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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: August 2002

  • esreveR nI s’gnihtyrevE

    Thanks once again to the creator of Monaural Jerk for showing me how to reverse-sort the journal entries. Now the newest additions will always be at the top of the page so you don’t have to scroll down to see if there’s anything new on a given day. Hooray!

    I’ve also learned how to make the “synopsis” data appear. This means that all entries with synopses (which would be all of them, mind you) back to the beginning of the database will be shown with little parenthetical comments.

    My next goal is to completely redesign how individual journal entries are displayed. Wish me luck. Send me cocoa.

  • T1 down, then finally up again

    Oh boy.

    Starting late yesterday and lasting until just a bit more than an hour ago, the T1 that feeds this website, www.entercom.com and a number of other servers in the building, was very very down. It appears to have been a problem at Qwest rather than with our equipment or Pacifier’s.

    It doesn’t help that today is a high-profile day for Entercom’s website. This does not make us (me) look good for insisting that we can host the website reliably. Oh well.

    In other news, I’m doing some tinkering with this site in an attempt to redesign and re-order the journal output display. (The center column, if you like.) Wish me luck as I dive headlong into things I probably have no chance of understanding.

  • Bad (dub) Saban, bad (Sailor Moon dub)! No biscuit!

    Poking around the animemusicvideos.org forums I spotted a somewhat amusing little rant about the “quality” of the Sailor Moon English dub. Note that I use the word “quality” reservedly here.

    Anyway, on to some of the funny bits…

    Sailor Moon is at the top of my list for bad dubs. I would rather scrape my eardrums out with strands of barbed wire than listen to those horrendous voices. Even dub enthusiasts usually agree that Sailor Moon’s dub is the worst ever made, preiod, end of story. Even if you hate Japanese voices, and hate reading subtitles, you’ll find yourself thanking the heavens again and again that you don’t have to listen to the English voices!


    Our gentle fanboy then proceeds to dissect the name changes…

    -Sailor Mercury, Ami – It seems Americans can’t handle that her name ends in an I, so they changed her name to Amy.
    -Sailor Mars, Rei – Her name just had a spelling change, too. She’s Raye in the dub.
    -Sailor Jupiter, Makoto, has the most inexplicable name change of all. Somehow they decided that her name should be Lita… WHY IS HER NAME LITA????! WHO WOULD NAME THEIR KID LITA????! It’s like “Yo, I’m finna go to the store and get me a lita of soda!”
    -Sailor Venus, Minako. This name was apparently much too long for American audiences, so they changed it to Mina. In the actual show, Artemis sometimes calls her Mina to be cute, but her name is Minako, not Mina god damn it!
    -Sailor Chibi-Moon, Usagi, Nicknamed Chibiusa – Her name got changed to.. this is so classic.. RINI!!! WHAT KIND OF NAME IS THAT???! RINI!!?? HAHAHAHA!! To top it all off, they changed her Sailor Soldier name to “Sailor Mini-Moon”! What’s funnier is that they did this AFTER Austin Powers 2 was out! They should have known better! I can see it now.. Sailor Moon looking down at Chibiusa, all like “I will call her.. Mini-Me!”


    But that’s not all, oh no…

    Here’s some other inexplicable name changes!

    Umino – Melvin
    Naru – Molly
    Motoki – Andrew
    Jadite – Jedite
    Kunzite – Malochite (???!)
    Dark Kingdom – The Negaverse
    Queen Metalia – The Negaverse
    Black Moon – The Negaverse
    Planet Nemesis – The Negaverse
    MTV – The Negaverse (OK, just kidding…)
    America – The Negaverse (Get the picture?)


    Gee, you think he doesn’t like the dubbed version of Sailor Moon? Maybe? “I will call her… Mini-Moon.” *chuckle*
    AMV.org forum topic

  • Karel, Gardener

    I did something Saturday afternoon that most people aren’t aware that I’ve ever done.

