Three-word review of Comedy Central's DOG BITES MAN

"Needs more Zach."

A non-review thought: Does this mean we're unlikely to see Zach reprise his role as Frisbee, my favorite recurring minor character on Reno 911?

You can bring props? If I'd known that we would have had props too.

I present to you, this Monday morning, what may be the best wedding picture ever by way of my hometown newspaper:

Gore-El

Mark Evanier links to this column by Elliot S! Maggin comparing Jor-El to Al Gore.

Exit Farina

Via TV Tattle (look, indispensible is indispensible, all right?) comes the welcome news that Dennis Farina is leaving Law & Order after two seasons. The news is welcome because, while he's a fine actor and I've enjoyed him in other places ranging from Manhunter to Justice League, he just never clicked on L&O or came anywhere close to filling Jerry Orbach's formidable shoes. He had very little to work with, character-wise, and more often than not his Det. Fontana was simply written as a bully.

As for a replacement, I suggest that Dick Wolf move Richard Belzer over from SUV to the mothership -- which would be rather fitting since we learned during a L&0/Homicide crossover that Lennie Briscoe once dated one of Munch's ex-wives...

Double treat for CSI fans

Via the indispensable TV Tattle comes a lengthy interview with CSI producer Carol Mendelsohn about the last few minutes of this season's finale as well as the show in general. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes of a show that's aging nicely into its upcoming seventh season and how the folks who write the show look at the series and the characters in general.

And as an added bonus, there are dozens of comments from obsessive fans who believe that the aforementioned few minutes have retroactively destroyed everything good about the show, that the producers and male lead of the show are liars, and that a bare handful of scenes showing or mentioning characters' private lives have turned the show into a soap opera.

God, I love the Internets.

Fug. LEE.

Michael Turner draws women like Rob Liefeld draws feet.

Six degrees of Tommy Westphall

Silly Desmond. If the world were really just a snowglobe, it would be much, much bigger.

Words fail me.

So just go here now. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

Bob Casey blog

Bob Casey is the man who will end Rick Santorum's Congressional career this fall, and now you can read his campaign's blog. I'm looking forward to this since I'm originally from Pennsylvania, and Santorum has never been anything but an embarassment to my home state.

Best. Wife. EVER.

Why? Because as we were watching TV last night, She Who Must Be Obeyed said this:

"I bet Jaime Pressly would be lots of fun in bed."

Oh, I chose very well...

RIP, Lloyd Bentsen

In honor of the late Senator and Treasury Secretary, we bring you a clip of the only memorable thing that has ever happened in a Vice-Presidential debate.

Great moments in headline writing

The Washington Post blows the lid off of this one:

Elections Are Crux Of GOP's Strategy

That's right -- a political party is going to try to -- wait for it -- win an election! The audacity! It's crazy enough that it just might work! Why hasn't anyone else ever tried this?

Bertie!

Four Weddings and a Funeral is one of those movies that She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have seen dozens and dozens of time, less because of any affection for it than because it is always on cable, and is a good background entertainment while doing whatever it is we do on the weekends. So you'd think that it would, twelve years after its original release, have nothing suprising to offer.

You'd be wrong.

We were watching it yesterday afternoon while waiting for friends to come by and take in some surplus funiture that had been living in the garage. And as I watched Hugh Grant's character stammer through his toast at the first of the titular weddings, it hit me:

"He's Bertie Wooster! He's playing Bertie Wooster!"

She Who Must Be Obeyed thought about it for a millisecond, "He IS Bertie Wooster!"

"That's what I said! He's Bertie Wooster!"

"Bertie!"

How did we miss that? How? It's one of those things that's so obvious in retrospect it's hard to imagine not seeing it in the first place.

Last night's CSI

Well, good for them.

The third Monday in May

May you all gave a happy Miracle Monday.

JLU: Curtain Call

Via Fortress of Fortitude, the Justice League -- and by extension, the wonderful animated DC Universe that began with Batman: The Animated Series all those years ago -- takes its final bow, with the best curtain call I've seen since The Life Aquatic gleefully ripped off Buckaroo Banzai:

Damn your black heart, DC Comics

As unpleasant as I find DC's editorial direction, I have to admit that their collected editions folks keep putting out some occational gems that, in a perfect world, I'd buy the second they came out. Here's what I like from their latest announcement of reprint books:

BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN TP
Writer/Artist: Matt Wagner
Collects BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN #1-6
$19.99, 144 pages

I keep hearing good things about this, so it goes on the wish list.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: BATMAN VOL. 1 TP
Writers: John Broome, Ed "France" Herron and Bill Finger
Artists: Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, Bob Kane, Sheldon Moldoff, Murphy Anderson and Sid Greene
Collects stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #327-342 and BATMAN #164-174
$16.99, 552 pages

If this continues to the O'Neil/Adams stuff, I'll be picking it up then.

SUPERMAN: UP, UP AND AWAY TP
Writers: Geoff Johns and Kurt Busiek
Artists: Pete Woods and Renato Guedes; original cover artists: Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson
Collects SUPERMAN #650-653 and ACTION COMICS #837-840
$14.99, 192 pages

I will probably read this at Barnes & Noble. I am a bad person.

ABSOLUTE DC: THE NEW FRONTIER HC
Writer/Artist: Darwyn Cooke
Collects DC: THE NEW FRONTIER #1-6, plus a pinup gallery, deleted story pages and more
$75.00, 464 pages

Darwyn Cooke's terrific spin on the DC Universe is one of the most fun comics I've ever read. I really wish this had become the new template for DC's line, as opposed to its recent run of slaughter comics.

ALL STAR SUPERMAN VOL. 1 HC
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frank Quitely; original cover artists: Frank Quitely and Neal Adams
Collects ALL STAR SUPERMAN #1-6
$19.99, 160 pages

It's great to see DC collecting this, but I'm holding out for the inevitable Absolute Edition.

