Dear Amazon,

I think all search results would be improved by the ability to exclude departments. Instead of forcing me to guess whether an item has been filed under “Home & Garden” or “Grocery”, let me instead exclude “Baby”, “VHS”, “MP3 Downloads”, and “Clothing & Accessories”. You already allow negative keywords in the search field, so this would be a natural extension.

This would be particularly useful for your “recommendations for you” list, which in my case is currently dominated by cookbooks, salami, and SF novels. If you want to sell me anything else, you have to give me a way to sort it to the top, and the current positive filtering system is trial-and-error, since most of the listed categories don’t actually have anything in them to recommend.

Arbitrary limits

As a general rule, office firewalls do not have to be configured to cope with simultaneous incoming syslog traffic from 80,000+ hosts. Mine did. Sadly, the default limit for a particular element was only capable of handling about 3/4 of that, leaving our outgoing connections somewhere between unstable and “not” when things got busy.

Fixed now.

PS: syslog can be scary efficient at sending packets when a box is unhappy. Enough unhappy boxes makes for a quite impressive DDOS attack, if you haven’t previously discovered that using “no state” in a firewall rule does not, in fact, avoid filling your state table with crap, thus accelerating your approach toward that arbitrary limit.

Got salt? The fine is $1,000…

…or will be in the state of New York, if the dumbest state legislators in American history can manage to pass their new bill.

Not kidding:

“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises.”

The “in any form” really puts the crown on these king-sized asshats. It’s amazing they managed to write a complete sentence, much less an actual bill.

Dear Wilder Publications,

One should never take this sort of story at face value, so I looked it up on Amazon, and my jaw dropped for two reasons.

1. The linked disclaimer that the contents of The Federalist Papers “does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today”.
2. The publisher’s claim of copyright on the material.

Both are most likely boilerplate, but they’re deeply clueless boilerplate. And they do indeed reflect a certain kind of modern values…

Definitions that don’t help…

I was looking up a Japanese word. I knew what it meant. I knew how it had been formed from the parent word. I knew the writer had used it correctly. It just wasn’t in my usual dictionaries, and I wanted to see if there was some nuance to the usage that wasn’t obvious from the construction.

The word was 偉大さ (“idaisa”). Idai by itself is in most dictionaries. As a noun, it means greatness, mightiness, grandeur; as a -na adjective, great, mighty, grand. The -sa ending converts adjectives to nouns, so idaisa should end up with exactly the same meanings as the noun form of idai, but it could emphasize one in particular, or it could simply be more formal. In this case, I think it’s a bit of both; formal, because it’s the foreword to a book about her youth, and emphasizing mighty, because her story is about Ultraman.

But the reason I’m writing is to mention the one dictionary entry that did list idaisa, and included among its meanings a word forged from the purest Scrabbleite:

honorificabilitudinity

Yeah, that helped, thanks.

Amber Benson, novelist

The first time I realized that Amber Benson had more going for her than I’d been shown was when she opened her mouth during the Buffy musical and sang. Suddenly a decent actress who’d capably immersed herself into a minor supporting role in the series was now a singer with a lovely voice. The second was when I got a good look at her face when she wasn’t made up to look plain and a bit frumpy; she looks as good as she sounds. The third time was when Amazon recommended her novel Death’s Daughter, and I discovered that she had another voice worth hearing.

It’s not my usual genre of fantasy; at least, the things Amazon starts recommending once you buy it are the kind of chick-flick broody-goth romangst fantasy that have stronger ties to Harlequin than Tolkien. Fortunately, Death’s Daughter is neither dark nor brooding, and the world-building is first-rate. The supporting cast is only lightly sketched, admittedly, but the heroine makes up for it by being quite thoroughly developed, and carries the story along superbly. It’s a good book, and now she’s made another one, Cat’s Claw.

It’s a lot of fun. I don’t usually stop in the middle of a page, laugh out loud, reread it, and then laugh out loud again. Benson got me to do that in Cat’s Claw. I won’t say where; if you read it, you’ll know the spot.

Amazon Recommends

We had a little contest tonight, to see who got the least comprehensible recommendation from Amazon. Here’s my best: The Complete Benny Hill, because I bought a crockpot.

“Sorry about all those childhood diseases I helped bring back. My bad.”

Jenny McCarthy, outspoken anti-vaccination activist, is now furiously beck-pedaling thanks to the discovery that her child is not autistic, and likely never was.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled herd immunity.

…unless Jenny and the gang already killed you, of course.

iTunes I18N

Interested in Girls’ Generation, but don’t want to order CDs from YesAsia? You can buy their latest album from the US iTunes Store, but only if you know to search for “소녀시대”.

