Sakuracon 09

I sit in a Tully's in the Washington State Convention center after standing in line for three hours to get in. What would I stand in line that long for? Nothing! But since my daughter an I pre-registered last year for the yearly event called Sakuracon I was stuck. Yes you read that right, I pre-registered AND waited for 3 hours in line. There was a slight extenuating circumstance in that my daughter's friends came too and they could not wait in the same line and I needed to be with them because Sakuracon won't allow underage participants to attend without an adult, but that doesn't completely explain the wait. Even the pre-registration line took 2 hours. So, we saved ourselves an hour by signing up last year, but that was completely unacceptable.

What is Sakuracon? Well, you can't get much out of the name other than it is Japanese. Sakura is Cherry Blossom, and “con” is a Japanese contraction of the word "convention". (They do that with a lot of English words. For example, aircon is Air Conditioner) The event is mainly intended as a celebration of Japanese comics and animation (shortened to “anime” in Japanese). I am not going to try to be the expert on the history of this event, but what it seems to have turned in to is a conflation of a Japanese anime and manga (comics) convention with a lot of computer game characters mixed in as well. The attendees of this event use it as a sort of Star Trek Convention-ish event for everyone to dress up like their favorite characters. But this year they are not limiting it to just games and anime. I had lunch sitting next to the Joker (Heath Ledger version, not Jack Nicholson), stood in the pre-registrations line behind the bad guy from Silent Hills, and I swear to gawd I just saw Jesus carry his cross down the escalator.

The other thing that this place is for is exhibitionism. A lot of anime characters are very scantily clad or sexy in other ways. There are quite a few teenage and 20 something ladies dressed as Japanese schoolgirls but with cleavage and legs up to here. There is so much exhibitionism going on here that it is quite reasonable for the promoters to insist that adults accompany the underage. It's also not a bad idea for me to find a nice low traffic corner and put my nose in my laptop to keep from feeling like a dirty old man every time I turn around.

We will be back tomorrow and maybe I will have a chance to blog some more about it.

Hatred is learned: We can teach tolerance as well

We just have to try.

11-Year-Old Hangs Himself after Enduring Daily Anti-Gay Bullying

free hand ...hold on...reach: Banning Picasso at the Lapin Agile, part 2

free hand ...hold on...reach: Banning Picasso at the Lapin Agile, part 2

It is possible that I may never cease to be amazed at what some parents think they are sheltering their children from. I was at first wondering if the folks who oppose the relatively innocuous play in question understand what is readily available to their children via the Internet, cable TV or the current state of computer games. But when I stopped to think about it I realized that much of what these parents are trying to hide from their children I would have known about before I got through Jr. High School. As a graduate of La Grande High School in 1985 I can assure you that I had not learned any of it from the Internet or from Premium Cable movie channels. It all came from magazines smuggled out from under older brothers' and fathers' beds, romance novels, some of the more explicit western novels, or just stories we told each other. Our young imaginations we filled with stories of sex and gun play. Don't think for a second that we didn't know what would happen in real life if we ever got the chance to rescue a damsel in distress in our flights of fancy. We were already hip to the bedroom scene of such a fairytale scenario even if we wouldn't have the details figured out for years. (if ever)...

If you have been a parent of a child for the past 12 to 13 years and they are allowed to see an R-rated movie by accident or any other reason, and the child is scarred for life and damaged morally, then you have failed as a parent. The only children (young adults) who could see a play like this and have their morals compromised have already been trained to regard this kind of thing as smut and will not show up to it and will not participate in it. The only people this ban will impact are the ones who want to participate in it in some way.

What Journalists Can Learn From Jon Stewart's CNBC Smackdown

Access to the nation's most powerful CEOs -- supposedly the big advantage of a journalistic enterprise like CNBC -- isn't worth a warm bucket of spit when it results in slo-pitch softball questions, for fear of offending the rich and powerful.

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Cool blog I found

Here is a cool blog I found by a guy living in Tokyo. A Ramen Blog from my old stomping grounds.

http://waseda-ramen.blogspot.com/