Denis Leary

Is Denis Leary a really good actor, or a guy who rather smartly constructs vehicles for himself (The Job, Rescue Me) that give him a space in which to do what he's good at? Discuss.

Chomp, chomp...more...

If last week's CSI piqued your interest in competitive eating, here's a more in-depth look at the sport -- and the people who do it -- than you ever imagined was possible:

"I would love to study them," said gastroenterologist George Triadafilopoulos, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He said studying competitive eating would help researchers "understand the mechanisms [of swallowing and satiety] and treat people in whom the mechanisms are not working."

Which is not to say they recommend anybody do it. Speed-eating has plenty of unpleasant side effects, among them vomiting, heartburn, diarrhea and painful gas, experts say. Not to mention choking, stomach rupture and esophageal inflammation. Frequent vomiting can splash teeth with stomach acid, eroding enamel. Swallowed bones can injure intestines; inhaled food can get trapped in airways. Then there is the issue of regularly eating far too many calories to maintain a healthy weight.

"These competitions go against everything that we've learned" about healthy eating, said Bonnie Taub-Dix, a dietitian based in Woodmere, N.Y., and a spokesman for the American Dietetic Association.

Arnie Chapman of Oceanside, N.Y., who is head of the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters ( http://www.competitiveeaters.com/ ), one of two main groups that organize and promote speed-eating events in the United States, acknowledges that in his events, well, vomiting happens. But he doesn't see that as a big problem.

"Vomiting is a healthy way [for the body] to say you've gone over your limit," he said.

Don't miss the photo gallery. Especially the one of the guy who goes by the nom de food "Eater X."

Paul Eddington

When we signed up for Netlfix earlier this summer, the first thing I added to the queue was Yes, Minister, about which I'd heard wonderful things for years but had never found available for rental, while the fifty-some dollar price tag was rather steep for something I'd be buying sight-unseen. The show more than lived up to its hype as the funniest thing ever made about politics.

The lead on the series was the late Paul Eddington starring as the Rt. Hon. Jim Hacker, and I was saddened to discover after watching a few episodes that both he and Sir Nigel Hawthorne, his foil on the series, are no longer with us. Eddington's case was particularly cruel; he died as the result of a long battle with a rare skin cancer that ravaged his face and left him recognizable but badly scarred. The final disc of Yes, Prime Minister included a documentary about him, in which friends and colleagues praised his talents and his courage, both before and during his illness, and the film was subtitled "A Life Well Lived." That's a hell of a thing to have said about you, isn't it?

It's one thing to think it...

...it's another to do it (via Fark):

Man, 20, Arrested for Killing Rest of Family on Thanksgiving

MYAKKA CITY, Fla. — A 20-year-old man was arrested in the slayings of his parents, younger brother and elderly grandmother, whose bodies were found in their home Sunday, authorities said.

Richard Edgar Henderson Jr. was arrested Sunday evening and was being charged with four counts of murder, Manatee County sheriff's officials said. He was booked in jail with no bond.

Comedy meme

Via Chris "Lefty" Brown. If I've seen it, it's bold, if I own it, it's asterisked.

Airplane!
All About Eve
Amelie
Annie Hall
The Apartment
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Blazing Saddles
Bringing Up Baby
Broadcast News
Caddyshack
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story*
Duck Soup
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Four Weddings and a Funeral*
The General
Ghostbusters
The Gold Rush
Good Morning Vietnam
The Graduate
Groundhog Day*
A Hard Day's Night
His Girl Friday
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
Local Hero
Manhattan
M*A*S*H
Monty Python's Life of Brian
National Lampoon's Animal House
The Odd Couple
The Producers
Raising Arizona
Roxanne
Rushmore
Shaun of the Dead*
A Shot in the Dark
Some Like it Hot
Strictly Ballroom*
Sullivan's Travels
There's Something About Mary
This is Spinal Tap*
To Be or Not to Be
Tootsie
Toy Story*
Les vacances de M. Hulot
When Harry Met Sally...
Withnail and I

24 out of 50. I guess I'm not very funny.

Caring for your introvert

With the holiday season starting up in earnest this week, you may wish to read Jonathan Rauch's excellent article "Caring for Your Introvert: The Habits and Needs of a Little-Understood Group," then print it out, roll it up, and beat your relatives in the head with it.

The end is nigh

Lo, there shall come a firey horseman, yea, and he shall bear a furious sword of venegance in his right hand, and Season One of Charles in Charge on DVD in his left.

All-Star Superman #1

How excited was I to read All-Star Superman #1 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely? Not as excited as this guy. But suffiently excited to buy comics on a Thursday. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Getting from my house to my comic shop is relatively annoying and tends to get put on the back burner until weekends -- and since I buy so many fewer comics than I did before grad school now, I sometimes go weeks (or even months) between trips. Hence the lack of frequent comics blogging here.

