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

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

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

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

This is my one and only Whedonverse fanfic:

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

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

This is rich:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the idea.

More to come.

Can we send Josh to cover all the primaries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The passenger was described as in his mid 40s.

Northwest Airlines officials said the flight was delayed 50 minutes

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

Snort:

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

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

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

"Uh, do you like cheese?"

"Um, yeah, I like cheese."

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

"Yeah, I'll eat some cheese."

"Cool."

"Yeah."

Speaking order doesn't really matter...

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on last night's debate:

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

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

Jar Jar is hungry.

He goes to the market

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

“Stop!” someone says.

It is Anakin Skywalker!

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

The Hutts are bigger and meaner than Sebulba.

Now Sebulba is afraid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny stuff. Read the whole thing.

The indispensible Dan Kennedy rises to the defense of polls:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's also this really intriguing note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, Jess, you can leave comments now.

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

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

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

Dammit, Butt-head, this sucks:

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

...

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

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

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

Maybe he's related to the Bad Santa pepperpot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


But at least I didn't see this.

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

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


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

Some random New Year's Day movie thoughts:

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