Anime, for the uninitiated, means Animation in Japanese. It does not refer to any particular type of animation. Just animation. And they animate everything in Japan. Adults watch animation just as much as kids, I understand. It does not have to have ninjas or 70 foot cyborg panda bears or any other particular thing in order to be called Anime. It just has to be animated.

Please don’t ever use the term JapAnimation. This is an embarrassing thing to say, as it reveals the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Anime, however, has come to have certain associations in America. This is due largely to the unfortunate fact that Anime was discovered by the American version of what the Japanese refer to as otaku. It tells you everything you need to know about this group of people that they 1.) have decided that being called an otaku is a compliment, when in fact it is the most degrading sort of insult, like being called an uber-dork or something. An otaku is someone with no life, who is completely socially inept and has nothing better to do with their time than sit at home and play on their computer and watch movies. It is not a badge of honor. They are basically the equivalent of people who frequently go to Star Trek conventions (offense intended).

And 2.), that the word Anime has come to be associated, mostly through the agency of the otakus, with movies that are primarily too stupid to be watched by any adult, but too violent and sexually explicit to be watched by any child.

I have tried to watch these movies on a number of occasions, almost continuously against my better judgment, at the urging of people I knew and respected, although I should not have respected them, it turns out, in at least some cases. This quest is periodically renewed by my viewing of an occasional Japanese animated movie or TV series, Anime to them, that I thorougly enjoy. Examples include Cowboy Bebop, Grave of the Fireflies and Spirited Away. These three movies are excellent and I recommend them to anyone. But of all of them, perhaps only “Cowboy Bebop” is typically considered “Anime” to the Otakus, being sci-fi, with space ships and guns and stuff. Grave of the Fireflies is a heart-rending story about a pair of orphans whose parents were killed in the firebombings of WWII, and Spirited Away is a dreamy children’s fantasy that absolutely puts Disney and Pixar to shame.

But the American Anime crowd is always talking in hushed tones about movies like Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which are awful. And don’t even talk about Sailor Moon. Most of the Otakus’ favorite movies seem to prominently feature well-endowed schoolgirls fighting aliens or demons. If it’s not that, then it’s cyborgs that needed for some reason to be designed to look like extremely attractive women. And it’s not like they’re undercover or anything. Everyone knows they’re cyborgs. And yet, they are anatomically correct (for the most part) women. How do I know this? Because the cyborg women seem to need to do an awful lot of their cyborg work naked.

And of course there are lots of ninjas and space robots and slo-mos, like The Matrix except with animated characters that oddly are less animated in many cases than Keanu Reeves, if you can believe that. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that cheap animation with like 4 frames a second was an artistic statement. And so you have scenes that look like a sexed-up version of Fred Flintstone- you know when he’d run through the house, and you saw the same background go by over and over? Yeah, they do that. Or a person (or ninja rabbit or anatomically correct cyborg girl) standing in a pose while the same scene goes by in the background over and over.

Also people have different colored hair, so you can tell who’s who. Which one’s Sailor Jupiter? Oh, she’s the one who looks exactly like all the other ones, that is, a really leggy girl with a superhero outfit that looks like schoolgirl uniform, except she has green hair. That’s how she’s different. Strong Bad gets it pretty much Exactly Right, here.

Don’t watch these movies, unless you too would like to be an Otaku, which remember is A Bad Thing, not A Good Thing. I am sorry (not really) if I offended anyone. If I did offend anyone, it’s a good sign that you should get a job, move out of your parents’ basement, and read a book or two. And not one with pictures.

Remember, that does not mean you should not watch Anime. A great deal of Anime is really good. But DO NOT watch Anime as defined as anything other than Japanese movies which happen to be animated, and DO NOT under any circumstances take the advice of someone who assumes that because you liked one animated movie made by Japanese people, that you will also like Battle Athletes or The Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040. This is like saying that because you liked Saving Private Ryan, you will also likely enjoy Bring It On.

Quick update on the Dell Inspiron blog that I reported on earlier. Just wanted to let you know that there have been no updates since my last post, at which time there was nothing posted on the site. For your convenience, I’ve added a link to my sidebar so that you can easily monitor the unfolding situation.

Just to recap, there continues to be nothing at all on the Dell Inspiron 600m Stuff Blog.

Fox News reports on a memo obtained by The Weekly Standard, detailing the relationship between Al Qaida and Iraq. This looks like the smoking gun.

