Green Bay Day

Today marks the first time in the history of ever that I cared about the outcome of a football game. It's not that I'm superstitious, I just like all the signs and portents pointing in my preferred direction...

Here endeth the Whedonverse

I got a weird feeling reading the news that the final season of Angel will be released on February 15, 2005. Once it's out, that's that, barring the ever-more-unlikely news of some spinoff or another.

I do wish there were going to be commentaries for "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco" and "Smile Time," two of my favorite episodes of any series, ever. Ah, well...

There's a good buck in that Hell racket

Remember the King of the Hill where a new neighbor set up a "Holy House" to protest Halloween and bring eight-year-olds to Jesus? Apparently it's a good way to make some cash:

Perhaps the most extreme incarnation is Hell House, a morality play featuring a gay man dying of AIDS, a lesbian suicide, drunken driving and a botched abortion -- and the reeking, fiery hell that is the consequence of such sins, said the Rev. Keenan Roberts, pastor of Destiny Church of the Assemblies of God near Denver.

Since 1996, Roberts has sold 600 $299 Hell House how-to kits that include scripts, detailed suggestions on music, costumes and props -- including how to select the best cut of meat to depict an aborted fetus -- and tips for dealing with skeptical journalists.

Covers

Ian Brill links to an awesome Marvel cover from the 70s: The Fantastic Four vs. Godzilla. It's the kind of cover that would leap out at you from the quarter bin, because it's just that awesome a cover.

Problem is, I suspect, that the story inside doesn't come anywhere near the scenario the cover makes you imagine. I wonder if that's not where so much of the appeal of comics, particularly long-running shared-universe superhero comics, comes from. Once you've got a basic knowledge of who characters are, covers invite you to fill in the blanks yourself. This cover would be really silly if you didn't know who the Fantastic Four were. But if you know Reed's a brilliant scientist, Ben's a brawler, the FF has faced lots of monsters, and so on, you start to wonder if Sue's force-field can contain Godzilla, or if Godzilla's radioactive breath can put out Johnny's flame or make Ben sweat, and so on. It's not all that different from the thought-process that takes place between panels, it just happens on a larger scale and draws on more of the reader's existing knowledge of characters and situations.

That Julie Schwartz fella, I think he was onto something with having the writers try to come up with stories for covers that had already been drawn.

Wonderfalls

Good news: Wonderfalls' DVD release is set for February 1, 2005. Later than I'd like, but better late than never.

Weird news: If your little-known series stars a strikingly attractive young woman, would you make your cover art look like this? Is that View-Master attached to her head or something?

Quiz time

The "Bush was wired" story refuses to die. What I want to know is, given how incoherent Bush was in that first debate, who was on the other end of the wire that night? Was it:

A. Cookie Monster,
B. Forrest Gump,
C. Grimlock, or
D. Bizarro?

Baseless election prediction

If Bush loses, Martha Stewart will get pardoned.

I have zero evidence to support this. Just a weird hunch-like intuition.

The weight of office

Something struck me while I was watching the third debate (even if it's taken me weeks to get around to writing about it): George W. Bush should never have been President.

I don't mean in terms of the fiasco that was the 2000 election. Rather, it was hard to watch him and not conclude that this was a man who had never really thought about what holding this job would and could entail. You can't be President and have your hands clean. And I don't think that ever really penetrated his brain, and has helped contribute to the weird disconnect from reality we saw at times in the debates.

If he hadn't won (or run), he would have finished his term as governor of Texas and retired to that semi-royalty status that Texans grant their former governors, sat on some corporate boards or something, and had a nice quite semi-retirement. He would have been better off. So would we have been.

Unfair, but funny. And that's what matters!

Here's an amusing, if hideously unfair, photo from the ongoing debacle of the Kentucky Senate race.

Uphill

The Washington Post's Jabari Asim is holding out hope that UPN's Kevin Hill will be that rarest of television animals, a successful dramatic series with an African-American lead. I understand his point; I remember waiting at the D.C. courthouse with She Who Must Be Obeyed to get our marriage license in the fall of 2000. Instead of muzak, the waiting area had a local radio station feed, and I remember hearing the DJ urge people to watch that night's premiere of Gideon's Crossing, because (paraphrasing) "We don't get many shows like this." That made an impression on the white guy waiting for his number to be called.

