For those unaware, I'm a pretty big fan of manga (and for those who still derive little meaning from this sentence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga). I follow several series that are published weekly, others that are updated with painfully little frequency and still others that are rarely translated. My favorite is Eiichiro Oda's fantasy-adventure masterwork One Piece. The chapter that was released today contained this bombshell (worry not, I expect most of you reading this are far from the blast radius):

I teach a lab section every Tuesday and Thursday, which I find to be enjoyable and sometimes pretty useful for my comprehension of basic physics (in particular, the recent refresher on principle rays was illuminating). I had originally intended to compile documentation on the worst measurements that my students would manage to produce on the acceleration due to gravity, but my plans were quickly thwarted when I was assigned to teach the third quarter of introductory physics; gravity is old hat to these weathered veterans of Newton's Laws. Of course, this merely delays my schemes, as I have already requested to teach the second quarter next time; providing counterexamples that involve the students not flying off into space and not being compressed into a millimeter thin paste is an inevitability. 


Tomorrow will truly be a day of reckoning; consecutive midterms will test my mind and my metal. I eagerly await the challenge.


Since I have now broached the subject of One Piece, I would be rude to so quickly abandon it. When a new chapter is released, expect that I will post a character from the series. Hence the villain of this post will be none other than one of Oda's greatest antagonists, Crocodile.

This cigar smoking, hook wielding, coat and cravat wearing pirate is, unbelievably, even more dangerous than he looks. Known as Mr. Zero and the head of a secret organization called Baroque Works, Crocodile's malevolence cannot be overstated. With conspiracy, theft and murder as his tools, he attempted to fool a country into overthrowing its government so that he could gain control of one of the world's most devastating weapons. Even supposing one can counteract his labyrinthine plots, stopping him physically presents an even greater challenge. Crocodile possesses the powers of the Suna Suna no Mi (Sand Sand Fruit) meaning not only that his entire body is actually composed of sand making him nearly impossible to damage, but worse that he can manipulate the material at his will, giving him the fearsome powers of sandstorms, flight and instantaneous desiccation. After being defeated he declined to escape prison at first citing that "he didn't feel like it," and deigned to leave his cell only because wanted to try to kill the strongest man in the world. Yeah.