli" (they use the English words). He flies to the scene and triages and treats on the spot, and then follows the patient all the way through the ER.

The case they followed was a traffic accident victim, and it was more explicit than anything I've seen on American television. The man's blood pressure was rapidly dropping by the time they got him to the ER (about fifty yards from the helicopter pad), so they had to open him up and find the internal bleed.

First surprise: the patient is prepped while the doc scrubs in. Then he gloves up, grabs a scalpel and goes zip. I mean, that fast. Lays the guy open with one swipe. None of this delicate, inching along stuff. I guess you get good at it after a while. But it looked like a butcher slicing open a side of beef.

Second "holy cow" moment: searching through his abdominal cavity for the bleed. Not to be too gross about it, but it looked like a bunch of cooks rooting around in a big bowl of spaghetti, picking up handfuls of intestines and pushing organs out of the way and stuffing in towels to soak up the gore.

Watching the video, the rather aghast interviewer posed the same question I had: "You can do that?" He shrugged. "Sure." Considering how badly boxers and football players pummel each other, and what a gymnast puts her body through on the uneven bars, the human gut can take a lot of abuse.

Third surprise: after the doc fixed the bleed and said "Close him up," a pair of nurses took a big piece of transparent (tinted yellow) adhesive tape--about ten inches wide by a foot long--and literally taped him close. Like a box.

The reason for this became clear a few hours later when his blood pressure didn't rise. He had another bleed. So they just peeled off the tape and rooted around in the spaghetti bowl some more and found the second bleed. The patient was fine after that. It was a truly amazing thing to watch.

Here's a video of a training exercise. Unlike the U.S., with parking lots and wide, four-lane streets everywhere, finding places to land the helicopters is a real challenge. Below is a short documentary involving an attempted suicide. The Doctor Heli team is similar to one that NHK featured.

Speaking truth to (gasoline) power

2009-10-05T08:59:00.006-07:00

A recent story on NPR about a bio-diesel project tries its best to sell the eco-utopian vision promulgated by "activist-turned-entrepreneur" Jeff Berman, but points out in the last paragraph that at best they're kinda, sorta breaking even on the investment, and then only because they've been selling food-grade sunflower oil instead.

You can almost imagine the investors listening to the first half of this report with economist Jeff Rubin and skipping out on the second.

Rubin says that when the economy recovers, oil prices will go up and stay up, and in the process restructure our economy and lifestyles. This is a rather obvious point (in other words, the future will look like Japan, where energy already costs a fortune). But with one important exception, I wouldn't bet the farm on the accuracy of the rest his particular vision.

In any case, even higher energy prices would be just as disruptive to society as the scary effects of climate change, not to mention the even scarier means being proposed to prevent it. The consequences of our "good intentions" on developing countries, observes Shikha Dalmia, would be "more awful than climate change's implications--even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions."

In the NPR interview, Rubin seems to be basing his arguments on the price of crude oil, assuming that every other factor in his model will remain static. Because technological trends seem obvious in hindsight, we forget how difficult the economic impact of technology is to predict, especially when it comes to the development of substitute goods and markets.

Reading early Asimov, I'm struck by how very smart people couldn't foresee the transistor--let alone the integrated circuit--even when it was only a few years over the horizon. AT&T had a hard time figuring out what to do with the transistor after its own scientists invented it (Sony did), just as Xerox didn't know what to do with the graphical user interface (Steve Jobs did).

We haven't become any smarter at predicting the future. We just like to pretend we are.

It's equally difficult to predict what technological innovations will fail after absorbing billions in private or public spending (other than "most of them"). We should be cautious about attempting to square the circle just because it hasn't been done before. It probably hasn't been done before for a good reason, like the second law of thermodynamics.

Believing that the government need only throw a few billion at a bunch of designated Really Smart People is a political act of faith masquerading as science. There's no guarantee that your chosen Smart People will be the right Smart People, or that they have the proper goals in mind (other than pocketing more of our money).

The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program didn't have anything to do with creating economic efficiencies. And while we're at it, the Apollo Program did not create a demand for integrated circuits. The credit for that (in the space industry, at least) goes mostly to the U.S. military, specifically avionics and air-to-air missiles (quantity matters, and there was a war going on).