Kerry, Catholics, and abortion

Andrew Sullivan is one of many bloggers speculating on John Kerry's surge of support from Catholic voters following the debates:

My own hunch is that undecided Catholics have been repulsed by the way in which the hierarchy has intervened in this election, and the outrageous notion that voting for one candidate can amount to a sin worthy of confession. Catholics know what is appropriate in politics, they know how they feel about the moral standing of the current hierarchy, and they can vote freely in a secular democracy.

Which is a good point. But I think there's more to it than that. My ears perked up during the third debate when Kerry described the decision to have an abortion as one between (paraphrasing here) "a woman, her doctor, and God." I suspect that the addition of God into the mix did a lot to make Catholic voters who are uncomfortable and uneasy about both the legality of abortion and the cost a ban would have (since making it illegal wouldn't stop abortions, it would just mean messier, uglier, more dangerous ones) see Kerry in a new light; I think he spoke to the deeply conflicted feelings many Catholics -- among whom I suspect many of the teachers I had in 17 years of Catholic education are included -- have on the issue, and gave them a reassurance that he saw a moral dimension to the question that many previous Democratic candidates have seemed to miss.

To infinity...and BEYOND!

Shatner wants to go into space. Did I mention that William Shatner rules?

The Jesse Show

Really, should anyone be surprised that the Ventura endorsement of Kerry is news as much for the fact of the endorsement as for Ventura's weird behavior during it?

Bored bored bored bored bored

It's really amazing how this season of Smallville is capable of a having subplot that involves a guy moving from Paris to Smallville to be with his underage girlfriend and getting a job at her high school -- which must be some sort of stalker distance record -- and said girlfriend's body being mysteriously scarred by some alien power, and making said subplot unspeakably, impossibly boring. Sometimes I get the feeling no one on the Smallville production staff has ever sat down and thought about just how creepy every single relationship they've put Lana in is...at this rate, they won't need to write a tearful, wistful parting of Lana and Clark in the final days of the series, because she'll be dead in a gutter somewhere. I mean, DAMN.

The Seven Soldiers of Victory get archived

Several thoughts ran through my mind at the news that DC is releasing a Seven Soldiers of Victory Archive in January.

1. What the hell? (This Fanboy Rampage comment thread is probably right that it's tied into Grant Morrison's upcoming Seven Soldiers revamp)
   
2. There are only six of the seven soldiers on the cover. Why no love for Stripesy?
   
3. Guess we won't see Legion Volume 13 in January.
   
4. Versions of six members of the Seven Soldiers of Victory have appeared on Justice League Unlimited: Crimson Avenger, Green Arrow, the Shining Knight, Stargirl (AKA the new Star-Spangled Kid), S.T.R.I.P.E. (AKA Stripesy), and Vigilante. The rights to Speedy are probably tied up because of his appearances on the Teen Titans cartoon.
   
5. This archive reprints the SSOV's appearances in Leading Comics #1-4 (Great name for a comic, by the way; I guess "Noteworthy Comics" was taken...). According to this fan site, the team appeared for 14 issues. Will we see another three or four volumes to collect their whole run?
   

The Internet is weird.

So this afternoon I decided to check some blogs before I did some class reading. I headed over to Atrios, where he'd linked to a post by Matt Yglesias about the "the creeping Putinization of American life," which was very interesting and thought-provoking, and then I read a little further and discovered another post Yglesias had made about a comment I'd posted back in July about the From Hell movie adaptation to a blog comments discussion about idiot plots.

The Internet is weird.

Our Vader, who art in...?

I had no idea.

Reap as ye sow

I know I'm not the only Democrat who was vaguely, kinda, sorta uncomfortable by JOhn Kerry's reference to Mary Cheney, Dick Cheney's gay lesbian daughter who's a gay homosexual. I asked myself if that was fair, if it wasn't some sort of sop to bigotry or something, if that was the kind of thing I wanted my candidate doing.

But then I remembered how the Bush campaign turned John McCain's adopted daughter into a political football in South Carolina in 2000. So, fuck it.

Best DVD cover ever

Behold: Sealab 2021 Season 2.

Without a rehearsal?

TNT has been showing the earliest episodes of Without a Trace on Monday nights, and this week's was fascinating to watch from an acting perspective.

Throughout the episode, Anthony LaPaglia's Jack Malone and Poppy Montgomery's Samantha Spade have a very odd dynamic going on; she's being flirty and he's being withdrawn. At the end of the episode, we learn that Jack and his wife have been separated for three months. Later on in the series, we learn that Jack and Sam had had a relationship that ended before the series began (if I'm remembering correctly). And that's how LaPaglia was playing this episode, while Montgomery seemed to be playing it as if she were flirting with the safely married guy she wouldn't mind having a relationship with if not for the inconvenient fact of his marriage. It all made for a very weird viewing experience, and reminded me of how William B. Davis has said he made up a different backstory for Cancer Man in every episode of X-Files he appeared in.

