Mélange

What? It's a synonym for potpourri. Anyone else think it's funny how Alton Brown habitually refers to mixed spices, like curry or chili, as "spice melange"?

As my sister is known to say when ordering cinnamon-flavored coffee drinks, "The spice must flow!" Or maybe that was the barista (her co-worker, since she works at Barnes & Noble)—if the latter, may I just say, "coolest barista ever".

Ahem.

• So why's Fullmetal Alchemist insist on translating King Bradley's title, daisoutou, as Führer? I mean, I get that that's how you say that in Japanese (possibly because the closest Japanese can get to the German sounds is "Hiira"), but look at Bradley. Look at his country, and its uniforms. Again, look at him, and his murderous mustache! Plainly, that man is Stalin, not Hitler.
  
  Then again, Brotherhood may just be keeping it up from the first anime, since the ridiculous adaptation had Amestris be Germany—never mind how totally not Earth their whole culture is; apparently things can change that much, just in the time between Paracelsus and 1913 (that's when the divergence happened, remember). But we'll still totally have the same people showing up (Bradley's double is Fritz Lang, remember?). Oh, and you can totally go from the middle of World War I to the beginning of World War II in the time between the first time Ed went through the gate, and the second, right?
  
  That's another weird thing: the movie portrays the Nazis as bad. But the guy who adapted that version for TV (and hijacked Arukawa-sensei's plot into an illiterate screed about the Iraq War) is a conspiracy-theorist who also wrote the notoriously anti-Semitic "Angel Cop", so shouldn't he be rooting for the Nazis?


• On a lighter note, you know 2nd Lt. Maria Ross and Sgt. Denny Brosh, the pair that Armstrong assigns to look after the Elrics, before the Lab 5 business? Uh, why are they the same age? Generally speaking, a sergeant is in early middle age, while a 2LT is a "butterbar", a fresh-out-of-school rookie. One suspects Arukawa-sensei just said "hey, these two ranks are close together, huh," without understanding that sergeant is about in the middle of the enlisted progression, while 2LT is the very bottom of the commissioned-officer one. One of their other nicknames is "commissioned private" for a reason.
  
  Also, I know better than many what a pain it is to write around, but don't even get me started on the "fraternizing with the men" that all anime characters do. Does the JSDF not have websites that explain how a military works? Come on, there's gotta be some sort of reference people could use.


• I might have to re-evaluate my felinoids' military structure: maybe have their space force begun as artillery. Remember, it was gunners who did a lot of our early work on rockets, like the Polonized Lithuanian who invented staging. And it seems highly in character for them, to have the same guys as shoot the rockets away, be the guys who shoot off in them.
  
  Before, I had them class their space-force as fortifications, but I think this makes more sense—besides, if you know what you're doing, a castle totally is an aspect of your artillery (they redesigned their castles so the keeps could be sunken into the ground, on giant elevator-shafts, and blast-doors closed over them). Now I'm just not sure if I should keep my distinction between cavalry (air forces, "starfighters") and infantry.
  
  Incidentally, speaking of FMA and the Japanese military, the felinoid cop in my books talks like a soldier, in Japanese—he uses "jibun" as a 1st person pronoun, says "de arimasu", and makes his imparatives with "-itamae".


• I don't know, have I mentioned? X-Men and its "Mutant Registration=The Holocaust/Slavery/other Very Bad Things" thing, get really funny, when you remember that most people at Marvel favor gun registration. Leaving the merits of gun registration to one side, Magneto is significantly more dangerous than any gun, even a GAU-8 Avenger. The destructive potential of a GAU-8 Avenger is but a fraction of his capabilities, after all.
  
  I honestly can't believe anyone doesn't realize that X-Men utterly subverts its own "tolerance" message. 'Cause, uh, yeah, Jews or Blacks or gays or whoever you feel we've been insufficiently tolerant toward, can't pick up a nuclear submarine with his mind, or teleport into your bathroom and stab you in the shower. Someone who could? Yeah, that dude, I want under heavy surveillance 24/7. And I'm a moderate; more skittish people are just gonna want him whacked, be on the safe side.
  
  And if you say, as they always do, "Oh good idea, make the superhuman angry", I reply, "Okay, you have fun with the cringing servility, that's a wholly viable career option...let's hope the superhuman's romantic proclivities don't run in any awkward directions. Me, I'm gonna be over here designing a machine that'll let me kill the son-bitch—only as strictly necessary, I promise."


• Which reminds me of another Chesterton thingy, this time an excellent method of peeing on Objectivists and kindred elitist lickspittles. From The Return of Don Quixote:

  "I was saying," said Wister, airily, but also a little loftily, "that I fear we have descended to democracy and an age of little men. The great Victorians are gone...We have no giants left."
  
  ...
  
  "That must have been quite a common complaint in Cornwall," reflected Braintree, "when Jack the Giant-killer had gone his professional rounds."
  
  "When you have read the works of the Victorian giants," said Wister, rather contemptuously, "you will perhaps understand what I mean by a giant."
  
  "You can't really mean, Mr. Braintree," remonstrated the lady, "that you want great men to be killed."
  
  "Well, I think there's something in the idea," said Braintree. "Tennyson deserved to be killed for writing the May-Queen, and Browning deserved to be killed for rhyming 'promise' and 'from mice,' and Carlyle deserved to be killed for being Carlyle; and Herbert Spencer deserved to be killed for writing 'The Man versus the State'; and Dickens deserved to be killed for not killing Little Nell quick enough; and Ruskin deserved to be killed for saying that Man ought to have no more freedom than the sun; and Gladstone deserved to be killed for deserting Parnell; and Disraeli deserved to be killed for talking about a 'shrinking sire,' and Thackeray..."

  Of course, though, Objectivists aren't giants. They are windmills under a delusion.


• Speaking of how rocketry is considered a sub-discipline of artillery, did you know St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery? Apparently her father was struck by lightning for burning her alive—let us all recall Jon's Law.
  
  Anyway:
  
  St. Barbara of the BatteryPray for Us...and for the Space Program!
  
  I vote we make her patron of hard-SF writers, too.


• And if you come here and deny her existence, merely on the basis of your unreflective double-Dutch demythologizing, I will give you another Chesterton quote. Or actually, a whole poem.

  "The Myth of Arthur"
  G.K. Chesterton
  
  O learned man who never learned to learn,
  Save to deduce, by timid steps and small,
  From towering smoke that fire can never burn
  And from tall tales that men were never tall.
  Say, have you thought what manner of man it is
  Of who men say "He could strike giants down" ?
  Or what strong memories over time's abyss
  Bore up the pomp of Camelot and the crown.
  And why one banner all the background fills,
  Beyond the pageants of so many spears,
  And by what witchery in the western hills
  A throne stands empty for a thousand years.
  Who hold, unheeding this immense impact,
  Immortal story for a mortal sin;
  Lest human fable touch historic fact,
  Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin.
  Take comfort; rest—there needs not this ado.
  You shall not be a myth, I promise you.