Reasonably Unique

With "Steven" I get this

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 6 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Steven		Gilham
There are 1,172,877 people in the U.S. with the first name Steven. Statistically the 26th most popular first name. 99.74 percent of people with the first name Steven are male. Names similar to Steven: Stephen Steve		There are 1,560 people in the U.S. with the last name Gilham. Statistically the 18372nd most popular last name. (tied with 468 other last names)

With Steve, the number drops to 2!

Anime — Planetes (ΠΛΑΝΕΤΕΣ)

Good, but not as good as the manga. Some extraneous comedy and office life stuff was added, and the Dream part of it downplayed.

Anime — Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (ひぐらしのなく頃に)

Interesting, occasionally gruesome — and if you don't realise that it was based on a popular game, slightly confusing with the reboots — mystery/horror anime. Very difficult to describe without much spoilerage, beyond the initial premise of the initial lead character being an outsider, new to a remote and insular rural community, where there are a lot of odd goings-on, and creepy little girls.

It had one “hardly bear to watch” sequence involving fingernails.

Anime — Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and ditto. A's

I tried this series out because of the on-going buzz about it on /a/, like —

It is made of high-speed, high-powered aerial combat, a touch of fanservice, massive explosions and major amounts of win. Despite the name, it's only a Magical Girl anime for the first three episodes of the first series. Then it becomes great. Then it becomes awesome at episode 7. Then it becomes legendary from the start of the second season.

and it did not disappoint. And if you need more inducement, there are also delightful magical devices speaking Super Engrish as well.

One of the nicer touches about it is that Nanoha is one of the more sensible, level headed, and yet nice characters around, from business-like talks with her parents when she tells them she has to go away and do her magical girl thing for a while, to the way she seriously befriends people. And by people, I mean Fate-chan, and then the Velka Knights from series two.

Nature Notes

Fog again, like yesterday. And, driving into town, just coming into Barton, a fox loping across the road in such broad daylight as there was, stopping to look at me as I went past.

Memetic Hazard

Memetic Hazard
Originally uploaded by Arenamontanus.

Anders of http://www.aleph.se/ has designed a neat set of forward looking hazmat style signs. This one ought be stamped on pretty much any viral ideology, especially the geopolitically active macho ones.