Off the Cliff

Our garbage pickups alternate: recycle one week, garbage and (in season) garden waste the other. Food waste every week, fortunately, because not everyone freezes their nama gomi like I do. The garden pickup days are the best, because the trucks do that first and then come by, usually in the afternoon, for the garbage garbage. I'm not only not a morning person ('put garbage out before 7 a.m.' are you joking?), I'm also not one for stomping back downstairs to do it late at night either. Especially since the raccoons will get into ordinary garbage if there's anything vaguely edible there, like the papers from muffins, and the bins don't have locks. You take chances putting garbage out at night.

So a week ago I was drowsing in bed early when I heard the crash chunk of the garbage truck's metal jaws, presumably munching the garden waste. But then there was a repeated rumble rumble clank rumble that doesn't go with paper garden bags at all. Startled, I sat up and checked my phone. No, 9:05: I hadn't somehow slept until 11:30 or 12. But rumble rumble clank rumble: they were emptying garbage bins, and I hadn't put mine out. And the garden waste? That truck was coming up the street just behind. Chiz curses. So afortnight's worth of garbage is still in the bin, with a rock on top to discourage varmints.

Meanwhile, this week is recycle, and as my bin is only half full I didn't put it out. But I had a clear plastic garbage bag of weeded manga to go. They want you to place such bookbags for recycle on top of your bin. Put in on my brother's instead, so as not to confuse it with the three bags of shredded paper next to it. (Lawyers generate a lot of paper, esp. if they weed their files regularly.) Also it was going to rain last night and books are easier recycled if not sodden from moisture building up inside the bags.

This morning I'm leaving for acupuncture and dodging thunder showers as I go. The trucks aren't coming at any 9 a.m. this week: sidewalk is still blocked by three foot square, four foot high bins, all firmly closed. Except... the bag is gone from my bro's bin. And no, it hasn't fallen among the shredded paper bags. Who could have taken it? You can't flog Japanese books at our 2nd hand stores. Well, someone is in for some interesting BL reading, I guess, as well as the '3 Kingdoms Furries In Spaaaaace' of Ginga Sengoku Gun'yūden Rai aka THUNDER JET. Good luck to them.

I should just do link dumps.

Sherlock Holmes cast with Red Cliff actors. Hu Jun as Watson? Can see. To Takeshi Kaneshiro's Holmes? Enhhhhhh.....

Chinese cast FMA. Nicolas Tse as Kimblee? Oh yes yes yes. Don't know Vincent Zhao, must check him out, but he seems not quite rugged enough for Scar.

And fourteen of the teracotta warriors will be on exhibit at the ROM starting-- tada!-- the weekend of the G20 summit that will close all buildings near Queen's Park where the protests are happening-- a stone's throw down the street from the ROM. Well, there should be enough cops around (with noise cannons) to deter anyone intent on crashing the opening party.

I'm watching Red Cliff in smallish increments, being one of those people who likes to have watched a thing the way other people like to have written. (I don't know why this is. Infinite distractibility, maybe; or a long-standing and usually well-founded anxiety that I'll be either harrowed or embarrassed by what I'm seeing.) Right now Xiao Qiao is making tea for Cao Cao, and beautiful as Xiao Qiao is, I'm finding the ruse a bit mh well-- a pointless distraction, in short. What did the woman think she'd accomplish anyway?

If this seems to be far along in the action, since it's well into part 2, the reason is that my DVD player thinks Red Cliff 1 is the wrong format and refuses to play it. That it's exactly the same format and company as pt 2 makes no difference. So I watch pt 2, which is reputedly slashier than 1 anyway. In time I'll overcome my technophobia and try pt 1 on the computer, something I've never done to date.
( Thoughts so far )

I'm sure everyone has seen this on daegaer, but it looks like they've found Cao Cao's tomb.

Also, happy birthday to joasakura

And otherwise, finished Unseen Academicals. With all allowances made for 'first time reading newly published Discworld in hardcover' which, truly, has a different feel from 'reading all of extant Discworld any way I can get it to catch up to everyone else', I really think this is one of the best in the series. As proved by the fact that the staff of UU did *not* get on my nerves as they customarily do, because ordinarily UU ranks down there with Rincewind for 'stuff I can take or leave alone, and would preferably leave alone.' (Earlier I had a feeling the football thing was going to prove too British even for my second-gen appreciation, but I got over it.) Also-- Vetinari and his squeeze. Also Pepe. Also Glenda. Also Nutt. I am a happy camper.