DVR

After a major-league VCR FUBAR last weekend (which resulted in us missing the finale of THE COMPLEX: MALIBU and the third episode of WORST WEEK OF MY LIFE on BBCAmerica; if anyone can provide copies, please e-mail me at cgaldieri-at-yahoo-dot-com) we bit the bullet and signed up for a DVR box from our local cable company.

We've had it for less than 8 hours and I'm already in love.

We taped SMALLVILLE and LOST at the same time, as well as the debate. TNT is showing the "Smile Time" episode of ANGEL tomorrow so I'm recording that one just for fun. I've programmed it to tape every new episode of CSI, WITHOUT A TRACE, TEEN TITANS, JUSTICE LEAGUE, SOUTH PARK, LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION, and SCRUBS. We'll give the new season of ENTERPRISE a try, as well as VERONICA MARS.

I am giddy with delight and in awe of the DVR's power.

There is the love of a man for a woman, and then there is the love of a man for a fine Cuban cigar, and then there is the love of a man for his DVR.

Spitting image

I found it really, really strange that President Bush seemed to have spittle-flecked lips at some points during the debate.

Christopher Reeve links

Mark Evanier has some thoughts on the various ironies of Reeve's life, and the ending we won't get to see now.

John Kerry, who referred to Reeve in an answer about stem-cell research during Friday's debate, released a statement.

Kathleen David shares a funny encounter with Reeve in which he was a clueless actor and she was a clueful stage manager; readers who have spent time in and around theatres will appreciate it.

Bad craziness

Kos links to reports of bad craziness and assorted weirdness in the U.S. Senate race in Kentucky.

Christopher Reeve

I saw the news this morning and doubt I can say anything memorable, but what's worth doing is worth doing badly. Christopher Reeve will always be the face I think of when I hear the name "Superman." I've lost count of the number of times I've watched Superman: The Movie; I was four years old when I saw it in the theater and it was one of the first DVDs I ever bought. He made me believe a man could fly, and in fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, and did it with a dignity and grace and charm that other renditions of the character have rarely approached. Since his accident in 1995, I have watched, astonished, at his continuing creative life and his activism for medical research, and I can only pray for that sort of determination and courage should I ever find my world shattered in an instant as he did. Rest in peace, Mr. Reeve, and thank you.

What a Dick

Am I the only person who saw Dick Cheney checking out Cate Edwards after tonight's debate? What a pantload. Big time.

Encyclopedia Disappointmenta

When I read DC was updating its classic Who's Who series with an oversized hardcover DC Comics Encyclopedia, I was more than a little curious; I loved the original and wondered what an updated version would look like. I took a look at the book at Barnes & Noble today and was extremely disappointed, to the point that when I came home one of the first things I did was go online and remove it from my Amazon wish list.

The book's biggest problem might be on the conceptual level; it can't decide if it's a catalog of the DC Universe and its continuity as it stands today or if it's celebrating of everything DC has ever published as a company. The selection of entries is just plain bizarre: We get weird little entries about characters no one has thought of in years and don't exist in DC's continuity any more, like Celeste Rockfish from the Giffen/Bierbaum run of Legion of Super-Heroes, half-page entries dedicated to short-run comics like the universally reviled Lab Rats series, and teeny-tiny listings for members of groups like the Russian super-team The People's Heroes, plus a group entry that duplicates all of the information contained in the individual member listings.

Artistically and production-wise, the book is a mess. Much of the artwork consists of low-quality reproductions from other comics or even past editions of Who's Who, and many of the listings don't even bother presenting a simple, clear full-body shot of their subject. Some of the ones that do THAT do it with shrunk-down, barely-visible copies of art from previous versions of Who's Who. Finally, the colored backgrounds for each entry are distracting and often clash with one another.

It was also depressing to realize just how far the DC Universe has fallen since the glory days of the original series. Entry after entry commemorated some forgotten character created for a stupid sales stunt, like the repulsive "Bloodlines" event, or all those annuals introducing foreign heroes who promptly dropped off the face of the earth, or the all-new, all-lame adjectiveless mid-90s Teen Titans series, or the hideous manga-flavored run of Superman comics from the not-quite-relaunch that came before this not-quite-relaunch.

It was sad, I tell ya, just plain sad.

