The transit strike is a go. And Squidlet summarizes the WHO report under the accurate cut-tag We're ALL GONNA DIE!! A pandemic of avian flu is inevitable. It hits not only the very young and the very old but the adults in their prime right in the middle. And it's definitely going to happen.

I feel ever so much better now about spending hideous amounts of money digging out my basement. I'd been thinking miserably that it will run three times over budget and consume all the money I've put away and I'll be condemned to an impoverished old age *living* in my basement subsisting on cat food and Campbell's soup from the food bank until defaulting tenants upstairs force me to sell the house to pay my debts, after which I must live on the streets.

But that isn't going to happen. Because I'm going to die of avian flu. This makes me happy. Maybe I'll go to Europe next year, now that I don't have to save my money for debilitated age twenty years down the line (if I'm lucky; ten years if I'm not.)

On another note, I'm a touch bemused by these people writing Stigma fic. I wonder how many of them have actually read the thing in Japanese. Because the last thing I feel the need of is Stigma fic of any description. What's there is perfect. Anything further is just... surplus to requirement. And not perfect, of course. But what I want, rather badly, is to be able to translate it again, only better than before; and that I can't do.

That 'guess my favourites' thing is unplayable by me, either because my tastes are too well-known to my friends (Basara, Saiyuuki, Saiyuuki Gaiden, WA) or the series are too obscure (Papuwa, Channel 5, Hi Izuru, Karin.) But mostly because I tend not to have favourite characters as much these days, which is a testament to a good series. Utena is the ultimate example: in fact I don't actually *like* anyone in it in and of themselves; but I like the ensemble acting and the bravura of the thing. My 'favourite character' there is probably Akio, who is a swine: but the Akio idea is handled so well that I find him compulsively watchable. Same for 12 Kingdoms, which for me has boring and unboring characters only. However Rakushun is such a corrective to anything Disney that I watch him in fascination whenever he's around, and wonder would he be more interesting if Youko was a guy.

No faves in LotR: nobody stands out in that epic; or Narnia: I have favourite books- Dawntreader and Silver Chair, the travel books- but no favourite characters. Same for FB, Gankutsuou, Hundred Ghosts, Onmyouji. It's the relationships or the plot or the style that does it, not the fact that one character pings with me in a special way.

But to be perverse, Sen to Chihiro, which is the acme of ensemble acting and setting and style and /everything/ just being so right, does have a favourite character in it. And it isn't Kaonashi.