The Patlabor movies standout as good examples of full-length feature film anime that really are films that just happen to be animated. In other words, the character designs and worlds explored, although futuristic, are exceedingly realist and the story lines resemble that of a serious film, not an unserious “cartoon.”

(Photo credit: The Washington Post)
I always like to read stories like this one coming out of Japan. They give me hope about the places and humainty in general. A 30-something woman who is a psychiatrist by profession only half-seriously answers a call by the Democratic Party of Japan to be a candidate for a Diet [...]

Sharp Electronics has unveiled an interesting new LCD display: one surface displays two different images at the same time when viewed from two different angles. One person could be watching TV on the left while another is playing Quake Arena on the right.You do have to be a few inches from center, which could feel [...]

What can I say? Pooh’s Heffalump Movie was heffalumpish. The only thing I didn’t like was the mother-centrism of it all. Fathers do not exist in the movie. Instead, the film perpetuates the false assumption that the only bond a child has is with his/her mother. Lumpy, the lost Heffalump, seems to have only a [...]

The upper fingers of Hurricane Dennis are tickling Nashville’s underside at this moment. We might see up to 4 inches of rain by this time tomorrow, but I think it’ll be less. They always tend to overestimate. We do need the rain, just not all in one dumping. There hasn’t been a significant rain here [...]

It’s “Shichigwachi Eisa” (7th month Eisa) time in Okinawa right now. Eisa (dances for the ancestors) is the spirited (so to speak) festival song/music/dance in Okinawa that corresponds with Obon practices on mainland Japan. It usually takes place from the night of July 15th, so it’s later next week, but it’s been touristified and commodified [...]

We can send a man to the moon, but we cannot conquer viruses. Or maybe we could if we spent as much money reserching viruses as we do funding space exploration. Right now I wish Neil Armstrong had never taken that “one small step” if we had an effective omnipotent anti-viral drug that would rid [...]

The annual bluegrass festival at Leiper’s Fork, TN is a pretty laid back, fun, down home affair. Of course, I’d say that it was probably 80% Republican, and of that probably 25% Neo-Confederate, but that doesn’t detract from the good music, food, and fine people watching. Here’re some pix from it:

The bands play on the [...]