Rocking in Hakata

If you were freaked out by Nara’s new mascot, Sento-kun, when he was announced, you might be able to relax a bit. A new challenger has arrived. I haven’t followed it particularly closely, but it was on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun this morning. Here’s some background from No-sword and Global Voices. Our buddies at Tofugu even have their own contest going on to rid the world of Sento-kun. Well, someone beat them to it, at least on the semi-official level.

Newcomer Manto-kun!

Oh heavens, what is that awful monster?
AAAGH! Sento-kun!

It’s an improvement, at least. Ha ha. I mean, it would take some work to come up with something as hideously creepy as Sento-kun all over again. :: full body shudder ::

Deas Customary Drivel

What gives? Anybody know how to fix this? If I enable smartfeed or something in FeedBurner will it help? Is there a way to tell it to ignore WordPress markup? Is it a character encoding issue? Hmmm…

It’s replacing some punctuation with code burps, showing the < div > tags that I use to position things, and otherwise just looking bad. Any help would be appreciated.

Deas Customary Drivel