When building extremely expensive, one-off, manned rockets, robustness is preferred over "new," which is why the Space Shuttle used prehistoric (but hardy) magnetic core memory cells well into the 1980s.

Yes, there's a lot you can do when money is no object. But as Margaret Thatcher put it, "Eventually you run out of other people's money." (Oh, I forgot, we'll just borrow it.) Nor is the government very good at stopping spending on bad ideas. Thanks to the fallacy of sunk costs, every failure is promised by its backers to succeed if only we spend a few billion more.

This has prompted Seth Roberts to coin what he calls "Pashler-Roberts Law": "The more expensive the research, the less likely the researchers will be honest about it." My corollary is that the more expensive the research, the less likely it is that the researchers will ever arrive at a definitive conclusion. Why turn off the spigot on your own gravy train?

Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Ten freaking years and $2.5 billion--hey, that's cheap for government work. Where there is government, there will be rent-seeking by people who are a lot smarter and craftier than the average politician. This corruption can only be minimized by keeping the government's involvement in commercial activities as small as possible.

Now we face the absurdity of supposedly "private" enterprises threatening to go bankrupt unless the government pays them off. Like a little kid threatening to hold his breath—and it works!

When I was in high school decades ago, two of the "big money" government science projects were the Space Shuttle and fusion energy. Billions later, fusion remains in the research stage. The Space Shuttle made it off the drawing boards, but was far more dangerous and expensive than projected, and never came close to achieving the promised launch schedules or economies of scale.

NASA eventually concluded that spending more money on the program wasn't ever going to improve it, and so it is scheduled to live on only in the Smithsonian.

The "Constellation" program slated to replace it resurrects Saturn/Apollo engine and capsule designs from the 1960s, and couples them with the solid boosters developed for the Space Shuttle in the 1970s and then reengineered after the Challenger disaster. The big selling point of the competing DIRECT architecture is that it would reuse all of the Shuttle booster technology.

So much for going where no one has gone before. Either way, it's going to cost about $40 billion to find out, and the science will be left paddling around in circles for decades. But it's not as bad as the $100 billion International Space Station, so useless that NASA is already discussing "de-orbiting" it by the end of the next decade.

That means burning it up in the atmosphere. Granted, the "international" part appears to work quite nicely. The State Department should pay for it.

Nobody advocating "bet the house" scientific strategies can predict what will happen when we double down, lose big time, and end up with no solution and a few more trillion dollars in debt. Does anybody remember the U.S. Synfuels fiasco? (Yes, I know, it really, really, really will work next time, cross my heart and let the taxpayers pick up the tab.)

Rubin does get one thing exactly right:

Efficiency does not lead to conservation. It is probably the biggest head-fake out there.

In a growing economy, efficiency gains are eaten up by greater use of the resource in question. Increasing automobile efficiency has the same economic impact as lowering the cost of gasoline, which promotes more driving and more highways, which promotes more sprawl and more McMansions in more exurbs, which promotes more fossil fuel consumption.

Houses today are much better insulated, heaters and air conditions are much more efficient than they were a generation ago. Families are smaller. The result? We build bigger houses that are less efficient (vaulted ceilings, large, unified kitchen/dining room/living room/family room areas with central air conditioning). Plus a heated swimming pool in the back yard.

It the behavior, stupid, not the technology. Just because you bought a Prius doesn't mean you're doing anything to save the planet. Popular Mechanics concludes:

Driven hard and recklessly, even a Prius will suck down dead dinosaurs at a furious rate. Driven carefully and with precision, you will find that a Hummer H2 can return something approaching reasonable mileage.

The Japanese don't live in "rabbit hutches" because of "climate change" or drive fuel-efficient cars because of CAFE standards. But because of the sky-high cost of energy and expensive, limited land resources. Japan builds (largely in the private sector) efficient mass-transit systems because of sky-high population densities and mass-transit friendly population distributions.

Size really does matter.

Nevertheless, Japanese who can prove they have a place to park them (a legal requirement) love them their gasoline-powered cars. So do Europeans. The automobile accounts for over 80 percent of passenger miles in western European countries (except for Austria and Ireland at 75 percent). It's a "do as we say, not as we do" world.

