Simulation means "near verity," which can be understood as "not quite real," and in Japan that is taken as permission for artistic liberty: so an ersatz gorilla shall be drawn straight from the morphology of Nintendo. But verisimilitude is near enough, and a funny-faced fugitive ape is treated as just as dangerous — to be kept away from steel platforms, blondes and barrels.

Fishermen can cheat in a modern style as waterborne pointer Kamome tags schools like a submarine spotter. No need to fib afterwards: Kamome let it get away!

And after twelve months' gestation, the Honda Motor Company has announced its delivery of Asimo the Second — in robotic aristocracy, however, it is the penultimate son who is consigned to heir presumptive. New Asimo is faster, more dextrous; closer to the design ideal. The first astronaut-like robot stands alongside its successor in public exhibits, if only to dramatize progress in humanoid articulation by way of inferiority. Still, old Asimo — and the Second, when it too is superseded — will remain on Honda's escutcheon. Machines recede in obsolescence but are never lost, safeguarded in museums and picture books, granted the title "vintage" or "classic"; thanks to their human keepers' compassion for antiquity.