Michael Hopcroft

The enraptured look on his face reminded me of the time I went to a concert given by an obscure but promising young cellist. I will never forget the look of concentration mixed with ecstasy on his face as he played, and the sweat pouring out of his entire body (yes, I did get to sit that close). It would have been unbelievable unless you had been there.
 
What happened to that musician? To answer that, I need only tell you his name -- Yo-Yo Ma.

I imagine there are hikkomori of both genders, but it's a serious issue. Some find that there are so many pressures from so many directions that they simply can;t face life and shut themselves away. I was affected by something similar growing up. The problem is that human beings are hard-wired to need other people, and when we shut ourselves off from them completely we quietly start to go mad.
 
Unfortunately mental illness is severely stigmatized in Japan, making obtaining treatment for serious conditions difficult and socially challenging. It's already hard enough to be mentally ill without massive social disapproval making things worse.

President Snow's favorite novel: To Kill a Mockingjay

President Snow's favorite novel: To Kill a Mockingjay

It's a new technology, and if it can be done for 25 bucks a test, it's about 5-10% of the price of current tests that do the same thing, so that's pretty cool.
 
How useful would it be? For high risk patients (like transplant patients) we already do this type of test, but that's not for diagnosis. It's for planning future treatment. The drawback of this new test (like the old tests) is that it relies on antibodies. Normally, it takes 2-3 weeks for your body to generate a measureable antibody response. So the test will tell you what you've had, but not necessarily what you have right now.
 
That could still be useful - especially as we collect more information on how individuals respond to infection and long term risks of infection - but probably won't have an immediate effect on medical practice.
 
Cheers, Mark

Not the actual recording I'm listening to but the same piece -- the overture to Gioacomo Rossini's opera Semiramede. Semiramede was the last of Rossini's operas written in Italy. No, I haven;t seen it.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXNw9iygwwI

Inside Out in the theater.
 
Brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.
 
As you probably know by now, it's as fantasy about the five core "feelings" that live in a little girl named Riley's head and control her emotional life. (Every other person in the movie has variations of the same feelings.) When an accident sucks the girl's "core memories" and two of the feelings (Joy and Sadness) out of headquarters and into the wider world of her mind, the girl's emotional life spirals out of control and Joy and Sadness struggle to get back to Headquarters while the three remaining feelings (Anger, Fear and Disgust) try to hold things together while they're gone and make matters much, much worse.
 
Joy wants Riley to be happy. The problem is she wants Riley to always be happy, regardless of what happens to her. The very existence of Sadness is an open annoyance to her, and behind her exuberant exterior she only tolerates the other feelings. She and Riley have one thing in common -- they both have some growing up to do.

Inside Out in the theater.
 
Brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.
 
As you probably know by now, it's as fantasy about the five core "feelings" that live in a little girl named Riley's head and control her emotional life. (Every other person in the movie has variations of the same feelings.) When an accident sucks the girl's "core memories" and two of the feelings (Joy and Sadness) out of headquarters and into the wider world of her mind, the girl's emotional life spirals out of control and Joy and Sadness struggle to get back to Headquarters while the three remaining feelings (Anger, Fear and Disgust) try to hold things together while they're gone and make matters much, much worse.
 
Joy wants Riley to be happy. The problem is she wants Riley to always be happy, regardless of what happens to her. The very existence of Sadness is an open annoyance to her, and behind her exuberant exterior she only tolerates the other feelings. She and Riley have one thing in common -- they both have some growing up to do.

Reginald D. Hunter, black American comedian in the UK, sometimes a touch profane for my tastes but often funny learns about the House of Lords
 

And maybe this?
 

Q: You know, now that the Cardassians are gone from Bajor I hope you're really sorry you became a collaborator.
 
A: Cardassian, Kardashian -- they're all the same to me!

You mean people thinking they should continue to milk more cash out of a franchise created by Michael Crichton?

I'm no horror fan, but I've come to really like Erma, a sadly irregular webcomic about the half-ghost daughter of the character from The Ring. Erma has started kindergarten in a private school (apparently the only one that would take her, and some of her teachers openly wish they hadn't), and is trying to make friends and fit in. But she is subconsciously scary, even when she's trying to be helpful, and has a set of supernatural powers that she sometimes uses cleverly to solve problems, sometimes uses cleverly to have fun, and sometimes uses cleverly while having no idea she's doing it. Despite this, she actually does start to make friends -- especially her unfazable babysitter (the previous one -- well....)
 

It manages to be funny, a little bit sweet, and more than a little unsettling. And I really wish it came out on a regular schedule.

When one of my old Motivators turned up on Facebook, I realized I wanted to start doing these again (the poster was unattributed and poster probably didn't know its origins, but I didn't mind because it wasn't the sort of thing you get anything other than fan-cred for anyway).
 
So I've done a few to dip my toe in.
 