One of these days I'll restart my reading of Three Kingdoms, possibly aided by this site ('ware ads) that I can't tell is it a RP 3K game or is it treating the 3K characters *as if* they were part of a RPG.

This because I, currently very porridgey in the brain, first read the lj entry about writing POC for Yuletide and saw that Red Cliff has made the YT cut; and then read an entry observing that feminine utopias are somehow always peaceful and one-with-nature, which prompted rushthatspeaks to observe "the old perception of women states very firmly that you can't be a mother and a warrior, a mother and a scientist." Porridge brain then presented me with a female Zhao Zilong fighting with a lance in one hand and a baby in the other. Which I like enough to start considering gender-bender AU 3K. This requires either finishing 3K or seeing Red Cliff somehow or possibly reading what there is of Ravages of Time in Japanese, which may not go nearly far enough. Cannot think which would be the least painful of these.

(OTOH there's a female general in the current Sumeragi Natsuki. And I wonder are there any female generals in Yue opera, or are they all delicate scholars? Shall find out next week.)

From the ever-inspiring baka_neko-- The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, with the usual quotable comments thereon.
( The flow flows )

Second time through with a dictionary and third time through looking closely at the pictures, I finally get what's happening in the grandfather story in 100 Demons 16. Half of me thinks manga shouldn't *be* that difficult and the other half is rather charmed. Ima makes you work for your story but the work is very satisfying. Of course, I bet native speakers don't have to work like this. *They* always know who the absent subject refers to and what the absent verb is and the exact identity of that sketchily drawn person at the end. (deep sigh)

Now to find where the streetside palmist who lures Akira away somehow in the first story comes from, because it seems I'm supposed to know who he is and I can't remember him at all. While I'm at it I might try to figure out what it actually *is* that happens to Akira in that story, because first she's gone missing for a two days and suddenly there she is, no explanation at all. But I'm tired.
( Cut for stats )

Does anyone know a 3K source that's hostile to Zhuge Liang? I mean, it's too much to hope it's been translated if there is. But it would make me very happy to know it exists, and that someone thought the sun did *not* shine out of the smug little git's bottom.

Now I see what paleaswater meant about most advisors standing aloof from the kings they advised and dying safe in their beds; not that anyone would want to be close to that utterly wet and a weed Liu Bei in the fist place. (And I wish I could recall where paleaswater said it.) The next chapter promises to show him weeping over Zhou Yu, but that notwithstanding, Zhuge Liang has ice water in his veins. 血もなければ、腸もない-- neither blood nor bowels. How brilliant of Minekura to have cast Tenpou in his role.

I has it. It starts with the first warm muggy stinky day in spring and doesn't go away till Thanksgiving (ours, not theirs.) It has started today. It'll be cooler on the weekend, but that's only a brief respite. June is coming, to be followed by July: hot muggy days in insufficient air conditioning, hot muggy nights that are both too warm and too clammy for sleep. And I grow old and stiff and nothing is as good as it was before, not that it was ever very good to start with, and nothing is ever going to be the way it could have been, and Zhuge Liang is not either a brilliant tactician, he's a hedge wizard who uses magic to make the wind to burn the ships that carried the men who marched in the army that Cao Cao led. Bah.

Have finished To Say Nothing of the Dog. It improved in the second half, before I quite lost patience with it, because the first half narrator was as hapless and irritating as Rincewind. And was a pleasant page-turning read, especially as I wasn't trying to keep track of what these slippages and anomalies were supposed to be.

And so it's done and so now what?
( This is the problem with fantasy generally and SF particularly )

Meme: This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
( At my age you have trouble remembering what you read yesterday )

Well, not quite. Several Badnasties bit the dust (or rather, expired in bloody vomit) in the last few chapters, and I thought I could say Oh good that's it for Yuan Shao *and* his unlikable family let's rest here and read something else before Cao Cao (being his generous Dr Jekyll self at the taking of Jizhou) and Sun Quan and Liu Biao and Liu Bei go at it again. But no.