GREEN LANTERN: REVENGE OF THE GREEN LANTERNS TP
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artists: Carlos Pacheco, Ivan Reis, Ethan Van Sciver, Marc Campos Jesus Merino and Prentis Rollins; original cover artists: Carlos Pacheco, Ethan Van Sciver, Simone Bianchi and Neal Adams
Collects GREEN LANTERN #7-13
$12.99, 168 pages

This is another one to read at the store. For some reason, I enjoy Geoff Johns' work on Green Lantern even though most of his stuff leaves me cold.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE PHANTOM STRANGER VOL. 1 TP
Writers: Mike Friedrich, John Broome, Ed "France" Herron, Robert Kanigher, Jack Oleck, Len Wein and Gerry Conway
Artists: Neal Adams, Jerry Grandenetti, Leonard Starr, Bill Draut, Carmine Infantino, Frank Giacoia, Murphy Anderson, Wayne, Howard, Vince Colletta, Jim Aparo, Tony DeZuñiga and Jack Sparling
Collects SHOWCASE #80 and THE PHANTOM STRANGER #1-21
$16.99, 544 pages

This intrigues me. I love the obscure stuff we're seeing released under the Showcase line, and I'd love to have more Jim Aparo stuff on my bookshelves.

AQUAMAN: SWORD OF ATLANTIS - ONCE AND FUTURE TP
Writer: Kurt Busiek
Artist: Jackson Guice; original cover artists: Jackson Guice, Ian Churchill, Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merino
Collects AQUAMAN: SWORD OF ATLANTIS #40-45
$12.99, 144 pages

Store. Just to see what everyone's talking about.

SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF STEEL VOL. 5 TP
Writers: John Byrne and Marv Wolfman
Artists: John Byrne and Jerry Ordway
Collects ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #432-435, ACTION COMICS #592-593 and SUPERMAN #9-11
$19.99, 208 pages

I don't actually plan on buying this, but at the rate this series is going they could collect the entire Byrne run on Superman in four or five more volumes. I wonder if they'll keep it going after that?

THE HUNTRESS: THE DARKNIGHT DAUGHTER TP
Writer: Paul Levitz
Artists: Joe Staton, Steve Mitchell, Bob Layton, Bob Smith, Bruce Patterson, Jerry Ordway and Mike DeCarlo
Collects DC SUPER STARS #17 and stories from BATMAN FAMILY #18-20, WONDER WOMAN #271-287, 289-290 and 294-295
$19.99, 224 pages

That was the sound of me blinking. I've read about these stories for years and I loved Levitz' run on Legion of Super-Heroes, so I'll probably pick this up eventually.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER VOL. 1 TP
Writers: Joe Kubert, Bob Haney, Robert Kanigher, Frank Robbins, Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie
Artists: Joe Kubert, Irv Novick, Doug Wildey, Dan Spiegle and Jack Sparling
Collects stories from STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES #151-204
$16.99, 560 pages

See my Phantom Stranger comments. Repeat.

And if you'd like to contribute to the "Help Matter-Eater Lad buy Absolute New Frontier Fund," please click on the Amazon links on this site next time you need to buy something...

Showcase Presents Green Lantern

I recently got around to buying DC's Showcase collection of Green Lantern's earliest two dozen or so issues, and they're some of the most fun comics I've read in a while. There's always been something about the character that's appealed to me, even though my only stint as a regular reader was the Green Lantern Corps series that spun out of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Maybe the idea of getting a magic ring from a dying alien seemed more likely to happen to me than getting doused by chemicals or finding out I was an adopted alien, or maybe the almost literal wish-fulfillment aspect of the character got to me; I can't really say. And these stories are terrific -- short puzzle and action stories with really nice art from Gil Kane as he evolved into the style we all remember him for, and featuring an amusing spin on the secret identity concept in that the already-cool Hal Jordan can't measure up to the coolness of his alter ego. I know it's unlikely, but I'd really like to see this volume continue all the way up to the end of the series with issue #225. It would only take, oh, eleven or twelve volumes...

Go here now, even though it doesn't do Katee Sackhoff justice.

I present to thee...Battlestar Galactsimpsons.

We're back...with more STUFF!

Mark Evanier shares the miracle that was Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine:

Then I went down to the floor to watch the next episode being taped...and something happened during it which I still remember with a tiny tingle. It was a regular bit they did involving a stagehand named Gene Patton who'd come on and dance under the name, "Gene Gene the Dancing Machine."

The minute they started playing his music -- "Jumpin' at the Woodside," I think the tune's called -- the studio positively erupted. Barris started dancing and the panelists jumped up and started dancing...and you could feel how much Gene Gene enjoyed what he was doing. Okay, fine, they're performers. It's part of the act. But the crew also started dancing -- people not on screen. The guy operating Camera 1 was operating Camera 1 and dancing at the same time. Grips were dancing, lighting guys were dancing, the members of the band were dancing as much as they could and still play their instruments. And of course, the audience -- an odd mix of younger Gong Show fans intermingled with old ladies who couldn't get in to the Hollywood Squares taping down the hall -- simply had to leap up and boogie. Some of the show's performers and staffers were a little (shall we say) under the influence of something...but the crew wasn't and the audience wasn't. It was just an honest "high" of excitement.

I've been on many TV stages in my life. I've seen big stars, huge stars -- Johnny, Frank, Sammy, Dino, Bob, you name 'em. I've seen great acts and great joy, and if you asked me to name the most thrilling moment I've witnessed in person, I might just opt for two minutes of the Gong Show electrifying Stage 3 for all of 120 seconds. Maybe it was because it came so totally out of nowhere that it stunned me but everyone, including the stone-cold sober people, was suddenly just so...happy. There was something very, very invigorating and enjoyable about being in the midst of all that sudden happiness, however frivolous it may have been.

The thing about the inevitable is that it always winds up happening sooner or later

The original, theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy are finally coming to DVD:

In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you'll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.

This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st. International release will follow on or about the same day. Each original theatrical version will feature Dolby 2.0 Surround sound, close-captioning, and subtitles in English, French and Spanish for their U.S. release. International sound and subtitling vary by territory.

I'm very, very glad that I never got around to buying the previous DVD release. Or the old VHS copies I keep seeing at Half-Price Books.

You may remember that I pretty much called this one:

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

Of course, I was off a year, since this comes in 2006 rather than 2007. My guess is that 2007 will instead see an omnibus DVD set of all six movies.

