Setsuled's Journal

I've just returned from lunch at my mother's house where she, my sister, and I watched Without a Clue. Or at least, I watched it and my mother left the room halfway through and my sister fell asleep two thirds through. I can't blame either of them. It's only a weird sense of cinema enthusiast's honour that kept me watching, I think. And I needed something to do while I finished my glass of wine. I had a glass of white wine followed by two glasses of red wine while I was there--I fundamentally don't understand the appeal of white wine. It tastes like liquid taffy.

Anyway, Without a Clue was my mother's idea, as she remembered liking it when she saw it in the 80s. I seemed to remember enjoying it when I was a kid, though I hadn't seen it since before I'd read all the stories. And it's surely a bad sign when the source material contains more laughs than the spoof. I do like Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley, and I did think Jeffrey Jones as Lestrade was an inspired bit of casting. But otherwise, it was a premise dead on the table.

Wow. I just checked the Wikipedia entry for Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was born in 1887. He is the son of Scottish-born author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based consulting detective, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess, and is renowned for his skillful use of "deductive reasoning" while using abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation) and astute observation to solve difficult cases.

It is with profound pleasure that I witness Wikipedia confirming the veracity of Mr. Holmes' existence and exploits. I knew it all along.

Last night, after I'd finished drawing, I took a journey into the world of anime to try to find a new series to fill the void left by Code Geass. First I tried a series for its name alone, Pumpkin Scissors, which turned out to be a decent alternate reality World War II story, set apparently in Western Europe with alternate factions and alternate technology, kind of a mix of medieval and early twentieth century. It's not bad, featuring a very serious big badass guy with an eerie blue Aldis lamp and a cute female commander in an orange coat.

Next I tried a series called Strike Witches, which Tim tells me is very popular. It's also a World War II series, the twist here being that aliens are at war with earth, uniting all of the world's nations against them. But the only way to combat their War of the Worlds-ish vessels is with teenage girl witches who wear what appear to be fighter plane turbines fixed to their legs like boots. These witches, and all other female characters in the series, for some reason never wear pants or skirts. Somehow this is another feature of this alternate reality--bottom halves of clothes seem not to have been invented for women, who all wear roughly period accurate blouses, shirts, and jackets on top but . . . no pants. Just panties that look to've been imported from 1987. The first scene is an aerial battle featuring several of the witches and many, many gratuitous panty shots. The term "camel toe" does not quite convey the gratuitousness of these shots.

I must say, many details of the premise undermine the integrity of the suspense.

Lastly, I discovered Hayate no Gotoku!--the series from whence comes the clip I posted last night. I'm currently downloading the entire series. I think I've found a keeper.