Merry Christmas, everybody!

Quick holiday linkage

Just a few links to tide you over through the holiday season:

• Ken Levine talks about A Christmas Story.
  
• Roger Ebert reviews Bad Santa, one of my favorite Christmas movies.
  
• 100 reasons Kirk is better than Picard.
  
• Hugh Jackman sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas:
  
  

This will exceed your recommended daily allowance of WTF

Via John Scalzi:

Anchoring

The student who showed up ten minutes late for her make-up exam should thank the students who were forty minutes late for their make-ups yesterday. Compared to them, ten minutes is practically on-time.

Bacon

I just got an e-mail from Kevin Bacon telling me why he's supporting John Edwards. Does this give me a Bacon Score of 1?

Quote of the day

From a write-up of an anime convention:

I was reminded much more of a science fiction con than a comic-con, to be honest. A sense of proud, or even defiant, nerditry prevailed over the proceedings, but rather than being anal retentive it was more, anal explusive, I suppose.

Really, I should go home and go back to bed, because nothing I read or write today is going to top that.

Campaigning can be weird.

Just ask Bill Clinton:

About seven minutes into the former president’s fourth speech of the day, the man stood on a chair on the press riser and shouted that robots wanted Clinton to say he was sorry for statements he made 15 years ago.

"Bill Clinton, I want you to apologize to Sister Souljah. Robots of the world want you to apologize to Sister Souljah. We want you to apologize,” the man said as one observer gasped "Oh my God.”

A volunteer demanded to know who had let him in and the audience heckled the heckler with boos and screams of "Get out of here!” He then threw dozens of orange, green, hot pink and yellow cards into the air. A woman yanked what appeared to be a microphone out of the man’s hands, and he was escorted out of the room without further incident.

The cards read: "Robots are mad at Bill. MR-IFOBCA stands for Mad Robots In Favor Of Bill Clinton Apologizing. Mr. Ifobca says, "Bill Clinton should be ashamed of himself for slandering a Black woman named Sister Souljah," followed by a website address (www.Mr-Ifobca.org ). Posted on the site is a "manifesto" entitled “"Why Did I Bum Rush Bill Clinton?”

I got nothin'.

UPDATE: I take that back. I got video.

Star Trek XI is going to be AWESOME.

The very lovely and very talented Rachel Nichols has joined the cast:

"I'm very restricted on what I'm allowed to say," she says. "But yes, there's a good chance you'll see my shining face in the new Star Trek ... My mom even e-mailed me about it because she saw it (online) and I hadn't told her yet. There's a lot of buzz about it, but honestly, I don't even know the name of my character."

Now if only someone would release her short-lived Fox series The Inside on DVD...

WTF Theatre: The Apple

There are bad movies that are bad. There are bad movies that are guilty pleasures. There are bad movies that are so-bad-they're-good. And then there are movies that are so bad you're not quite sure you can't think clearly about them, because they're so amazingly terrible that they've blown your brain out the back of your frakking head leaving you to wonder if THIS is what taking all the drugs would feel like.

And then there's The Apple. Which was ably deconstructed by Nathan Rabin a few months ago over at the Onion's AV Club. I can't quite top his summation of the movie:

The peculiar genius of The Apple is that every time it appears that the film cannot get any crazier, it ratchets up the weirdness to almost indescribable levels. It belongs to the curious subset of movies so all-consumingly druggy and surreal that they make audiences feel baked out of their minds even when they’re stone-cold sober. The Apple is both the perfect mind-fuck to see while high (on life of course, this column in no way wishes to promote the disgusting, disgusting practice of consuming drugs) and a movie that makes drugs seem redundant and unnecessary.

I think everyone in the world should see The Apple. It should be taught not just in film classes, but in regular schools as well. It should replace the Bible and the Constitution as the immutable cornerstone of our civilization.

Rabin is right -- I don't so much remember watching the movie as experiencing it, and when She Who Must Be Obeyed came home I made her watch a few scenes just to get confirmation from someone who hadn't already been exposed to it that I had not imagined the whole thing after accidentally taking Sudafed and NyQuil at the same time. Which I suppose is par for the course for a science-fiction-ish retelling of the Adam and Eve story where Satan is a record producer and Adam and Eve are an innocent Canadian folk-singing duo. The damn thing moves into your brain with its relentlessly and surprisingly catchy-but-terrible music -- did I mention it's a disco opera with more musical numbers than most Bollywood films? -- and while the movie is not good by any definition known to man, the mere fact of its insane, improbable existence makes it some sort of demented triumph. I didn't like the Apple, and I don't actually recommend it, but I think you should see it anyway.

Always remember...

Jack Bauer isn't locked in the Glendale City Jail with you.





You're locked in the Glendale City Jail with HIM.

Links count as a post.

No, really, they do. So here are a bunch of links:

• John Scalzi presents The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.
  
  
• Check out Keith Giffen's Legion poster from way back when.
  
  
• Johanna brings us fun with fanboys who will not do as they're told.
  
  
• Ken Levine shares the background of that episode of M*A*S*H that's shot from a wounded soldier's point of view. He should know, since he wrote it.
  
  
• This defies description, and may well drive you mad.
  

PSA: Amazon's Veronica Mars sale

Longtime readers of this blog will remember how much I loved the too-short-lived Veronica Mars. So I'd like to let you know that Amazon is currently selling the first two seasons of the show for fifteen bucks each. Enjoy!

A gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth

Just ask Senator Bob Corker (R-TN).

We're heading out of town for a bit...

...so posting will be light-to-nonexistent for a bit. In the meantime, enjoy this year's Doctor Who Children In Need special, which is simply fantastic, even if I personally would have switched the billing order. Seniority and all that...

THIS JUST IN!

Airport screening is a joke. A bad joke that wastes everyone's time, millions of dollars, and does absolutely nothing to make anyone safer.

UPDATE: Don't worry, that won't stop TSA from coming up with new ways to waste everyone's time and damage your expensive electronic equipment.

Things like this make me miss THE BRAVE & THE BOLD

Batman meets Tim Gunn.

Kids, you prayed and you failed!

The moral is, don't pray!

Hey!

Hey! I have a question: Why do the e-mails I get from the Obama and Dodd campaigns all start off with "Hey!"? Will this continue if either one wins the election?

What he said.

This bit from a recent Lance Mannion post needs to be repeated, loudly, everywhere:

Before we go any further, a note to any members of the Media who may be reading. The Catholic League is not a religious group, it is not a Catholic group, it is a political pressure group pushing a reactionary political agenda that has virtually nothing to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church. If you feel you need a Catholic to give you a good quote for your story, the Church has people on their payroll who'll be glad to talk to you, and none of them is Bill Donohue.

Alternately, you can call up the theology departments at one of the many Catholic colleges and univerisites and ask somebody there to explain things to you.

You don't need Donohue and his minions for anything.

Thank you.

"Is Artie Bremer here tonight? Where's Artie Bremer!?"

He's right over there, apparently. Weird. I wonder how many people today have ever heard of Arthur Bremer. Or even of George Wallace...