John Doe

It's nice to see another Gorilla Comics series -- albeit one that never actually saw print -- returning. I really liked what the guys at Gorilla were trying to do, and I suspect I'd have a lot more monthly comics on my pull list if their imprint had taken off. Now, if someone would just revive Section Zero and take a chance on Stellarwoman's Boyfriend, Bob Jones...

Why?

Why would anyone set up MS Word to use smart quotes instead of straight quotes? Why? Smart quotes look ugly, they take up too much room, and they don't have any friends. So why do people use them? Why?

"Lousy Smarch weather…"

There really is a Simpsons quote for every occasion.

At least there were no woodsmen, or an heiress-turned-maid

It's bad enough to have a dream in which one is helping Veronica Mars move a futon mattress through a park.

It's worse when she guesses your age and is off by three years in the upper direction.

It's worse than THAT when you lie about your age in response.

Imagine if I'd eaten Chinese food that night...

How do you DO that, exactly?

It's nice to read that the BBC series Worst Week of My Life will get a Region 1 DVD release; the show was an amusing enough trifle and it's always good to know it can be Netflixed. But I'm kind of amazed to read that the second series of the program will air on BBC America in August. What would that be about, anyway?

Secret Wars re-enactors

And to think, I knew these guys when...

You work for Jimmy, you work hard!

When I saw the news story about President Bush declaring himself "The Decider," all I could think was, "Great, now we have Jimmy Wichard for a president..."

Batman as he should be

I know I keep complaining about the direction of DC Comics when I talk about comics here, but they still manage to do some things right. One of them is this spiffy action figure of Batman with a blue cape and a yellow oval around his bat-emblem and a utility belt with tubes instead of pouches that comes out in December. I must own it; everybody's Golden Age is 12, after all...

War on Easter

Are you a self-satisfied crybaby who needs your religious practices affirmed by powerful agents like the government, and department stores? Is fighting the War on the War on Christmas not enough for you? Good news, then! Here's how to do your part in the War on Easter!

(Via She Who Must Be Obeyed.)

Big Mars Love

I'm glad She Who Must Be Obeyed and I aren't the only ones who have noticed:

...how many Veronica Mars alums have parts on Big Love? The late Lilly Cain, computer whiz Mac and the unfortunate Beaver Casablancas from Veronica Mars have all shown up...

And while I'm enjoying the heck out of Big Love, despite it's fascination with Bill Paxton's fleshy bits, my reaction to the setup of one man having three wives remains: Why would you DO that?

(Via TV Tattle.)

David Morrissey

Last fall, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I discovered an astonishingly good actor by the name of David Morrissey in two series BBC America was airing. The first was Viva Blackpool, a murder mystery musical in which Morrissey starred as Ripley Holden, proprietor of a skeezy Blackpool amusement hall that he was trying to turn into a hotel casino. As Ripley, Morrissey turned in a terrific performance as a larger-than-live, Elvis-sideburn sporting character, whose outsize behavior masked outsize depth of character. He underplayed his part by overplaying it, if you follow what I mean; if I knew more about acting I could make it more sensible.

The other was State of Play, a taut political thriller in which Morrissey played an up-and-coming politician caught up in a scandal. This time he turned in a perfectly controlled performance as a consumate politician whose world was falling apart around him.

Either performance alone would have been noteworthy. But watching them in tandem was a revelation -- Morrissey's such a chameleon that he barely looked the same in either part; he inhabited the skin of each man so completely it was almost impossible to imagine him being anyone else. Surely, I thought, this was an actor to watch; big things no doubt lay in his future. In an idle moment, I thought that the folks who had case Daniel Craig as James Bond had missed out by not casting Morrissey -- but I put that thought aside. It seemed impossible that another perfect showcase would not come along.

But if the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry, so too must the idle musings of a grad student who watches too much television.

You see, a big movie with David Morrissey as its male lead just opened.

It's called Basic Instinct 2.

Can't win 'em all, I suppose...

If I had 12,000 Euros...

...I'd be bidding on an authentic Enigma machine and wondering if Rudolf von Hackleheber had ever used it. (Via BoingBoing.)

Kneel before Caesar!

Because you demanded it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about the Caeser's salad, including things you didn't know you needed to know.

In the last two decades, the simple combination of romaine lettuce, creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese has:

· Become America's most popular main-dish salad, showing up virtually everywhere from fast-food chains to white-tablecloth restaurants to the takeout counter in the supermarket.

· Dramatically altered the lettuce industry as the demand for romaine has skyrocketed.

· Turned the chicken-topped Caesar into the chicken item most frequently found on restaurant menus -- more often than wings or even that perennial kid favorite, chicken fingers.

And still we want more.

Better living through market inefficiencies

I'm not much of a basketball fan, but I was entertained by this Slate article about how George Mason has built its basketball team and economics department using the same techniques:

GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. Its basketball team and academic programs began with the (correct) assumption that they couldn't hope to compete against the top schools in their fields—say, Harvard Law School or the Duke Blue Devils—by directly imitating their methods. GMU lacks the resources and reputation to recruit McDonald's All-Americans or Alan Dershowitzes. So instead, GMU has hunted for inefficiencies in its markets. Coach Jim Larranaga follows the Moneyball model of recruitment: hunting for the undervalued players—the ones who everyone else thought were too short, too thin, or too fat—and then building them into a team. In its astonishing defeat of UConn, GMU's players were giving away 4 inches at nearly every position.

Picking undervalued players wouldn't be possible if the market for jocks worked perfectly. In an efficient market, jocks—like stocks—should be valued no more nor no less than what they are actually worth. So, why isn't the market efficient?

One reason is that coaches who take chances on oddball players risk making themselves look foolish. A coach who goes after the same jock that everyone else wants, or an investment analyst who picks the same stock that everyone else recommends, at least can't be made to look worse than average. Herd behavior means that unpopular opportunities remain unexploited. An unusual coach who's willing to look unfashionable with the in-crowd has a chance to excel.

This is also the idea behind GMU's free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn't afford to be a first-class MIT and didn't want to be a second-class MIT, so successive chairs of the department, backed by entrepreneurial university presidents George Johnson and Alan Merten, looked for unexploited opportunities.

James Buchanan, GMU's first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist, has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.

