Random: Nobody would greenlight this. Nobody.

Oogh, I'm short of sleep today -- but I wouldn't have missed the end of last night's Olympic gymnastics competition for ... um, all the tea in China? ( Sometimes the universe reminds you where the stories come from ... )

Review: FMA 86

Oh, wonderful. Best line of the chapter: "No one beats me the same way twice." Here on display is one of the reasons I'm so impressed by Arakawa's work -- she doesn't repeat herself. Her characters can confound each other's expectations (and ours), learning from their history and solving their problems not with magical power-ups, sudden accesses of skill under emotional pressure, or di ex machinae, but with logic and attention to the strengths and weaknesses of themselves and their enemies.

(The second best lines? "Don't go running away with my body." "Screw you! It was my body to begin with!" :-)

I continue to have good feelings about where this story is going. I also think it's going to run about a hundred chapters, give or take. We're in the endgame ...