My solution:

1. In the psycopg dir, edit setup.cfg and add the line

   library_dirs=/opt/local/lib

2. Add a symbolic link to patch weird zlib issues:

   ln -s /opt /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/opt

   I know this is unpleasant, but it works. Got the idea from here.

Now the build should work. I still got warnings about arch conflicts, but I think this has something to do with it trying to build versions for both PPC and 386, and since I only need the 386 version, I blissfully ignore such warnings.

The plot is both ridiculous and inconsequential: a demon and an angel had a child, which was as powerful as God. God then took off, the kid escaped his confines and fled to Earth, where he merged with the proud but decent Southern ex-Preacher Jesse Custer, granting him the Voice of God, allowing him to control anyone with the sound of his voice. The angels have sent an unstoppable murdering cowboy called the Saint of Killers after Jesse, and Jesse has set off across the country in search of the derelict God, with his ex-girlfriend and possible hit woman, Tulip, and a recently befriended Irish vampire named Cassidy. Like I said, ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter a jot. The writing is snappy, often hilarious. The characters are actually very well realized and fleshed out. And yeah, it will probably sate your need to for adolescent titillation and gross-out.

This is one of the few comics works that feels like it was made by a master of the medium. The writing is fairly awful at times (possibly only in translation), but graphic elements, both the illustrations and narrative flow of the layouts, are genuinely wonderful and often novel (well, to this Western inexperienced reader). Here are some examples I noted

(p. 17 & p.26 cartoony abstraction)
Early on in the book Tezuka uses even more cartoony abstraction in moments of heightened motion and emotion (think Loony Toons). I haven’t noticed this convention much before. Perhaps it’s just a manga convention I’ve missed? I found the effect a bit jarring, sort of kicks you out of the story for a panel or two.

(p. 43p3)
Another interesting convention was using hatched shading in place of solid black to indicated asides. One would think thought bubbles would have been the convention, which Tezuka used rarely.

(p. 625p1 great cartoon of shocked guilt)

(p. 650, p. 654) poor people depicted with much more realism. Is this intentionally done to distance them from the reason? Or the opposite?

One final though I had while reading was on translating works like this. There is a line on p. 528 that goes, “I’m sorry but I have zero interest in you as a woman.” This was either awful in the original Japanese, or the translator did Tezuka a serious disservice. This is an especially bad example, but overall the text was awkward and simplistic. I was wondering, though, if the text was equally abysmal in the original Japanese, what should a translator do? Replicate the quality of the prose, or write better passages so English readers won’t overlook a great work of comics due to infantile text?

Done
Another good’un, but possibly not quite up to snuff with the preceding books in this mini-trilogy. Not quite sure why I felt that way, just passages that didn’t quite do it for me. Or maybe it was the intrusion of such modern trappings as telegraphy.

Quotes

After Jack delivers a long-winded explanation of how an accurate timepiece can reveal a ships longitude at sea, Stephen replies (in Chapter 9, p. 278),

‘Heavans, Jack, what things you tell me. And I dare say this would answer for let us say Dublin and Galway?’

‘I should not care to affirm anything abou Ireland, where people have the stragest notion of time; but at sea, I do assure you, it answers very well. That is why I should like to borrow your watch.’

In Chapter 10, p. 312,

… on Jack’s first visit to the men it was represented to him that this here French bread, full of holes, could not nourish a man: if a man ate holes he must necessarily blow himself out with air like a bladder, it stood to reason.

Words

accoucher (v): p. 41
“cry peccavi” (v): p. 77
drabblers (n): p. 78
garefowl (n): another name for the extinct http://www.pageofguh.org/random/706 It recently occurred to me that a series of very low tides would coincide with the brief gap between the semester’s end and my summer job, so I decided to go for three days of consecutive tidepooling, and stay on the coast for the two nights to avoid helping the terrorists.

After that I headed to the Montara Lighthouse Hostel. Spectacular view, full kitchen, couches, beds, wifi, for $24. Pretty awesome. Spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading Harry Potter and Patrick O’Brian, and playing with my photos some more.

Day 2: Bean Hollow

The next morning started with a 5AM alarm and a drive down the coast. Cafe Classique was actually open, so I tanked up on drug broth and headed for Bean Hollow State Beach, another one of my favorite spots. There I met up with John, a contact of mine from Flickr and fellow tidepooler. Bean Hollow was overflowing with life, and the weather was mild (i.e. I didn’t feel like dying by the end). Lots of cool slugs, many that I hadn’t seen since last year or the year before. Flabellina trilineata was definitely the most common one we saw, often in clusters. I even found some eggs that I think my have belonged to F. trilineata. Yay.