This particularly entertains me since it's not that different to how I picked production staffs when I was producing theater as an undergrad. There was always gnashing of teeth among the board of the theatre club about the shortage of skilled technicians, but I always liked making offbeat choices -- particularly ones that didn't make sense unless you rethought what, say, a technical director's job really consisted of -- that usually worked out really well. And the people recruited that way were usually more likely to bring their A game, because they were so pleased to be asked to do something no one else thought they could do. Who knew I was onto something? Not me, that's for sure...

Quick politics

1. I spent the short unhappy life of Red America crashing on a deadline for school and then fighting off -- with little success -- a bug. So I've got little to add to what's already been said about it elsewhere, except that the whole miserable train wreck was like seeing every pampered, talking-point stenographing fop I've ever known implode publicly.
   
   
2. So, when do we see the ads attacking John McCain as a flip-flopper?
   
   
3. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president whose idea of humor is not making fun of other people? I've no use for the deeply Abramoffed Conrad Burns, but humor is funniest when it flows uphill.
   
   
4. Good for Utah.
   
   

Apocalypse Nigh

Just Say Julie is coming to DVD. This might be a good time to put your affairs in order, examine your relationship with the spiritual deity of your preference, and make whatever amends you feel you must.

Early Happy St. Patrick's Day

I've never been one for St. Patrick's Day, but Robby Reed's celebrating with a terrific gallery of Green Lantern art. Check it out even if you're less Irish than I am.

Putting the "duh" in Dubya

The most entertaining results of a new poll showing, like so many other recent polls, that George W. Bush is -- as he should be -- very, very unpopular are respondents' descriptions of him:

But the most compelling part of the Pew survey was when Americans were asked to describe the president in a single word. Respondents volunteered answers, and were not offered words to choose from. They had some interesting responses.

A year ago, the top three responses were "honest," "good," and "integrity," in that order. Now, the top three are "incompetent," "good," and "idiot." (A close fourth was "liar.")

For a while, I've seen and heard Bush critics asking, "When is the public going to realize how awful the president is?" I think it's fair to say, we've reached that point.

Mahna Mahna

Doo-DOO-doo-doo-doo.

Scenes from in front of the television: Beached

She Who Must Be Obeyed: Is that China Beach?

Matter-Eater Lad: That's Dana Delaney. In a swimsuit.

SWMBO: An unflattering swimsuit.

M-E: Nevertheless.

SWMBO: How old were you when this show was first on?

(M-E does math in his head)

M-E: 15, 16 tops. Do you suspect imprinting?

SWMBO: I'm just sayin'.

M-E: That ship sailed long, long before I ever watched China Beach...

DC doldrums

Looking over DC's solicitations for June, I'm struck by how little interest I have in anything that's being offered that month. The series of Superman Returns one-shots sound kind of, well, strange -- I mean, a Ma Kent special? -- and the One Year Later stuff generally leaves me cold. I have to wonder if the stilted "talking around stuff that happened in the gap" storytelling evinced in some of the previews of the first OYL books will continue for the next 12 months, as 52 runs its course, but mainly I find I've got no interest in seeing whether DC truly gets away from the bloody and nasty tone it's set for its main line since Identity Crisis. Somehow, I doubt it. And the mind boggles at collecting the forgettable (and likely forgotten) "Our Worlds At War" stunt event in an omnibus collection while Darwyn Cooke's superb New Frontier languishes in a two-volume edition (though I'm hoping for an Absolute edition of that story someday!). The Steve Englehart JLA CLassified story about the Justice League Detroit -- speaking of the forgettable! -- sounds just weird enough that I'll likely read the trade paperback at Barnes & Noble some rainy weekend afternoon.

But, still, I think the only ongoing mainline DC universe comic I'll be buying after Seven Soldiers ends is Supergirl and the Legion. That and All-Star Superman are it, as far as the DC bullet goes for me. Everything else I read from DC is either Vertigo (Y) or WildStorm (Ex Machina, Astro City).

I'm not sure how I feel about that, or what it means, but there it is.

Fortunately, there are some interesting trades that are also coming out this summer, foremost among them the fourth volume of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. Plus the Metal Men get an archive (albeit one with a truly hideous cover image) and the 1970s Justice Society finally gets collected; I note that the solicitation is for "Volume 1" and hope that we might eventually see a collection of the Len Strazewski/Mike Parobeck run.

Hoo, boy...

I can't quite believe that the syndicated Superboy TV series is coming out on DVD. The show wasn't very good to begin with, and for some reason or another it has never been shown since its original run, and really the only thing to recommend it is the presence of the lovely Stacy Haiduk, who could teach Kristen Kreuk a thing or two about being Lana Lang.

Trivia note: One of the costumes from this show is on display at the Planet Hollywood in the Gatwick Airport outside London. It was one of the things I noticed when She Who Must Be Obeyed and I ate breakfast there while waiting for our flight home from our honeymoon. The presence of the suit -- which was looking disappointingly threadbare -- should tell you all you need to know about the caliber of the memorabilia on display at that particular Planet Hollywood. Are those places even around anymore?

Battlestar Galactica

I spent the last week never getting around to a snarkish post about how the rescue mission to Caprica seemed to be the worst plan since attacking the Mayor with hummus.

After last night's season finale, I have two things to say:

1. Never mind.
2. Holy frakking CRAP!

More later.

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair hair hair...

I have been accused of having certain weaknesses when it comes to certain colors of hair. But it turns out I'm a piker compared to Superman...

Oscar grouching

Intellectually, of course, I know that the Oscar awards themselves are largely meaningless; these are the same folks who picked Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, Titanic over LA Confidential, and Lord of the Rings over Lost in Translation. And I enjoyed Crash well enough -- the decision wasn't the kind of travesty that the above awards were by any stretch of the imagination -- but I simply didn't think it was as good as Brokeback; the farther away I get from having seen Crash, the smaller it feels to me.

But, again, meaningless.

That said, here's an assortment of links that I've noted or run across in the last few days:

• This blog comment rather squarely nails the bizarre hysteria Brokeback Mountain evoked among rightwingers:
  

  ...note that it's not cowboys who are banding together to protest. You and I have both known cowboys, and though they can be reactionary, racist, and homophobic, usually they also tend to be libertarian. They might not see the movie, but its existence wouldn't bother them much, just like the existence of gay people doesn't bother them much, as long as they don't have to deal with them. The people who are getting uncomfortable are exurban, kinda wussy fundamentalists who fantasize about a masculinity they don't actually have. If you made a movie about exurban fundamentalists discovering they were gay, nobody would care because exurban fundamentalists are nobody's masculine icon.

