TV helps your brain.

Have you ever noticed that the casts of CSI and Teen Titans match up, personality-wise, almost one-for-one?

Grissom : Robin
Catherine : Starfire
Warrick : Cyborg
Nick : Beast Boy
Sara : Raven

I'm just sayin', is all, here.

The liver's connected to the...oh, crap...

Scott at Polite Dissent tries to make sense of some nonsensical anatomy in a recent Legion of Super-Heroes tale.

Martha Stewart Living. In Prison.

The Washington Post takes a look at the facility where Martha Stewart will serve her jail sentence for lying about crimes the government admitted it couldn't prove were committed:

"There's a tremendous loss of control. Your life is regimented from when you get up to what you wear to what belongings you can have," said white-collar defense attorney Michael Kendall.

Stewart also may find herself under constant scrutiny from longer-term prisoners seeking to curry favor with the guards by reporting potential infractions, said Todd A. Bussert, a New Haven, Conn., lawyer who specializes in post-conviction work. "She's going to have a tougher time than most," he said.

Alderson was founded in 1927. The federal government had found itself with a large number of female inmates thanks to laws that made a federal crime of prostitution targeting military bases. Over the years, it has housed such well-known women as Holiday, who served time for illegal drugs and worked in the prison's garment factory, and Iva "Tokyo Rose" D'Aquino, the notorious World War II propagandist. Before the prison was converted to a lower-security camp in 1988, it housed a higher-security unit that held the two women who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore.
[...]
Both Fromme and Moore attempted to escape before they were transferred elsewhere. But they and most other inmates who have walked away were easily recaptured in this isolated area that lost its Amtrak passenger service in 2001 and has only limited air service nearby.

That isolation is why West Virginia was not on the multimedia entrepreneur's list of preferred prisons. When Stewart volunteered earlier this month to serve her time while continuing to appeal her conviction for lying about her sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock, she asked to be assigned either to Danbury, Conn., or Coleman, Fla. But the Florida federal prisons have been hit hard by the hurricane season, and Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said Alderson, Coleman and Danbury all are over capacity.

So subliminable it's SUPER-liminable!

Reason's Jacob Sullum takes down his daughter's homework worksheet that talks about "hidden persuaders" in advertising. Is it just me or does that term sound like something out of the Donnie Darko time-travel cosmology?

Vincent, we hardly knew ye

So it turns out that Mark Hale of ChaosMonkey is the guy who named The Goat. Lucky bastard!

The company you keep

The inspiration for this blog's title makes McSweeney's list of "Actual Superheroes From the Pages of International and Obscure Comic Books Who Are Unlikely to See Their Origin Stories Developed Into Movies." Which doesn't strike me as precisely fair; I mean, Matter-Eater Lad was simply born with his power to consume matter in all its forms because that's an ability natural to the people of his homeworld of Bismoll. And then he joined the Legion of Super-Heroes. As origins go, it's pretty prosaic; it's not like there's radiation or cosmic rays involved. A fuller -- albeit borderline reverential -- picture of our namesake's history can be read here.

Hmm. Looking over that list a second time, methinks the author of the McSweeney's piece has been spending a lot of time over at Gone and Forgotten...

Bwah-HAH! I got your ass!

I've been saying for years that, for all of George Lucas' protestations to the contrary, that a DVD release of the theatrical cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy will probably come in 2007. That year will be the 30th anniversary of the first movie's release and provides a perfect opportunity for a "because you demanded it..." non-apology.

Yesterday Van Ling, producer of the newly-released DVD set, did a chat on WashingtonPost.com, and lo, there came a hint:

I don't believe there will be another release of the Star Wars Classic Trilogy for several years, until probably 2007, which is the 30th anniversary. So this is money well spent now.

I'm just sayin', here, is all. I'm also going to guess that the 2007 release will feature BOTH versions of the films to avoid the embarassment of the theatrical cuts outselling the special editions. (Though I must ask: Does anyone really care about the changes to Jedi?)

Thanks to De Baisch's Retroactive Continuity for the link to the chat.

Skyeteer

I haven't seen Sky Captain yet, though it's nice that it's done so well in its first weekend of release. As enthusiastic as so many of my fellow geeks are, however, I can't shake the nagging, wholly irrational feeling that its target audience is everyone who still insists that The Rocketeer was the Best Superhero Movie ever...

William Shatner rules

Bob Greenberger gives praise to the Shatner.

UPDATE: The link should be working now. Sorry 'bout that.

Now that's just sad

I find the news of Britney Spears' wedding just plain depressing; some people can handle fame and some people, clearly, can't. It's hard not to look at her public crackup of the last year and change and not suspect that she'd be better off if she'd never gotten rich and famous and had married a perfectly nice footbal player right out of high school. Or not; what the hell do I know?

