Hanachan drew up this pic of Her Royal Hotness for me in response to an art meme she posted on her blog recently. Hana said she had a lot of fun drawing it, now everyone can have fun looking at it.

The final results of Paul Thomas’ latest H!P Poll are up, and Her Royal Hotness has placed #3 in the polling with 10,900 votes. Seven spaces in the top 10 were dominated by current MoMusu members (appropriately, leader Ai Takahashi is also top of the H!P poll), with the other three taken up by all three  members of Buono!. 

Obviously, hardcore Reina fans like myself and CK had the Wonkylicious one at the top of their personal poll results (mine here, and Chris’ here), but the young man who operates the fan site Reina Reina Reina came up with what he calls his one “true” top 10. Given that this worship site is headed for its third year of existence and I was doing posts of Reina eyecandy with the subtitle So Hot She Shits Fire on the original Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama (version 1.0, long lost by a hair-metal drummer) for over a year before I started this blog, I beg to differ on who the more devoted Reina fan is.

I said over at TGML I was serving cake here at So Hot She Shits Fire rather than the other way around like I did last year. And since this is a worship blog for the Wonkylicious One, the cake being served here is the best cake of all to serve on a site devoted to Her Royal Hotness: cheesecake!

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Yes, I know things have been a bit inactive over the past month or so here at SHSSF, but after finally getting to log on today I found a nice way to make up for it… the PV for Morning Musume’s new single “Naichau Kamo” is out, and guess who’s front and center just like on “Resonant Blue”?

Yes, Reina and I will be “discussing” this and maybe a couple of other things soon, but I’ll leave initial comments to the mothership first.

reina_t_1111: Geez, we’ve both been busy little beavers, haven’t we?
minimoniotaku: Seriously.  I just got my Christmas shopping done on Saturday and my wrapping finished two hours ago while watching the Bomb Kyu Bomb Kyu concert.
reina_t_1111: Well, you know what I’ve been up to, what about with you?
minimoniotaku: On top of my usual daily insanity, I’ve been fighting first a bacterial infection I caught two weeks ago, then a cold.
reina_t_1111: Ugh. Been down that road myself. Speaking of past roads traveled, remember a year ago today?
minimoniotaku: Yeah, when you joked that you were going to be under my Christmas tree last year?
reina_t_1111: Yep. It’s a good thing that didn’t really happen considering that you proposed to Tara last Christmas Eve. Can you imagine the aftermath?
minimoniotaku: That would have been pretty uncomfortable!
reina_t_1111: And yet funny. Tara would be like, “So what else did you get for Christmas?” “Reina Tanaka.”
minimoniotaku: “Oh, you got something with Reina whatshername on it?” “No, I got Reina Tanaka.”
reina_t_1111: “I know, you got a stuffed Reina doll. She’d better not be lifesize and anatomically correct!”
minimoniotaku: “I’m afriad she’s neither stuffed nor neutered.”
reina_t_1111: Yeah, and then in the aftermath you’d have one short engagement and I’d have been kicked out of the band.  
minimoniotaku: Thank god there really isn’t a Santa Claus!
reina_t_1111: Who needs a Santa Claus when you’ve got me and the rest of Morning Musume?
minimoniotaku: Exactly.
reina_t_1111: Hehehe. Lub you, Ceej, and Merry Christmas.
minimoniotaku: Lub you too, Reina, and Merry Christmas.

Before we begin, a special thought needs to go out to Kaori Iida and her husband. The news was made public today that the MoMusu O.G.’s son died of chronic renal failure back in late July. Iida laid her son’s ashes to rest at a memorial service in September, and statements were released by both Johnson and H!P today. The news broke at Hello! Online’s board at their Iida thread here; I’m writing this late Friday night (11.28.08), but there’s no doubt that H!O’s news page will have translations of everything related to this sad news before 11.29.08 comes to a close.

Hello! Online have apparently been busy little beavers, because they’ve unveiled a new feature of their own: A translation of Reina’s latest Five Stars episode! In part of the episode/transcript, Reina talks about taking a bubble bath… and I’d write something about how certain sectors of Reina’s fans might want to get their minds out of the butter at the image of Her Royal Hotness wearing nothing but soapsuds and a smile, but according to Reina’s comments, JunJun may have to do the same thing as the rest of the Tanakawotas out there.

The episode itself isn’t without its musical moments, of course - Reina plays another cut from COVER YOU (check the mothership for a review, of course), but also gives some airtime to the new C-ute single and commemorates her birthday (funny how she’s mentioning it two weeks afterward - I presume that Reina is cutting her talking segments to some of these episodes in advance) by playing her own “Kira Kira Fuyu no Shiny G” and a song by, appropriately, the band 19. As always, H!O’s tracker is your hookup (registration required).

Reina in Hawaii? No, I don’t mean her Alo! Hello photobook and DVD. According to her short-but-sweet answer to this week’s Pocket Weekly question, Her Royal Hotness wants to live there someday. Judging from some of the pics in the photobook, she definitely seemed to enjoy being in the 50th State (and around the time of her 17th birthday, too.).