USS Clueless has an analysis here on what drives Osama bin Laden and the radical Jihadists, which I think is excellent (mostly). On the subject of Osama, Steven Den Beste appears to be exactly right, but his analysis of Christians is oversimplistic to put it kindly. I put it kindly because I really like his stuff for the most part. But he’s really off track on his comments about Christians and what drives different kinds of Christians.

I’ll comment on that part of it. It boils down to this- either you believe God doesn’t really get involved in world affairs today, or you’re a zealot. This is pretty typical. Atheists will accept religion in other people as long as it’s a nice safe stripped-down religion that doesn’t make any real claims.

One line I particularly liked was this: “Religion is a source of comfort for powerless people living in a terrifying world.”

I don’t like it for the reasons Den Beste wrote it- he’s describing people who are ignorant of what’s really going on, and powerless to change it, as the ones who need religion, while rationalist superminds like himself who apparently are in complete control of all aspects of their lives prefer to be atheists.

No, I like it because it’s precisely true. Religion is a source of comfort for powerless people living in a terrifying world. The part that Den Beste misses is the extent to which we are all powerless, and to which the world is terrifying.

Den Beste is a white male living in America. He is extremely intelligent. According to his biography he is currently unemployed, although he has skills in engineering and will no doubt be employed again once things pick up. He lives in a country where a man can be unemployed for a time and write very long and perceptive blog articles, rather than one where he would live in a cardboard box and be attacked by dingoes.

Den Beste had nothing to do with any of this (except the engineering skills and the great blog posts). He may feel light-years ahead of that Dark Ages peasant, but anything he knows about any of that is the result of the simple accident that he was not born a Dark Ages peasant. He could have been. There were lots of Dark Ages peasants. Broadly speaking, there have been far more people born in the world into that kind of life, and are even today, than are born as intelligent white males in the richest country the world has ever known. And how sanguine would he be about religion being for the ignorant and powerless if he’d been born an outcast in India or a woman in Pakistan? He had nothing to do with any of that, and yet he seems to think that he is somehow less powerless than that Dark Ages peasant.

Our wealth and our arrogance do a good job of obscuring a simple fact to many of us- we are exactly as powerless as that Dark Ages peasant.

What good will his atheism do him if he gets diagnosed with inoperable cancer tomorrow? If a loved one is murdered? If a loved one betrays him? Many things of this nature have likely happened already, because they happen to all of us. And when they happen, I could choose to view them all as the result of totally understandable natural processes, over which I have no power, or as part of the plan of a sovereign God who loves me (who, it’s true, typically works through natural processes) over which I have no power.

Either way, I’m not in control. But one of those options puts me in the hands of my loving Father, and another one puts me at the mercy of arbitrary forces, an orange in the clockwork of nature to be ground and crushed. Because we all get ground and crushed.

Faced with that terrible truth, where do I turn for comfort? That’s right, religion. My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

If that makes me a Dark Ages peasant, or pre-enlightenment, or a zealot, I’m OK with that. If those are the worst things I get called in my life, I’ll be all right.

I could write a great deal more on this, but I have a busy day. I have to go out this afternoon and spend some time with the family of a man (a talented white male American) who got bitten by a mosquito, got West Nile and died. Sometimes life makes our arguments for us, much better than we ever could.

Here’s a great article (an excert from his book, really) by Victor Davis Hanson on the importance of battles in history.

I know, because I’ve been alone all week.

My productivity has gone through the floor. My life has spiraled into an embarrassing smelly mess of unwashed dishes, frozen pizzas and video games until three in the morning. It feels like college again, except without all the insecurity (Wait, I think that might be coming back too).

I suppose if I actually had to live alone permanently, I could adjust. I’d have to, because the way I’m going I’d end up like the plumber in Brazil, except instead of being engulfed and eaten by pieces of paper, I’ll be buried in Hot Pocket wrappers.

I think Diablo fogs my brain. Normally I’d have more to say, but this week, all I can think about is ‘click kill click kill click kill- ooh, a mana leech broadsword!!’

Sad, really.

The Washington Post wonders if the string of recent attacks is a counterattack by Saddam Hussein. Apparently the coordination of the attacks leads some to think it might be.

It’s pretty sad, though, that if this is in fact his counterattack, we’re not actually sure whether or not he really is counterattacking. Reminds me of that Bill Cosby bit about their made-up game Buck-Buck- “What was that? A mosquito bit me!” Here’s a guy who used to be supreme ruler over tens of millions with a regionally feared army, and now he can’t even counterattack us effectively enough for us to be sure whether he’s counterattacking or not.

