Product Review: Nestlé: 和苺 (wa-ichigo) Kit-Kat

The Japanese word 苺 (ichigo) means "strawberry".[1] The package says 和苺, but 和 (wa) means "peace"/"harmony", "sum", or "Japanese".[2] A similar-looking character, 味 (aji), however, means "flavor" or "taste.[3] So I'm unsure what to think. Are they trying to say this a harmonious strawberry Kit Kat? A Japanese strawberry Kit Kat? Or did someone mess up and it's supposed to say strawberry-flavored Kit Kat? Interestingly, the first two options could refer to the fact that a specific Japanese variety of strawberry, the Tochiotome (とちおとめ) strawberry, is used. According to enthusiasts [4], the Tochiotome strawberry has a perfect harmony of sweetness and tartness. So maybe this is a Japanese harmonious strawberry-flavored Kit Kat?

Television Review: Arrow, Season 1

The CW's Arrow was written and filmed to have a gritty, urban realism like Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. In fact, there are too many parallels with Batman: when Oliver Queen (a.k.a. the Green Arrow) isn't crimefighting, he's a rich playboy; he has an underground lair; he uses technology, but not guns; it looks like he's about to pick up a young, metrosexual sidekick; his decision to become a crimefighter is informed by the death of a parent; and in the comic books he even has an Arrow-plane (yeah, they went there).

Television Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 5

Well, thanks to Leann and Lilli going to visit family in Texas for two weeks, I'm finally caught up on Star Wars: The Clone Wars.[1] It has been announced that all the episodes for a sixth season were completed before the Star Wars franchise was sold to Disney and those will somehow be made available (possibly by being broadcast on a Disney-owned channel), but there probably won't be a seventh.[2] However, there is a hint that a new animated Star Wars series will be produced.[3] I certainly hope to see the sixth season of the current series, but I'm also willing to acknowledge that this season left things at a reasonably decent stopping point (see below). So if this season ended up being the last hurrah, I wouldn't be disappointed to see it end here.

Book Review: Ishmael

[This is a guest book review from my dad. The footnotes are mine.]

I read the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, at the suggestion of a colleague of mine who had read it. The quick-and-dirty substance of the book is the angst of a lost child of the 1960s whose desire to change the world was not realized. In a hard-to-believe scenario, he falls under the spell of a telepathic gorilla.[1] To wander further down the path of unbelievability, the monkey has been educated by a wealthy Jew who has purchased him. The Jew dies and his surviving spinster daughter continues to be the monkey’s patron until she dies, at which time he is sold to a circus. The storyline, as dictated by the gorilla, is that through the evolutionary process, from the lightning strike in the primordial ooze to present day, everything was all right until a faction of the Homo sapiens line decided to abandon the wandering tribal life (the “leavers”) to form an agrarian society. This society then proceeds to destroy the whole system in their quest for stability. The endgame of the book is that the unfulfilled, lost, 60s throwback fails again to find fulfillment in saving the world and the bad guys (the “takers” [2]) win again, only to face the specter of the telepathic monkey’s prophecy that they will self-consume as a society.[3]

Television Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 4

Those of you who know me know that I am a big fan of Star Wars. When this cartoon series began, I was quite excited and diligently watched each new episode as it came out.[1] But since then I've fallen behind, and since then the series has wrapped up. Apparently there is more material, but further work on the series has been cancelled following the sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney.[2] It is unclear how that material will be made available to the public.

Distribution Maps X: Bearded Manakins

Bearded manakins are small birds found in Central and South America. I learned about them by reading a scientific article entitled "Comparison of Species Tree Methods for Reconstructing the Phylogeny of Bearded Manakins (Aves: Pipridae, Manacus) from Multilocus Sequence Data."[1] Within the article was a map representing the ranges for the four species of bearded manakins. I redrew the map as an .svg, separated it into indivual maps for each species, and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons. And, of course, I inserted them into the appropriate article over at Wikipedia.

Movie Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

The filmmakers of Star Trek Into Darkness played coy with us (and in a few cases outright lied to us). They said the villain (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, of Sherlock [1] fame) would be "Harry Mudd, or Trelane, or Gary Mitchell, or the Talosians or the Horta."[2] Later as trailers, screenings, and interviews began we were given the name for Cumberbatch's character: John Harrison…which wasn't any of the three we were originally told. Then things really started getting fishy. One of the new characters was revealed to be Dr. Carol Marcus. And there was a trailer with some highly evocative scenes reminscent of a previous Star Trek movie.[3] If you haven't already figured it out, I reveal the identity of the villain below. Proceed at your own risk.