Neil Gaiman vs. the Gelatinous Cube

Yesterday afternoon we went to see Neil Gaiman be interviewed at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul as part of MPR's "Talking Volumes" series. Gaiman was his usual self --witty, insightful, surprising, in short, the perfect person to see asked questions about his craft. Even the insipid, lame-ass questions the MPR person was asking her.

There were only two things detracting from the experience. One was the air of MPR smugness that overhung the entire event. Before things got started an MPR apparatchik came onstage and, looking over her glasses at us, thanked us for coming out to an event about books, when we could be home watching the television or going out to a movie! Because, of course, People Like Us Who Read Books don't pollute our brains with the sorts of things commoners amuse themselves with. I continue to marvel at the ability of Minnesota Liberals to make my skin crawl even when I'm otherwise inclined to agree with them.

The other was the gelatinous cube who sat next to me throughout the event. I refer to her by the name of the freakiest D&D monster of them all not because of her size, which was ample, but because of her monstrous ability to ooze into every possible micrometer of space that came to exist between us throughout the event. Look: I know theatre seating is narrow and uncomfortable and there's sure to be a bit of touching. I understand that. But for God's sake, learn to, you know, get something out of your purse without splaying your legs to their maximal if limited capacity. Learn to, say, cross your arms once in a while to get your forearms out of the way. Don't repeatedly shove your hamlike upper arms into the person sitting nest to you. What was most annoying is that her companion, whom one might describe as Jack Sprat-like, sat on the aisle seat next to her. Yo, Cube! Maybe you should try sitting on the aisle once in a while, and they way the only person you're touching is the guy with whom you're going to spend the event engaging in sensual -- and I sensual, I mean grosser and more unnecessary than hands-in-each-other's-back-pockets goth couple wannabes at the Mall of America -- hand-holding activities the whole god-damned time, anyway. Do what you want with your cream-cheese filled fingers, lady, just do it in the dark and away from other people, 'kay?

And I haven't even gotten to the audio portion of the gelatinous cube's performance.

She brayed. Last month I had occasion to describe a guest at the potluck from hell as a braying ass. I was wrong. This woman brayed throughout the talk. Every time Gaiman said anything mildly amusing, she couldn't just laugh -- she let out these piercing, shrill bleats of something that an alien might consider laughter. Sort of a "NYEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEE HEE HEE HEEEEEEEEE HHEEEEEEEEE!" sound. Perhaps she's related to Howard Dean. But remember that Gaiman is an incredibly funny person, and then imagine that sound going off right next to your right ear three or four times a minute for over an hour, and you'll understand that I really, really respect Neil Gaiman, becase at no point did I turn to the gelatinous cube and tell her to SHUT THE FUCK UP SO I COULD HEAR THE GODDAMNED PERSON I PAID TEN BUCKS AND JOINED MPR TO HEAR.

The worst parts came whenever Neil talked about the creative process itself, because she turned the volume up to eleven and added hand-clapping and nodding to the performance -- and that's what it was, a performance to show everyone else just how smart and witty she herself was for finding the smart and witty writer so smart and witty. No doubt the gelatinous cube fancies herself an pan-media artist, writing sonnets about flowers in glue and glitter on black velvet, stalking the aisles of Michael's looking for sales, writing fan fiction in which she's the fourth Charmed sister and they go through the Stargate and meet Richard Dean Anderson and the power of her love and creativity turns the casts of both shows into ocelots and they all have sex with her.

Let me put it this way: It was so bad, that after fifteen minutes or so, the small children sitting in front of us turned and stared at the gelatinous cube every time this happened, and the children's faces appeared to say, "Gee, Mommy explained to me how to behave at the theatre. I wonder why no one ever explained it to that lady? And how come the lady looks like a gelatinous cube?"

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

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

A statement from The WB:
For the last seven years Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been cornerstones of our network. The sum total of the work done on those shows has produced some of the proudest moments in our history. Like some of the great series that are leaving the air this year, including Frasier and Friends, the cast, crew, writers and producers of Angel deserve to be able to wrap up the series in a way befitting a classic television series and that is why we went to Joss to let him know that this would be the last year of the series on The WB. We have discussed continuing the Angel legacy with special movie events next year, which is still on the table. In a perfect world, all of these details would be completed before this information went to the press so that we could be definitive about the show's ongoing future. But in any case, we did not want to contemplate this being the last year of Angel without giving the show the option of crafting their own destiny for this character and for this series. David Boreanaz continues to be one of the finest, classiest and friendliest actors we have had the pleasure to work with and we hope that the relationship furthers from here. The same can be said for all the actors and producers on the show.

Is this what Doug Shaftoe meant by "displaying adaptability"?

According to the Israeli daily Maariv, Israeli police have a bizarre new way of preventing suicide bombings.

The police are going to begin implementing their plan to hang bags of swine fat in buses and other public places, in the hope it will deter suicide bombers from entering them...The suggestion is based on the fact that Islam, like Judaism, regards the pig as an unclean animal. Strict Moslem tradition holds that any Moslem who touches a pig before dying will be denied access to heaven.
What about those observant Jews within proximity of bags, won’t they be offended? Apparently not, because a rabbinical permit has been issued endorsing the measure. Rabbi Eliezer Moshe Fisher of the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court warned:

[I]f the police do not use pig fat in buses, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews will arm themselves with spray guns filled with liquid lard, which they will spray on terrorists whenever the need arises.
No doubt the suicide bombers will be able to elicit fatwas, or religious decrees, of their own permitting them to carry out the bombings, despite the presence of the bags.

This just in: NYPD Blue is still on.

This is not what I wanted to see when I logged on this morning after being without Internet access all weekend:

Comics writer Mark Evanier has reported the unfortunate news that comics legend Julius Schwartz died this morning at Winthrop Hospital in New York City at 2:30 AM. He was 89.

Schwartz was a pioneer of the Silver Age of comics, joining DC and immediately having an effect on the publications of that company. The majority consensus agrees that the Golden Age of Comics gave way to the Silver Age of Comics with the publication of DC's "Showcase" #4 in 1956 when DC revived the Flash. The job of editing the title fell to Schwartz and the changes to the Flash were guided by him. The response was so positive that the character was brought back in future issues of the anthology and the character was ultimately awarded his own series in 1959. The impact of this book changed the landscape of super hero comics forever. To this day he is considered one of comics' greatest editors.

Mark Evanier has plenty of reminisces about Schwartz at his web site; just go here and keep scrolling down.

I was lucky enough to meet Julie at a small, local con in 1988; he and Curt Swan were special guests and each one signed my copy of The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, the first hardcover comic collection I ever bought. I think it cost the princely sum of $16. Both Swan and Schwartz are gone now. Dammit.

I'm hoping DC will do a tribute book entitled "Strange Schwartz Stories." The kickoff should be 1985's surprise birthday issue of Superman, which you can read here.

Monitor Duty has this to say about the eventual Lord of the Rings DVD boxed sets:

Box sets? Can there really be anyone who loved these movies who hasn't bought them already?

Considering that the hard-core "LOTR-is-the-best-movie-ever" crowd has been gleefully buying two versions of each movie on DVD, one with the theatrical cut and one with the super-terrific-happy-special edition, with full knowledge in buying the first that the second will be out in just a few months, why wouldn't the studio expect that the lemmings will line up for a boxed set as well? Just throw in ultra-super-terrific-happy extras and outtakes and they'll fall all over themselves to buy it.

What's sad is the eager willingness of these folks to fork over their money for these things with nary a complaint. If George Lucas were to try the same nonsense with the original Star Wars movies, Skywalker Ranch would be burned to the ground with torches. The fans would still buy every version, of course, but at least they'd have the good sense to grumble about it, for God's sake.

If the casting news is any indication, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie might not suck:

Sam Rockwell, star of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and known to science fiction fans as Guy the security guy in GALAXY QUEST, will be sipping Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters shortly because the actor has been cast as Zaphod Beeblebrox in the HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY movie. The two-headed President of the Galaxy is one of the two that pick up the last Earthman, Arthur Dent, and his companion Ford Prefect after the Earth has been destroyed by the Vogon contruction force. Martin Freeman, Mos Des and Zooey Deschanel have already been cast as Arthur, Ford and Trillian, respectively, in the film.

