All In Several Days' Work Dept.

The one-two punch of work and real life has left me without a great deal to talk about as of late, but here's some tidbits.

My last bit of foraging at Book-Off turned up a fun new manga: Batten, the adventures of Tsubaki Seijuro, a flamboyantly-dressed samurai who walks around in geisha getup and dispenses justice with both his sword and his mega-stacked platform geta.  I don't expect to be seeing this in translation anytime soon, so if you know any Japanese at all you might be inclined to snap up a used copy and check it out if the material sounds like your sort of thing.  (I'm a sucker for goofy period stories, so this was a natural.)

Vertical sent me a preview copy of the about-to-be-released paperback edition of Parasite Eve, inspiration for both the video game and the J-horror movie of the same name (available domestically thanks to ADV), although the game bears almost no resemblance to the story.  I'll be posting a review of this sometime in the coming week.

A snippet from the Paper Cuts blog, from the perspective of two writers who have had to go into hiding or receive police protection when they came under fire — literally — for their work.  One of them, as you can well imagine, was Salman Rushdie.  When his fatwa was first handed down, a whole slew of writers showed their support in the book pages of the Times, with the best one being: "Death threats are some of the best reviews possible."  I wish I could remember who said that.

Finally, I'm going to be seeing Iron Man this coming Tuesday.  The buzz from everyone has been through the roof and up somewhere in geostationary orbit.  Heck, my mother wants to see it, and she's about as far removed from being a comic-book fan as I am from being an Anatolian shepherd.  (Wait — given that I'm of Anatolian descent, maybe that's not the best analogy...)