The Americas – Page 6 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Time Suck is funny

Let’s close out this intense week on a lighter note:

1. The Time Suck section of Houston-based culture website 29-95.com is hilarious. It’s written by a team of people including Joe Mathlete of “Marmaduke Explained” fame (he now posts his explanations on this site). Here is one video of a “translated” rap battle they recently recommended:

2. Mad Men is back for its third season starting August 16 and I for one can’t wait. It’s turned into a total soap opera but I love it because in a lot of ways the office atmosphere is remarkably similar to the corporate culture at Japanese firms. Here is a photo gallery they posted to help promote the new season (thanks to Time Suck for the link).

Renting in Japan vs America: Interlude on discrimination

In my post on how renting works in America I included the following paragraph.

I should also add that exclusion by race or nationality is highly illegal, to the point where realtors are legally prohibited from even discussing the racial makeup of the neighborhood, should the renter be trying to, for example, avoid living near black people. This is very strictly enforced (at least in some states.) My mother had a good friend who worked as a realtor, who told me that the New Jersey state board of real estate (or whatever the official name is) actually sends undercover inspectors to do random checks of real estate agents and make sure they are following the discrimination guidelines. Realtors who break the rules lose their license.

I should add that despite being highly illegal this kind of discrimination is far from gone.One of my relatives emailed me the following anecdote, which I have edited to anonymize.

I didn’t want to post this in a public place, but just thought it would interest you. Somebody, can’t remember who now, asked [my partner] and I if — in selling our house — we would give preference to someone Jewish. We were amazed that anybody would ask us such a dumb question. First of all, selecting on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity would be illegal, but furthermore, it never entered our minds. So here we are in the 21st century and many people are still mired in the 1950’s — when this truly did happen on Long Island on a regular basis (and probably everywhere in the USA), and was still happening well into the 1980’s (even tho’ illegal).

I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which while today has a moderate Jewish population, until a few decades ago reputedly had an unofficial policy of excluding Jews. Montclair has also always had a large black population, but there has certainly been a history of anti-black racial discrimination in the real-estate market. For example, a brief 1909 item in the New York Times states that “The colored residents of this town are agitating a movement to erect a hotel for negroes in Montclair. The leaders of the negroes here say that such an establishment has become a necessity.” Although I have no other information, this certainly suggests to me that the black community has having a difficult time finding permission to construct the hotel, and furthermore, the very idea of a “hotel for negroes” suggests that they were being excluded from the hotels for whites, despite New Jersey being a Northern state, allegedly free of Jim Crow type discrimination.

Accusations of real-estate related racism today, however, allege a far more subtle manner. In the case of anti-black racism, there has been criticism of such things as the gentrification of neighborhoods in the South End of town, historically where the less wealthy blacks in Montclair have lived, near the train stations whose desirability has increased following rail service upgrades.

As for antisemitism, there was the case of B’nai Keshet, the Reconstructionist (which basically means leaning more towards culture than religion) synagogue that I and my family belonged to until I gave up on religion at age 11. From a 1996 NYT article on the phenomenon of minority religious groups suffering discrimination under the guise of legitimate zoning concerns (they have many other worthy examples in addition to B’nai Keshet):

In Montclair, B’nai Keshet, a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, ran into tremendous opposition to its plan to move into a former art school. After many contentious hearings, the township ultimately approved the plan. But then the neighbors sued, and incensed synagogue members with comments in the local press likening the group to the cultist Jim Jones, said Susan Green, a past president of the congregation.

I remember this controversy actually going on for years, with B’nai Keshet moving around to a couple of temporary locations before they finally located a building, but I must admit that having quite years earlier, I paid little attention and don’t even remember where they ended up. However, while I may have found them boring, they were about as non-cultish as a religious group can be. A lawyer quoted in the article makes an important point:

”Churches no longer carry the cachet that they once did, that they sweep away for all citizens all opposition, and that’s particularly true when it comes to smaller or less established churches — which means new immigrant groups or smaller denominations,” said Marc Stern, a lawyer with the American Jewish Congress. ”Sometimes it’s flat-out bigotry masquerading as zoning.”

