Eric had written a special guest blog entry for Kamichu, an Anime series about a girl who somehow becomes a god. Not a great god, but a good one. The text was lost in the Great Database Debacle, but here’s the video…
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAY07/KamiChu.flv 425 240]
As Eric pointed out, this sequence is atypical for the show, which is mostly slice-of-life vignettes, sometimes featuring little spirit creatures.
Here’s another repost of an entry about an Anime title that was lost to the database error. We’ve watched the entire series of Kino’s Journey, which turned out to be one of our favorites.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAY07/Kino.flv 425 240]
I’m still bumming about losing six weeks of blog posts. We just watched an episode of RahXephon with Eric, so I’ll repost the two videos that were here previously.
First, the trailer …
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAY07/RahXephon.flv 400 300]
… and now an unexpected love scene from a series that is full of battling giant robots!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAY07/RahXephon2.flv 400 300]
I’m finished repairing the blog for now. I’ve lost six weeks worth of posts. Sorry! But at least that’s better than the three months I thought I’d lost. In fact, for a while, ALL was lost! Long story. I’m beat! Need a break. I think everything is OK, as far as it goes, but let me know what problems you see.
P.S. I need cheering up! I’m looking through the audio and video clip listings, which are in directories that are separate from WordPress, and I’m seriously depressed. So many posts gone! But at least the sounds and pictures remain. I’m going to re-post SOME of this stuff, but certainly not all of it.
P.P.S. I never want to go through that again! And if I do a better job of making backups I won’t, especially now that I’m better versed in how to use phpMyAdmin, the thing that administers the mySQL database.
One nice thing about the way embedded Flash video can be done in WordPress is that I can update and, if necessary, downdate the player in a matter of seconds. An update to Jeroen Wijering’s player, version 3.7, was released today. [Link] Unfortunately, it breaks the “overstretch” feature, which is how 4:3 videos that need to be wide are posted in 16:9 format. So it’s back to version 3.6 for now.
This letter is in today’s Boston Globe:
THE SHOOTING at Virginia Tech is another example of why gun-free zones are dangerous. This would have ended much sooner and with fewer people dead or injured if at least one of those students or faculty members had been armed and able to shoot back.
In February in a mall in Utah, another young man started shooting at customers. An armed, off-duty police officer engaged the shooter until other police arrived, and the police were able to kill the shooter.
If that armed citizen had not been there, the shooter could have killed many more innocent people.
When law-abiding citizens have guns, law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals are not.
ANNA DeMARINIS
Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has made this point in the past, that more guns equal more safety. Obviously, this is false. The statistical “proof” for this assertion doesn’t hold up. [Link] Would more guns make Baghdad safer? If the off-duty police officer in Utah saw another civilian drawing a weapon when he engaged the mall shooter, the safe assumption would have been that he was also dangerous.
I haven’t read everything there is to know about who knew what, and when, about the shooter at Virginia Tech, but it seems clear that concerns had been raised with the proper authorities. There was enough to go on for somebody to check if he owned guns, and to put him on a list of names to be reported when an application was made to buy a gun. I don’t know the Federal and Virginia regulations concerning gun ownership, but they were inadequate.
If only Abraham Lincoln had been packing heat. He could have returned fire!