Sam Rockwell, of course, kicks ass like a great giant ass-kicking thing that kicks asses. I've been willing to watch him in just about anything ever since I saw him doing an interview for Galaxy Quest in which it became quickly apparent that he had constructed an elaborate backstory for his character, who was, really, not much more than a bit part. If I ever get around to picking up Confessions of a Dangerous Mind on DVD, I'll make a point of watching his screen test for the role of Chuck Barris.

I am 42.80079% - Major Geek.

And for political entertainment of a more rousing sort than that mentioned in my previous entry, Bob Dornan is running for Congress again. Boo-ya!

Make sure to read the comments so you don't miss this:

That interview was almost as weird as the time I turned on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and realized that Bob Dornan was the star of the movie they were watching.

Posted by: Chris Puzak on February 4, 2004 02:27 PM

If you have a perverse desire to watch a bunch of people shouting at each other like total asshats, go read this thread at Peter David's message board/blog. I swear to Jebus, nearly every person who's taken part in this thing needs to be fitted with protective, padded headgear lest they give themselves brain damage.

Peter David's a hell of a good writer of comics and fantasy and Star Trek novels. And as a political commentator, he's a hell of a good writer of comics and fantasy and Star Trek novels.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think each of the major Democratic candidates can be mapped onto a character from King of the Hill.

John Kerry is Hank, the solid, reliable, dependable guy. Howard Dean is Khan, the screaming lunatic neighbor. Joe Lieberman is Bill Dauterive, the lovable loser down the block. John Edwards is Boomhauer, the slick good-lookin' feller with the accent. And Wesley Clark is Dale Gribble, the paranoid conspiracy theorist next door.

Look, it's about as solid as most political analysis you'll find on the Internet.

HDTV versus porn:

If HDTV is sharp enough to reveal a G-rated entertainer's humanity, the technology's harsh gaze must be all the worse for those who make their livings in the nude. So when DirecTV announced last week that it would be broadcasting pay-per-view adult movies in HDTV, starting last night after the Super Bowl, one had to wonder whether the company's decision-makers actually bothered to watch some samples. A big part of the allure of porn—at least the relatively highbrow variety that DirecTV shows—is that the participants appear to share few of our species' physical foibles, thanks to clever lighting, makeup, and surgery. Your spouse may suffer from a dearth of gym time or the occasional bout of acne, but Kobe Tai's on-screen personas are always in tip-top shape.

...
Of course, as long as they've got some bedroom skills, adult performers needn't be absolute world-beaters in the looks department, so they tend to be a lot less lovely than your average Hollywood star. In addition, they end up revealing a lot more nooks and crannies than their mainstream peers, which means many more physical flaws can wind up on-screen. That's no big deal for peddlers of lowbrow or amateur smut, in which bad bodies are the norm. But keep in mind that DirecTV will be broadcasting films from two sources, Playboy and the Spice Channel, both of which pride themselves on being vendors of classy porn. The action on Spice is tame compared to what you might find at the local XXX store, and the stars typically sport toned, pneumatic bodies without visible shortcomings. If Cameron Diaz's otherworldly reputation can't survive HDTV intact, what chance does the Spice Channel's talent have? And will HDTV customers readily fork over $14.99 per three-hour movie block once they realize that the naughty sorority sister their order conjures up has amateurish implants, and the lucky TV repairman's skin redefines the word "leathery"?

There's a long article at the Washington Post about Mickey Dolenz, his work on Broadway in the musical Aida, his thoughts on the Monkees from a few decades out, and other stuff, but this bit is what jumped out at me:

"The Monkees really becoming a band was like the equivalent of Leonard Nimoy really becoming a Vulcan," Dolenz says. "It was that weird. Mike used to say it was like Pinocchio really becoming a little boy. We transcended the imaginary and became this supergroup."

Tomorrow the Sci-Fi Channel will air Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the final time. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett have posted some thoughts on the end of an era.

I personally came late to the MST3K party, but I assiduously taped the episodes I could from the Sci-Fi Channel and have been picking up the Rhino videos where I've been able to afford 'em. I've never taken the plunge into the unofficial tape trading networks, but maybe that time has come.

Since moving to Minnesota, I've been lucky enough to meet Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy (who looks just like you'd expect Tom Servo to look if he were a person), and Mary Jo Pehl, and every one of them was as nice and friendly as can be. I'm gonna miss the show, dammit.

Over at Salon (they're not actually dead yet) there's a fascinating article entitled "Why I Love Laura Bush"; there's no easy paragragh-teaser-excerpt for me to post, but the whole article is well worth a read. The gist of it is that the writer, a liberal female Democrat, has found a great deal to admire about Mrs. Bush and that reading a new biography about her has only increased that admiration. For those of use whose biggest impressions of Laura Bush came from watching "That's My Bush" on Comedy Central, it's an eye-opener.

This is my one and only Whedonverse fanfic:

"Then Andrew got on the plane to go home, and it crashed in the middle of nowhere and he died a horrible, agonizing death, and everyone was happy."

What a stupid, worthless, pointless character. I'm mystified at Mutant Enemy's obsession with him, or their apparent belief that he's funny, interesting, and worth wasting screen time on at the expense of characters that actually ARE funny, interesting, and worth screen time. What was the point of having him guest-star on ANGEL, again? Oh, right, there wasn't one.

This is rich:

News Flash!
John Kerry now has 94 delegates in the Democratic primary, while Dean has 113. See the scorecard on CNN for more info. The news flash is that the media are not reporting that - try to find a single story about it. Instead, they say that Kerry is clearly the frontrunner, and that Dean's campaign is effectively finished. Let's show the media that we prefer to make our own democracy, rather than let them pick the winner for us. Send email to your local paper, radio, and TV stations, and demand to know why they aren't reporting the facts. Send this note to 5 of your friends. I don't mind if Kerry wins - but I want him to win fairly. Let's tell the media what we think of their crapulent bloviation!

First of all, I think the CNN scorecard referenced in the note is a media story about the delegate count. Second, if you actually look at the scorecard on CNN that the media, including, presumably, CNN, is suppressing, you'll see that Dean's delegate edge consists entirely of delegates who have not been elected by primary voters but are instead "party leader and elected official" (PLEO) delegates.

In other words, they're members of the political establishment, not the voice of the people. So how, exactly, is that "making our own democracy"?

And if you look just at the two states where elections for delegates have taken place and do some quick-and-dirty back-of-the-envelope number-crunching, Kerry has 33, over twice as many as have been elected for Dean, who has 16. John Edwards actually leads Dean in the elected delegate count with 18 from Iowa alone. In the world of this message's writer, does winning elections equal media bloviations, while the endorsements of party hacks counts as making democracy?

Josh Marshall crosses the line into gonzo in the home stretch to the New Hampshire returns:

After lunch we went to see Clark's brief stop in Manchester (he was hitting each of the state's ten counties, finishing up in Dixville Notch at midnight). We got there just after things were winding down and ran into a ragged crowd -- camera crews, supporters, family, campaign aides -- walking down Elm Street following Clark, who was shaking hands and glad handing from store to store. "I don't know but I've been told, yada yada, yada yada... sound off, sound off, etc." You hear this a lot at Clark functions.

As his crowd parked itself in front of the Merrimack Restaurant, where the candidate was making the rounds, they were confronted by a Kerry crowd at the other side of the intersection. (Kerry has an endless stock of potential volunteers just across the state line, remember.) In response to the Clarkies marching songs, the Kerry crew started chanting "Bring! It! On! Bring! It! On! Bring! It! On!"

It was, I guess, the reductio ad absurdum martial moment this week. Who says this party ain't down with the military?
...
For whatever reason, Edwards seemed a bit off his game. He rushed through everything, though with pretty much the same lines throughout.

Edwards has these ridiculously hokey rhetorical questions that he lays on you which become more comical with each repetition. "If what you want is to eat $#%^, live on the streets for five days and comb your hair with a cheese grater, then ahhh'm not yahhhw candidate for president. But if you want ..."

You get the idea.

More to come.

Can we send Josh to cover all the primaries?

I think this might be the asshole who sat behind me and Kate on our return flight from Philadelphia New Year's Eve:

Channel 5 has learned that a Northwest Airlines passenger was taken off a plane headed to Philadelphia.

It happened at around 11 a.m. today on board Flight 684 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Another passenger on that flight told Channel 5 the man appeared drunk and unruly and refused to comply with the flight crew. The flight was delayed while airport police escorted the passenger and his bag away from the plane.

