Dragon Sakura

As I type this I wait my friend Phil to arrive with some beers and stories. In the meantime I figured I'd post as I've been a bad blogger this week. Basically life, more specifically work, intervened to keep me busy. I have finally begun to make some progress into FFVII, but not enough to change my opinion so much, yet anyway. Also, I've realized that probably so far that July as had the least postings of my whole blog, but probably the largest and most substantial in terms of pictures and information. I plan to have a picture guess contest up tomorrow or the next day.

Today I heard about a Japanese dram currently airing here that I haven't watched, but sounds as whacky as most J-drama. It's called Dragon Sakura (it took a lot of Japanese to find this site, well hidden in kanji) and is based on a fairly famous Japanese comic here. It's important to note that Japanese comics, unlike the American style, are usually not based on Super-heroes or extraordinary people, but rather more real life and slightly fantastic situations. There are exceptions, but stories like that of Batman, Spiderman, Superman, etc. don't really exist in that form. There are plenty of stories about the odd high school student who is endowned with amazing powers or abilities and the trouble he gets in. There are also many about normal charcters, like teachers (Great Teacher Onizuka), sports captains (Slam Dunk) and of course young awkward couples (MARS), which is quite common here. There is plenty of outlandish stuff too, Sakura Taisen, Mobile Suit Gundam, Cowboy Bebop (great music!) and Magic Knight Rayearth to name a few.

Anyway, Dragon Sakura is the story of a high school which is about to go bankrupt but is saved when a random lawyer, played by the ultra-memorable Hiroshi Abe, decides to save the school by getting some of the students accepted into Tokyo University, which is the Harvard of Japan. This proves to be harder than he originally expected due to the lack of scholastic ability amongst the student body and the his dealings with the beautiful Kyoko Hasegawa. Okay, so I haven't watched it, even though I love HaseKyo, but I'm really not that interested; most of the dramas I've watched here, while interesting, always come off as rather formulaic. Still, the J-drama community seems to be eating it up, as is my private student and her husband (also my student) to a lesser degree.

Time for a few beers. Going to see the Island tomorrow, will give my personal review then.

Wisdom of the Day: Three year-old programs don't play nice with today's XP.