Sometimes I put a lot of effort into these photos.  The picture on the Third Day of Duckmas in 2009 is an example.  I had to come across the idea in the first place, figure out what duckies to use for it, then I ran around the Duck U campus trying to find a suitable bit of terrain... the day before the shoot.  Then there was getting to the top of the hill, not easy when it was as steep as it was and covered with snow and ice, setting up the duckies so they wouldn't blow away in the gusting winds and frozen surface.  Only then could I take the pictures, all the while hoping that they turned out because the sun was so bright that the screen was washed out.  THEN I had to trudge back up the hill and reset the duckies for another pose and do it all over again.  All of that was done with the air temperature around 5°F and winds blowing around 20mph.

Yes, sometimes I put a lot of effort into these photos.  And then there was today's picture.  Explaining to the Duck U HR office why I was borrowing their snowman took longer than the setup and picture-taking... and they're used to me doing odd things with duckies.  Yet this pic might be the one that turns out to be the best for Duckmas 2010 anyway.  Love it when that happens.

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The gingerbread duckies decided to branch out at this year's Duckmas party...

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A favorite show should be like an old friend... someone that you've known for a long time, and that you consider family.  In the case of an anime, it should be something that you could pop in the DVD player and sink back into your chair, pleased that you're watching it.  Maybe you've even got some routine surrounding the series, like you only watch it once or twice a year... but you know, deep inside, that you will watch it, no matter what else is going on.  Maybe you know the show well enough to not even need subtitles (assuming you don't know Japanese).  In short, it's a series that, just by watching, makes you happy and warm inside.

Even if it's about sad girls in snow.

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Three Wise Men Ducks make their way somewhere, watched by two wise guys. 

We'll be seeing the Wise Men Ducks again, somewhere down the line...

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I had intended to post Number Two in the "Wonderduck's Favorite Anime Series Of All Time" series, but... um... instead of just taking screenshots, I wound up watching the show instead.

Whoopsie.

As it is, I no longer have the time to get the post finished before I have to go to sleep... it's Finals/Buyback week at the Duck U. Bookstore, and that means we're pulling-out-our-hair-busy, from the moment we walk in to the moment we close, plus two hours after.  So tired.

So the WFASOAT:NT will be up on Thursday evening... thank you for your patience.

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You can't keep a good duckie down... even with an elf attendant.

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And here we go...

Its the traditional beginning to the annual Twelve Days of Duckmas event here at The Pond, the "duckie in a fir tree."  It's how we've started the past three years, and there's no way I'd change that... traditions are important, after all.

Tune in every day between today and December 25th for another entry in the Twelve Days of Duckmas for 2010!

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A favorite show needs to transport you to a different place than your own reality.  That's one of the advantages of the art of animation in general and anime in particular.  Anything you can imagine, and most things that you couldn't, are not only possible, but easy to do.  Giant mecha striding confidently across flaming terrain.  Enormous battleships rising out of the ocean to do battle with massive alien fleets.  Martial artists that make Bruce Lee look like a newborn infant.  Magical energy blasts powerful enough to destroy skyscrapers, called forth by girls in elementary school.  Heroes and heroines of every shape and size, saving the world from the most evil of opponents.  All of these are entertaining, exciting... and commonplace in anime.  To be truly different, a show needs to be outstanding not only in plot and character, but in setting, and not be afraid to tell its story the way it needs to be told, no matter how unlikely it may sound.

Even if the story is that of female gondolieri on Mars.

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A favorite show should be one of those things that fits like a good pair of shoes or well broken-in jeans... comfortable.  You should be able to put on any episode and immediately sink into the backstory like you'd watched everything up to that point in a marathon.  Perhaps it's a seminal moment in your fandom, or something that made the whole concept of what a good anime could do click for you.  In short, a favorite show should be part of you as an anime fan.  Coming in at Number Four on my list is an epically grand story involving secret societies, spans multiple continents, and the whole of the history of Western Civilization, yet at its heart is about nothing more than two young women.

Who happen to be assassins.

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That is all.

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What makes a favorite a favorite?  Ask that question to a dozen people and you'll likely get a dozen different answers.  But just as everybody who watches anime has favorite shows, they'll also have some series that fall just short of that lofty goal, and I'm hardly an exception to this rule.  So before I get into my true favorite series, it's time to look at those that just don't make the cut.  Understand, all of these shows are quite good but have a shortcoming or two that keep it from making it to the top of the heap: Wonderduck's Favorite Anime Series Of All Time.  Without further ado, in no particular order here's the slightly not-as-great shows!

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-Strike Witches 1st Series, ep04

As I'm currently working on a series of posts, tentatively titled "Wonderduck's Favorite Anime Series Of All Time," and can't be bothered to come up with something clever today, here's a picture of Gertrud Barkhorn from a series that isn't on the list, Strike Witches the first season, which is a perfectly acceptable show, but doesn't make it onto the short list of my favorite anime series of all time, and thus I end this run-on sentence.

By "(Completely) Random," I mean it.  I used a totally impartial random number generator in Virginia to give me the number of a folder I have sitting on my external hard drive, then chose an episode by waving the mouse over the episodes contained therein with my eyes closed.  Then I chose a spot in the episode, also at random, and voila!  A Barkhorn appears.  Enjoy!

