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.