Interested in the extremely talented South Korean singer Younha, popular in both Korea and Japan? Don’t bother looking, she’s not there, not as Younha, ユンナ, or 윤하. On the bright side, if you search for “윤하”, you’ll find 윤손하, who is also a pretty, pretty good singer, although her Wikipedia page suggests that she’s a bit of a bridge-burner.

A difference in the style

The following four images are the front covers of the Japanese editions of two well-known science fiction novels (two each, because novels are frequently split into two volumes in Japan). I have crudely blacked out the author’s name, so as long as you don’t sight-read katakana, you can examine the covers and try to guess which novels they are.

The Japanese and English titles are below.

Dear Amazon,

Please don’t pollute the well. Search results for the writer Masako Bandou return a link to an Amazon US product page for the title “13 of Pornographic Chica Japanese Language Book”. No details, no availability, no hint that the book has ever actually existed. Because it doesn’t.

The actual book sold by Amazon Japan is called “13のエロチカ”, which should properly be translated as “13 Erotic Stories”. The loanword used is “erochika”, which is not the nonexistent hybrid English-Spanish loanword “ero-chica”, but the perfectly ordinary “erotica”. The book even includes French on the title, “13 Histoires Erotiques”, just in case the casual viewer is confused.

The two possibilities are a lazy “self-publisher” using machine translation (of at least the titles) or a used book store that was trying to unload a bunch of used Japanese books, and was ambitious enough to hire someone who had taken a year of Japanese and could mangle the titles into Engrish, but didn’t bother including the ISBNs.

The only good thing I got out of this little adventure was the discovery that a Google image search for the acronym “asin” returns something far more interesting than publishing data.

Melon’s Not Dead, or will they?

After being kicked out of Hello!Project in The Grownup Purge, idol group Melon Kinenbi’s career initially didn’t look much different. The label had been grudgingly giving them occasional promotion and a single once or twice a year, and they had a monthly concert gig with guest performers, and that continued. In fact, things improved slightly, with the release of five indie singles collaborating with other bands, leading up to their just-released album and DVD, Melon’s Not Dead (even available on the US iTunes store), and an upcoming 10th-anniversary tour.

Their last tour, and last album as a group. When the tour ends, they’re disbanding, and the team of Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi will be no more.

My copy of the album arrived yesterday. I was already fond of Don’t Say Goodbye and Seishun On The Road, but some of the others don’t work for me, largely because the groups they collaborated with have very different styles. Review to follow.

Crossing the streams

I’ve been following Mari Yaguchi for some time, starting with her debut in Morning Musume, and I’ve been impressed at how well she’s diversified her career, enough that being kicked out of the band was only a minor setback to her plans for world domination. She’s well-established as an actress, writer, spokesmodel, tv host, and all-purpose talent, and she even still sings occasionally.

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a famous writer and actor, probably best-known in the US for his science fiction novella 時をかける少女 (“The girl who leapt through time”), the basis for the anime film of the same name. Pete and I have been trading notes on his work for a while, starting when he went looking for a short story he’d originally read in Russian. We eventually found the original Japanese version, and last week he sent me a copy, which I finished reading last night.

So what do I find this morning?

Cambridge Mass. Suicide

This story about the “Cambridge Climate Congress” would be hilarious satire if it weren’t dead-serious social engineering. Click through to read the PDF about the “climate emergency” and the quest for “environmental justice”. Count the fluff-headed buzzwords scattered throughout. Picture their future, and when you’re through throwing up, bitch-slap a socialist.

How can you come back when you never left?

I’ve always thought of the phrase “comeback album” as meaning “first release in a long time from someone who’s dropped out of sight”. In the K-pop universe, it apparently means something quite different. Girls’ Generation released two incredibly successful EPs last year, had a major concert tour, released a single with a popular boy band, is constantly on television in one way or another, and one of the members is even the lead in the current theater production of Legally Blonde.

Everywhere you look, though, you see talk about their eagerly-anticipated “comeback” album, Oh!. Just like the Fall ’09 Genie EP was their previous comeback, and the Spring ’09 Gee EP was the comeback before that. The anticipation makes sense to me; they’re talented and hot, and their label invests in quality songwriting, choreography, costuming, and career development. It’s just that “comeback” seems to have crossed the ocean with only its literal meaning.

So, on to Oh!:

They’re performing this song constantly on television, in all three of the outfits featured, as well as little white tennis dresses with knee socks (go ahead and look; you know you want to), but that’s not all. The fans had barely recovered from the surprise ending of the video when they started performing the second song from the album, Show! Show! Show!. I could do without the excessively curly hair extensions and the “hats”, and to be honest, it’s not my favorite musical style, but I can watch them all day long…