There were also a few sloppy errors I noticed paging through it: Black Lightning's entry depicted him in the MD Bright-designed costume that was never used in a comic, and Minuteman was depicted in the entry for Mr. Scarlet.

Worst of all, entries contained no credits for their creators or the artists whose work was used in the entries. There was simply an "Artist Acknowledgements" listing in the back of the book.

I'm afraid my verdict is to save your money and buy back issues or some TPBs instead.

Lileks, you ignorant slut.

I didn't realize just how bad the debate had gone for Bush until I read Lileks' insane and stupid rant about it this morning. Here it is, with my comments interspersed:

I hate the debates. I have a vision of 65 million undecided Americans tuning in and making a snap judgment for all the wrong reasons.


Wrong reasons? Like listening to a candidate field questions about major issues in a forum without aides, handlers, and notes? This isn't shooting the messenger, this is shooting the medium. Marshall McLuhan would be proud. Next time just come out and say "Presidents don't need none of that fancy book learning!", m'kay?

Wow, he pounded the podium to emphasize each word - but the other guy pounded each syllable. What’s this about sealing Fallujer? Is it leaking? Did they have a flood?

"Pay no attention to the city in Iraq that has spiraled out of control into a sea of violence and misery! Don't look at how the President has ceded it to the terrorist insurgency in Iraq! Look, look! An iMac!"

But mostly I hate the debates because I simply cannot abide hearing certain statements I’ve been hearing over, and over, and over again. I can’t take any more talk about bringing allies to the table. Which ones? Brazil? Mynmar? Microfrickin’nesia? Are there some incredibly important and powerful nations out there whose existence has hitherto escaped me? Fermany? Gerance? The Galactic Order of the Belgian Dominion? Did we piss off the Vulcans? Who?

Maybe it's the allies Bush touted as part of the "coalition of the willing" that have been dropping like flies, because this President can't even hold that together? And that "bringing allies to the table" would involve actually maintaining the alliances one makes, and working to keep one's allies on one's side instead of cutting and running because you had no farking idea what you were getting into?

If we mean “France and Germany,” then please explain to me why the reluctant participation of these two countries somehow bestows the magic kiss of legitimacy. They want in? Fine. They don’t? Fine. At this point mooning over France is like being that sophomore loser dorm pal who spent his dateless weekends telling his loser roommate about a high school sweetheart who stood him up for the prom. Give it up. Move on. I understand; they are wise and nuanced, we are young and dumb. We’re the cowboy leaning with his back against the bar, elbows on the rail, watching the door; we need our European betters to teach us how to ape the subtle forms of Nijinsky, limbs arrayed in the exquisite form of the Dying Swan.

"Look at how pretty the iMac is! Isn't it a pretty iMac?"

Understood. But I don’t want to be the Dying Swan. And I don’t want posture lessons from a country that spent the last 20 years flopping on its back and grabbing its ankles when Saddam showed up waving stacks of Francs in exchange for bang-sticks. Don’t you think I know about France’s relations with Saddam? Surely the advocates of the French Touch must know, and don’t care. Or they don’t know – in which case their advice is useless.

"This iMac is the only creature in the world that I would ever let marry my child, who is the first child in the history of children to do anything, ever!"

Germany? Whatever.

And it took lots of dead Americans to be able to say that.

The mind boggles at whatever the fuck is meant by this.

Also dead Russians. Is Russia the great ally we’ve dissed? If we invite Russia to help, then we have to tell them things. I don’t want to tell them things. At least as they relate to the battlefield.

"Mustn't tell the things...my precious, precious things..." Because, you know, if the Russians were providing manpower or logistical support or whatever in Iraq now we'd also have to give them the keys to the nukular football, like we did with Poland. Don't forget Poland!

Hmm. Maybe you should, actually. It seems the Poles would like you to.

Perhaps the “ally” is that big blue wobbly mass known as the UN, that paragon of moral clarity, that conscience of the globe. You want to really anger a UN official? Tow his car. Short of that you can get away with anything. (Sudan is on the human rights commission, to cite a prominent and amusing detail. It’s like putting Tony Soprano on the New Jersey Waste Management Regulation Board.) I don’t worry that the UN is angry with us. I’d be worried if they weren’t.

The sad thing about this sort of nonsense is its myopic insistence that just because this administration is incapable of bringing the UN to its way of thinking, the institution must be completely useless and evil to its core. It's utterly impossible to imagine any other President using a combination of carrots and sticks to bring the UN around to supporting his policy and providing an additional framework of support for securing and rebuilding Iraq. "This President can fly to the moon under his own power and could best a rhinoceros in single combat! If Bush can't do it, it not only can't be done, it's wrong to think about doing it!"

