I always find that he has some pretty interesting ideas, but that his characters are flat. It's as if he has all these concepts he wants to press in that the characters just become delivery devices for the ideas of China Meiville. My ardour for his books, that was sparked by The City & The City has cooled after…

Josef K., because sometimes uncertainty and shreds of hope are worse than pain.

Terror found! H.M.S. Erebus still elusive.

I'm with you. Ninety per cent of what the German big three put out just leaves me cold. They're like Camrys with pretension. Maybe if I can ever afford one, I'd be amazed at how they drive, but from the point of an outside observer, they are racing toward a vanishing point of design mediocrity.

Sure it does. It's all based on pronunciation in different countries: in Japan Mazda is pronounced Matsuda, the founder of the companies name; and in English an 'e' hanging off the end of a word isn't pronounced, thus porsh. I also don't get your comment about Volkswagen versus Porsche. Saying Volkswagen with an…

I've never heard that. But I do know that the founder of Mazda's last name was Matsuda, which is how it's spelled in Japanese, and I've heard Japanese car companies when they were coming to America wanted to not seem Japanese, because most things coming out of Japan at the time was cheaply manufactured crap, a la…

But it's an anglicization of the founder's name: Matsuda Jujiro.

All car brand names are written in katakana or romaji, which means they, as far as I've seen, either write it Mazda or マツダ (matsuda) depending on which alphabet they want to use.

I love bringing up Mazda when Porsche lovers complain about mispronunciation. Cars have become so global the word Mazda, as most westerners read it, isn't even in the phonemes of the Japanese language. There's not even a real proper pronunciation for it.

Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman totally changed the way I look at our media, which is pretty much everything today. And Fear and Trembling gave me a whole new, and deeper view on the faith I grew up in.

First vampire President erases term limits.

I think you're hearing the Japanese word for space, which is uchyuu. You can see it written in each one as 宇宙.

I disagree, though I may be the only one, that chick car is necessarily a bad thing. Lots of them are just cars that focus on style rather than speed (think karmann ghia, new beetle, new mini, and new fiat 500). I think these cars offer some much-needed diversity in car line-ups. Their great sin is that when you're…

Gunma is a prefecture, not a road.

Freaked my (then) girlfriend's mom out constantly turning on the windshield wipers when I wanted to turn, but in her defence, it was my first time driving in Japan and it's weird relearning something you've done by default for so long.

The City and The City is a great example ambiguity in genre fiction. Also, there dal reason I'm writing this is to see if I fall into the grey abyss where ambiguity flocks like the geese of Capastrana.

Shane.

They went through with it. It pisses my brother, who has a Japanese iPhone, off because it interrupts his music every times he takes a picture all because a bunch of pervs.

A) Humphrey Bogart is the man and Ingrid Bergman is beautiful and they have awesome chemistry on screen. B) If you feel like the romance angle will remove your penis, you can feel safe as there is just as much action, making it no more a romance than Speed. C) Pro Tip: Romance movies have never removed anyone's penis.…

I can't believe I had to scroll so far down to see this. I tingle-handedly made me lust after a '55 Chevy and was the genesis for the idea of the Blasphemi.