John knows a whole lot more about intertidal fauna than I do, and he was pointing out a lot of cool stuff I didn’t know about, like hydroids (not the same as sea pens, d’oh), the difference between strawberry anemones and cup corals (the former are red and white, the latter orange), and the absolutely insane spaghetti worm, which uses its two jillion tentacles to gather food. Fantastic morning all around. Onto the slug bill and pics!

Nudibranchs Found

1. Aegires albopunctatus
2. Triopha maculata
3. Diaulula sandiegensis
4. Rostanga pulchra
5. Cadlina luteomarginata
6. Cadlina modesta
7. Tritonia festiva
8. Dendronotus frondosus
9. Dendronotus subramosus
10. Doto amyra
11. Flabellina trilineata
12. Hermissenda crassicornis
13. Cuthona divae

Day 3: Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Slightly later wake-up call at 6AM, and then down the coast a little ways to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Fitzgerald is a well-known spot, with docents and placards and the like, so there were a few other people out there on the reef, but that didn’t detract in the slightest, as there was a ton to see. I’d sent out an email to an iSchool listserv about this morning, so we were joined by a bunch of stout and sturdy iSchoolers willing to brave the icy winds and treacherous algae. All manner of sea stars were in abundance, including your garden variety Ochre Stars, Bat Stars, Six-rayed Stars, and several of the massive Sunflower Stars. The harbor seals were out as usual, some of them getting curious and swimming over to check us out. We found a massive Cabezon in one of the pools, which is a fish that looks like an algae-covered rock. Exactly like one. It took me several minutes looking through the pool before I saw it (this thing was about 1/2 a meter, and not particularly well-hidden), and even when I was standing a meter away pointing at it, people still took 10 or 20 seconds to say “That’s a fish? Oh! I see it!” Pretty cool. Slugs were out too, including the crowd-pleasing Opalescents, and some nerd-pleasing new species for me: Eubranchus rustyus and Cuthona albocrusta (both under 1 cm in length, but spectacular in close up).

Nudibranchs Found

1. Acanthodoris lutea
2. Aegires albopunctatus
3. Triopha maculata
4. Diaulula sandiegensis
5. Peltodoris nobilis
6. Rostanga pulchra
7. Cadlina modesta
8. Doto amyra
9. Flabellina trilineata
10. Eubranchus rustyus
11. Hermissenda crassicornis
12. Cuthona albocrusta

Also, I got a little scolded by the docents at Fitzgerald. I was about to jump in a pool and snag a little Acanthodoris lutea to show people (this is the one that smells like sandalwood), when one of the docents muttered, “We don’t really do that,” to the person next to her. “What I’m doing?” I asked. “Yes. It damages habitat.” “Yeah, you’re right,” I replied, and stopped what I was doing. Later, as we were packing up in the parking lot, another docent came over to us and let us know that he had been watching us from the cliff, and let us know that containers and removing things from the pool is illegal. He let us be since he figured our intentions were innocent enough, what with our cameras and generally unsuspicious demeanor, but told us that next time we should look, touch, but not remove. He was very nice about it, if a little condescending, but it touched a nerve with me. As I wrote last time, I’m trying to codify (or learn about) this idea of engagement as a conservationist and environmental ethic. For me, that involves photography and letting people have a very close look at creatures. When tidepooling, you can get an awful lot out of just sitting quietly beside a pool and watching, but there are some things, like some of the tiny nudibranchs, that you can barely see without removing them from the pool. Often times, letting a group of people see something requires putting it in a dish and passing it around. So while I agree that at a high-traffic place like Fitzgerald it’s good to have a no removal policy, I’m not sure it really supports the level of engagement necessary to fully know the rocky intertidal habitat. Of course, there aren’t a whole lot of people who want to know that habitat quite as much as I do, I guess, and perhaps my level of engagement is somewhat detrimental (although I’d say the warning on the Fitzgerald website that “You may touch marine life, but DO NOT pick it up or place it in a container. If you do they will die” is patently false (I’ve seen biologists from the California Academy of Science do it, after all, and these creatures are mostly adapted to the possibility of at least partial desiccation), and somewhat patronizing. As far as removal being illegal, that’s probably true within the reserve, but I’m not sure it’s true elsewhere. The only other time I’ve come close to running afoul of the authorities was when I met up with a Fish and Game warden, and he told me it was fine to remove things from the pools to take pictures, as long as I didn’t keep them (obviously) or move them around. Maybe I should do some research, and learn to step a bit more lightly.