And even those sky-high taxes and energy prices have to keep pace with a growing GDP, which makes energy continually cheaper on a per-capita basis. When I was living in Japan thirty years ago, most home lighting was the 1970's version of the not-so-compact CFL. Nobody cared about "climate change" back then. The reason was the cost of electricity relative to personal income.

Now with people wealthier, the Japanese government must talk about "incentivizing" demand for CFLs.

If we believe it's up to the government to "engineer" a solution, then we'd better think about what we're asking our politicians to do. The answer is probably a synonym for "when pigs fly." And when Congress dutifully passes legislation forcing those pigs into the air (say, subsidizing hot-air balloons to carry them), think about what will coming raining down on our heads.

Lost and found in translation

2009-10-01T08:57:00.015-07:00

My sister Kate has been watching Lois & Clark with the French subtitles turned on. In one scene, Lois is goading Clark to abandon a particular demand, stating that "it will never happen." With added emphasis she asks (hypothetically), "How long can you hold your breath?"

As Lois stomps off, Clark (aka Superman) mutters, "A very, very long time."

The subtitles simply render Lois's questions as "How long can you be patient?" which misses the play on words. Kate asks if there is a French colloquialism that means the same thing, or are translators doomed to miss some jokes when they move from one language to the next?

The question reminds me of a Star Trek TNG episode where the Enterprise encounters an alien race that speaks only in allegory. It's one of those clever but stupid ideas. All language is allegorical. Even mathematicians have to agree on what the symbols mean before they can communicate using them.

Every translation system--human or machine--depends on a corpus of translated material to work from. Granted, in a universe where a "universal translator" is plausible technology, I suppose it makes sense (though in that case, even Douglas Adams's "Babel Fish" would be more scientifically realistic).

In sociolinguistic terms, the episode does make a nice point. Consider the story of Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume. Back at the dawn of time, after the Storm God, Susano'o, went on a holy tear and trashed her temples and fields, the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, shut herself inside a cave, plunging the world into darkness.

Uzume overturned a tub near the cave entrance and began a dance on it, tearing off her clothing in front of the other deities. They considered this so comical that they laughed heartily at the sight. Amaterasu heard them and peered out to see what all the fuss was about.

When deployed metaphorically (such as in the anime Maison Ikkoku), "Ame no Uzume" describes a woman acting sensuously in order to lure somebody (usually a man) out of his metaphorical cave. If the name is meaningless outside Japan, once it's defined in context, it's perfectly understandable.

Human nature is universal enough that in most cases the substance of the metaphor or pun can be translated along with the text. Getting hung up on "close literalism" is the greater obstacle. In my own work, if a metaphor is unique but still understandable, I'll keep it, even if it requires a parenthetical.

Otherwise, my approach is, "How would I phrase this if I wrote it?" I don't mind imprecise translations if they preserve the intent of the writer and the meaning the reader takes away. Often I'll "translate" the image or sense in my mind rather than the words of the metaphor itself.

The translator faces the same literary challenge as the writer. Except that distributors have to expeditiously turn around products at the "good enough" level. Not many have the deep pockets to do what Miramax (thanks to John Lasseter) did with Princess Mononoke, and hire Neil Gaiman to rewrite the script.

Additionally with dubs and subtitles, there's the whole matter of space and time constraints. Sometimes anime DVDs do add liner notes to explain cultural contexts. I like adding footnotes to my translations. It's easy to do online, though I suppose could make genre fiction look too "scholarly" and the typesetting a pain.

Alethea and Athena Nibley (BYU grads) write a column for Manga Life (scroll down to "Words of Truth and Wisdom"), examining the nuts and bolts of translation. In this interview, for example, they 'fess up to confusing "Aegis" as a type of cruiser (specifically the weapon system) with the name of a cruiser.

Translators have to know what the author knows. Here is a sentence I translated from Yashakiden: "These Magnum revolvers had a double-action trigger pull of seven pounds, with four pounds in single action." The grammar is straightforward. The challenge was to phrase it the way a gun expert would in English.

I was vaguely aware of the term "trigger pull," but googled it to see how it was actually used in context. (Google and Google Books are the translator's best friend. I'll often translate a complex sentence, stare at it and wonder, Does anybody actually say that in English? and google it to see.)

