"ich würde gern etwas zerstören / doch es darf nicht mir gehören / ich will ein guter Junge sein"

[larryhammer]

Department of It Should Work But Doesn't, Quite: Attention James Burke fans -- every episode of Connections is now available on YouTube (via). The problem being that the chopped-up format is kinda annoying, given the content.

Department of It Shouldn't Quite Work But Does: Samurai High School (Hiro Kashiwaba), which can be summarized as Torikaebaya Monogatari x Gin Tama. In a Japan where the Meiji Restoration never happened on an Earth ruled by aliens, the twin sister and brother of a poor samurai-class family are both very masculine and feminine, respectively, and get into an elite high school by changing places. And since this is written as a shounen gag-humor manga, they can Never Let Anyone Find Out, even while they compete in an unstructured tournament of their masculine and feminine skills. Dumb as a drawer of teaspoons, and nearly as sharp. Plus along the way, we get rip-offs nods to other classical romances, such as the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and probably a metric cartload of cultural references I'm simply not getting. (That it's an update on Takaebaya is, btw, explicit; the Gin Tama likeness makes me wonder if Kashiwaba was an assistant to Hideaki Sorachi.)

Department of Just Different Work: A New Yorker profile of Shigeru Miyamoto (via), the creative mind behind Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, Nintendogs, Wii Fit, and many more of Nintendo's best-selling video games. In short, a guy who knows how to play.

Department of It Just Doesn't Work: .......

I got nothing for that one. Any suggestions?

---L.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The entry directly below this on my reading list was titled "How I Am Making It Work", which seems correct.

[larryhammer]

I would have included an entry like that, but I'm just back from Santa Fe and took a day off from everything except minimal laundry and classical Japanese.

---L.