  
  
• David Poland talks about how the Crash "upset" happened.
  
• Here's a post by screenwriter John Rogers from last month about how just plain dumb the rightwing complaints over the Oscars were this year.
  
• And, hey, wasn't it cool to see Busy Phillips -- Kim Kelly of Freaks and Geeks fame -- sitting with Michelle Williams and Heath in the front row?
  

This week's 24 lesson

You cannot sneak up on Buckaroo Banzai, for he will kick your ass. Even if you're Jack Bauer.

And while I appreciated the shout-outs to George Mason and Nina Myers, I really wish Ryan Chappelle had been mentioned, too.

Spin

A post about it at Washington Monthly was enough for me to pick up Robert Charles Wilson's science fiction novel Spin this weekend and I'm glad I did. It's a high-concept, big-mystery story that manages to resolve the mystery in a satisfying way without being about the mystery itself. And that's all I should really say, lest I spoil it for you. If you're interested, here's an Amazon link:

My lifetime point total playing organized basketball is, I think, 4...

...but this is still one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Via Kung Fu Monkey.

Whew!

Now I just have to worry about graduate-level stats class...

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Oh my stars and garters!

Comic Book Resources has an interview with Kelesy Grammer about his role as the Beast in X-Men 3. And I think it was the news of his casting is what made us decide to start Netflixing the first season of Frasier. The interview really focuses on the acting challenges of working in makeup and playing such a well-established role, and it's really worth a read.

Tie 'im up, tie 'im down

If you're wondering why Saddam Hussein never wears a tie to his trial -- on those days when he bothers to show up -- Slate explains it all:

The necktie has a knotty history in the Middle East. For some hard-core Islamists, its crisscross shape resembles a crucifix. For other, less fanciful Muslims, it's simply an emblem of encroaching Westernization. In the 1920s, when the secularist leader Mustafa Kemal came to power in Turkey, he encouraged his countrymen to abandon traditional Muslim garb in favor of suits and neckties. The modern style quickly swept the country and hasn't changed much since. In neighboring Arab countries, this advance of the necktie—like Kemal's Romanized Ottoman alphabet—was perceived as yet another inroad on traditional Islamic society.

In Iran, the tie became a much more controversial symbol of Westernization. The CIA helped Reza Shah Pahlavi take power in the early '50s, and in the years that followed, the shah's necktie linked him with his U.S. backers and their corporate oil interests. For many Iranians living under the shah, it was also a sign of his subservience and decadence. (Iranians still sometimes refer to the shah's rule as "the regime of the Crown and Necktie.") After the shah's ouster in 1979, the tie came under fire from Ayatollah Khomeini, who sought a return to Islamist—or at least anti-Western—attire. Ever since the revolution, Iranian officials have adhered to an unspoken dress code of dark suits, unkempt beards, and bare collars. (One of the ironies of Saddam's tielessness was that it made him look more like Iran's President Ahmadinejad than he would probably have cared to admit.) With their loaded history, neckties now make for a ready symbol of dissidence for pro-Western Iranian students, who nearly always wear them in protests.
[...]
The added bonus of an Islamist look for Saddam is that it might help him overcome his considerable image problem. In 2003, the once-dapper tyrant emerged from his "spider hole" looking more like a homeless man than the autocrat whose pristine French cuffs made for a stark contrast with his bloodstained hands. He later graced the cover of the New York Post in a grungy pair of briefs that evoked a diaper. It's important for Saddam to get these embarrassing images behind him, especially in the midst of a war in which photographs have had no small impact.

There are other possible reasons for Saddam's courtroom appearance. Perhaps he didn't think the tribunal deserved the gesture of a necktie. There's even a chance that U.S. and Iraqi officials are controlling Saddam's attire, though that seems highly unlikely. Saddam has complained about many indignities of his confinement—the lack of showers, the infrequent laundry service, the physical abuse by guards—but so far he has voiced no discontent with his wardrobe. "I'm very sensitive about these matters," he reportedly told his former tailor, who also cuts suits for Pervez Musharraf and Nelson Mandela. For those sensitive enough to see it, Saddam is using every stitch available to make his allegiances known.

Without a Trace

Is Without A Trace part of your Thursday night TV viewing? Perhaps you should try playing the Without A Trace betting game when you watch tonight's installment.

(Speaking of wagers, anyone have a bet as to when teevee.org will ever update anything again?)

Belated Valentine links

Ken Levine shares the true meaning of love, as voiced by Louie DePalma:

Louie is trying to win back his girlfriend, Zena. He asks if she loves him. She says she doesn’t know what love is. He tells her she’s in luck because he does. And he’s the only person alive who can say that. He’s read what everyone else says love is and they’re always wrong. She finally asks him what it is, and Louie says:

“Love is the end of happiness!

The end. Because one day all a guy’s got to do to be happy is to watch the Mets. The next day you gotta have Zena in the room watching the Mets with you. You don’t know why. They’re the same Mets, it’s the same room…but you gotta have Zena there.”

And if that's not romantic enough for you, read Hank Steuver's exegesis on the legend of Lloyd Dobler.

Top 5 things I learned while watching too much of VH1's Top 100 Teen Superstars this weekend...

1. Deborah "Debbie" Gibson now looks better than she did at 19.
2. Tiffany now looks like a man trying to impersonate Tiffany.
3. Corey Haim now looks like a man who ate a man trying to impersonate Tiffany.
4. If Kirk Cameron had been the Roman guard to whom Peter thrice denied Christ, Christ probably would have been a lot more understanding about the whole thing.
5. Scott Baio: What the hell?

Mike Parobeck

It's hard to believe it's been ten years since the phenomenally talented Mike Parobeck died after far too short a career. There's a very nice retrospective about him and his work over at Newsarama that's worth a read. And maybe it will prompt DC to get around to putting some of his work, like the Justice Society series or Elongated Man mini-series that he drew, back in print...

Watching Batman Begins...

...I realized that Cillian Murphy looks like the long-list love child of Tom Welling and Michael Chabon.