"The captain brought the plane back into the gate and the man was removed from the plane with his baggage and the captain announced over intercom they don't tolerate that type of behavior," said passenger Kevin Wollin.

Hennepin County officials were going to take the passenger to detox, but authorities said he passed out and was taken instead to a local hospital by ambulance.

The passenger was described as in his mid 40s.

Northwest Airlines officials said the flight was delayed 50 minutes

I'm really having trouble working today. I just don't seem to have any Joementum.

Snort:

This is not to say that Return of the King will sweep the board on Oscar night. The film registers a spectacular duck in the acting honours, perhaps because its inhabitants are regarded as heroic archetypes as opposed to flesh-and-blood characters.

Or perhaps because the movies feature some of the most horrifically terrible acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture. Liv Tyler looks like she's always thinking VERY, VERY HARD about her next line; Elijah Wood wandered through the first two movies looking for all the world like he's got the worst case of constipation in his life and is trying to cure it by walking very, very slowly from one end of New Zealand to the other; and Viggo Mortensen is the Joe Millionaire of Middle Earth.

Actually, I'd love to see a conversation between Viggo and Joe Millionare (the original one, of course, not the lightweight from the second series):

"Uh, do you like cheese?"

"Um, yeah, I like cheese."

"Do you want to, uh, go eat some cheese?"

"Yeah, I'll eat some cheese."

"Cool."

"Yeah."

Speaking order doesn't really matter...

Seat-of-my-pants New Hampshire predictions, no numbers, in order of finish: Kerry, Dean, Edwards, Liberman, Clark, with Kucinich and Sharpton barely getting asterisks. Yep, I'm Mr. Wild Prediction today...

Assuming Kerry wins, the real question will be how close Dean comes to him. If it's tight, Dean's still in this; if it's a blowout, Dean's in trouble. And if Edwards manages a significant second place finish -- that is, if he's way out ahead of Dean, or as close to Kerry as he was in Iowa, or both -- Dean's in deep, deep trouble. That's a technical term.

And if Clark and Lieberman fare poorly, we'll see how long their campaign deathwatches are. If Arkansas didn't have two Democratic Senators already, I'd say that I wouldn't be surprised to see Clark make a run in a few years.

You know you're doing too much home improvement-type work when Elisha Cuthbert comes to you in a dream and you ask her to help you replace the baseboards in the den. I mean, for God's sake...

For more on the debate, check out Josh Marshall's terrific meta-reportage on covering a debate and his post-game analysis. And then bookmark his site and visit it three or four times a day until New Hampshire' he's really doing some incredible work covering the hell out of this primary.

Thoughts on last night's debate:

• Who the hell lit this thing? Dennis Kucinich looked like he was made entirely of pudding skin. There was so much glare on Brit Hume at one point I thought maybe he was actually Peter Jennings.
  
• The New Hampshire reporters were not ready for prime time, to say the least. The whole debate had a certain amateurish, let's-put-on-a-debate-in-the-barn sort of feel to it.
  
• Wesley Clark really whiffed the question about Michael Moore's description of President Bush as a "deserter." Clark could have said something along the lines of, there are many questions about the president's National Guard service that remain unanswered, and until we get straight answers about them there will be people who assume the worst and use strong language about it.
  But instead Clark came off as incredibly detached and disinterested in his own campaign and the facts of the matter, almost like an SNL parody of Ronald Reagan. This guy was the great white-haired hope for the Democrats? (And on a related note, why has Moore so eagerly embraced the commander of the Kosovo mission he linked to the Columbine shootings in his movie?)
  
• John Kerry won by not losing or drooling or shrieking. But I don't think I've ever seen a candidate look so damn tired during a debate.
  
• What was up with the rounds and the bells and the whatnot?
  

Lileks takes a look at a really, really strange children's book starring Jar Jar Binks:

Jar Jar is hungry.

He goes to the market

To find food.
Eventually he finds frogs for sale, which is good because Gungans love frogs. But of course so do children, which is why the sight of dead frogs hanging from ropes might be unnerving. Anyway, Jar Jar eats one. The frog seller says he has to pay for it; Jar Jar promptly vomits out the frog, which bounces all over and lands in Sebulba’s soup. You all remember Sebulba. (That’s Tatooine for “scrotal cyst,” I think.) Sebulba pushes Jar Jar down, and Jar Jar is scared! Note: Jar Jar hasn’t had a word of dialogue, nor will he. None of this meesa gonna yowza boss nazz is de nizzle shizzle minstrel talk. Jar Jar closes his eyes, because he does not want to see Sebulba punch him.

“Stop!” someone says.

It is Anakin Skywalker!

“Do not hurt Jar Jar,” says Anakin. “Jar Jar is a friend of the Hutts.”

The Hutts are bigger and meaner than Sebulba.

Now Sebulba is afraid.

WTF? What is this? It’s bad enough that Lucas invented Jar Jar in the first place; it’s bad enough that they made childrens’ books with him, but Anakin is DARTH FRICKIN’ VADER. To have him show up and dispatch the bully by suggesting that Jar Jar has mob connections is so totally farged I can’t even begin to untangle the moral idiocy of the story. Boil it down: young Damien from “The Omen” saves Rastus McWebfoot from a beating by claiming that the Corleones have his back.

Sounds as weird as the "Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Nice Fat Policeman" book I found in an antique shop last summer. That book seemed like the perfect choice for the obese pedophile on your Christmas list; maybe you could put it in a gift pack with that creepy-looking Peter Pan movie that came out last month.

ANYway, Lileks diagnoses the biggest flaw in Episode One -- we're supposed to cheer the adventures of Hitler when he was a boy, without any indications of his future turn toward the dark side. We're supposed to get a little of this in Episode Two, with Anakin's slaughter of the Sand People who have just kidnapped, tortured, and killed his mother, but, well, that DOES seem like the kind of thing that would provoke a strong reaction in most people.

This report from Josh Marshall takes down an attempted smear on John Edwards on Social Security.

But there's a basic point here that Drudge (or rather his liaison at the RNC or the White House or whomever) is intentionally obscuring. The debate over Social Security is about whether risk is pooled or whether it's individualized. Are there guarentees? Or do you invest your money and take your chances on your own? As one friend of mine said a while back, if it's not Social, it's not Security.

What Edwards was supporting in 1998 was taking a small portion of aggregate funds and investing them in the market, not creating individual accounts. And for those who are big Social Security policy wonks that makes all the difference in the world.

Slate's David Plotz reports on http://slate.msn.com/id/2094247/:

The populated part of New Hampshire is about the size of my living room. With nine candidates careening around it like pool balls, it's nearly impossible to avoid getting struck by one. In November and December, the candidates make themselves alarmingly accessible. When I see Wes Clark speak in late November, I can't avoid getting my hand shaken. I slouch in the corner, yet still he hunts me down. (Now I know how Slobodan Milosevic must have felt.) I am accustomed to seeing politicians in their Washington captivity, cordoned off by aides and hustled into waiting Town Cars. It's thrilling to see them here in the state of nature. New Hampshire really does force candidates to behave almost like regular people.

For a while, that's a great spectator sport. But what first seems like refreshingly direct, grass-roots politics eventually irritates the hell out of me. We New Hampshirites pride ourselves on our honesty, which means we think it's our obligation to be surly and entitled. After a few events, this no longer seems charming. It's just rude. To the guy at the nursing home outside Manchester: Do you think you could at least stop chewing while Gen. Clark talks to you? Yes, it's lunchtime, but the man is a four-star general and quite possibly the next president of the United States. Does he really need to see your spittle?

Funny stuff. Read the whole thing.

The indispensible Dan Kennedy rises to the defense of polls:

Six weeks ago, as we all know, John Kerry's presidential campaign was dead in the water. As Dan Aykroyd's Bob Dole would say, he knew it, we knew it, and the American people knew it. Fundraising dried up. He poured his personal money into the campaign in a desperate attempt to stave off collapse. It got so bad that in New Hampshire, which is close to a must-win state for him, the alternative to Howard Dean increasingly came to be seen not as Kerry but as Wesley Clark.

Now, what if Kerry had ignored the polls? Guess what: he'd be limping into the final week of his campaign. Instead, he shook up his campaign staff. He sharpened his stump speech. And - most important - he pulled up stakes in New Hampshire in favor of running full-time in Iowa during the last few weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
...

