I wish someone would explain interstellar travel to me. I'm quite excited about the new planet they found ( Read more... )

After ten years I'm revisiting English Philology, my minor, and beginner's course materials. I'm loving A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (Huddleston, Pullum). It's lovely and accessible and corrects a lot of inaccuracies in traditional grammar. I was rather disheartened to see how bad the user reviews on GoodReads and Amazon are. People ( Read more... )

Santa got me Some Remarks, which is a collection of short mostly non-fiction from Neal Stephenson, like his essays, speeches and interviews. Santa knows I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson. In a New York Times article from 2006 called Turn On, Tune In, Weg Out, Stephenson discusses the evolution of the Star Wars franchise and how the movies in the ( Read more... )

I went looking for Grimm slash fanfic. I'm not sure why I did it. I really like Grimm, it's... better than I initially expected, when I watched the pilot on the plane back from Japan. It's also a series I watch together with my Mom, which is good times. I boxed the second episode and sat down to watch it alone, and about halfway Mom came up and ( Read more... )

Went to Nice, had fun. This blog is not about real life events ( Read more... )

After my work's over, I've been reorganizing the desktop where I had just saved stuff rather indiscriminately for easy access. I also found notepad files containing cryptic snatches of text or lines and lines of mysterious unlabeled urls. The following was typed into one of them:These were those books on Japan which are written entirely in ( Read more... )

I read Laura Millers fascinating article Mammary Mania in Japan (2003, Positions: 11/2, pp. 271-300) yesterday. Her conclusion reads:The history of female breasts in Japan is interesting because it illustrates the power of media models, the influence of American culture, and how easily and quickly culturally molded behaviors and ideas become ( Read more... )

In his controversial and largely academically discredited book, The Naked Ape, zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris argued that the human females mammaries evolved into such rounded and erotic things because humans lost the direct line of sight to the ass when they became bipedal. In other primates the buttocks are erogenous, and the mammaries ( Read more... )

I'm backing up a bit, to April 6th when I wrote some things about YA. I recently changed computers, because my trusty old HP resigned after years and years of selfless servitude. So now when I visit Amazon, I am not greeted with lists of recently viewed items, but a list of what Amazon thinks I might like. Namely, their best sellers. And I suppose ( Read more... )

I've been thinking of fandom lately. I had an interesting discussion with a friend on how when we were young, being a fan meant analyzing the product one was a fan of, which most often meant finding faults in it. The writers/producers/directors/editors just didn't get this or that right or didn't have a very good understanding of the characters and ( Read more... )