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In this day and age of anime otakudom, the internet gives you just about anything you could possibly want to ever want to know about every show that's running, has run, or is going to be coming down the pike.  It has also given us the chance to dislike shows even before we see them, and to tell everybody that the shows are awful weeks before they hit the air.  Every season it has become routine to hear the call of "worst season ever!"  These calls are never right.  There are always shows that come from out of nowhere that sound horrible but turn out to be decent, good, or occasionally even great.  It is therefore rare that something sneaks through the vast web of bloggers, websites and twitterfeeds until it is actually released.  I don't consider myself particularly plugged in to the Great Horde, but yet I still seem to know a little bit about just about everything that's coming out every season.

Which is why the Megane no Kanojo OVA has come as such a surprise to me, and I suspect quite a few others... I heard nothing about it prior to the day someone subbed it.  That's a shame, because in this time when cynicism about everything anime is de rigueur, this little show is quite a breath of fresh air.  The OVA consists of four unrelated short (around 10-12 minutes running time without the OP and ED) episodes about, as you may have guessed from the title, girls who wear glasses.  As of the time this is written, UTW has released two of the episodes.

The first one is about the Sempai of a high school Literature Club, and the boy who joins because he saw her without glasses once and thought she was cute.  Shocked and horrified by the fact that she wears glasses constantly, he then spends a year trying to get her to take them off, just once... until she discovers that his eyesight is horrible.  Hijinks ensue.

The second episode is about "Japan's most popular Idol."  In her time off, she puts on a pair of glasses, a different hairstyle, and a floppy cap as a disguise, then sits in a coffeehouse and relaxes... until the day that one of the waiters asks her out.  They go on a date, while she frets the entire time that he knows who she is... until she figures out that he really has no clue, then she frets about the fact that he doesn't know.

There's no way in the world that I'd claim that Megane no Kanojo is a great show.  The art isn't particularly good, the two stories so far aren't particularly deep (to be fair, there's only so much you can do in 10 minutes), the characters are basically stock, and on and on.  But yet, they're refreshing.  There's no pretensions towards great art here, just short stories that are entertaining, friendly and fun.  Ten minutes is about the right length for them; shorter and you won't get around to actually liking the characters, longer and the amount of story the plots can support would run out.  The production team clearly understood this and did the best they could under the constraints they had.  The results turned out pretty good.  Heck, I had a smile on my face after I watched each one, and what more could you hope for from a show like this?

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In contrast to the dusting we had a couple days ago, last night Duckford was hit by a real snowfall.  No totals yet, but the predictions were for 4"-8".  My guess is that we probably had five inches, at least around Pond Central.  It's not a wet, heavy snow, which is nice.  Slippery, though.  Last night around 1130pm, I was returning from a pleasant evening of conversation with Dr John, who is the father of reader-and-occasional-commenter Vaucaunson's Duck.  At one point I was stuck behind an idiot who didn't know how to climb a slightly steep grade in a rear-wheel drive car... at least, I was stuck behind him until he fishtailed himself into a curb.  *shakes head*  Right up until he clonked the curb his rear tires were a blur.  Obviously the driver was a believer in the Jeremy Clarkson method: "MORE POWER!!!"  Idiot.

Yup, it's winter.

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1 OMGosh! Snow already! That means it's not too long before it arrives over here on the east coast. Brrrrrr. That duck is gonna need a scarf or something so it doesn't catch a cold or the bird flu Haha. Cute pic as always! Stay warm!

Posted by: Digicolleen at December 04, 2010 11:51 AM (y3twI)

2 We didn't get as much down here.  Maybe 3 inches.

One night--back when I lived in Cedar Rapids--we'd had an ice storm and everything was coated with ice, including the roads.  I was watching TV, but kept hearing this weird noise from outside; it went on and on for several minutes, and finally it annoyed me enough to go see what the hell it was.

Some guy, out in the street, was trying to get his RWD car (I think it was a mid-80s Buick Regal) moving on the ice, and he seemed to think that if he stood  on the gas and spun the tire (open differential FTL) as fast as possible, that would get him moving.

You'd think that after a few minutes of this the guy would twig to the notion that this isn't going to work and might try something else; but no, it went on like this for quite a while. 

The sound eventually went away.  I don't know if the guy grenaded his drivetrain or what.

Posted by: Ed Hering at December 04, 2010 01:59 PM (Dh1KI)

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As the DuckMobile is pushing 15 years of age, I've been looking for a replacement.  This involves a lot of head-shaking on my part as I can't really afford anything these days, but occasionally there's a "For Sale" ad that's hard to ignore... to whit:

MUST GO, ALL OFFERS CONSIDERED!  30 years old, needs work but in decent shape.  Good mileage.  In stock.

It's British, too.  Well, can't hurt to look...


