Careless Operations

Twitter Sonnet #117

Jacks are hazardous to awkward robots.
Espresso's bad for rusty metal joints.
In the future, nuns wear plastic habits.
To a shinier world Peg-leg Pete points.
Q-tips are oil drills of the mind's sea.
Famished, free ducks might tip you a feather.
I think perhaps gorillas don't like me.
Noisy geese aren't really my fans, either.
Crying birds flee ghost computer toasters.
The greatest shocks drop jaws to wishing wells.
Time's over for analogue wall posters.
Bright pixels weave infinite mundane spells.
Needed hours shrink in old fried egg yolk.
Fifty years effort might earn you a Coke.

All the typos in my copy of War and Peace are really starting to annoy me. They'd been getting more and more frequent before I came across this barely intelligible paragraph;

But the Tsar and Balashev passed without noticing Arakcheyev Holding his sword to his side and lancing wramfolly about him. Arakcheyev followed some tweaty paces behind.

Okay. "Tweaty" was funny. But I had to reread the paragraph to figure out "lancing" was meant to be "glancing" as at first it looks like Arakcheyev drew his sword and started randomly thrusting at the air around him. And "wramfolly"? I take it this was meant to be "wrathfully", but what the fuck? Would this be erring in the manner of a wram?

Just looking quickly through the past thirty or so pages, I spotted these bits;

Till then he had reproached her in his heart and tried to dospise her, but now he felt so sorry for her that there was no longer room for reproach.

. . .

Pierre too, when she had gone. almost ran to me anteroom, restraining tears of emotion and joy that choked him.

It's getting seriously distracting. This is all from the War and Peace on my Kindle, the Signet Classics edition, which I also have in paperback. So I compared the Kindle copy with my paperback copy and found the paperback had none of these typos. Judging from the fact that a lot of the wrong letters and punctuation marks bear some resemblance to the correct letters and marks, I'm guessing the Kindle edition comes from a scan of the pages that a computer automatically formatted into the electronic edition. Oh, brave new world with such lazy people in it.

Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Re: Cutie Honey, a three episode OVA series based on a manga series and anime series from the early 70s. It's directed by Hideaki Anno, who had directed a live action Cutie Honey film shortly beforehand and which I've only heard bad things about. This OVA, though, is just thoroughly delightful, manic, stylised fanservice. It reminded me a bit of a borderline pornographic Powerpuff Girls, though much, much funnier.

Re: Cutie Honey features a lot of the very angular, fishbowl zaniness Gainax first started producing in His and Her Circumstances and developed further in series like FLCL, Top wo Nerae 2, and Gurren Lagann. I liked Re: Cutie Honey a lot better than Gurren Lagann, which is a series that annoys me for reasons I can't even quite explain.



In addition to good sexual fantasy, there are a lot of quick visual gags in Re: Cutie Honey I loved, many of which are poking fun at dramatic anime conventions. My favourite being the cops, who appear to be mindless, always happy children who quickly show up at any crime scene just to goof off until the no-nonsense inspector shows up.



I also liked a bit where the henchmen of the main villain, Panther Claw, take over the bodies of people in a nearby hospital a la Agent Smith from The Matrix. The guy on the operating table giving the doctors a devious spurt of blood from his open stomach was the best;