Random Thoughts

So I had a number of random thoughts, and decided to fill space with them. You know, like some of those political commentators do.

• Has anyone noticed how many "harem" anime can be summed up as X + Tenchi Muyo? So, for instance, Moon Phase (it's a small harem) is "Gothed-up Tenchi Muyo", and Elfen Lied (which ain't very good) is "Wes Craven Presents: Tenchi Muyo," and DearS is basically "Alien Nation meets Tenchi Muyo"...or maybe, "the unholy lovechild of ChobitS and Alien Nation, Meets Tenchi Muyo."
  I still like DearS, though; it has a fairly intriguing exploration of what it means to be free, and whether or not it's even always desirable--without getting into Slave-women of Gor country--that I thought was impressive.

• More generally, one can often express a major tendency of a show by assigning it to a network. Thus, for instance, "Lifetime: Television for Women presents Law and Order: Special Victims Unit", or "Bravo! presents Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or even more, Angel)". How about "Discovery Health presents A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila"?
  Don't know that there really is a network really uniquely suited to House and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, but if there were, it'd be one damn smart network. Even if House's writers can't seem to decide if he's a materialist (he's too smart to be a materialist, really) or some kind of mathematical realist, or maybe a nontheistic Platonist (like that guy whose name I forget, that wrote a book about the problems Goedel Incompleteness poses to the field of AI).

• As I edited the above, and changed "if there was" to "if there were," it occured to me how odd it is that English expresses the subjunctive by changing singular to plural. Someone needs to have a look at why that is.

• Apparently South Korea's sunshine policy (hopefully now abandoned), of being nice to the lunatics in North Korea, wasn't just stupid--it was also not named right. According to Wikipedia, the policy got its name from the Aesop's fable about the wind and the sun. I quote, from the article:
  

  In the fable, the sun and the wind compete to remove a man's coat. The wind blew strongly, but the man clutched his coat and kept it on. The sun shone warmly, and the man voluntarily took off his coat to enjoy the fine weather.

  Only, see, the point was not that the sun was being nice while the wind was being nasty; the point was that the wind was being hasty and direct and the sun was being slow and patient. He took off his coat so as not to die of heatstroke, not "to enjoy the fine weather"! Aesop was a Greek, and Greece is a mediterranean country where the sun was the cruelest of the gods--Korea is a cold-temperate country where the sun is a benign figure. A policy accurately named after the fable would involve the slow application of diplomatic, economic, and small-scale military pressure, until North Korea caved in. Or in other words, Reagan's Cold War strategy for dealing with the USSR.

• Nemesis, by HP Lovecraft, ought to be taught in every school in this country. It's one of the best copies of Swinburne that I've ever read, and it shows Lovecraft at his Dionysian (in Neitzsche's sense) best. Pretentious? God yes. But it's arguably one of America's greatest poems, for all it's a knockoff of Swinburne, and it's not like Virgil didn't copy Homer (not that Swinburne nor, especially, Lovecraft is either of them worthy of the comparison).