At Wotaku Now!, Shirow reports that amongst the strange search terms that end up leading websurfers to his blog (including a couple that are horrible toward’s Reina’s fellow Aa! Airi Suzuki) is “Reina Tanaka has skinny legs”. I’m reminded of the days when I was running now-former ECW valet Francine Fournier’s official homepage and discovered that a lot of marks were landing there hoping to find nude and XXX pics of her. Hmmm, I should check the search log for SHSSF and TGML…

At his/her H!O blog, Sadako_Sasaki has apparently found some creative inspiration in Her Royal Hotness, using her as the inspiration for a story she’s writing. I can definitely identify with that!

I couldn’t resist…

It’s been a bit quiet this week with Her Royal Hotness in the leadup to the release of [COVER YOU]. (And in my case, that mean’s that tomorrow’s release of the new G’n'R album here in the States [exclusively through a big-box retailer but not Sprawl-Mart like some bands I could mention - sorry for the stray into the mothership's territory] is merely going to be a tideover until the new MoMusu CD arrives in my mailbox later this week.) If you can’t wait those extra few days for your copy to arrive in the mail or for the album to end up on US iTunes, Reina has seen fit to play three songs from the album on FIVE STARS this past week, and Hello! Online has the torrent of that episode.

But fan OPVs and other YouTube uploads have been popping up, like this one using footage from Alo! Hello (and elsewhere) but whose soundtrack isn’t identified by the creator or poster:

And then there’s another creative person who decided to do a bit of manga-ization of Reina, CGI style, and shows off the results in a short YouTube clip. (I’m reminded of an article a few months back about contact lenses that can make your pupils anime-sized.) It’s a bit freaky - so suffice it to say you’ve been warned in advance.

There’s also apparently been a little crate-digging going on, as someone else has shared a live performance of Aa! doing “First Kiss” on (I am presuming, since there’s no identification at the page itself) PopJam. Can you believe that this record was out SIX YEARS AGO?!?. Reina was pretty back then (but obviously with no indication of how sexy she’d become), but the real holy shit moment now, as then, was then nine-year-old Airi Suzuki singing her ass off.

Last week we mentioned that a translation of Reina’a new DVD was up on the torrents. If torrents aren’t your thing, the entire translation is on YouTube thanks to one enterprising fan. It’s in six parts, so start here.

If you ever wondered what would be a good thing to cook for Reina if the opportunity to have her over for dinner arose, her answer to this week’s Pocket Weekly question seems to suggest that a good ribeye steak would be perfect for Her Royal Hotness. (I usually rub mine with Montreal steak seasoning and then throw it on a Foreman grill for ten minutes.)

Left out of last week’s roundup - Vee has both of the covers of [COVER YOU] up at Pink Wota. Let’s just say my fellow Cancerian and favorite J-Pop blogger has my number near the end of the piece.

A belated (to us) short-but-sweet birthday tribute to Reina from Sekushii Island a new blog from a longtime fan, hosted by pengie of unchained. Believe me, I can ID with having to blog on the fly.

Because I don’t always get to catch them and probably you don’t either, here’s what the blogosphere had to say and display about Her Royal Hotness this past week:

A MoMusu fan happened to be in the right place at the right time when he discovered that Reina and her mother were a few feet away from him/her in Tokyo’s Sibuya district last week. Nakane at hello!musume shares the pictures, which she calls “stalker” photos, but these are more like photos of a normal music lover thinking, “Holy shit! It’s Reina Tanaka! Where’s my camera phone?”. I have to agree with pengie at IW when she takes note of Reina’s early November outfit: 

The thing that’s bothering me about these photos is the way she is dressed. Everyone else is wearing coats, scarves, long pants, what have you. It’s cold in Japan right now, you know? Reina is wearing a coat and fuzzy boots. And that’s… about it.

Reina, honey, you know we love you, but put on some damn pants. Sheesh.

Hello!Island caught wind of some ads for a Japanese pizza chain featuring members of Morning Musume and company. Apparently the ads are catching on with H!P wotas, as a couple of the other photographs suggest. (How come the TV ads only feature Buono! though?)

Reina’s new photobook Very Reina (yeah, I know, why didn’t I mention it sooner?) is (not surprisingly) getting a lot of notice around our part of the blogosphere. The latest to have to pick their jaw up off of the floor is MorningBerryz, who shares scans of the entire PB for your viewing pleasure - or if you’re Photoshop-inclined and want to start working on some new wallpapers and LiveJournal avatars (hint, hint).

If you have the companion DVD (or a torrent thereof) to Reina’s photobook and, like me, know very little nihongo outside of words like “kawaii”, “ganbare”, and “zakennayo”, Hello!Fansubs already has a subtitled version of the entire DVD out (they had it ready for Reina’s birthday), and Hello!Online’s tracker has it up in H264 (iPod/PSP) format here and in Xvid format here.

Of course, the commencement of Reina’s 19th trip around the sun (as my good friend, punk legend Mike Watt puts it) had its fair share of notice. Sasaki at Sasaki’s H!P Weblog almost forgot but posted in time, while Morningtime commemorates the occasion with a few favorite shots from Very Reina and Reina’s live-in-studio cover version of Country Musume’s “Iroppoi Onna ~ Sexy Baby” (which we also posted here last year). Chris of CK’s H!P Blog fame (who missed seeing Reina and her mama by one day during his recent MoMusu/AKB48 hajj), meanwhile, commemorated this blog’s first anniversary at International Wota while looking at Reina’s birthday as a national holiday - or at least falling on the same day as one!