In other words, it appears that the polls were an accurate reflection of what was happening on any given day. The polls were immensely useful to the Kerry campaign. Where the pundits blew it was in taking those polls and using them to predict what would happen two or more months out. But even here I think it would be wrong to be too harsh. No one has ever come back from the kind of hole Kerry had dug himself into.

These words the Washington Post's web site is using, I think they say more than what the Post thinks they do:

		Got Plans? With Kids Join our gang -- experts at family planning -- at the Kids' Table, at noon Wednesday. D.C. Area Places & Events Go Out Find a Movie | See a Play Pick a Table | Pick a Happy Hour Scan The Post Weekend section.

I wonder what the Post's family planning experts have to say about Bush's abstinence program proposals...

Sometimes I think the Iraqi information minister is working for Dennis Kucinich. From Kucinich's web site:

The media had long ago predicted the winner of the entire process and even the loser of the general election, and tonight's caucuses have the pundits scratching their collective scalps in bewilderment. I moved from ninth place to fifth and won delegates despite the 15 percent threshold.

Kucinich moved from ninth place to fifth after 1) Clark and Lieberman decided to pass on competing in Iowa, bringing Kucinich up to seventh, and 2) Braun decided that her black Jewish female ninja strategery wasn't working and withdrew from the campaign to endorse Crazy Howard Dean Head Man, bringing Kucinich up to sixth. None of these events are ones that Kucinich had anything whatsoever to do with. Then he beat Al Sharpton in a state many of whose residents have heard of these "black people" and seen them on the UPN on the TV but aren't really sure the whole thing isn't made up by some syndicate back East, bringing him to fifth.

I think candidates like Kucinich have a role to play in the nominating process, and as Michael Lewis noted in his terrific book about the 1996 campaign, Trail Fever, it's often these candidates who are the ones who can say interesting and provocative things because they're not interested in electability as much as they are in saying what they have to say. Which is terrific for everyone. But when a candidate whose big claim is straight talk and saying what he means no matter the consequences then starts spinning on a "no infidels in Baghdad" level, it's just depressing and annoying to watch.

Slate's Chris Sullentrop continues the Dean pile-on:

DES MOINES, Iowa—"Prove it or not," Howard Dean told his supporters at a rally Sunday in Davenport. "Now is the time to see if this works," to see if the unorthodox, Internet-fueled campaign assembled by Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, translates into votes. "Tomorrow, at 6:30 p.m., you can prove it or not." The answer Iowans gave him was a raspberry: Or not.

There's also this really intriguing note:

There were lots of new and first-time caucus participants, so many that the organizers ran out of forms to register them. But they weren't the new voters the Dean campaign wanted. George Davey, the precinct captain for the Dean campaign, said he was hoping for 25 to 50 Dean voters between the ages of 18 and 25, but only one showed up. "I think if we could blame [Dean's loss] on anyone, blame it on the 18- to 25-year-olds, because they were nonexistent," he said.
(Emphasis mine - CJG)

That, I think, bodes poorly for the argument that Dean's still got the money and the organization to recover from the Iowa loss.

Sweet Christmas, Howard Dean's speech last night was bizarre. Not only did it look like he was going to have a stroke by the end of it, as he ran through the states with upcoming primaries and caucuses, but that shrieking guttural noise at the end was freakish and strange. Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone freakish and strange.

Well, I got the top right. The actual Iowa results as of now:

Iowa Caucuses
Updated 11:06 PM ET	Precincts: 97%

Candidate	Delegates	%
Kerry	1,128	37.7%
Edwards	954	31.9%
Dean	540	18.0%
Gephardt	315	10.5%
Other	57	1.9%
Full Results	Source: AP

Edwards did better and Dean and Gephardt did worse than I guessed. Should get interesting from here -- Gephardt is dropping out and if Dean does poorly in New Hampshire he'll be hard pressed to continue, I suspect. I'm wondering if Edwards can hang on until the southern primaries; I still think he could be the best chance in November.

And, by the way, Howard Dean's coming out to give his speech while John Edwards -- who, y'know, did far, far better than Dean did -- was still giving his speech was a world-class asshat move. So I'm amused by all the fun Jeff Jarvis is having at Dean's expense.

Josh Marshall has some insights, which I found via Jarvis, on the Dean slippage.

I love it when John Byrne is more rational than his board's posters.

OK, Jess, you can leave comments now.

My utterly unscientific, uninformed, seat-of-my-pants prediction for the Iowa caucuses:

1. Kerry
2. Dean
3. Gephardt
4. Edwards

Percentages? Damn, I'm not THAT stupid. I suspect that the really important thing will be how far apart the results are. If all of these guys are bunched around 22%, it's a dead heat going into New Hampshire, with Clark as the wild card there. If Kerry pulls far away, bad news for Gephardt and Edwards. If Edwards does really well, he might hand on until South Carolina, which would be good for him and -- since I find him one of the most appealing guys running -- good for us, too. For Dean, it's all about the expectations; if he does anything but finish first he's going to need to spin like hell to stay alive.

Dammit, Butt-head, this sucks:

Attention, Game Show Network viewers: like too many cable networks before it, your channel is about to begin trashing its original cozy niche (and fan base) and trying to be everything to everyone. Here's the big clue: the network is changing its name to just its initials: GSN.

...

When the name goes, so goes the heart of the programming. Give it two years, and game shows will be as scarce on GSN as videos are on MTV. And Sunday on AMC, don't miss that American Movie Classic, "Legal Eagles."

At least AMC is degenerating slowly. GSN is charging headlong into the blight, loading up its schedule with dating nightmares (a new show called Fake-a-Date, hosted by beloved non-cowboy liar Evan "Joe Millionaire" Marriott), hidden-camera discards (Spy TV), and second-run, second-rate reality shows. You know what that means: more Kathy Griffin. You may destroy your television now.

Perhaps the only thing more astounding than Charlize Theron's transformative performance in Monster was the comment from an idiot sitting behind us to the effect of, "Well, THAT was an uplifter!"

Maybe he's related to the Bad Santa pepperpot.

What is it with people who know nothing about the movies they go to see? I mean, the movie is called MONSTER. Maybe that should have been a HUGE HONKING CLUE that this wasn't gonna be an uplifter, you nimrod.

Once it became clear that tonight's Angel would center on frickin' Harmony, of all people, I started hoping that the episode would also be the one guest-starring the impossibly annoying Andrew, who tied with Kennedy as the new character who was the most useless waste of screen time during the last season of Buffy, so at least there wouldn't be two episodes focusing on utterly peripheral characters. Sadly, 'twas not to be. Here's hoping the Andrew episode will be less of a waste of time than the Harmony Show was...

UPDATE: After thinking about the episode and discussing it with some people, I suspect most of my annoyance was that this was a fluff episode coming right after a major cliffhanger which I would rather have seen pursued sooner instead of later. But no episode with a Buckaroo Banzai reference can be all bad...

Tonight's Smallville should have been subtitled, "The Smallville High Players present OZ." The kid who plays Iceman in the X-Movies looked like early Beecher, what with the glasses and all, but connived like Ryan O'Reilly; Survivalist Lad was probably Robson. Not sure who the Home Improvements Kid would be; maybe the pasty preppy rapist whom Schillinger made over to look like a big fat twentysomething Cindy Brady?

Scenes from the loading zone of Home Depot just before closing on a Friday night:

• An ancient little pickup truck -- remember the Eastern Bloc used car Homer Simpson test drove once? That ran on kerosene? "Put it in H! Put it in H!" This was its older brother -- driven by two strung-out freaks who insisted to the Home Depot mini-forklift operator that, yeah, man, it could handle that stack of cinderblocks. Said cinderblocks caused the truck's frame to creak and sag and, I suspect, to eventually break about five miles down the road.
  The truck also had no gate on the back of the bed, just a piece of board with a sticler reading "I love my co-op." Yeah, and I bet your co-op's going to love you when a cinderblock slides off of the stack and through the front window and knocks over this week's patchouli display.
  
• A him-and-her pair of geniuses sliding eight sheets of drywall into the back of his pickup. That's not so bad, except that the sheets were longer than the bed of the pickup, so they put the gate up and just sorta RESTED the drywall on top of it at a fairly steep angle. I can see it now: "Hey, you got your cinderblocks in my drywall!" "You got your drywall in my cinderblocks!" Together "MMMMM!"
  