While explicit discrimination in real estate is illegal in the US and there has been much success in eliminating it from the residential real estate market (although I’m sure this varies greatly by region), it persists in more subtle ways, particularly in commercial real estate involving stores or religious/cultural institutions where minority ethnic or religious groups will gather.

Renting in Japan vs America – Part 1

Inspired by the news the other day that a Kyoto district court has rules that housing rental contract renewal fees are a violation of consumer rights, I thought I would write a brief introduction to how renting works, based primarily on my own experiences.

I have rented twice in America, three times in Japan, and one time in Taiwan, with an asterisk. As this post was getting quite long, I’ve decided to split it up into three pieces. Since I want to go in chronological order, I’ll first discuss America with a brief mention of Taiwan, then part 2 will discuss how it works in Japan, and finally in the third part I will break down my actual housing contract as specific examples.

I went to college at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in the small city of New Brunswick. After two years in various dorms I decided to move out, and went looking for a house or apartment to share with a friend or three. The Rutgers campus is surrounded by a zone of houses (with a very few apartment buildings) which are occupied almost entirely by students renting from year to year, formed as if the city were insulating itself from the campus in much the manner of an oyster generating a pearl to protect its soft, fragile body from a piece of grit. Since houses in the area are almost entirely for students, landlords can advertise directly to them quite easily through the housing office bulletin board etc, so there is no need for anyone to involve real estate agents. In most cases, the owner of the house rents directly to students, and are usually very amateurish about arranging repairs etc. The security deposit is equal to 1.5 months rent, as specified by city ordnance, and must be kept in a special bank account which may be used only to store the security deposit. When first moving in, the only thing you pay are first month rent, last month rent, and the security deposit. There is no “renewal fee” or anything similar, and in ordinary circumstances, most of the security deposit is returned.

This is pretty much the procedure throughout the US. While houses may be rented directly by the owner or through a real estate agent (who I presume earns some sort of fee), one often has contact with the landlord (i.e. the actual owner) after moving in, but owners of multiple properties may hire a company to deal with residents for them. Large apartment buildings generally have a superintendent who manages building, particularly construction, although I am somewhat vague about how small apartment buildings generally work. Security deposit is usually legally restricted to an amount of 1.5 or 2 months rent, and contract renewal fees are illegal. There is one big exception in the case of ‘key money’, which I will discuss later.

I should also add that exclusion by race or nationality is highly illegal, to the point where realtors are legally prohibited from even discussing the racial makeup of the neighborhood, should the renter be trying to, for example, avoid living near black people. This is very strictly enforced (at least in some states.) My mother had a good friend who worked as a realtor, who told me that the New Jersey state board of real estate (or whatever the official name is) actually sends undercover inspectors to do random checks of real estate agents and make sure they are following the discrimination guidelines. Realtors who break the rules lose their license.

I lived in one such house for a year (actually the first story of a two family house, as many houses are in the area), went to Japan for two years, where I lived in school dorms, and then returned for my final year at Rutgers, where I shared a second-story apartment of a different two-family house, which had been arranged while I was away by the girlfriend of a good friend (the girl being Jess Rees and the friend being Brian Cervino, both members of the band Huma whose music I recommend), and another guy that she knew. I’m afraid I forget now exactly what the rent was, but it came out to somewhere between $300 and $400 per person, plus some more for utilities. The security deposit in New Brunswick is set by law at 1.5 months, and in both cases most of it was returned, although well after the 30 day window required by law. As a student with no independent source of income, the landlords also required parents to co-sign as a guarantee. This is common in the US in such situations, but is not usual for renters who actually have a stable job. In both cases, everyone living in the apartment signed the lease, but the room and rent allocation was not explicitly spelled out, which in retrospect might have been a good idea, as there were some minor arguments in that area in the first house (although none at all in the second.)

I next went to study in Taiwan for a few months, where had arranged no housing in advance aside from a one-week reservation in a youth hostel, but almost immediately found a promising room advertised on a bulletin board at school. This experience gets an asterisk because as a subleter I never signed, or even examined, a contract and know relatively little about the local procedures and laws. My general impression, however, is that it works more or less the same as in most of the US, with no ‘key money’ or renewal fees, and only moderate security deposits. It seemed to me that rentals often go through agents (at least in apartment building-dominated Taipei) but perhaps in smaller cities/towns there are more landlords renting directly.

Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.

Great news! Sears Tower is now the (Wesley) Willis Tower

It’s a good day in America, folks: the Sears Tower has been renamed!

CHICAGO (AP) — The Sears Tower, one of the world’s iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., was renamed the Willis Tower on Thursday in a downtown ceremony, marking a new chapter in the history of the giant edifice that has dominated the Chicago skyline for nearly four decades.

The linked story might claim the building is being named after an insurance broker. But that’s just not true. Everyone knows the building was named after the late native Chicagoan and prolific schizophrenic songwriter Wesley Willis.

Rock over London! Rock on Chicago! Taco Bell: Make a run for the border!

As a fan of his since junior high, I was shocked when Willis died in 2003. I couldn’t think of a better tribute than to name a huge building after him!

Civics lessons from 1913

Here are a few quotes from “The Philippine Citizen”, a 1913 reader on civics for students of secondary schools in The Philippines under American colonial rule.

Popular government. Since the Unites States is a representative democracy and is attempting to create a government of this kind in the Philippines, it becomes necessary to study this form of government with great care.

In the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the United States is a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” that is, popular government. It is important to remember that not all the people in any democracy take part in the election of public officers and the making of laws. In the most liberal of democracies women, with few exceptions, are excluded from a share in the government. Even in the United States only about one fifth of the whole population is entitled to vote. Popular government differs in degree in different democracies. What constitutes a democracy is not the number of people who vote but the fact that the people are the source of the laws.
(…)
It is sometimes difficult to say just how much one should know to be qualified to vote. In the United States, where popular education is so efficient and widespread, some states grant the suffrage to all males over twenty-one years of age. In many of the states, however, an educational or property qualification is also required. This often greatly reduces the number of electors. In the opinion of many, the suffrage should be still further restricted in the United States. It would certainly be a very foolish step to grant unlimited suffrage to people like some of the negroes of Africa, who in many cases know hardly enough to build a hut over their heads.

Woman suffrage. Even in the United States the full rights of suffrage are not granted to women, except in nine states. Many of the women are exceedingly intelligent and possess every qualification of mind and character that the male voters have, but they are not allowed to vote, because the suffrage is not a right but a privilege. This privilege it is not usually considered necessary to extend to women at present. If their votes were necessary to secure civil liberties to the people it would be entirely proper to grant them the suffrage.

On the future of Asia, ca. 1935

From the journal of Dr. Austin Craig, then professor of history at University of the Philippines who first moved there from the US around 1902. May 10, 1935.

I want self-government here because that is the next step due, the Filipinos have advanced to it, and there has to be progress. But I don’t want these fourteen millions of Christians – European trained, just as we – to be submerged in the hundreds of millions of heathens that surround them. I believe the Filipinos are the hope of Asia, and no less important to Europe and America, who want this world Europeanized, or Christian-civilized, which is the same thing, and is what we mean when we talk about white people. The Filipino, by Indian inheritance and European association, is European, and I hope the United States is going to protect him against the pan-Asiatic heathen influence – which means Japan.

Of Course Japan is no permanent menace, for the strictly repressed discontent – with all Japanese liberals talked of as Koreans – is going to bring an explosion, sooner or later, and with it the Japanese Republic. The old fetish of a God-like Emperor was ended when an emperor died of tuberculosis, and the special protection of the God has been discredited by earthquakes and a succession of other great alamities.

But until the day of Japanese Emancipation comes, the United States ought, in my opinion, to keep this outpost in the Orient and the Filipinos can be relied upon, with American backing, to hold their own land against any neighbor.

It’s a goodly land, worth keeping, and the people are as good, with “comely faces,” as the old Oriental writer long ago wrote of his native country and his countrymen. I have liked both land and people, or I wouldn’t have stayed here nearly thirty-one years.

I am glad that the Filipinos’ long-cherished dream of freedom is coming true. Only let men deam of teh possibility of anything and, no matter how frequently the failuers by trials, eventually comes triumph!

(Source: Bearers of Benevolence: The Thomasites and Public Education in the Philippines ed. Mary Racelis and Judy Celine Ick)

Worst. Luck. Ever.