 

Whatever it is, it's free-range, gluten-free, non-GMO, organically farmed, no added salt, heirloom variety, no corn syrup added, sustainable and free trade, and it's only $189 a serving. And it tastes like s***. 
NT: What the 21st Century North American version of Valhalla looks like.

When one of my old Motivators turned up on Facebook, I realized I wanted to start doing these again (the poster was unattributed and poster probably didn't know its origins, but I didn't mind because it wasn't the sort of thing you get anything other than fan-cred for anyway).
 
So I've done a few to dip my toe in.
 
 

I.....I can't write that....
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary stood in the middle of the Room of Pain gazing curiously about at implements and equipment it had no hope of understanding, disturbed neither by the evidences of a deviant Human sexuality - for all Human sexuality was equally alien to it - nor by the fact that most of the room was various shades of a color that somehow lay at an angle to the normal straight line of the visible spectrum. "Of course you can write it" said the beast, "The question is, can you write it without a palindromedary to help you?" Then it casually walked away, leaving the door mercifully open...nothing is keeping me here. I can't stay here. Why am I still here, turning about, my eyes constantly skittering away from objects I cannot bear to see both because of their implicit threatening purposes and because my mind rejects the very existence of that...that....colour....

All I'm going to say on that is that if someone is cruel to me, that doesn't obligate me to be cruel to them in return. Quite the contrary, in fact -- it's horrifyingly difficult not to demand revenge against a crime that heinous, but in the end what do we gain when we kill him? Isn't "all human life is valuable -- except yours" the precise attitude of this man towards his victims?

All I'm going to say on that is that if someone is cruel to me, that doesn't obligate me to be cruel to them in return. Quite the contrary, in fact -- it's horrifyingly difficult not to demand revenge against a crime that heinous, but in the end what do we gain when we kill him? Isn't "all human life is valuable -- except yours" the precise attitude of this man towards his victims?

Citizen Kane. I can see why it's hailed as a cinema classic.

Kamichu! is from a while back, but I got to see a couple of episodes again and it reminded me why a show that could only be made in Japan doesn't necessarily mean the ultra-weirdness people claim.
 
During the lunch break at a rural junior high school, a shy girl named Yurie matter-of-factly tells her best friend that she's a god now. Sometime overnight she somehow became a divinity. The immediately attracts the enthusiastic interest of a classmate who runs the nearby shrine, who begins an attempt to find out just what sort of god Yurie has become.
 
It makes a lot more sense if you know even a little about Shinto. Shinto has millions of gods, which inhabit just about everyplace. A human becoming one during their lifetime is rare but not unthinkable. A Westerner would probably have sent Yurie to a psychiatrist. As it is, Yurie finds that she can now see and interact with the hundreds of minor gods with whom mortals share the town.
 
But in this case Yurie is absolutely right. She's a god, but doesn't know what she's doing. An effort to create a breeze resulted in a typhoon with her face in its eye almost laying waste to the town. Afterwards her new friend seizes on "the god of junior high' as an opportunity to save the shrine from bankruptcy, a quest which becomes more earnest when they discover that the god who had previously inhabited the shrine has been gone for three months. Again, it falls to Yurie to resolve the situation by traveling to the plane of the gods, locating the missing god, and gently persuading him to come back.
 
It's really very sweet, innocent and oddly fascinating.

It's hard finding work if you're a panda. It's even harder if you aren't even trying. That is the situation faced by Panda, a protagonist in one of 2104's more interesting anime series, Polar Bear's Cafe.
 
Panda wants to relax all day and eat bamboo, but his mother wants him to get a job and will suck him up into her vacuum cleaner if he doesn't. So he reluctantly goes out looking and stumbles upon a cafe run by Polar Bear, who is in fact a polar bear. after a reluctant and unsuccessful attempt to apply for a part-time job at the cafe, Polar Bear takes a strange sort of pity on him and directs him to the perfect job for him -- at the zoo, acting like a wild panda for the benefit of children who are blown away by seeing pandas.
 
Now the world of Polar Bear's Cafe is decidedly odd. Wild and exotic animals who are just as smart as people walk among us and nobody bats an eye. The human woman Polar Bear ends up hiring to work for him doesn't mind working for a massive Arctic carnivore, nor is it a problem for his many human customers.. Lots of animals work at the zoo (some are regulars at the cafe) but apparently few if any live there. Polar Bear himself has a fondness for puns and non-sequitur that always annoys his best customer, a sardonic penguin who is always in the cafe and doesn't seem to have a job or much of a social life.
 
One of the most interesting things about the series is the drawing style, which is detailed and astoundingly realistic. The animals look like the real thing if the real thing were walking on their hind legs and making espresso drinks.
 

 
The rest of the drawing style is very painterly and Miyazakiesque, which is surprising for a TV comedy.