• Two guys and a girl sliding carpet into a pickup -- funny, dat, how all these involve pickups -- THROUGH the back window of the cab, over the bed of the truck, and just resting it on the gate, with one whole piece of twine holding it in place.
  

In other words, none of these genuises were as smart as this guy:


But at least I didn't see this.

You know, I don't claim to be Hank Hill, Tim Allen, or even Xander Harris when it comes to home repair. Sure, I know my way around painting and spackling and sanding. But the most important thing I know is that WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW SOMETHING, YOU CALL SOMEONE WHO DOES.

Captain James T. Kirk- You are the paradigm of the
Starfleet Captain. You explore the universe.
You save lives. What's a few small fractures
of protocol when you've saved the galaxy more
times than you can count. Hell, you even
brought peace between the Federations and the
Klingons.


Which Star Trek Captain are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Some random New Year's Day movie thoughts:

• Dammit, Tim Burton made me cry.
  
• Saw two movies today (The Last Man on Earth and Soylent Green) that featured corpses wrapped in white sheets being dumped into slag pits.
  
• The idiots who brought us Independence Day and are gearing up for The Day After Tomorrow could learn something about making an audience feel something from the aforementioned Last Man on Earth.
  
• Master and Commander could simply have been called Fighting 'Round The World with Russell Crowe.
  

That would have been a good idea:

You know what would have been a great way for one of the candidates to counteract the Gore endorsement? Call a press conference, keep the reason a secret, and then invite a "regular person" up onto stage to endorse you. Get a steelworker, or a soccer mom, to say, "I'm voting for John Edwards. I may not be a big, famous politician like Al Gore, but last time I checked my vote counts just as much as his does. Here's why I like John so much." It would be cheesy-populist endearing (just like Edwards!), and it would make a pretty powerful point about this thing not quite being over just yet.

Stuart Benjamin on Strom Thurmond:

So the choices with Thurmond seem to be that either he was a hypocrite or someone who would say anything to get elected, even if he disagreed with the words he was saying. Which one was he -- hypocrite or liar? My guess is that he really did believe what he said in the 1940s and 1950s, so I think he was probably a hypocrite. One piece of evidence that provides some support for this position is that, unlike some other former segregrationists, he never did repent.

The second disturbing question is, what did he do to cover this up? One big question is why Ms. Williams never went public while he was alive. She now has given us an answer, and it's not pretty: "Williams said her earlier statements had been a cover, part of an agreement she made with the senator to keep quiet in return for decades of financial support." She had little money -- she was, after all, a daughter with no father (and a mother who worked as a maid and died young). Thurmond helped to create her penury by not raising her, and then exploited her poverty by apparently making a deal in which he would give her money in return for her silence about her true parentage. I don't blame her -- she was dealt a pretty lousy hand by life (and by Thurmond more specifically), and she made a rational decision given her choices. I do blame him. His decision was rational in the way that hush money is often rational -- the briber would rather pay the money than have the information revealed. But it's a pretty despicable business when the hush money is paid to your daughter to further a career built on discriminating against her and others like her.

If they're allowing unsupervised furloughs for John Hinckley Jr., what's next? France banning students from earing religious gear like headscarves, yarmukles, and crosses? Oh, wait...

Three down, fifteen pages -- and 25 hours -- to go.

Finals suck.

Dumbass:

A top Vatican (news - web sites) official said Tuesday he felt pity and compassion for Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and criticized the U.S. military for showing video footage of him being treated "like a cow."

Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department and a former papal envoy to the United Nations (news - web sites), told a news conference it would be "illusory" to think the arrest of the former Iraqi president would heal all the damage caused by a war which the Holy See opposed.

"I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures," he said.

"Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him," he said in answer to questions about Saddam's arrest.

Quick question: What the hell dentist does the cardinal go to, that footage of a murderous kleptocratic ex-dictator getting free dental care -- as opposed to being given some face time with the fathers and brothers of Uday and Qusay's rape victims, say -- equals treating him "as if he were a cow"? Does his dentist have a cow fetish or something?

Dumbass.

Thank God at least one reviewer is, David Elliott of the San Diego Union Tribune, is taking a stand against the LOTR fangasm:

Here is an epic that divides viewers, maybe more than the "Matrix" films. Its many young fans, who did not grow up on "Lawrence of Arabia" and "The Godfather" or even "Star Wars," revel in "awesome" visuals and slow, backfilling narrative.

You can't blame people (like a few Lordites who called to tell me I was too old to really relish the series) for not having seen movies made before they were born, but some perspective beyond the Tolkien or fan-site kind does help you evaluate Jackson's film achievement.

It was my awareness of what Coppola, Lean, Gance, Kobayashi and other creators of epics have done that helped prompt questions in my head, as the latest film rolled along. Call them snarky, but they may be pertinent:

Since we know that cute Frodo must save mankind by returning the gold ring to Mount Doom, why the endless padding of "heroic" suspense? Jackson really thinks we needed such touches as the episode with a huge spider worthy of a '50s monster film (reputedly he's an arachnophobe).

Details, details (Jackson loves them): How come good guys are essentially defined by ears (usually pointed) and bad guys by teeth (nearly all grotesque)? You could gnaw greasy steel wool for 2,000 years and not have teeth like these.

Why is hero Frodo (Elijah Wood) often so wan and floppy, as if in need of smelling salts? Why is he so slow to notice that creepy mini-nudist Gollum is no friend? And his pal Sam (Sean Astin) calling him "Mr. Frodo" starts to seem like a joke.

Why does the villainy, though large, lack stature? With evil Saruman not back again (and Christopher Lee is mad as blazes about it), we're stuck with Sauron, nearly as dark and abstract as the monolith in "2001," plus gruesome Orcs and medieval mammoths.

Why, in these many realms, are the only viable occupations warfare, sorcery, music and carousing? Who built and sustains these mountain-scaling keeps (perhaps Merlin, the original digitalizer)?

...

Jackson has achieved not Tolkien. He has made a cornucopian and corny hash of Tolkien, old John Martin spectacle paintings, head comix, Arthurian tales, Bob Howard macho-lit, New Zealand travelogues, Thomas Kinkade kitsch, '30s serials and the mountain films of Leni Riefenstahl, whose spirit hovers over the grand shots of relay bonfires on snowy peaks.

"Lord" is All Epic, All the Time. Jackson loves battles, which means: hurling dense masses of mostly computerized fighters at one another. "How are the battles?," he recently asked a British reporter about "Master and Commander," and one hopes the reporter had the sense to tell him that Peter Weir's sea saga involves realistic men fighting a historical war with only modest help from special effects; nothing seems cartooned, and death, though bravely won, is not mythic.

This may be the best bit:

Impressively mounted, technically dazzling, the series also italicizes in neon every feeling, while some characters (like a gloomy, inept king) function as filler.

Preach on, brother! Ever Lordite who says these are the best movies that absolutely ever were should be strapped down, Clockwork Orange-style, and forced to watch Lost in Translation until they Get It.

There are probably better things to drink while proctoring an exam than a Naked brand smoothie whose flavor is called "Man-Go-Go." The name alone could probably justify 87 sexual harassment suits...

You know an SNL host -- in this case, the insufferable Elijah Wood -- is about as funny as a field amputation when they bring in a former cast member and a taped segment to punch up the monologue. If they had to have a LOTR cast member host, why not bring back Ian McKellen? Dumbasses.

UPDATE: I do have to say, however, that the kid from Kenan and Kel is hysterical.

This is some fun, happy news:

ANGEL's big guy is getting behind the camera lens for an upcoming episode of the show. David Boreanaz told Sci Fi Wire that he's directed an episode of the show, "Soul Purpose", which will air on January 21 next year. "It's got a JACOB'S LADDER feel to it," the actor told the website.

I noticed a few years ago that, rather surprisingly, none of the BUFFY or ANGEL cast members had directed any episodes, which was rather odd considering how often that seems to happen on long-running series. (HOMICIDE's Clark Johnson may be one of the best examples of someone making the TV-series-actor-to-director jump; he directed SWAT this past summer, which was far more fun than it had any right to be.) This season of ANGEL has been surprisingly strong, given the age of the series, the addition of Spike to the cast, the mysterious loss of Charisma Carpenter from the cast, and the potentially shark-jump-inducing premise switch. Boreanaz himself has been doing some rather subtle acting, as someone who's lost nearly everything he had but can't quite give up, either.