Japanese woman found dead in New Mexico

LOS ANGELES, June 11 (AP) – (Kyodo)—The body of a Japanese woman has been found in New Mexico, local police said Thursday.

Megumi Yamamoto, 26, a graduate physics student at a university in New Mexico, got lost while hiking in a mountainous area near Santa Fe and was rescued by a police helicopter after contacting the local police via mobile phone Tuesday evening.

But the chopper crashed after hitting a mountain during a storm.

History of Book-Off

I happened to run across this neat little history of the Japanese used bookstore chain Book-Off from a 2003 brand profile. Perhaps surprisingly to many readers, I was actually familiar with Book-Off long before I first came to Japan due to their Manhattan outlet at 41st Street, just east of the main NYC Library building and Bryant Park. I cannot actually recall if I had ever visited before I started taking Japanese classes in the summer of 2001, but once I started learning Japanese I started making occasional trips to the NYC Book-Off, located a very short distance from either the Port Authority or Penn Station, which were the terminals by which I would enter the city from either my home town of Montclair or my college town of New Brunswick, respectively, at which I would buy things like childrens books of folktales or very easy manga, with which to work on my reading. Mirroring the Japanese chain’s pricing, it was divided into sections of variable but far less than cover price, and $1 books. Naturally, I have been to plenty of Book-Off’s in Japan over the years. Book-Off in NYC looked even more attractive when compared with the Kinokuniya outlet, which sells imported Japanese books at a significant markup from cover price. Interestingly, the Book-Off manages to acquire their used books from the local Japanese population. For example, a Japanese girl I knew in NYC who devoured stacks of $1 novels, which she would then sell back to Book-Off for a nominal fee (I believe slightly higher in store credit).

The profile paints Book-Off as a major revolution in used book-selling.

Twelve years ago, Sakamoto was abandoning his career as a piano salesman for a new adventure in sales. His idea, as good ideas so often are, was simple: establish a clean, well-lit used bookstore staffed with friendly, well-trained employees and create a pricing system designed to yield a high margin of profit.

In the service-oriented society of today, setting up shop with these ground rules might seem like a given. But in the Japan of 1990, used bookstores were dark, cramped, dusty affairs. Furthermore, an elite group of publishers, wholesalers, and bookstores had for years been cooperating closely with one another to squeeze their competitors out of the business. One of their main assets was a stipulation of the ironically named Antimonopoly Law, which prohibits the sale of books at prices other than what the publisher has fixed. This provision effectively eliminated competition among wholesalers and bookstores and raised the publisher/wholesaler/bookstore relationship to a level of prime importance.

Fortunately for the entrepreneurial Sakamoto, the Antimonopoly Law has nothing to say about used books. In less prosperous times, he reasoned, people would be forced to change their reading habits. They would be less willing to pay the exorbitant cover prices demanded by the big-title publishers. He came up with a simple but ingenious pricing system whereby his shops purchase books at 10 percent of their original cover price. They are then retailed at half the cover price. If, after three months, the books have not sold, they are then discounted to ¥100 (US .85, € .75).

I had of course never been to Japan before the advent of Book-Off so I am not sure quite how exaggerated or accurate the portrayal of all pre-Book-Off used bookstores as “dark, cramped, dusty affairs”, but it is true that a clear majority of old bookstores do match that description, usually tended by one very old man or woman who barely notices the customers’ presence except at checkout time.

The most interesting thing to me about this profile was the tidbit that “Sakamoto’s used books are cleaned and sanded using special techniques that he developed to make them look near mint.”

Komakai cash flow planning for the cross-border professional

I’ve been intrigued lately by some good pieces on gaijin personal finance. First there’s the blog Frugalista Japan, which is all about saving money and has some interesting tips to share. Then came this great piece on budgeting for the inaka lifestyle by Deas at “Rocking in Hakata.” And, of course, our own Adamu wrote recently about borrowing his way out of debt.

This stuff is great. For those of you who don’t know, I work in structured finance at a bank in Tokyo, which is an inherently unstable job these days (lots of going-away parties lately). To make matters worse, although my salary is pretty decent, going through three years of grad school gave me several figures of student loan debt to pay off, and I have to wire money to the US on a regular basis to cover these bills. So money management has been in the forefront of my mind for a while.

