today is filled with annoying things

While waiting for the manga I was selling to be totaled up, I decided to tachiyomi the first five volumes of Adachi Mitsuru's Fight no Akatsuki. Glad I read it before I bought it, because it totally pissed me off. It's about kid with funky hair and an eternal grin who loves basketball. He and his childhood friend fell in love with the game in elementary school and (I think) taught themselves to play. They were their intermediate school's basketball club, and they practiced in a totally crappy old gym. Luckily, their school had very low enrollment and was merging with another school that happened to be a basketball powerhouse. Unfortunately kid with funky hair gets put into the reject group (I think because he's too smily, thus weak-looking?) which is put through grueling physical training until they quit on their own. Of course his love of the game (and complete cluelessness) keeps him going even through all adversity and he manages to gather a group of other rejects, they get to challenge the second string of the "real" team (including childhood friend), blah blah blah. Sounds familiar, right? I don't necessarily dislike the set-up, I just got tired of the constant "need to beat the rejects down into nothing so they never play basketball again" attitude of the "real" team. Cross Game had an element of that, but a) it wasn't so nasty (the first string bad guys didn't want to completely destroy the reject group's love of the game) and b) the reject group knew very well what they faced (I suppose the rest of the reject group in Fight no Akatsuki knew, but they were so not well fleshed out I couldn't really tell. As for funky haired kid--Did I mention he was really clueless?). The coach of the "real" team is a real asshole who came up with the system thanks to some kind of trauma from his high school days (I think...I was skimming at this point in the manga), but he learns that summarily judging people and throwing out the ones deemed worthless is not the true spirit of basketball (or something like that--for all I know I'm pulling it all out of my ass, but considering the way these kinds of manga go...). At the end of volume 5 it looks like both funky haired kid and his friend make the first string, but at that point I didn't want anything to do with a paper cut-out main character as well as a team I found pretty repulsive and petty (seriously, guys, work on your game, not crushing the "losers"). The childhood friend actually had the most angst (torn between the desire to reach the heights of really good high school basketball and loyalty to friend/pure love of basketball), but he couldn't compensate for the major problems in everyone else. UGH. How long did that series go? I can't imagine people actually liking it enough to stick with it, unless it got much better (and people became more three dimensional?).

I did get more money than I thought for my manga, though. Still a very small amount considering how much I must have spent on them (and how much they are probably going to resell them for), but more than I had thought. ^^;

Some happy food thoughts:

I love the concise dietary advice from Michael Pollan's newest book In Defense of Food: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Michael Pollan is the author of the very famous The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I plan on reading some day soon (despite all the criticism of it I've heard) along with In Defense of Food.

Brilliant idea over at Not Martha for making cookies: "We scooped out the dough onto cookie sheets and froze it, then put it into bags in the freezer and now we can bake one cookie at a time, or as needed." When asked how they had frozen them, she added, "We just scooped them out as if we were going to bake them and put them in the freezer instead of the oven. I think they could do with a little flattening pre-freeze, or a slightly cooler oven when baking (350 instead of 375) post-freeze." I love this idea since I don't think our regular oven works, thus I only have a toaster oven to use. If only I could be bothered to make my own cookies...