Plus, they did that amazing flashback episode about the demon-fighting Mexican wrestler brothers, which featured the immortal line, "Andale! Andale! The devil has built a robot!"

Gary Farber has thoughts in the key of "F".

Horribly under-rated writer Priest is going to be writing a new CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON series for Marvel, starring, well, Captain America and the Falcon:

The foundation of CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON is the unshakeable friendship between these two men. The friendship is non-negotiable and the trust between them is implicit, despite the rather damming evidence that, in issue #1, The Falcon has violated National Security, and the government has given Cap just 24 hours to bring Falcon in before they go after Falcon with guns blazing. If you use the trust these two men have as a compass, it makes negotiating the many twists and turns of "Two Americas," CAF's inaugural story arc, much easier.

In four issues taking place in just over 24 hours, Cap tracks the fugitive Falcon through rural Cuba as a hurricane slams the island, trying to stay one step ahead of government agents and Columbian drug warlords-- all out gunning for Falcon who has apparently and inexplicably turned against his own government. Cap's faith and trust in his old partner is put to the test as Falcon leads Cap through a dangerous steeplechase, ending in a major firefight in Miami. Using all the training he's received from Cap to stay one step ahead of his old partner, Falcon comes into his own as a worthy adversary for Cap as he manages to evade not only Cap but the good guys and bad guys as well. Complicating matters is a powerful rogue agent, a mysterious new threat developed by the US Navy, who is determined to stop Falcon from revealing classified secrets and who will stop at nothing-- not even Cap's death-- to achieve that objective.

I'm there, dude.

Neil Gaiman's brain farts are much more interesting than my brain farts.

I woke when Dave Mckean phoned this morning.

"Did you get my e-mail?" he asked. "I need the dialogue overhaul. Stephen Fry will be here in a couple of hours."

"Hang on," I said, puzzled. "That's not happening until Thursday."

"Right," said Dave. "Today. Thursday. Stephen Fry. Couple of hours from now."

My brain farts never involve celebrities.

This word you are using, "precious," I do not think it means what you think it does...

The only good thing about the impending premiere of the third excruciating installment of the relentlessly tedious Lord of the Rings trilogy is that the three-years-and-counting Internet geekgasm about these fricking movies will finally, FINALLY, end soon.

The cast members, alas, still labor under the delusion that they have taken part in the making of The Greatest Movies That Anyone Has Ever Made In the History of Making Movies.

Orlando Bloom led co-stars Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen in the goodbye dance for excited fans. Cast members had attended the world premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the final film in Peter Jackson's trilogy, in this capital city on Monday.

"It's amazing. The whole experience has just been the most precious time ever," said Bloom, who plays Elf warrior Legolas.

Still, I imagine that it couldn't be as bad as the fifty thousand DVD featurettes of Elijah Wood smirking about how very, very wonderful and precious being part of these very, very wonderful and precious -- and by "very, very wonderful and precious" I mean "very, very long and overwrought" -- movies has been.

And there's only one more Oscar season of fanboys griping that the movies had better win this time OR ELSE, never mind that there have been dozens of amazing motion pictures this year like Lost in Translation, American Splendor, Matchstick Men, Kill Bill, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Bend It Like Beckham, A Mighty Wind, all of which were a hell of a lot better than the previous installemnts in this turgid, bloated trilogy.

Vote Lieberman! He Eats More!

Blogger seems bloggered again. Blogger.

Silver Bullet Comic Books features a long interview with my online pal Tony Isabella about DC Comics' mishandling of his creation, Black Lightning, and DC's treatment of black superheroes in general. What's happened to these characters over the years is simply depressing; Tony's faith in and aspirations for his creation are inspiring.

Well, that's a relief.

I'm crazy Howard-Dean-Head-Man! Give me some candy!

Photo via Drudge.

Meanwhile, Political Wire links to a WTOP poll showing that Dean leads with 45% among the candidates actually running in the DC primary. That's the good news. The bad news is that the other candidates running in DC are Shaprton (11%), Moseley-Braun (8%), and Kucinich (4%). You'd think he could manage 50% or better versus the bottom tier of the primary field.

An open letter to the Teasdalian pepperpot who sat behind me at Bad Santa this weekend:

Dear Pepperpot,

Thank you for your running commentary throughout Saturday's showing of Bad Santa. Had you not been sitting behind me, I would not (to take just one instance) have known that actress Lauren Graham appears in a TV series called Gilmore Girls, nor known that you thought she was "so cute." In fact, you were even kind enough to repeat your observation of her cuteness no less than four times during the film. This knowledge affected my moviegoing experience in ways which I am sure you cannot even imagine.

I do have a few questions, however. Throughout the film, you made frequent exclamations about how shocking you found some of the events and behaviors depicted. Given that the movie is a black comedy about an alcoholic, sexaholic department store Santa Claus planning the latest in a series of Christmas Eve heists, I must ask, which part of the title "Bad Santa" did you not understand? Did you not expect that the film would address the less savory side of the life of an alcoholic department store Santa? Were you thinking he would be a wacky drunk, in the Nick and Nora Charles tradition? Did the advertisements for the film featuring Billy Bob Thornton, as the titular bad Santa, vomiting, cursing, passing out, stealing things, and so on not communicate this aspect of the film to you? Or did you simply assume that all of those scenes were staged expressly for the film's advertising, like that ad for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels fifteen years ago?

Clearly, you possess remarkable and unique cognitive capacities. Please contact me regarding medical research for which I believe you would be well suited.

Very truly, etc.

Some things I learned at the Science Museum of Minnesota yesterday:

1. Never, ever, ever go to downtown St. Paul at the same time as a hockey game and some cultural festival in which hundreds of children and their families run around the area dressed in silver-and-black lame and neon tassles and ribbons. Unless you LIKE spending an hour trying to get into the museum's parking garage. And why the hell do they call parking garages "ramps" around here? Did the locals decide they wanted a clear, unambiguous "Please rob me" sign for when they visit real cities?
   
2. Minnesotans possess a truly remarkable power to stand exactly where you want to go, and possess no understanding of the concept of a "straight line," let alone walking in one.
   
3. Just about every single non-extinct major fauna in the museum was shot by a Twin Cities businessman and donated to the museum after his death. One imagines the wives of all of these businessmen waiting for their husbands to kick off so they can get the freaking polar bear out of the foyer.
   
4. Forensic entomology is really, really cool.
   
5. Even the museum store doesn't carry stuffed toy penguins.
   

I think I've found the unintended consequence of the "Christmas season," at least as far as shopping goes, starting earlier and earlier every year: It's protected Thanksgiving and left it relatively untouched by commercialism. Not that I'm not a big fan of commercialism, capitalism, consumerism, mind you -- but it's nice to have one holiday, and especially the Thanksgiving holiday -- comfortably overlooked by the forces of commerce.

Another thing I love about Thanksgiving is that there are no real social expectations, beyond, well, eating. It's not like Halloween where people dress up in costumes that, generally, would be laughed off the stage of an eight-grade production of South Pacific or Christmas with its coercive demands for holiday cheer. It's just a nice day to take a break, relax, and think about the things you should be thankful for.

And eat turkey until you pass out, too.

It's pretty weird that I've seen two movies this year that featured Japanese characters named "Charlie Brown" (Lost in Translation and Kill Bill) and another two that used the Los Angeles subway as a plot device (SWAT and Hollywood Homicide.)

The picture doesn't do justice to the wonder that is DC Direct's action figure of the armored, middle-aged Batman of Mark Waid and Alex Ross' epic Kingdom Come. The wings are articulated and span more than a foot. The paint job and sculpting are dead on and flawless, at least on the figure I got Saturday as an early Christmas gift. And you can't quite see in the photo just how perfect Batman's slightly nasty, slightly eager-to-brawl grin is. This thing looks like an Alex Ross illustration come to life.

Now if DCD could just do something about those damn stickers on the Kingdom Come Green Lantern figure...

Well, this is different:

Kentucky U.S. Rep. Ken Lucas, a Boone County Democrat, will announce today that he will retire from Congress and not seek a fourth term next year, sources close to Lucas said Sunday.

Nick Clooney, a television personality, newspaper columnist, Democrat from Augusta and the father of actor George Clooney, will announce plans to run for Lucas' Fourth Congressional District in the 2004 election, the sources said.