I started out keeping track of my accounts manually, but this carried three significant drawbacks. One was that it took a hell of a lot of time. One was the ongoing annoyance of fluctuating exchange rates and wire transfer fees, which really add up if you are doing things on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. The other was that I would sometimes miscalculate something, or overlook a pending payment, and end up overdrafting one of my accounts, which can be REALLY expensive.

If you are rich, you can get an account with HSBC Premier and avoid many of these headaches. I am not rich, though, and even if I were, I would not want to stick 100 grand of cash into an uninsured account. Not in this economy.

Fortunately, the right accounting solution was in front of my eyes the whole time. Structured finance — whether in the form of asset-backed securities or syndicated loans (i.e. loans extended by a big group of banks rather than a single bank) — often revolves around the concept of “waterfalls.” This is the notion that some constant flow of money (business revenues, mortgage payments, etc.) trickles into an account somewhere and then gets divided among a bunch of recipients in a predetermined order on a regular basis, much like a multi-level waterfall pours water in different directions. For instance: “Bank A gets paid interest on its share of the loan, then any remainder gets split evenly between Banks A, B, C, and D, then the company which took out the loan gets to keep the rest.”

This concept works pretty well when you are getting a regular paycheck and need to pay bills in two countries. I set up a spreadsheet using Google Docs, and now I have an idea of exactly what to do with my money each month. I’ll start with the Japan side.

                        4/19/09   5/19/09
JAPAN
Last Balance            xxxxxxx   xxxxxxx
Paycheck          19th  xxxxxxx   xxxxxxx
Other Income                       57,550
JAL Card          27th   11,800         0
View Suica         4th  207,431    60,000
E-Bank Deposit          158,000   183,000
Rent              Last   90,000    90,000
Extraordinary             8,000
Discretionary            90,000    93,000
Wire to US                        199,040
End JPY Bal             xxxxxxx   xxxxxxx

Each column represents the cash flows from one incoming paycheck (I get paid on the 19th) and any extra income, such as my commuting allowance or the upcoming teigaku kyuufukin bonanza. I pool my yen in the bank account where the paycheck comes in, and my two credit cards automatically pull payments from that account. (My utilities get billed to these cards as well; the April payment is high because I put a few sizable nomikai on my card for the points.)

Then I stick spending money in a separate account with eBank, which I use because of its awesome cash card (it works as a Visa card and can pull money for free from Yucho and 7/11 ATMs) and easy online banking interface. The “E-Bank Deposit” line gets automatically calculated based on how much I plan to spend in rent, extraordinary expenses and discretionary expenses.

The “discretionary” line is my pocket money, which I use for groceries, restaurants, booze, gadgets, hot dates or whatever else comes up during the week. I keep this budgeted at 3,000 yen per day/21,000 per week for simplicity’s sake: it varies in monthly amount because the months have slightly different lengths. Then there is a line for “extraordinary” payments: gifts, travel and other potentially big-ticket items which I know are coming up.

Finally, I have to send money to the US to pay student loans. The rather random-looking “wire to US” number comes from the bottom half of my spreadsheet, which looks like this.

                        4/19/09   5/19/09
USDJPY rate               99.56     97.52

US
Last Balance            xxxxxxx   xxxxxxx
Wire from JP                     2,000.00
Interest                   2.48      0.44
Wire Fee                            18.00
Chase SLS         Last   389.62    389.62
KHESLC            10th   456.00    456.00
Chase CC          15th   400.00  1,400.00
Other Spend              405.64
End USD Bal             xxxxxxx   xxxxxxx

It’s easiest to read this from the bottom. I have two student loan accounts, which draw from my US checking account automatically every month, as well as a US credit card which is still carrying the bill from my last trip to the States. I simply set up the spreadsheet to calculate the ending balance for each month based on the starting balance and the scheduled payments in between. Then, whenever the ending balance comes up negative, I drop in a big wire transfer to top it up.

