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Cut grass at work today. I hate mowing grass.

We also looked at a building we were considering buying, but it turns out that said building is in the hysterical district, which is a right royal pain in the ass and makes the whole thing not worth our time. So, y'know, no building buying going on here.

After work, I went and played horse, which was somewhat more enjoyable than work. Elklin dropped her colt yesterday, filly with a bit of white. It's cute enough, I suppose, but not earth-shattering. Taku did a damn nice job with the feed sack today. It's getting to be old hat, which is kind of encouraging to see. She's coming along. Nick needs to learn to stand stll when I'm putting gear on her. I do not have time to chase after her moving-around-ness, so we worked on that today. It's not a fast project, but I think I made some headway.

I talked to La regarding horse events for the weekend -- the weather's supposed to be quite nice -- and we're trying to get something together for early Saturday. Knowing how these things work, it'll probably be noonish before we get underway but that should still work out okay. I'd like to get another ride on Nick this weekend because I've been busy doing other stuff for the two previous weekends (Okay, enjoyable stuff, but still stuff that interferes with horse things.) and I don't want to get out of putting miles on the red horse.

I'm watching the tennis cartoon again. At the current time, there are two choices for subtitle... a very competent and professional job is being done by Anime-Otakus, with whom I have absolutely no quarrel. I like their work and have no complaints. They can spell and punctuate. There is also a relatively clueless and ungrammatical version being done by some other people who shall remain nameless. *sigh* The problem here is that A-O doesn't have versions for all the episodes that the other guys have versions for... so if I want the plot to advance (the pace of this damn thing is glacial), I have to watch really crappy subtitles like "There so tough, the both of them." (They mean "They're so tough, the both of them.") The pain, Boss, the pain! It does not help that these episodes have an American junior high tennis team playing in Japan so that the episodes contain a fair amount of not-native-speaker English. It's not horribly pronounced, but the sing-song rhythm is way off. (I would do just as badly if I were saying Japanese lines.) Anyway, I'm watching both versions of subtitling efforts where they exist. It's enlightening.

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Why do I like Anime-Otaku's subtitles for PoT better than the other ones? In addition to being able to spell and punctuate and navigate thickets of they're, there, their with aplomb, they provide cultural footnotes. For example, in episode 148, where we see Atobe's flaming tennis serve thing*, which he calls The Tannhauser Serve (there's an umlaut over the second A in the subtitle but I am not cool enough to make an umlaut appear here, so just pretend it's there), there is a surtitle that says [Tannhauser is the title role in an opera by Richard Wagner. Its name alone conjures up an image of wealth for the Japanese audience.]. Now, I know Tannhauser. I'm up to speed on my opera. I do not need a surtitle telling me this but I am still somehow pleased that my subtitlers are aware of Wagner's operas and are willing to provide me with this sort of information, just in case I might not be up to speed, to enhance and extend my enjoyment of a tennis cartoon (allegedly) aimed at preteen persons of the opposite gender on the other side of the world. I gotta say, though, doesn't this sort of thing make you wonder how many preteen Japanese boys are aware of Wagner's operas? Truly, it is a foreign land.

*Each of the tennis players (and there are a gazillion of them) has his own unique move or moves. These moves have names. The names are incredibly dorky, so very dorky that I have trouble admitting that I know the names of the moves and which moves belong to which players. Just let me state for the record that The Tannhauser Serve isn't at all out of line. It's actually one of the better names out there.