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

Snort.

Via the Washington Monthly comes this news -- presented without editorial comment -- about the House leadership election:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Oddly, She Who Must Be Obeyed pointed out to me that the Washington Post's account describes the first ballot as merely "inconclusive," which seems rather euphemistic...

Happy Groundhog Day!

Celebrate the day by re-reading Roger Ebert's appreciation of the movie that features one of Bill Murray's two or three best performances:

His journey has become a parable for our materialistic age; it embodies a view of human growth that, at its heart, reflects the same spiritual view of existence Murray explored in his very personal project "The Razor's Edge." He is bound to the wheel of time, and destined to revolve until he earns his promotion to the next level. A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says "Groundhog Day" is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, but never mind: They have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."

What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair.

We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.

Penguins!

I didn't get to see March of the Penguins when it was in theatres last summer, but I was amused and baffled to hear that some quarters of the fundamentalist right had embraced it as a demonstration of intelligent design. She Who Must Be Obeyed and I finally saw the movie on DVD last night, and after watching the torturous process that it takes for the emperor penguins to reproduce in one of the harshest environments on earth, I have to ask: On what planet could the design of that system possible be considered intelligent?

As for the movie itself, it was enjoyabe but oddly ephemeral; I suspect this was one that you had to see on a big screen -- the bigger, the better -- to get the full impact.

Huh-huh...

These upcoming Angel and Spike action figures look a helluvalot like Beavis and Butt-head to me.

Saving Faceman

Trio has gone away and been replaced by the Sleuth Channel on our cable system. As near as I can tell, this channel exists solely to air mediocre-at-best 80s cop shows and the occasional episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, which does not benefit from its company. Still, the channel has afforded me the chance to see bits and pieces of episodes of The A-Team, and I had a thought: This is one of the only 80s action shows not to have been adapted into a big budget movie. If you're making that movie, and reading this blog, I have an awesome idea: Cast Katee Sackhoff as Face. Trust me, that would be totally AIRWOLF.

24

24 remains my ultimate guilty pleasure TV series; it's preposterous and absurd, yet utterly gripping and addictive. Today I give praise to the character of Mike Novick, who returned unexpectedly last season as a member of President Keeler's administration. Mike Novick is the guy Dick Cheney wishes he was when he gets up in the morning. Mike Novick's every line of dialogue has an unspoken coda of "...you fucking shit." Except when he's talking to Jack Bauer.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to worry about CTU Director Bill Buchanan. He's smart, competent, well-adjusted, respects his underlings, and knows how to stand up to his superiors in an effective and productive manner. Clearly, the man is toast.

In brightest day, in fugliest night...

Kyle Rayner has been saddled with some truly hideous costumes in his day, but this thing sets a new low. What on Earth is up with that mask? And why not just take a cue from the animated version of the character?

Spit, spitted, spat

Here's everything you always wanted to know about spit, but were afraid to ask:

"Spitting your bodily fluids at someone is seen as more offensive than hitting them," Ross Coomber, a British sociologist who has written on the meaning of spit, told the Guardian back in 2003. "It's obviously a form of violence, very confrontational."

Hawking a loogie, spewing, spluttering or whatever you want to call it is very human. And inhuman. Getting slimed by someone else's effluence is downright humiliating.

Read the whole thing for more on the role of spit in language, sports, and art restoration.

Grease: The Novel

Technically, it's the novelization. But, damn, does it sound surreal.

Why wasn't I told about this?

So there's apparently some sort of scandal involving a right-wing blogger here in Minnesota, according to the always-useful Political Wire. Intrigued, I checked out the blog in question and discovered this gem:

Minnesota Democrats Exposed is not coming to an end. To quote a line from "A Few Good Men":

"I eat breakfast 80 yards away from 4000 Cubans who are trained to kill me. So don't for one second think you're gonna come down here, flash a badge, and make me nervous."

I don't want anyone to think a lawsuit filed against me by prominent Democrat consultant is going to make me nervous and end my blog.

Set aside, for the moment, the amusing comparison to writing (no longer) anonymous blog posts in one's pajamas to actual miltary service. What I want to know is why no one told me that there are, apparently, 4000 Cubans trained to kill just hanging out in Minnesota. You'd think that sort of thing would make the papers. Damn that media!

More on the "War on Christmas" nonsense

Readers of this blog will no doubt be shocked, yes, shocked to learn that many of the bloody shirts being waved by the right wing these last few weeks are, in fact, white as the driven snow, and crisply starched and pressed as well. This lengthy Washington Post article does something rare in this tempest in a teapot, which is -- wait for it -- actual reporting and fact-checking.

The school in Wisconsin that rewrote the words to "Silent Night?" Didn't happen:

The first thing we found out, contrary to both news releases, is that nobody at the school rewrote anything. The song is part of a copyrighted play. Really in-depth reporting -- making two phone calls -- revealed the offending playwright and composer to be one Dwight Elrich. No one had talked to him until we called.

[...]

"I'm just flabbergasted. I'm a choir director in a church! I do Christmas carols in retirement homes! I perform 'Silent Night' 40 or 50 times each year! I thought the play was a really charming, wonderful, positive story about love and acceptance . . . removing it from the Christian tradition was something I never thought anyone could ever come up with. We were telling a story about a little tree, so we used a familiar tune to help the kids get it."

The school in Texas that banned red and green? Didn't happen:

Here's a corresponding memo from Doug Otto, superintendent of schools for Plano:

"The school district does not restrict students or staff from wearing certain color clothes during holiday times or any other school days. . . . Our attorney requested of Mr. O'Reilly that, in the future, he ask his fact checkers to do a more thorough job of confirming the facts before he airs them."

O'Reilly did not correct his broadcast in a prepared statement, instead noting that there was ongoing litigation about other Christmas-related issues at the school.

And the gnashing of teeth over the ruination of Christmas has been going on for a very, very long time:

And there is one problem with that pristine image of the American Ghost of Christmas Past, he and others say: It never quite existed. "White Christmas" -- which became one of the best-selling songs of all time -- was already lamenting a season "just like the ones I used to know" in 1939. The same year, entrepreneur Charles Howard opened one of the first Santa Claus schools, dismayed by the cynical crush of "bums, ham actors, and thousands of odd job men" who were cashing in by playing the man in red.