The spreadsheet automatically updates the USD/JPY exchange rate based on Google Finance data (one of the advantages of using Google Docs for this purpose), and the formula for the outgoing transfer amount accounts for the transfer charge and the rate spread. So whenever I go to make a transfer, I overwrite the auto-updated exchange rate formula in the spreadsheet with whatever exchange rate was actually used (generally the same one if I am quick enough), and all the numbers line up perfectly.

The beauty of this system is that it makes it really hard to run out of cash or miss a payment on any of your accounts; you can simply tweak a couple of numbers (like wire transfer amounts or credit card payments) to keep everything in the black in any given pay period. Setting the spreadsheet to make negative numbers bold and red helps a lot. This also makes it easier to game exchange rate fluctuations, as you can move your transfers around based on your own estimates of when the rates will be good.

Just to be even more komakai, I also set up a running balance sheet for myself so that I can track how my net worth is doing. Although I started out doing this on a monthly basis, I switched to quarterly accounting recently after reading Nassim Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness. Taleb makes many good points in this book, but one that stuck out in my mind is that keeping a very tight eye on financial indicators which are mainly relevant in the long term (stock prices, property values, etc.) is likely to cause more stress than the benefit of the additional information can justify. Personal net worth is one such indicator: it’s nice to know when you will pay off your debt, or how much dough you are set to hoard by retirement age, but you don’t need to know it on a monthly basis, as those months where you buy a plane ticket, give to charity or have a wild night in Roppongi are likely to turn you off to the whole idea of accounting for yourself.

In defense of unicorns

I have noticed a recent habit of political pundits to mock perceived idealism and naivete with phrases like “rainbows and unicorns.”

For instance, a commenter on the latest episode of The Young Turks, in explaining that Arlen Spector has never been principled (he was the guy who voted for a bill that he himself argued would set human rights back 700 years), noted that “he was not voted in on rainbows and unicorns.”

In a sign of just how much of a standard cliche this has become, in the Washington Post former CIA Director Porter Goss makes the topsy-turvy argument that making the torture memos public has jeopardized national security: “The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust.” (Has anyone actually argued that the move makes us safer? I thought the whole point was it is not worth it to torture people even if it does make us “safer” and that the people who pushed for and praised releasing these memos see it as a step in disclosing mistaken and illegal policies that were done in our name)

But you know what? Unicorns are nothing to mess with! It only takes a cursory reading of the animal’s Wikipedia page to prove why:

1. Unicorns are as strong as the Lord: The bible (or rather its translators) considered unicorns “untamable creatures” and noted that God himself was only as strong as a unicorn:

“God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of the unicorn.”–Numbers 23:22

2. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered unicorns to be both real and fierce: The Greeks, for all their polytheism and fantastic mythology, believed that unicorns really existed somewhere in India:

Pliny the Elder mentions the oryx and an Indian ox (perhaps a rhinoceros) as one-horned beasts, as well as “a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length.”

3. Unicorns are so insane that they must be placated with virgins to stop their bloodlust (see above painting): In the middle ages, unicorns were used to mix pagan stories with Christian virtues, such that “The original myths refer to a beast with one horn that can only be tamed by a virgin maiden; subsequently, some Catholic scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Virgin Mary.”

Moving into Renaissance times, Leonardo Da Vinci had this to say about how to hunt a unicorn:

“The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”

Bottom Line

This “unicorns are fuzzy cute happy creatures” concept apparently originates in more modern imagery, particularly the My Little Pony animated series and toys and some other “fairy princess” pop culture. A product of the 1980s, My Little Pony offered saccharine-sweet entertainment for young girls that could not have anticipated the ballooning of ironic humor in the 90s and 2000s. Hence, when Homer Simpson uttered this classic, oft-repeated line:

Ohhh look at me Marge, I’m making people happy! I’m the magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane!!!!…… By the way I was being sarcastic…

it was only a matter of time before someone added a unicorn in there. But as we start to retreat from irony a bit as a society (see the return of earnest saccharine with Disney hits like High School Musical and Camp Rock, along with South Park’s reaction), it might be a good time to stop equating unicorns with frivolous and naive idealism and recognize their historically badass mythological status. I mean, honestly – how happy and nice could an enchanted animal with a deadly sharp horn actually be?