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1 Maybe you could afford it! Newsweek sold for $1, after all.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 02, 2010 11:44 PM (+rSRq)

2 Which was more than it was worth.

Posted by: Wonderduck at December 03, 2010 12:16 AM (vW/MM)

3 I don't have any jets that can take off from a jump deck. Fleet carriers only!

It did good service in the Falklands War, indeed. If not for the CAP provided by those Harriers, the Argentine air force would have had a much better time of things. On the other hand, it's arguable that the Invincible was worth more than the entirety of the Falklands; certainly the British nightmare scenario was "Exocet takes out the carrier". (They DID lose the Atlantic Conveyor, their big cargo transport, along with most of the force's transport helicopters on board...)

Posted by: Avatar at December 03, 2010 12:30 AM (pWQz4)

4

Don't get me started on our new coalition overlords decision to retired the Ark and the Harriers (the air to air Sea Harriers went ages ago btw, only the RAF's ground attack version was left).

Hopefully there won't be a need for a naval air support until the new carriers (minus aircraft!) arrive later this decade...

Posted by: Andy Janes at December 03, 2010 02:46 AM (KBzPM)

5 Are you kidding?  $5 says the electrical system came from Lucas Electrics.

Posted by: Ed Hering at December 03, 2010 03:01 PM (Dh1KI)

6 It's OT but I JUST hadda!


Word of the day: orinthophobia (fear of ducks).

via Charlie Stross's blog

Posted by: Tony von Krag at December 03, 2010 05:39 PM (VGXAE)

7 Why does that need a name? Is there anyone who doesn't fear ducks?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 03, 2010 06:00 PM (+rSRq)

8 I got $5 that says the UK never launches another carrier.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 03, 2010 06:01 PM (+rSRq)

9

Why does that need a name? Is there anyone who doesn't fear ducks?

Well, ducks don't fear ducks, as far as I know...

Posted by: Siergen at December 03, 2010 10:55 PM (Gqqsw)

10 Tony, that's good, but I prefer anatidaephobia: the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.
^{(with thanks to Gary Larson)}

Posted by: Wonderduck at December 04, 2010 12:31 AM (vW/MM)

11 No bet, Steven. (At least if we're talking about jet carriers. Wouldn't be surprised if they built a heli "carrier"...)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 04, 2010 03:57 AM (mRjOr)

12 I'll take that bet Steven, though the only reason we're getting at least one is because it was cheaper to build than cancel the contracts (which I still can't quite get my head round)

Posted by: Andy Janes at December 04, 2010 07:36 AM (vu1Y2)

13 Andy, IANAL, but I have seem some contracts which contain rather harsh cancellation clauses.  If you're ordering something that the other guy will need spend a lot of upfront money to produce (build a factory, construct custom tooling, pre-order unique parts, etc.), then they want assurances that they won't get screwed if you change your mind. 

If you have a prior reputation for canceling big orders (like say, Britain's MoD), then you may need to really pad the cancellation clauses to get them to bid on the contract.  Afterall, they are not bidding on other projects because they anticipate being busy with your work.

Posted by: Siergen at December 04, 2010 06:25 PM (Gqqsw)

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Okay yes, the correct term for the snow we had today would be "a dusting," but it still was snowfall, and it did stick around.  And I did have to brush it off the DuckMobile, so I don't care what anybody says, that was an official snowfall.  Throw in the sub-20°F ambient temperatures and the gusty winds and you had yourself an ickycoldbad day.

And in a month we'll be saying "remember a few weeks ago, when it was 20 degrees and there wasn't any snow on the ground?  Ah, it was warm then!"  But today, I kinda wish I had Snowbird's earmuffs...

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That's quite the label, isn't it?  "The Greatest Turn In Motorsport."  If you want to start an argument amongst gearheads and racing fans, that's a good way to do it (another is "{insert name here} is the best driver of all time.").

There's a lot of famous bends out there.  The Dunlop Curve at the Circuit de la Sarthe, home of the 24 Hours of LeMans.  The Lowes Hairpin at Monaco.  The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca.  The tri-oval at Daytona.  130R at Suzuka.  Parabolica at Monza.  The Kink at Road America.  The Karussell at the Nurburgring.  The list goes on and on.  But only one can be the greatest and in this duck's mind, there can be no other than Spa-Francorchamps' Eau Rouge.

Why?  That's simple... here's what it looks like from the bottom in 1997:

...and here's what it looks like from near the top today:

About 105 feet of elevation change.  Now imagine taking it at 160 mph, knowing that there's another (blind) curve waiting for you just over the hill.  While it's become a little bit easier for F1 cars to take Eau Rouge flat-out these days, thanks to high downforce and grippy tires, one still needs nerves of steel and attachments of brass to stick with it.  Most F1 drivers will praise it to the heavens, and that's good enough for me.

But visually Eau Rouge is a spectacle one doesn't get to see much anymore: part hillclimb, part turn.  Only the Corkscrew on the above list has any elevation change, and while it is steep, it's also short... there's no sense of the grandiose about it.  Eau Rouge?  If it could walk, it would swagger.

So that's my call for the greatest turn in motorsports.  What's yours?

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Some time ago, there was a general sense of excitement around The Pond when it was announced that there was to be a Nanoha movie.  Screened in Japan last January, it came out on Blu-Ray just recently, and it took very little time at all for it to be translated and released torrentially.

So how is it?

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