Last page of vol 1 has impetuous Cow Pee bursting armed into Yuan Shao's house (in defiance of his father's orders) and finding two women weeping together. He decides to kill them, because that's what one does with unarmed women your father has given securities of safety to. So I had to start vol 2 to see what happens. Yes, and it all ends well, but Cow Pee does not impress. I wish him a short unhappy life.
( Musings on the uses of history )

Meaning any book I happen to be reading at the moment. One goes from the revolting doings of the early Han to the revolting doings of Three Kingdoms, where Cao Cao no more governs with filial duty than anyone else. This all rather reminds me of Claudine at School during the examination:

I installed myself; he looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, 'Ha! What was the War of the Two Roses?' After the names of the leaders of the two factions, I stopped dead.
'And then? And then? And then?' He irritated me. I burst out:
'And then, they fought like ragamuffins for a long time, but that hasn't stuck in my memory.'

(grimly) Onwards. Book 1 of 4 aproaches its end. How in heaven's name did people who wrote by oil lamp or candlelight with brushes or quill pens manage to be so damnably prolix?

I am fighting the urge to order Red Cliff 2 online. Not that I have Red Cliff 1, mind. Not that I would watch it if I had it, which is why I haven't ordered it yet. I know me and I don't watch DVDs short of a gun at my head or everyone on my FL talking about it. I just have the urge to buy it.

So here's the deal-- I'll order Red Cliff 1&2 when I've read that section of 3K. And by that time (mid-July by my calculations) I'll have my refund tidily in hand (touches wood- supposing I'm getting a refund this year) and can afford it.

Reading about hegemons in Spring-Autumn period in Japanese (hardcover book smelling slightly of mold) requires having hanzi for all the state names, to say nothing of a few provinces and cities. I shall begin with the states, anyway, and put it here to be handy. (Discover wiki didn't alter its S-A map: it's this damned monitor that makes wiki's maps too dark to see clearly.)
( Read more... )

Discover, in a slightly pleased way, that what makes Three Kingdoms marginally less anxiety-triggering and marginally more readable is six weeks of hanzi study. I may have the wrong Zhuo hanzi for that particular personage-- in fact it's certain I have the wrong Zhuo hanzi for that particular personage-- but at least I have a hanzi I can associate the word Zhuo with. Mr. Filthy (濁) or Mr. Clean (濯) as per choice. This helps immeasurably in keeping people separate, especially when faced with five different Zhangs in the same chapter, only three of whom are brothers.
( Mr Long, Mr Stretch, Mr Bill, Mr Swell, and Mr Rise-in-prices )

If I have a bête noire in Japanese popular culture, it's Three Kingdoms. Yes, really- Japanese popular culture, not Chinese. (Far too much of a n00b to know anything about Chinese.) There are certain foreign works the Japanese have taken to their bosoms so that now you stumble across them everywhere. Coming Through the Rye is what they got from us: traffic lights play it, and Sakura Sakura for the other direction. Rather more respectably, what they took from China is Three Kingdoms.
( Lookit those purty kanji- sure are a lot of 'em-- OMG it's *Chinese*!! Get back in the car! )

ETA: Ha! So that's what the invert function is in photoshop. Look here to see inverted Tenpou and inverted Kenren. And Kanzeon being uhh well Kanzeon, from the back pages of vol 2.

FWIW the Kenren frontispiece is the same in both editions of Gaiden 1, just has thinner lines in the new version. The colour pages that start the book have more colour in them- Nataku appears against a blood red background- and a tendency to the browns she's shown so much love of in her art books. Goujun now looks like yellow ivory, Kanzeon is yellow-brown rather than peach. I'm not quite the fan of it myself.

Have my new Gaidens courtesy of shiny_monkey. If I may ask the Chinese here present about this picture-- I looked at it and said Zhuge Liang and then said no wait didn't he have a horsetail fan? So who's Tenpou being in this pic?

Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.

An entry in baka_neko's journal has me gasping weakly on the floor.
( Shall quote rather than link )
Simple things amuse simple people, yes.