The League of Extraordinarily Mercurial Gentlemen Who Were Impish Scamps in Their Early Appearances But Became Detached, Brooding, and Dour Later On

1. Charlie Brown, who in the early years of Peanuts was a little wiseacre running around playing pranks on Patty and had a tagline, "I still get my laughs!" that causes me to crack up whenever I read it.
2. Angel, who was a smirking mystery dude who oozed charm all over the first episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer before becoming tortured and brooding later on.
3. Gil Grissom, who in the first two episodes of CSI flirted with three women, cracked bad jokes, and played to the crowd when tossing dummies off the roof of a casino while investigating a murder -- a far cry from the later presentation of the character, whose response to Sara's advances is generally a blank stare.

Any I missed?

I'm surprised I have to explain this

The new Justice League Unlimited series has been a hoot, with its increased cast of characters, short-form storytelling, and a slowly emerging season-long storyarc. As with any such endeavor, of course, there are nitpicking fanboys picking nits. Two in particular demand a response, even if that response is so obvious that I'm surprised I have to explain this.

1. The Question's depiction as a conspiracy theorist in "Fearful Symmetry" in no way, shape, or form diminished or insulted the character or his creator, Steve Ditko, because the Question is right about everything. That doesn't make him a nut, that makes him the smartest (or at least most perceptive) guy in the room.
   
2. The reason J'Onn J'Onzz included Vibe on the mission team before Booster Gold was to show the audience how apprehensive J'Onn was about Booster's abilities as a hero. That wasn't the writers insulting Booster, that was J'Onn using shorthand to show his exasperation with Booster's quest for fame and fortune through super-heroics.
   

Like I said, I'm surprised I have to explain this.

It's not like I didn't pay to see Starsky & Hutch...

The Dukes of Hazzard movie looks like it might actually be worth seeing:

Broken Lizard's Jay Chandrasekhar is directing the movie with the script having been penned by the five person comedy troupe.

That's right, the Super Troopers guys are writing and directing it. I'm predicting now that Brian Cox will be tapped to play Boss Hogg. Oh, and the article also has some info about casting some guys to play the leads, but that's much less interesting than who's writing and directing it.

Legendary

Lauren Bacall took issue with a reporter's description of Nicole Kidman as a "legend":

When the interviewer referred to Kidman as a "legend" Bacall got a little snippy.

She cut off the interviewer, saying "She's not a legend. She's a beginner. What is this 'legend'? She can't be a legend at whatever age she is. She can't be a legend, you have to be older."

Bacall went on to say that real legends do cheesy TV commercials for Tuesday Morning.

Time, time, time...

It's natural to feel like you've wasted three days at mid-afternoon on the last day of a holiday weekend. Then you read about something like this and think maybe wasting time without accomplishing anything is OK.

Fortune favors the quick

I thought it on Friday, but Ken Layne actually blogged it:

After being shot, Reagan famously quipped to his doctors that he hoped they were Republicans. My hunch is that Clinton also had a quip for his surgeons: "Thank god we made the Friday morning news cycle."

Wayne...I feel kinda funny...

Rank these people from most wrong to find vaguely somewhat I've-been-drinking attractive to least:

1. The animated Supergirl;
   
2. Megan Mullally (but only in CheapTickets.com commercials);
   
3. Kirstie Allsop of the BBC's Location, Location, Location;
   
4. Lindsay Lohan.
   

Apparently, spending is going out of style.

Watching Bush's speech tonight, I couldn't help but wonder how a candidate presenting himself as a fiscal conservative and ideological heir to Ronald Reagan could kick off and intersperse throughout his acceptance speech with calls for increased government spending. Turns out I'm not the only one, as Howard Kurtz, who is far from a liberal, is wondering the same thing:

As the president delivered an almost Clintonian laundry list of proposals -- after months of offering few second-term specifics -- some questions popped into my mind.

How's he gonna pay for it?

There was, you might have noticed, no mention of the nearly half-trillion-dollar budget deficit. And Bush called for making his tax cuts permanent. So that doesn't leave him a whole lot of money to play with. More job training, more community college funds, more Pell grants, 7 million more affordable homes -- where does he get the cash? How does he then pivot and call Kerry a big spender?

A "simpler, fairer" tax code -- very Reaganesque. The Gipper pulled it off in 1986. But how exactly does Bush plan to do this? Which "special interest" provisions will he get rid of? Surely not the mortgage tax break, or his new, lower capital gains rate for investment income.

The president's regulatory proposals -- on tort reform and Social Security -- were definitely crowd-pleasers. But these went nowhere in the first term.

Bush said Kerry wants to raise taxes -- but omitted the fact that the proposal is limited to the $200,000-plus crowd. Hey, a speech doesn't have room for everything.

I demand satisfaction

After watching lunatic turncoat Zell Miller challenge him to a duel for the high crime of asking him questions, I take back everything bad I've ever said about Chris Matthews (whom I saw eating at Booeymonger's in Georgetown on Columbus Day 1994, a factoid appropos of nothing except perhaps that my fellow Hoya Norah O'Donnell was one of Matthews' panelists tonight).

UPDATE: Here is what's said to be a link to the Matthews/Miller exchange (I'm at home on dialup, so I'm taking a commenter at Washington Monthly at his word). This needs to be remixed like the Dean Scream.

