I made a somewhat cranky remark over on Chizumatic, and Steven seemed to think I was dissing Strike Witches. Not exactly — maybe Japanese WWII denial in general, but it’s a well known phenomenon that keeps their neighbors a little antsy. That’s not the real problem. Yes, changing Japan to the “Fuso Empire” and wiping out Germany, Italy, and half of Russia in the initial invasion definitely removes any nitpicking problems with undesirable historical facts.
I’m not complaining, and it’s very necessary to the story. I’m just sort of cynically amused/angered at the comparison that insists on running through my head: a Hollywood version would have started the invasion in 1968 Vietnam, with the My Lai massacre in gloriously revolting detail, and the American flag flying over it all. The heroes would have been some little brown people from Laos or Cambodia of course, not (white) members of some evil, dominating, colonial western regime.
As far as I’m concerned, mere whitewashing and denial is so much cleaner than all the false anguish and emotional histrionics/seppuku that our entertainment industry likes to indulge in. Speaking of which, couldn’t we just prevail on some new age guru to sell these jet-set liberals some indulgences, so they’ll go away and leave us alone? Oh, wait, I forgot, they call it Scientology. Well, it’s not like Hollyweird would accept such from the corrupt Roman Catholic Church.
Bah. You know, I just got back from a meeting of local bloggers talking about problems in Houston, and I think I’m very cranky as a result.
I didn’t think you were dissing “Strike Witches”.
(And these days, indulgences are called “carbon offsets”.)
Neither did I; I thought you were dissin’ my saying that WWII started in ’39.
Steven, you owe me a new monitor and keyboard for your carbon offsets jibe.
Ooh, can I join in? I have a bit of spleen saved up for Metro from last week. I tried taking the bus one day as an experiment. It turned my 20-25 minute drive into an hour and 45 minutes. Apparently we don’t believe in express buses connecting the various transit centers.
It might be faster if I try the recommended route from Metro’s Trip Planner. Apparently the fastest way to get from Meyerland to I-10/610 West is to take the bus all the way into the med center, take the rail up to downtown, walk an undetermined distance, and take another bus back out to 610. Wha?
That was one of the exact issues that got kicked around at the blogger meeting, and I pulled from a discussion at Chizumatic to answer it. Remember a while back when we were discussing how the major overnight package distribution services all have a single big facility in the middle of the country? Hub and spoke. It’s the most cost and time-effective method of getting lots of packages from A to B to C, even where A and C are closer to each other than they are to B. The problem is, what works on the macro scale, that is for Fed-Ex or UPS, isn’t necessarily time and cost-effective on the micro scale — an individual package, or a person trying to get from A to C for work.
Metro’s managers can’t understand that you are not a package, and therefore value your time. You don’t want to go an hour out of your way, and you have an opinion about that. (Edit: Metro doesn’t believe in opinions other than it’s own.) And thanks to their sinking of increasing amounts of money into expensive rail systems, they don’t have the money to run the additional buses for direct Park & Pillage, er, Ride connectors.
One interesting point that came up was “How expensive would gas have to be before you considered riding the bus and losing that extra hour or more commuting?” The answer from the one person who had already calculated it into his budget was “about $10-$12 a gallon. Otherwise, my time is more valuable.”