The Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney series that I've been poking at is basically made of terrible puns. The Japanese, if you haven't noticed, love these things. Both spoken and written puns are much easier to construct in Japanese than in many other languages -- although the visual ones don't always work when read aloud, and the aural ones don't always work in text -- for a number of reasons. First and foremost are the borrowed Chinese characters. Called kanji in Japanese and hanzì in Mandarin (both written 漢字), they came into widespread use back in the ancient court days, when the high-ranking men would keep official records in Chinese script, mostly as a status symbol ("behold, I have to do so little physical peasant labor that I can learn an entire other complicated language without starving") to prevent the plebs from getting into them. I can't swear that women were never taught Chinese, but educated women wrote in the vernacular, using hiragana , wh...
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This has been a hell of a week, so I'm trying to think of other, less important things, to keep myself from going completely gonzo. Right now, I'm having an enormous, but ultimately inconsequential, sad over the fact that Gyakuten Kenji 2 is not going to be released in English, pretty much ever. Gyakuten Kenji translates as Turnabout Prosecutor -- the series English speakers would know as Ace Attorney Investigations , the semi-spinoff line to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games for the Nintendo DS. (The main series is known in Japan as Gyakuten Saiban , or Turnabout Trial Court . The reference is to Phoenix's habit of letting the prosecution get thiiiiiiiiiiis close to grinding his metaphorical face into the dirt before he remembers something horribly important and snatches victory, and usually some amount of insanity, from the jaws of defeat.) I love these things like you would not believe. They are tremendously clever, and the entire writing staff ar...
I finally lost the broken rat yesterday. He fell or jumped out of the cage the night before; I woke up to find him sleeping in one of my shoes, next to the bed. I tried to put him back into the nest box with his brothers, but he emphatically did not want to be set down -- every time I tried it, he hauled himself back up to the cage door and went NO, UPMOMMYUP! So, aside from a few times I had to run to the bathroom, and once out to the grocery store, he spent his last few hours wrapped in a warm towel, and draped over my shoulder like a sleepy baby. I think I am proud to report that my rats are so spoiled that this one felt free to complain about bits of carrot in his baby food -- and flick them distastefully in random directions with his nose -- while he was being hand-fed out of a spoon, lying across my lap. I capitulated and just gave him my own cheese and broccoli soup the night before. His last nibbles were chunks of canned peaches, which he quite enjoyed. One of nature'...
It's very difficult sometimes to properly convey what my family is like to normal people. Fortunately, I have a convenient shortcut for nerds: My mother is Lwaxana Troi, only without the telepathic powers, and she's married to her Mr. Homm. She's very intelligent, independent, and has a total lack of shame that very occasionally comes in handy, such as when one has been kidnapped and stripped naked by a number of rogue Ferengi; but overall, her refusal to respect pretty much any social norm that strikes her as stupid, or capitulate gracefully to other peoples' requests, drives most everyone bats. A number of people have independently drawn this comparison over the years, one of them actually being my mother. She's thrilled. She has no idea why everyone on the Enterprise has sticks lodged up their unmentionables and thinks they should all just lighten up. She's also aware that I used to play a sort of gallows-humor game with my friends in high school that we ca...
Discussions of physical attractiveness are often fraught. Often, it trolls itself rapidly down into a shouting match between people who see themselves as the "haves" and the people who see themselves as the "have-nots". It doesn't always break down according to who the average observer would consider attractive. "Anecdote" is not the singular of "data", but it's been my experience that overwhelmingly, the people who would disagree with a disinterested third-party over which group they were in are the ones who are generally considered attractive but don't believe so. Eventually, someone will get frustrated with all the talk of what should be and shout, "Yeah, but all other things being equal, wouldn't you rather be pretty?" It's the Godwin's Law of the topic. What do you call that, anyway? Wolf's Law? There are two ways you can take that question. One of them is a near-instant way to trip everyone's t...
The thing about the whole people-sense is that, like the language-sense, it kicks me in the brain at the weirdest times. I sat down and watched a whole bunch of Mock the Week recently, because I love Dara Ó Briain. Also current events shows are way less anxiety-inducing when they're many years out of date, and I have the comfort of knowing that I will never wake up one morning and find that my country has handed control of part of the government to what appears to be a 400-year old Scottish man named "Ming". As a note that is completely tangential to what the rest of this post will be about, I'm always surprised at how much US news leaks into y'all's television programming, including the satire. (The Dubya years were such a goldmine, weren't they? The one American accent Brits appear to be able to get a reliable handle on is 'mentally-deficient Texan'.) We, on the other hand, kind of vaguely know that you still have a Queen, and that Prince Char...
One of my readers wrote me the other day and mentioned an intention to embark on the grand adventure of owning rats. I don't know if she's already got them or not, but if anyone else is interested in acquiring rodents, here are a few pieces of advice. Assuming that you haven't inherited your rats by accident or necessity -- I know several people who have ended up with rescue rats -- there's an easy way to ensure you get friendly, sociable critters. First, you find a pet shop that sells rats. Note that I do not say 'find a shop that sells pet rats'. Unless you specifically want a particular breed of fancy rat, like a dumbo or a rex, rats is rats is rats. The ones in the pet terrarium are exactly the same as the ones in the bin marked "snake food (small)". Snake food is often cheaper. (We took some un-fancy rats to the veterinarian once. I had a hell of a time making the appointment. The receptionist kept asking me what kind of rats they were. I e...