Scotty gets his star

Laura Gjovaag links to these pictures of James Doohan getting his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. I see George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and Grace Lee Whitney in attendance, and at least one of those "that guy" character actors. I've always been fascinated at the enduring popularity of the "second tier" characters from the original series -- their characterization took place in the margins of the series, while Kirk and Spock and, to a lesser extent, McCoy sucked up most of the dramatic oxygen available (which is not a knock on the series, its creators, or any of the actors; that just seems to be how TV series worked in the late 1960s). And so it seems to have fallen to the fans of the series, during the liminal decade between the series' cancellation and its return on the big screen, to have projected and extrapolated much of their impressions of the characters from their repeated viewings of the 79 available episodes. In a way, the limited nature of their characters made this simpler; there just wasn't all that much TO know about Scotty or Sulu or whomever, and if they never attained the depth or screen time of their counterparts on the later, more ensemble-style Trek series, I think they've come to occupy a place in the popular culture firmament that none of the later characters can ever hope to match.

All of which is a very rambling, roundabout way to say it's cool that Mr. Doohan has gotten this honor as he retires from the public stage. Sail on, Scotty.

Squeal like a...um, wait...

Via Obscure Store: A man makes love to a pig. The story is perhaps the most deadpan use of the inverted triangle AP style I've ever seen.

Hercules goes bananas

Listening to Governor Schwarzenegger's speech last night, I found myself agreeing with many of the broad principles he discussed, even as I found myself thinking, gee, it's pretty tough to see how the GOP can now claim to have stood with Nelson Mandela (when the Reagan administration was, shall we say, less than critical of apartheid) or the protesters in Tiananmen Square (when the first Bush administration [which I'm quite amazed to realize I now think of as "the good one"] reacted to the Chinese government's massacre by giving China most favored nation trade status). Schwarzenegger himself is an oddly compelling messenger and I've got enough libertarian leanings that my head nodded a few times early on, until I came to my senses and remembered that Republicans by and large have a hell of a time living up to any of their stated principles, and tend to spend money like drunken sailors and vastly increase the scope and snooping power of government whenever they get their hands on it. William Saletan goes even further, with this argument about why you shouldn't vote for Bush even if you're a Schwarzenegger Republican:

The GOP under Bush is nothing like what it was under Lincoln or even Roosevelt. The notion of wartime deficit tax cuts would have made Lincoln ill.

There's a curious gap in Schwarzenegger's speech as he segues from his litany of Republican principles to the case for Bush. Essentially, the principles vanish. He stops talking about accountability and starts talking about faith. He asks for "faith in the resourcefulness of the American people, and faith in the U.S. economy. To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!" The audience roars—it's the loudest moment of the convention—but the descent from logic into grade-school humiliation is unpersuasive and revealing. The American economy is performing far below par. Bush got the tax cuts he wanted when he came into office. He said they would fix the economy. They didn't. He will be the first president in Schwarzenegger's lifetime to preside over a net loss of jobs.

[...]

Schwarzenegger implies that giving up on Bush would be un-American. "We may hit a few bumps, but America always moves ahead. That's what Americans do," he says. But remember that Republican principle about the government being accountable to the people. The suggestion that giving up on Bush means giving up on ourselves—which is essentially the argument of the Bush campaign—directly subverts this principle. Bush is your employee. You don't have to vote for him just because he's in charge and represents the spirit of the nation. That's Communist talk.

Same goes for Bush's Iraq policy. It's a betrayal of everything Republicans claim to stand for—fiscal prudence, the reservation of U.S. military resources for the protection of the national interest, and skepticism of government's ability to shape society. The weapons of mass destruction that Bush touted as the reason for spending our blood and treasure in Iraq are simply not there. We were not greeted with sweets and flowers as the administration suggested. We have lost nearly 1,000 soldiers. We have sunk about $200 billion into this mistake, and there is no end in sight. It's a complete failure.

Unable to defend the policy, Schwarzenegger defends Bush as "a man of inner strength. He is a leader who doesn't flinch, who doesn't waver, who does not back down." But "inner strength" is exactly the kind of New Age pap no hard-headed Republican should fall for. Accountability means judging a president by visible results. Schwarzenegger says leadership is "about making decisions you think are right and then standing behind those decisions." Fine. But standing behind your decisions means taking responsibility at election time. This is election time, and Bush's decisions have turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Schwarzenegger applauds Bush for taking a hard line on terrorism. So do I. Bush's clarity on this subject is his finest quality. But it doesn't make his foreign policy wise, any more than liberal piety about compassion makes liberal social programs effective. In Iraq, Bush has confused a mortal enemy with a less urgent one, and he has botched the worthy idea of American military leadership by biting off more than we can chew. The hatred manifested by terrorists "is no match for America's decency," Schwarzenegger opines. Decency? Do you think we're going to defeat Osama Bin Laden with decency? That's liberal talk. What we need is smart allocation of our resources. At this, Bush has utterly failed.

Resolved:

Underworld is the Derek Zoolander of vampire movies. Discuss.