Facts, of course, aren't going to sway the Christmas warriors, but it's nice to have them -- the facts, that is, not the Christmas warriors -- out there.

And on that note, posting will be intermittent-to-nonexistent until after Christmas. Happy Holidays!

This is not the John Byrne they're looking for

I have often been stunned at the usefulness of online recommendations from vendors like Amazon and Netflix. Sometimes, however, you get a message like this:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased books by Steve Englehart often purchased books by John Byrne. For this reason you might like to know that John Byrne's newest book, Transforming Power: Energy As a Social Project (Energy and Environmental Policy), will be released in paperback soon. You can pre-order your copy by following the link below.

Meanwhile, at the Absorbascon...

...Aquaman reacts to DC's plans to revamp his title by replacing him. Is it me or is the latest round of replacing DC's characters with newer, hepper versions of them reminiscent of the dark days of the early-to-mid 90s, when just about all of DC's comics except Mark Waid's Flash and Impulse sucked?

John Spencer

I've never watched The West Wing, except for a few minutes here and there on cable, but I was saddened to read about the death of John Spencer last week. A few years ago, my parents saw him in a restaurant while they were visiting New York City and it made their trip. He'll be missed.

Cal Thomas has a moment of lucidity

I rarely, if ever, agree with right-wing columnist Cal Thomas -- or much of anything posted at TownHall.com -- but I'm entertained by his column using Scripture, Christmas songs, and, well, actualy Christianity to knock the wind out of the histrionic and bogus "War on Christmas" meme. Here's just a taste:

I have never understood why so many Christians feel the need to see and hear "Merry Christmas" proclaimed to them at stores by people who may not believe its central message. While TV personalities, junk mail letters and some of the ordained bemoan the increasing secularization of culture; perhaps some teaching might be helpful from the One in whose behalf they claim to speak.

[...]

Paul the Apostle said, "We live by faith, not by sight." (2 Cor. 5:7). Jesus spoke a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven resembling a treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44). The Apostle John warned, "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world - the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." (1 John 2:15-17)

Let's see: Should the crass commercialization of "Christmas" and the focus on accumulating and giving stuff (each sold separately; batteries not included) be part of this indictment? Even a casual observer or biblical illiterate might reasonably draw such a conclusion.

What mystifies me -- among other things in this nonsensical pice of astroturf outrage -- is that the bleating drones who demand that everyone scream "Merry Christmas" as loudly and joylessly as they want them to don't seem to give a rat's ass about Easter, which is a far, far more significant Christian holiday. After all, everybody gets born. But there's only one guy who came back to life...

Threes

Everyone always remarks that deaths come in threes when someone famous dies. But losing Robert Sheckley, Richard Pryor, and Eugene McCarthy in the space of 36 hours is just plain depressing.

Motes, planks, yada yada...

John Scalzi weighs in on the ridiculous "War on Christmas" (TM) kerfuffle, with the observation that some Christian megachurches will be closed on Christmas (which seems, to my Catholic eyes, to be especially heinous or amusing or both since Christmas falls on a Sunday this year):

This is definitely one of those "mote in the eye" moments for the Merry Christmas Militants. How can a certain breed of willfully excitable Christian tell the rest of the world that saying "Happy Holidays" is just like stabbing Jesus in the crotch, if some of their more casual Christ's Club, arena-filling brethren can't even bother to pop in at Mary and Joe's place on Christmas day, and send their greetings to the birthday boy? I mean, really, who's crotch-stabbing Jesus now?
[...]
So, to arms, you Merry Christmas Militants! Those lazy no-church-on-Christmas-Sunday so-called "Christians" are making a mockery of your cause and values! Quell these vipers in your midst! I think Bill O'Reilly bludgeoning the pastors of these churches with a peppermint-striped truncheon live on Fox News would be a wholesome and instructive start. It would really show everyone the spirit of the season -- or at the very least, the spirit some folks would like to see applied to the season, and those people are really the only people who count. And they wouldn't want these other "Christians" to make them look bad.

Christmas: If you're not with us, you're against us. Especially if you're Christian. Yes, yes. That's what Jesus was all about.

What would Charlie Brown do?

The right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth over the nonexistent "war on Christmas" (TM) continues this year without missing a beat from last year's nonsense. The latest perpetrator? George W. Bush:

Religious conservatives are miffed because they have been pressuring stores to advertise Christmas sales rather than "holiday specials" and urging schools to let students out for Christmas vacation rather than for "winter break." They celebrated when House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) insisted that the sparkling spectacle on the Capitol lawn should be called the Capitol Christmas Tree, not a holiday spruce.

Then along comes a generic season's greeting from the White House, paid for by the Republican National Committee. The cover art is also secular, if not humanist: It shows the presidential pets -- two dogs and a cat -- frolicking on a snowy White House lawn.

"Certainly President and Mrs. Bush, because of their faith, celebrate Christmas," said Susan Whitson, Laura Bush's press secretary. "Their cards in recent years have included best wishes for a holiday season, rather than Christmas wishes, because they are sent to people of all faiths."

It's almost as if it's about good manners rather than using faith as a cudgel.

Coincidentally, tonight saw ABC air the only Christmas special I enjoy and the only one that deals with the true spirit of Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas. That was the special where Linus' heartfelt recitation of the Christmas story inspired Charlie Brown and, after a while, the other kids, and they celebrated Christ's birth by decorating a humble tree and singing a carol. That's where the special ends, and while we don't know what Charlie Brown and Snoopy and the rest of the gang did after their song, I really, really doubt they went out and screamed at shopkeepers for providing insufficient validation for their faith.

Mama never actually said there'd be office hours like these, and with good reason.

I'm not sure if this counts as the best office hours ever or the worst.

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...

Vs.

Go read now: Robin vs. Wolverine.

SIEGE!

Over at TPM Cafe, Paul Begala provides some insights about what it's like inside a White House under siege:

This is when a White House staffer earns his pay. The pressure of a federal criminal investigation - especially one in the media spotlight - is bone-crushing. My guess is that the strain is taking a gruesome toll. Already we hear rumors of President Bush exploding at his aides, at the President blaming Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and anyone else in sight for his woes.