Two things occur to me about Peter David' latest attempt at political commentary, in which he takes George W. Bush to task for saying, in response to the protests in London, "I am so pleased to be going to a country which says that people are allowed to express their mind. That's fantastic. Freedom is a beautiful thing."

1. A similar statement from a politician of whom David approved would no doubt be seen as a clever riposte that illustrates a deep and profound understanding of the pluralistic values that undergird a democracy.
   
2. Bush's critics and opponents have been telling themselves that his comeuppance and exposure as The Absolute Worst Person Who Ever Lived In The History Of Ever is just around the corner for nearly a decade. Hasn't happened yet. Not that I'm any fan of Bush -- I voted against him twice in 2000 -- but maybe, just maybe, "Bush is the devil!" is not a winning campaign slogan.
   

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

Was it just me, or was Anthony LaPaglia's Aussie accent really fighting to get out during last night's episode of Without A Trace?

This line from a rundown of DC Comics' publishing plans for next year, including a NEW TEEN TITANS graphic novel begun in the 80s, is just plain irritating:

The graphic novel was drawn well before the World Trade Center collapsed, but DC decided not to have the pages that feature the WTC redrawn. DC is considering this to be an "untold tale." (Emphasis added. - CJG)

Isn't that a bit like saying "well before the USS Arizona stopped floating" or "well before President Kennedy stopped waving to crowds in Dallas?"

Weird:

TASTY TIDBIT: Sun-Times food columnist Nigella Lawson will share her passion for food with President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair today -- serving lunch at No. 10 Downing Street.

According to the Prime Minister's press office, Lawson was asked to plan the menu and supervise its preparation.

No word on whether the saucy Lawson will be breaking bread with the men.

Also no word on whether the President will make a pass at the saucy serving girl with whom the PM has fallen in love, thereby precipitating an international incident...

OK. Can't blog. Writing paper.

Good news from DC Comics:

THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES VOLUME 2 HC
* A hardcover collecting DOOM PATROL #90-97
* Written by Arnold Drake with art by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown, a new cover by Brian Bolland and a foreword by Roy Thomas
* Scheduled to be in stores in March with a cover price of $49.95 U.S.

There are enough Doom Patrol stories to fill five volumes; at 2 years between volumes, I'll be 35 or dead when the series is finally complete...

COURTIER THE FIRST: Shall we inform the queen?

COURTIER THE SECOND: Inform the queen of what?

CTF: You know.

CTS. No, I don't.

CTF: Of course you do.

CTS: No, really, I don't know what you want to inform her of.

CTF: Well, it's sort of an emperor's new clothes sort of thing.

CTS: I thought you were talking about the queen.

CTF: I am.

CTS: You said emperor. Which one is this about, now?

CTF: It's a figure of speech. This is about the queen. Just have a look at her, OK?

CTS: She's not even queen anymore. She's a senator.

CTF: True, I suppose.

CTS: And even then she's just an actress. So what's she got us courtiers for?

CTF: Hmm. I suppose she doesn't.

CTS: So we don't even bloody exist?

CTF: I suppose not. The hell with it, then, I'm not telling her everyone can see her ta-tas.

I defy anyone to look at Lileks' perm link graphic for this week (scroll to the end of the page) and not misread it as "Porn Link."

Sweet galloping Jebus, how did Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (or SUV as we call it 'round these parts) make it to 100 episodes? Does anyone even know anyone who watches this thing? Is there that much frisson from seeing actors from OZ playing cops?

Game over, man, game over.

Stuffed animal penguin toys are much harder to find than you might expect.

Robin Givhan takes a look at the hair of the men who would be President.

In a locks-to-locks comparison, Clark would be judged more favorably. Dean's hair looks as though it was ordered from an old Sears catalogue. But there's a certain Mayberry charm to Clark's barbershop cut. Yet who can linger over Clark's perfectly trimmed, supreme-Allied-commander hair when his taut profile is competing for attention? His jaw line is so perfectly sharp that a draftsman could use it as a straight edge. Clark has an ideal nose, one that should be cast in plaster and used as a teaching aid in a course on rhinoplasty. Given all that, he doesn't even need hair.
...
Seven of the nine Democratic candidates have the same haircut, with only slight modifications to accommodate the texture of their hair. It is the haircut that boys are often given on their first trip to the barber. And as many men are loath to experiment with their hair, it is often the cut that, decades later, they take to the grave. It is the "regular guy" haircut: parted on the side, clipped short at the temples, not too much layering lest it look as though a Hugh Grant/Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise degree of thought might have gone into it. It is self-consciously unstyled, a cut that camouflages any furtive use of a blow dryer or styling product. It is the cut that Dan Rather ditched when he wanted to look more modern. Richard Gephardt, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Dean and Clark all part their hair on the left. John Edwards, 50, parts his low on the right and a thick mane flops across his forehead like an inverted Nike Swoosh. It is an old man's haircut -- neither short nor rakishly long. Just unremarkably there.
...
Candidate Kerry -- he of the dramatic jaw line and a 59-year-old physique that looks particularly fetching in a motorcycle jacket -- has a thatch of hair that always looks as though it is one percentage point of humidity away from floating up and off his head. But on arid days, Kerry's hair has a thick, glamorous quality. It edges toward dashing, hints at vanity but steers clear of roguish. It is leading-man hair with a politician's part.

David Greenberg writes a sharp examination of the deification of Ronald Reagan:

For most of his career, Reagan took bold and provocative (and often wrongheaded) positions. For that boldness, he elicited affection but also distrust and even hatred, and not just from a small band of liberals in Hollywood. By airbrushing out those qualities that made Reagan controversial, by trying to turn him into a beloved George Washington-like icon, his boosters are doing him a disservice. In forsaking insight into the antipathy he often engendered, they seek to render him a sunny, universally adored, wholly benign, and two-dimensional figurehead—a portrait that, even more than this idiotic docudrama, would utterly conceal for posterity the reasons that Ronald Reagan mattered.

The whole piece is worth reading. Reagan was a complicated figure; he should, at least, be remembered and explored as such. That's a hell of a lot more interesting than reading about St. Ronald of Eureka.

You are Jesse Custer.
Jesse is as tough as they come and always willing
to prove it. He'll kick your ass for being a
jackass. Or back you up if you prove that
you're a man. An actual good guy, Jesse's word
and honor is without reproach.


What Gritty No Nonsense Comic Book Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Is there ANY occasion David Broder can't take and turn into a lament for the good ol' days of compulsory military service?

Living, eating and working together with Americans of different races, educations, religions and backgrounds, as millions did between 1940 and 1970, had benefits that lasted a lifetime and helped every aspect of our national life -- including politics.

It contributed to the sense of community that supported local schools, built local hospitals and endowed local athletic, recreational and artistic facilities. It sustained the national spirit through the decades of the Cold War and helped the nation recover from assassinations, riots and other travails of the 1960s.

It was the glue of what we have come to call the Greatest Generation.

Gee, you think maybe part of the reason a draft did all that had to with the massive military threat the Axis powers presented? And that a because-it's-good-for-you draft like the one folks like Broder trot out every time they can't come up with a real idea for a column would meet with massive resistance and criticism from just about every corner of society?

Yes, there are situations that warrant compulsory service. But those situations are on a scale comparable to the threats faced in World War II, not simply to make the Broders and Putnams of the world feel like those irresponsible young people are learning their lesson and eating their spinach.

Damn. I didn't even know Art Carney was still alive.

Art Carney, who played Jackie Gleason's sewer worker pal Ed Norton in the TV classic "The Honeymooners" and went on to win the 1974 Oscar for best actor in "Harry and Tonto," has died at 85.

Carney died in Chester, Conn., on Sunday and was buried on Tuesday after a small, private funeral. He had been ill for some time.

Jeff Jarvis has the last word on The Reagans and Saving Jessica Lynch (and, sweet galloping Christ, couldn't NBC have at least bothered to use Lynch's proper rank in their title?) and all other TV-movie brouhahas:

TV movies are crap. To act as if they matter is like acting as if we should care about the political pronouncements of, say, Robin Leach. If he came out tomorrow and said anything about Iraq, would we care or notice? No, because it's just Robin Leach. If a TV movie claims to depict the story of Jessica Lynch or Ronald Reagan, should we care or notice? No, because it's just a TV movie.
And that makes the stinks all the more fake news.

It's certainly a saner response than, say, this.

