I first heard about Setsubun no hi from an episode of Urusei Yatsura, where Ataru drives Lum and Ten-chan out of his house by throwing beans at them. It’s a Japanese festival celebrated on February 3 every year, where people throw beans to drive out the evil spirits of the old year and the disease spirits of the new year. Of course, I’m not sure I would throw beans at Lum. I don’t really want to drive her away, and even if I did she would just zap me. Plus I’d have to smuggle beans into the house just like Ataru and Shinobu.

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Longtime readers know how ticked off I was about Haruhi’s Endless Eight fiasco. Even though KyoAni never reused animation throughout the arc, I kept thinking they were being cheap, lazy bastards, except I thought they were keeping the money for themselves.

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I’m eating lunch at Sizzling Pepper Steak when the group of freshmen college kids from Ateneo at the next table start talking about what classic movies they’ve seen. The list is absolutely disheartening to me: The Matrix, Gladiator, The Truman Show. These are classics now?

But their love for the movies despite their ‘age’ is great. One of the boys tells his rapt female audience about the plot of the Truman Show in loving detail, remembering little plot points like Truman’s father being written off the show as ‘lost at sea’. “But the movie is kinda old na,” he qualifies, “nineties pa.”

I remember talking about Star Wars with my law school classmates and one of the girls said, “All I know about Star Wars is like, Yoda. That’s the little guy with the lightsaber, right?”

So, little guy with lightsaber am I?

Indeed.

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