This I know first hand: when The Boss explodes like that, there are two kinds of aides -- those who fight and those who flee. When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone. Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment. His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months. (That's why, I suspect, some months back Rove popped off and said liberals wanted to give terrorists psychotherapy after 9/11. It was a loopy, stupid, and distinctly un-Rovian, meltdown - the first public sign that the pressure was causing Karl to crack.)

Miers? We hardly knew 'er!

You know who the big loser is in the Harriet Miers withdrawl? Aside from an president who's looking like a lamer and lamer duck with each passing day, that is? Rachel Dratch. I'm just sayin' is all, here.

And while I'm on the subject of Saturday Night Live, I should mention how strange it was to learn of the sad death of Charles Rocket earlier this month. I first encountered him playing David's brother Richie Addison on Moonlighting, and was surprised to learn he'd been on SNL long before I could stay up late enough to watch the show...

Remember Sea Quest?

I don't know what's stranger, the fact that someone has written a very, very detailed analysis of why the early-90s TV series SeaQuest DSV failed, or the fact that it's written in a staccato prose style that's reminiscent of Hemingway as read by Shepard Smith:

Ground control to major disaster...in the ratings. Except for MURDER. She still writes big ticket. SQ's budget gets bigger. Demographics get higher. But ratings still low. More sci-fi plots. Blow up ship. Redesign. Entire show. Rename title. Change cast. Alter uniforms. Remix music. Move to Florida. Scheider's had it. Bring in Michael Ironside. Focus still murky. All three years. Manic changes. Appears desperate. Save the whales? Or the universe? Keep Darwin? No matter. Watership down. Audience at bay. Dive. Dive. Dive. Cancelled. Lost at sea, though still loved by hardcore fans, surfers, now on the Web.

I never watched the show while it was on, but there was a string of several months in the year immediately after I graduated from college where I'd come home just as the Sci-Fi Channel was starting its 11 pm rerun of it (I vaguely recall the show being touted as a major acquisition for them, but I could very well be mistaken), and let its sheer sucktitude lull me to sleep. Then I'd go to work the next day and e-mail my friends about how much last night's episode of SeaQuest was. I'm feeling much better now.

Alas, poor Rampage...

The incomparable Fanboy Rampage is closing up shop today. To get a sense of just what we're losing, take a look at this hideous Michael Turner-styled Supergirl figure, solicited just hours ago, and imagine the comments thread it will never have the chance to inspire. Godspeed, O Fanboy Rampage!

Eternal Neil

Neil Gaiman talks about his next project for Marvel, an updating of Jack Kirby's Eternals, here.

De Baisch rocks.

Consider this a very public and heartfelt thanks to De and Em Baisch of Retroactive Continuity for hooking She Who Must be Obeyed and me up with the first two episodes of the second season of the new Battlestar Galactica series, bringing us up to speed with the Sci-Fi Channel's reruns of it. I can't believe it took us so long to discover the show, but we're both very glad we have.

Features and bugs

Whedonesque links to a blog entry criticizing the Firefly universe for having a thoroughly Asian character without the presence of any Asian characters:

My beef is this: why would a man intelligent enough to read the Asian tiger on the wall (having all the characters in his future world speak an English/Chinese patois, and all of the spaceship names and call signs translated into Chinese on their hulls), be too stupid to include a SINGLE ASIAN CHARACTER in said world? Sure, there were maybe enough Asian extras in Serenity to count off on (one of) my hands, but where's the recognition, folks? The slopes are coming, and not just to buy your cheap-ass products (which they're sweat-shopping anyway.) Asian economies are just that: economies. Not wet, gaping holes for you to fill with your junk, but rather whole, integral eco-bitches of cash and power, that will only invite you to join their orgy if you're very, very relevant.

In the world of Serenity, Asians are literally inscrutable. We somehow rule the universe enough to get our main lingo (Chinese, natch) spoken everywhere, yet you can't scrut us. Anywhere. But in fifty years the world really will look more like the establishing shot of Blade Runner (which Whedon jacks with abandon, sans, of course, Asianyness), with the massive moving billboards of future cities burdened with the facets of Asian beauty and Asian power. The politicians you'll love to hate will be Asian. The CEOs who own them will be Asian. The guy in the corner store? Still Asian, but so, too, the cops that park there illegally to grab a dozen you tiu with their coffee, and the kid that stupidly holds up the store while the cops are there. You can't make up, like, over half the world's population, be poised to swoop down upon the new global economy like a hawks on a dazed field mouse, and not end up everywhere. In fifty years, much less five hundred, Asians will be more scrutable than the sky. You won't be able to look away.

At one point during our viewing of the Firefly DVD set, I made a similar comment. But then I thought that this may be a feature, not a bug, of the Fireflyverse. Think about it: You've got a future civilization in which the newspapers elite families read are printed in Chinese, highly-paid courtesans wear makeup that's at least slightly Asiatic in its effect on their appearance, everyone curses in Chinese, and yet there are very, very few actual Asians in evidence.

Sure, that could be an oversight or a hole in Whedon's worldbuilding -- or it could be a fascinating storytelling opportunity. I'm reminded of David Brin's question: Where are all of the civilizations between the Federation-Klingon-Romulan level of technology and all of those ultrapowerful, superadvanced races like the Organians and the Q Continuum? If we ever see more Firefly on the large screen or small, I'd love to see an attempt to explore just what happened on Earth in the run-up to its evacuation to new worlds...

Further adventures with the Best Wife Ever

A snippet of our commentary while watching the new Battlestar Galactica on DVD last night:

Matter-Eater Blogger: Is it wrong that I'm enjoying this as much as I am?

She Who Must Be Obeyed: No, because this is fucking awesome!

Banned books meme

Via Chris "Lefty" Brown, what I've read is in bold, what I own is in italics, and those I own AND have read are in italics:

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Some thoughts: Da fug? They banned BLUBBER? The don't-pick-on-chubby-kids book? What the holy hell is up with that? How is THAT on the list and not Then Again, Maybe I Won't? At least that one's got the evils of self-gratification to get bluehaired church ladies up in arms over.

I remember the fact of having read Beloved in college, but nothing else about the book. This is probably because I read it in the car, in the dark, coming back from Thanksgiving break.