Jeff Jarvis has the last word on The Reagans and Saving Jessica Lynch (and, sweet galloping Christ, couldn't NBC have at least bothered to use Lynch's proper rank in their title?) and all other TV-movie brouhahas:

TV movies are crap. To act as if they matter is like acting as if we should care about the political pronouncements of, say, Robin Leach. If he came out tomorrow and said anything about Iraq, would we care or notice? No, because it's just Robin Leach. If a TV movie claims to depict the story of Jessica Lynch or Ronald Reagan, should we care or notice? No, because it's just a TV movie.
And that makes the stinks all the more fake news.

It's certainly a saner response than, say, this.

I just returned from the U of M Law School's 2003 Silha Lecture, which was by Ken Starr on "Campaign Finance and the Freedoms of Speech and Association." I'm skeptical of campaign finance reforms on a good day, so I was intrigued as to what he had to say.

Most of the lecture was a recapping of the basic arguments against CFR/BCRA/McCainFeingoldShaysMeehan. What I found most intriguing was Starr's tentative step into the area of policy-making. He argued that the current, command-and-control system of campaign finance law is bad policy and contrary to the spirit and tradition of free speech, association, and political discourse. His recommendation was that we outgrow it and replace it with a system of transparency and disclosure, which I tend very strongly to agree with. A perfectly transparent system of campaign finance disclosure, open to citizen monitoring (hell, sounds like a perfect job for the blogosphere) would do a hell of a lot more good than fining organizations that dare speak the name of a candidate in a broadcast ad 30 days before an election.

Joe Bob Briggs presents the "The Complete, Comprehensive, and True Story of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" for your reading enjoyment. It's a frighteningly long and sordid -- and thoroughly entertaining -- tale of guerilla low-budget filmmaking.

[Director Tobe Hooper made] the most financially successful film in the history of Texas, a film that is still shown in almost every country of the world, and whose innovations have continued to influence the horror genre for the last 25 years. Using $60,000 raised by an Austin politician, he filmed mostly in and around an old Victorian house in Round Rock with a crew that used exactly two vehicles--a Chevy van for the film equipment, and a broken-down 1964 Dodge Travco motor home for the actors' dressing rooms. The result was "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," a movie whose very title has become America's cultural shorthand for perversity, moral decline and especially the corruption of children. (It remains the favorite example of Congressmen calling for the censorship of television.) Yet the movie's pure intensity, startling technique and reputation as an outlaw film have brought praise from a group as diverse as Steven Spielberg, the Cannes Film Festival, the inmates of the Pennsylvania State Penitentiary, Martin Scorsese (Travis Bickle watches it in "Taxi Driver"), the Museum of Modern Art, Paul McCartney, almost every metal band of the past twenty years, and the Colombo crime family of Brooklyn, which gleefully ranked it right up there with "Deep Throat" as one of their major sources of income in the seventies. The film itself is a strange shifting experience--early audiences were horrified, later audiences laughed, newcomers to the movie were inevitably stricken with a vaguely uneasy feeling, as though the film might have actually been made by a maniac--but the story behind the film is even stranger.

...

It was conceived, shaped, filmed, edited and released in a kind of mild doper's haze, like a free-love happening that, on the third day, turns a little ugly. Hooper would go on to direct "Poltergeist," "Salem's Lot" and many other films and television shows, but through it all he retained, like his friend Spielberg, a latent counter-culture shabbiness, with his unruly beard, mop haircut, professorial wire rims, and gravelly halting voice. (He rivals Dennis Hopper for the number of times he uses the word "man.") Hooper's scenarist, Kim Henkel, was a lanky, drawling textbook illustrator with a droopy handlebar mustache who had starred in Hooper's first feature, "Eggshells," as a dope-smoking sexaholic poet who likes to write in the nude and discuss politics in the bathtub. Henkel was also living the Austin hippie lifestyle--"but I joined the hippies one week and got fired the next. There were too many rules. It's easier to be a redneck than a hippie." And likewise, most of the "Chain Saw" cast had some connection to the counter-culture. Allen Danziger, who played the van driver "Jerry," was a childhood friend of Stokely Carmichael who had travelled from the Bronx to Austin to work with the mentally retarded in one of LBJ's Great Society programs. Dottie Pearl, the makeup artist, was a cultural anthropologist who had received government grants to make films about the Navajo. Gunnar Hansen, who played the actual chainsaw killer, was the editor of the Austin poetry journal Lucille at the time he got the part.

Yet the more you learn about "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," the more it seems less the invention of a screenwriter, or director, or acting company, than the product of Austin itself at the end of the Vietnam era. It was a different, now vanished Austin, a place where the canonical six degrees of separation had been reduced to one or two, where the governor and the small-time marijuana dealer were likely to both know the chairman of the Public Broadcasting System, and where legislators and lawyers and lobbyists could easily form marriages of convenience with poets and quirky filmmakers.

All these years later, almost everyone involved feels permanently changed, or, in some cases, permanently scarred by the film. At least one actor--Ed Neal, who played "The Hitchhiker"--can't speak about it without becoming enraged. Robert Kuhn, a criminal attorney who invested in the film, would waste years fighting for the profits that should have poured into Austin but were instead siphoned off by a distribution company that absconded with the funds. The late Warren Skaaren, who would become one of the highest-paid rewrite men in Hollywood, could trace his whole career to his association with "Chain Saw." Ron Bozman, the film's production manager, would ascend to the very pinnacle of the profession. He accepted the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture as the producer of "The Silence of the Lambs." Still, even he says that "Chain Saw" was the greater thrill. "It was by far the more intense experience--nothing compares to it for density of experience--it was just such a wild ride."

Read the rest, as they say.

Oh, man, this is purty.

I'm not much of a reality TV sort of guy. My wife and I watched the first Joe Millionaire because we were attracted to the Stanley Millgram-esque cruelty of the whole thing, but other than that the entire phenomenon has just sort of passed us by. Never seen Survivor, don't know a Big Brother from a Bachelorette.

But we did watch the first episode of The Joe Schmo Show on The Nashville Network, I mean, TNN, I mean, yeah, Spike TV, that's the ticket...and we were hooked. The premise, of course, was that all of the participants in the show were actors except for one guy, Matt Kennedy Gould, the titular Joe Schmo. Who, as it turned out, may be the nicest damn schlub ever to walk the planet in the last few years or so.

We finally saw the last episode, in which the whole thing was revealed to Matt, last night. Here's what his hometown paper had to say about it:

Spike TV's "The Joe Schmo Show," which seemed at the outset to be the cruelest reality show yet, turned into one of the most entertaining and ultimately uplifting series as it introduced viewers to the nicest, most down-to-earth reality show contestant ever.

On last night's finale, the show's star, Mt. Lebanon resident Matt Kennedy Gould, was let in on the big secret of "Joe Schmo": It was all about him.

Gould thought he'd signed on for "Lap of Luxury," another run-of-the-mill reality series. But on last night's finale, taped in June, he learned that all the other "contestants" in this rigged reality show were actors working from a script outline. He was Joe Schmo, winner of a spa vacation, a trip to Tahiti, a flat-screen TV and $100,000.

He took it well, smiling and shaking with emotions that ran an upbeat gamut from laughs to tears of joy. This good guy was in shock, but he still had the wherewithal to continue his role as Pittsburgh's unofficial ambassador, talking up the town with genuine enthusiasm.

"Ask me now that I've won where I'm gonna go," he said to his co-stars in the finale. "I'm going to Pittsburgh!"

"Did that come off as good as I felt?" Gould asked yesterday in a phone interview from New York. "Did you get the 'Yeah!' feeling? It's really the way I felt. That's the one place I wanted to be at that moment."

The Big Reveal was one of the most stunning, oddly moving things I've ever seen on television. It was like something David Mamet might have written in a universe where he's been properly medicated for all these years -- slowly, all of the actors fessed up while Matt slowly realized that the whole thing was not what it had seemed for the last ten days.

And, jeez, it couldn't have happened to a better guy. The reason the scene was so moving was because Matt, the show had made clear, was not in a good place when he started -- he was in the kind of amiable-but-maddening directionless that hits a lot of people in their mid-late twenties. Seeing him see these actors who had been so damn impressed with what a plain old good guy he turned out to be was just plain wonderful.

Funny how the fakest reality show of them all turned out to have so much genuine emotion in it.