Some manga

New comics day, but nothing that engaged my shopping gland. Over the past week or two I’ve found a few manga titles I like:

Planetes
by Makoto Yukimura, published by Tokyopop
I have no idea how to pronounce this one. “Plah-neets”? “Plah-nah-tayz”? Whatever, it’s a great SF comic about astronaut-garbagemen working to clear debris out of Earth’s local orbital pathways. Nice, mature writing style, by which I don’t mean that there’s sex, but that the characters don’t all act like hysterical highschoolers.

Gunslinger Girl
by Yu Aida, published by ADV Manga
Italy’s “Social Welfare Agency” has a black ops division that builds cyborg assassins. The cyborg treatment works best on children, so that’s what they use. The kids are lethal, but still have the emotions and vulnerabilities of children, so each is paired off with an adult trainer who acts as a parent/older sibling figure as well as a supervisor. Melodramatic, but nicely dark.

PhD: Phantasy Degree
by Son Hee-Joon, published by Tokyopop
Yet another highschool manga, I shouldn’t like this, yet somehow I do. Maybe it’s because it’s about a human girl trying to gain admission to a monster school, so not all the characters are annoying manga Japanese schoolkids. Maybe it’s because the author’s doing a good job of parcelling out mysteries little by little while moving the story along. Maybe I just like the ruthless protagonist, who starts the comic attempting to eat a werewolf. (And no relation to the webcomic.)

Yesterday's subway outage

Gothamist has the skinny on yesterday’s Lex line power outages:

The 7AM power outage may have been caused by an A/C power issue at Grand Central, which then caused a signal problem. Then some other circuits blew, and when the MTA put in temporary cable, it shorted out and caused an afternoon power outage. Finally, at around 5:50PM, the MTA found a 2' by 3' hole in a manhole near the 33rd Street station, where water and salt had corroded through the subway's concrete ceiling.

bugsybanana got caught in this and kept me waiting in front of the Astor Place Starbucks for 20 minutes last night, while I got to watch transit workers come out and put an out-of-service sign on the subway entrance, which many would-be passengers ignored. The guy handing out free copies of some new magazine kept telling them “No service”, but they’d already put his voice into their mental ignore box.

Today there seems to be something wrong with the 7 line. Makes me glad to take the PATH.

Assholes, then balls

I keep thinking I’m gonna have to give up reading political blogs. Between filthy James Lileks’s cowardly half-accusing Oliver Willis of antisemitism and Glenn Reynolds’s whining yet again about bias in the NY Times (“chief architect”, aieee, oh the pain) I feel like hitting someone and not stopping till I topple from exhaustion.

But then every once in a while I find something like a link to a story about study of scrotum shape in ancient Greek sculpture, and it all seems worthwhile.

Oh, and I found that scrotum link through Kevin Drum, who also linked to an article in the LA Times about how genetic sex differences. Apologists for sexism will gleefully jump on bits like this:

All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2% of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative — the chimpanzee.

...but I note that it’s an article on a technical topic written by a staff writer for a general news source, and according to Grumer’s First Law of Science News must therefore contain at least one glaring error. Wait to discover what the error is before using this news to buttress your worldview.

Irish bumf

Without even thinking about it I put on a bright orange shirt this morning.

The Irish Name Generator (I refuse to call anything a quiz that does nothing more than ask for your name and sex) says my Irish name is “Kane Fitzgerald”. Kane seems to be an Anglicized form of Cathán, which is Irish for guerilla. Not my name at all. An Irish version of my first name ought to be something like the word for father (athair) with an honorific attached; I can’t find a common Irish name built along those lines.

When I was a kid (that’s right, it’s time for me to thump my cane and tell y’all how you disobey your elders and your LJ quizzes are just noise) we used to generate pseudo-names using amusing formulas. Like, fer instance, your porn star name was the name of your childhood pet followed by the name of the street where you grew up. bugsybanana and her siblings wound up inventing a whole backstory for their shared porn star, Willy Pacific. (I seem to recall that he was born de la Paz, but changed his name for showbiz.) There was something wonderful and surprising about those old formulations that you just can’t get out of a lame CGI doing a rough alphabet match. (Assuming it’s doing even that much work, and not just randomizing.)

Update: camwyn suggested “Patrick” (or “Padraig”), which means “nobly born”, but is derived from the Latin patricius, which is in turn derived from pater, which means father.