So I sympathize with subtitle translator Natsuko Toda--often given only a week or two to crank out the raw copy--whose work on Lord of the Rings provoked storms of protest. She simply didn't have the time to familiarize herself with the source material enough to capture its subtleties to the satisfaction of the fans.

The other lesson here is to avoid translating stuff when the fans know the story better than you do even before seeing it.

Lake Wobegon health care

2009-09-28T10:00:00.020-07:00

I'm an agnostic when it comes to heath care policy. As a closet libertarian, I inherently distrust big government solutions. Cartels and monopolies are bad ideas no matter who is running them. And bureaucrats don't have the spirit of God descend upon them when they enter government service.

All bureaucracies behave like bureaucracies. The bigger they are, the badder. That they're not "doing it for the money" is even scarier, because money can be tracked, taxed and audited. The serpentine corridors of power aren't so easily navigated (unless the Feds happen to be bugging your phone).

And doing it for the ideological idealism of it all turns government into a religion. With the police and IRS at its disposal.

But Christian Lander is exactly right that I'm one of those artsy-fartsy types who's going to rake in a ton more benefits from whatever socialized system we end up than I'll pay out. I may just be old enough to clean up on Social Security and Medicare before they go totally broke too.

The secret reason why all white people love socialized medicine is that they all love the idea of receiving health care without having a full-time job. This would allow them to work as a freelance [artist or writer] without having to worry about a benefits package.

I really am a freelance writer.

The best solution would be to tax benefits as income and provide a tax deduction at the median amount to balance that out, and then greatly expand high-deductible health savings accounts. Then at the low end of the income scale, salt the HSAs with EIC-type funds to cover the deductible.

Both health care providers and insurance companies should be required to publish a price list for all common medical procedures, and provide them to all comers. Oh, and an electronic medical record system is definitely a must (though I don't see why legislation is required to do that).

And then there's the most egregiously disingenuous part of the whole debate: that the government must provide a "public option" to spur competition when it was the government that curtailed competition in the first place by not allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines.

Auto, home and life insurance companies don't work under those restrictions. And not surprisingly, nobody is calling for an auto, home and life insurance "public option." Why can't that cute Australian gecko hawk health insurance in all fifty state too?

In any case, we could import the Swiss system (a network of private non-profits probably closest to the current U.S. system) pretty much whole. Why reinvent the wheel? The best "worst" solution would be to either expand Medicaid out or expand Medicare down. No need to start from scratch.

But here's the one thing I don't understand. Why are the big unions officially so in favor of single-payer, and so rabidly party-line and anti-private insurance? These unions have the best health insurance benefits on the planet. I thought only populist proles from Kansas lobbied against self-interest.

Well, the health care labor unions will certainly clean up. But when it comes to the rest, I'm a living example, having grown a beneficiary of what we actually referred to as "Generous Electric." My father was white-collar (R&D), but white-collar benefits were based on the union-negotiated package.

And as the unions spent about half their time striking for better benefits, that package was very nice. (Then Jack Welch showed up and bared his fangs and they struck themselves right out of a job.)

Even as bad as things have gotten in the auto industry of late, and with all the concessions, the GM auto worker benefits package remains better than anything I could have dreamed of back when I had a "real" job.

Active United Auto Workers members make no monthly contribution and pay no deductible for their health insurance coverage. They face no co-insurance costs for in-network physician services and an annual out-of-pocket maximum of just $500 per family for out-of-network doctors[.]

In short, there is no freaking way that a single-payer or nationalized health care system could deliver that level of benefits. The system will inevitably regress to the mean. Though maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing.

We've either got to admit that we really want to spend tons of money on health care, or grow the stones to piss off powerful interest groups--not just trial lawyers and PhRMA--try convincing the AMA to increase the supply of doctors and drive down physician incomes to European levels (i.e., cut them in half).

Or simply admit that we don't live in Lake Wobegon and everybody can't be above average when it comes to their health care benefits.

Oh, and my last "real job" insurer? IHC, which the president has called out specifically as an exemplary health care provider. It was okay. No complaints about the care provided (the paperwork was a nightmare). But it ain't Generous Electric. No standalone insurer--including the government--can afford to be.

On the other hand, if we simply can't decide what to do, there's always this idea.