And I find it interesting that someone who would complain about outsourcing peevishly notes that we hired HALLIBURTON to do the work instead of throwing buckets of billions to French and German contractors who sold them the jets and built the bunkers.

I’ve been hearing this shite for years! That’s why I can’t stand the debates! ENOUGH WITH FRANCE AND GERMANY!

Lileks, you ignorant slut, it's about more than France and Germany.

(pause; huffing into a plastic bag to restore blood chemistry)

Uh, dude...there's no spray paint in blood.

OK, the next six paragraphs are so relentlessly stupid, and were so obviously written in that fog of incoherence and lunacy that comes in the immediate aftermath of a really big hit of spray paint, that I'm just going to skip them and move on, because it's not fair to pick on a man in the midst of spray paint fever. That, and I have things to do today.

Ask yourself this: you’re a dictator who has violated the terms of a peace treaty over and over again, and frequently shoots at the planes enforcing the treaties. Who do you fear the most? A) The magnificent concert of allies in the UN, some of whom you’ve bought off, who are desperate to prove their legitimacy by prolonging the process into the 22nd century

B) The United States, Britain and Australia, who have several hundred thousand troops on your border and frankly are in no mood to put up your crap any longer

What would you want in this situation? The answer starts with “S” and ends, five letters later, in “T.”


Wow. Lileks has managed to provide a rationale for the war in Iraq that actually incorporates none of the usual suspects: no mention of WMDs, nor of the capacity to develop WMDs, nor the possibility Saddam was thinking about WMDs, or even my favorite, the half-assed human rights argument that argues the same baseline "no Saddam" condition that has existed since April 2003 is not affected by increasing violence and chaos in the streets that's a direct result of Bush's incompetence in planning and executing the occupation.

Also, does the description of the coalition as consisting in the United States, Britain, and Australia mean that Poland doesn't count? Or that the other nations in the coalition were window-dressing, making minimal and easily reversible committments and contributions to provide a slender shade of cover for this administration's inability to keep the alliances it made?

So, I get it. We are wrong and bad and stupid and stupidly wrong-bad. We failed to make France act as though it wasn’t, you know, France, a militarily insignificant nation that is understandably motivated by self-interest, and we haven’t convened a summit so we could be castigated for ignoring the extralegal use of Israeli helicopters to turn Hamas kingpins into indistinct red smears. You’d think we nuked Paris and converted everyone to Lutheranism.

That, or that we'd gone to war without anything resembling plan for what to do after we won, or the resources to get the job done properly, and that as a result the country we said we were going to liberate has watched that promise of freedom unravel into a nightmare.

Here’s the thing. I’d really like to live in John Kerry’s world. It seems like such a rational, sensible place, where handshakes and signatures have the power to change the face of the planet. If only the terrorists lived there as well.



Right. John Kerry's whole life is about nothing but rationality and handshakes. That's what he did in Vietnam: Go around shaking hands with the Viet Cong. The Purple Hearts were for carpal tunnel, and the Silver Star was because he hurt his back stooping over to shake hands with this one Viet Cong guy who was very, very short.

Who does Zarkowi fear the most - France, summiteers, or Marines?

"These are THE ONLY OPTIONS, people! France, summiteers, or Marines! No chance a summit would put more Marine-like people on the ground to actually, like, find him or anything!"

Let's play parallel universe: If a Gore or Kerry administration had passed up an opportunity to nab Zarkawi so it would have his continued presence in Iraq to bolster its paper-thin case for going to war with Iraq, how many pages of screeding would Lileks subject us to?

If the rightness of a cause is measured by the number of one’s allies, would Britain have been right if the US had stayed neutral in World War Two?

"Hey, have you seen the new Apple G5? If Bush's tax cuts go away I might have to save up before I get it or something!"

You know, I used to enjoy Lileks, particularly his genius for pop culture detritus, back before he became a disingenuous shill for the administration. As a political commentator, though, he's a hell of an expert on pop culture detritus. I should look on the bright side: Every time he writes about politics, at least he's not writing about taking his kid to Target.

Conspiracy Theory Market

Bush was really, really awful. I think the particular awfulness of his performance -- its repeated moments of fumbling, stammering incoherence -- will quiet down the crazy left-wing-nut theory that he has his "lines" fed to him via an earpiece, and boost the crazy left-wing-nut theory that he has a neorlogical disorder that's degrading his ability to think and speak.