But All-Star Superman #1 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely? Took me all of a day to realize I not only couldn't wait, waiting was very likely to ruin things, since the entire Internets seem to be talking about the book, as well they should, since it kicks ass up and down the street and back again.

Let's start with that cover:



That, that right there, that's Superman. He's friendly and he's glad to see you and if you ask how he's doing he's both delighted to be asked and thinks about how he's really doing before he answers you. And right there on that cover he's inviting you to pull up some cloud while he tells you a story.

(There are people who have criticized this cover for its lack of action, for its lack of dynamism, for its depiction of Superman sitting on a cloud. These people are known as "idiots.")

And in considering the cover, it's worth taking a moment to read this post by Mark Fossen about the Silver Age tradition of inviting the reader to interact with the comic by trying to solve a riddle or puzzle before the hero can. This cover takes that a step further by making Superman himself, not an omniscient narrator, do the inviting, albeit nonverbally. Brilliant, beautiful stuff.

Past the cover, there's enough good stuff to choke a horse. The rescue. Superman's confidence and reassurance. The Daily Planet as a lone, if need be, beacon of truth and justice. Lois Lane's rock-solid faith in Superman. A dangerous Luthor. Quintim, the zillionaire genius so inspired by Superman he's jump-started incredible genetic research. A Clark Kent with just a glint of humor to him. The second rescue, told in all of two panels in which Superman never appears. The endless background activity and details.

Or just look at this two-page spread. I was looking at this at school today and one of my officemates saw it and said, "Man, that is a cool picture."

You see, I've really missed Superman since, oh, Man of Steel #1 came out in 1986. Not that what followed was not without its virtues, but I grew up on the Schwartz/Maggin/Bates/Swanderson stuff and this is the first thing that's really felt the same way, in terms of the world Superman and his friends and his enemies live in, in a very long time. It's nice to have him back as he should be -- even if it's just for a short while.

Saliva? I hardly know ya!

Dave's Long Box asks an important philosophical question:

The thing that annoys me about unbridled use of saliva strands by artists is that the overuse of the imagery ultimately undermines the meaning of the image. Does that make sense? If every character has saliva strands, what do saliva strands mean?

PSA: Cheap Wonderfalls

While I was updating my Amazon wish list for the holiday season, I noticed that Wonderfalls is available for under 20 bucks right now. So if you've been putting off buying it, now's the time to take that plunge. (Get it? Plunge? Waterfall?)

I hate agreeing with George Will...

...but sometimes it happens:

The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking reelection were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design" theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact."

But it is. And President Bush's straddle on that subject -- "both sides" should be taught -- although intended to be anodyne, probably was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives. Dover's insurrection occurred as Kansas's Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6 to 4 to redefine science. The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition of science these words: "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."

"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.

Some LOST thoughts

1. It's really amazing to me just how bad Michelle Rodriguez's acting is. I mean, it's high school musical bad: One note, repeated over and over again, with nary a hint of anything going on in the character's head beyond "How should I say this line?"

2. Anyone think it's just a coincidence how much "Mister Eko" sounds like "misdirection?"

PoMo Star Wars

Aidan Wasley argues that the Star Wars movies are a postmodern meditation on the mechanics of plot:

Most significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd coincidence to propel the story forward. Just what are the odds, in just one of near-infinite examples, that of all the planets in that galaxy far, far away, the droids should end up back on Tatooine, in the home of the son of the sweet (if annoying) boy who had built C-3PO decades before? Throughout all six films there are scenes of crucial serendipity. Such dependence on unlikely coincidence isn't unique to Star Wars. As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2 needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennet needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.
But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. Within the films' fiction, that force is called … er, "the Force." It's the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin's birth, fall, redemption, and death are required to "bring balance to the Force" and, not coincidentally, to give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.

And still they rampage.

Fanboy Rampage may be no more, but there's no shortage of nuttiness from around the Internets. For instance:

• The always-entertaining Monitor Duty's first item about George Takei's coming out has a headline that manages to include scare quotes, an ellipsis of fear, and a slash-mark of terror:
  

  Mr. Sulu... 'Comes Out' As Gay/Homosexual This Week

  
  Which is merely nutty. Then a followup item takes the author of the original to task for missing an opportunity for puns, and the orignal item's author then goes into a rant about gay marriage in Canada, which is apparently on the rampage (no pun intended) up there on the terrible tundra since Stan, Kyle, and Cartman deposed Saddam a few Christmases ago...
  
• Here's a heated discussion about the lack of fat superheroes in comics.
  
• And for good measure, John Byrne and Ethan Van Sciver argue about McCarthyism. Byrne's the sane one, for once.
  

Ah, Grim, we miss ye...