I had a weird dream the other night. I know what they say- nobody thinks your dreams are interesting except you. But this one was pretty weird. And Lileks got to tell us his dream, so I’m telling you mine. If you don’t like it, just hit alt-f4.

So in it, I’m fighting this gangster guy, real snoop-dog type, called the Neck Cutter. He’s called that because he’s got this really nasty switchblade. So I’m casting spells on him (yes, too much Diablo lately) but I do one of the spells wrong and turn him into a genie by mistake. So now he’s a Gangsta Genie.

This transformation also transformed his switchblade. Now it’s like a butcherknife, but still a switchblade. So it’s a switchblade butcherknife (butcherblade switchknife?). Also it flies through the air on its own. And, naturally, it’s the source of all of th Neck Cutter’s powers.

So somehow I get the knife away from him, and take off. He’s only a half-powered genie without his knife, so he can’t just zap me, but he does come chasing after me. I’m holding on to the switchblade, keeping it closed so it doesn’t get me, but it’s trying to open, and due to poor product design the sharp edge of the switchblade opens out, so it’s cutting the crap out of my hand, trying to open up. So I’ve got to fight this genie gangster with this knife in my hand that is shredding my palm. Mostly I just ran around and yellled for someone to get me a glove. Woke up screaming, all that.

So that’s my dream. I’d welcome any kind of Jungian dream interpretation that anyone would like to lay on me, though I’ll probably just laugh at you if you do, since I don’t believe in any of that. Does it mean I really hate my father or something? Or wish I’d been a fireman? Let me know- I’m fascinated.

The Salton Sea is a thriller about a meth addict (Val Kilmer) who’s working with the cops as a rat. He’s got a troubled past that puts him in an apparently no-win situation between the cops and the dealers. His wife was murdered and it appears that he’s trying to get revenge somehow, but has gotten lost along the way. It’s a very tense movie, and very well done.

It opens with Kilmer sitting in a room that’s on fire, playing his trumpet. This is maybe the weakest point of the movie. It’s just a little too artsy. Starting the movie right at the end of the movie, so we see where all of this is heading, is overdone, I think. It’s self-referential in an annoying Tarantino kind of way. Also, there’s voice-over narration which is supposed to automatically qualify it as Low Art, but I’m not sure I buy that. Anyway, the narration is really well done, so it doesn’t intrude like it can sometimes.

The movie has an awful lot to do with drugs, and so some might not want to see it for that reason. If one is opposed to drug use, though, this is the movie for you. What it does to all of the people involved is graphically depicted. Literally, graphically depicted, in one case. There’s a particularly memorable character called Pooh Bear, who’s a meth cook and a dealer who is called Pooh Bear because he got “his nose stuck in the honey jar”. He snorted so much that he had to have his nose amputated. Pooh Bear is played by Vincent D’Onofrio in a fantastic performance. Pooh Bear is vicious and crazy in a humorous sort of way. He seems to behave almost at random, but a wily pattern emerges that makes him just that much scarier. The rest of the drug-using characters range from humorously stupid to totally dysfunctional. This movie definitely did NOT make me want to go snort gakk, and it reminded me a great deal of the actual drug users I used to know.

There’s a lot of swearing in this movie. Some people don’t like to watch a movie with a lot of swearing because it offends them, which I can appreciate. Sometimes the language of movies is just gratuitous, just there to offend, and we hardly need more offense in our media choices these days. I can go on record saying that most the folks I knew in the drug culture certainly do talk that way, though, so it’s not inaccurate.

There’s also a lot of violence in this movie. It wasn’t gratuitous, though. There were no artistic shots of blood gushing out of people, or people getting body parts cut off or anything like that- slo-mo’s of bullets shattering people’s faces. Most of the violence was more by suggestion and threat than it was graphically depicted, which I appreciate.

So, I’m recommending it. It’s not for the faint of heart, definitely, but the acting, writing, directing and shooting of the movie were all excellent, and there was certainly no glorification of sin. The end message was a little on the existentialist side, but I’m not one to say a Christian shouldn’t see anything he disagrees with. We’d be about limited to Veggie Tales, these days. The mature Christian will not be tossed to and fro by every thing that comes along.

4 out of 5 stars.



Rent the DVD free from Netflix!