    I trimmed back both the rhododendron bush next to our front door and the big leafy shrub that’s been taking over the bend in our walkway for the last three years. The rhodie is in pretty sad shape, limbs and leaves all over the place. I cut it back pretty drastically, but at least we can see out the window now and get to our front door. Yes, it was that bad. Over the last few years I’ve done very light trimming to keep the rhodie out of the doorway, but this is the first time I’ve made a serious effort to rehabilitate the little shrub.

    As for the other bush, whose name I do not know but probably should, we’ve been letting it grow unchecked since we moved in. It used to be no taller than I am, and was neatly contained in its bed on the inside of the walkway curve. Over time it’s grown upward and outward to the point where you almost have to walk in the grass to get around it. While I did make pretty good progress on that plant, I expect to make a few more passes at it with the pruning shears over the next few weekends.

    For grins and chuckles I also got the neighbor’s grape vines the hell out of our tree and off our house, did a tiny bit of trimming on the other, better-grown rhodie at the corner of the house, and removed what looks like some ivy vines that wanted to climb up the drainpipe.

    You didn’t know that I sometimes get a kick out of pruning shrubbery? See what happens when you assume you know everything you need to know about a person?

  • Blog cheerleading, the meme of the future!

    At the end of a long day, it’s fun to think up new blog memes with which to torture the websurfing masses…

    Emily: i’ll claw my way to the top somehow
    me: I’ll cheer you all the way. 😉
    Emily: whee!
    Emily: Blogger cheerleaders. now there’s a concept.
    me: Hmm, I wonder if we can come up with a new meme for that. Because, after all, spawning a cool new meme is what it’s all about, right?
    Emily: oh totally 🙂
    me: If you have blogger cheerleaders, you then form them into a blogger cheerleading squad.
    me: And then you make them do cheers, and perform acrobatic feats.
    Emily: and they do stuff to get you hits, i guess
    me: Yes!
    me: “Gimme an E!” “E!” “Gimme an M!” “M!”…
    Emily: yay!
    me: And, of course, they have to wear short skirts.
    Emily: even the male cheerleaders?
    me: Um, unless they’re men. Unless the men want to.
    Emily: right
    me: Kilts.
    Emily: yes!
    Emily: cheer kilts!
    me: Do they then have to do their cheers in a brogue?
    Emily: Hm
    Emily: Yes.
    me: Tough requirements for the cheerleading squad then… “Must be fan of blog. Must look good in kilt. Must be reasonably athletic. Must be willing and able to drive traffic to said blog. Must be able to cheer in a Scottish brogue.”
    me: Assuming an all-male squad, I suppose.
    Emily: they better look good in the kilt.
    me: Indeed. We don’t anyone with scary legs.
    Emily: which would be the colors of the blog’s design?
    me: Maybe, but then you’d have to commit to a color scheme for the course of the cheerleading season.
    Emily: Hm yeah.
    me: At least until the quarter-finals, when you can break out the stunning new color scheme to quash the competition in the finals.
    Emily: Do they date the blog football players?
    me: Only if they’re lucky.
    me: (I cannot believe I just said that. WHAT blog football players?)
    Emily: i’m sure they exist…in some universe…
    me: What kind of field would you play blog football on?
    Emily: A virtual one, perhaps
    me: No… we get one of those old Coleco hand-held football games!
    Emily: hee hee
    me: It makes the team a lot smaller, thus easier to pay the salaries.
    Emily: they get salaries?
    me: You just know they’ll go on strike if they don’t. Unless we get REALLY dumb players who will work for peanuts. Or cheerleader nookie.
    Emily: Hm I was picturing a volunteer thing
    Emily: but then, i’m stuck in high scho0ol mode 😛
    me: You’ll get over that.
    Emily: i hope so.
    me: *grin*


    Thanks to Emily for several minutes of fun and a few disturbing mental images. No, not that image! That image is really rather nice.

  • Stay back, I’m a meme carrier.

    I am so damned cool. Thanks to me, both Tinkrbel and the Cosmic Babe are doing the Friday Five.

    Er. Tinkrbel’s site didn’t respond for me when I tried to reach it just now, but maybe it’ll work for you. Both of their most recent FF responses are more interesting than mine, so it’s worth the effort. Really really.

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