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.

Two LOST thoughts...

1. If I had to make a list of people I did not want to see charging out of a jungle waving a machete at me, Adebisi would be at the very top of the list.

2. I want to see the scene where Charlie tells Claire, "It's not drugs if they come from the Virgin Mary!"

Serenity wow.

Last night She Who Must Be Obeyed and I attended the local preview screening of Serenity; I will not discuss whether my eagerness to attend this screening was informed partly by a desire to cut short the time during which I could not discuss the movie with her by three days. Without getting into the spoilers I so diligently avoided spilling in the three months since I saw an advance screening, I have to say that it's a terrific movie, even without the frisson of "I can't believe I'm seeing these people again!" that I had the first time I saw it, and I don't think people who have not seen the series will be lost. There's a rather large infodump at the beginning of the movie -- it starts with a dream sequence that turns out to be within a flashback that leads to the introduction of the film's villain, which I think is some sort of record. (She Who Must Be Obeyed found this harder to take than I did.)

What else can I say without giving anything away? It's a shame that so much this cast of incredibly talented people don't seem to have turned up in very much since the series ended, and I hope that their careers flourish in projects worthy of their skills. I believe that Gina Torres is not a human being, but a goddess of beauty sent from a higher plane to enlighten us all. Damn Fox for killing this show through sheer incompetence, and thanks to Joss and Universal for making this return happen. And despite the thrill that this movie is, I can't help but lament the fact that we were denied the chance to see these characters and their universe unfold slowly, over dozens of episodes and multiple seasons. Unfinished epics always hurt, but this one now hurts just a little bit less.

Serenity soon?

This could be interesting. I followed a link on Whedonesque to submit my name to get into Tuesday's press screening of Serenity as part of a "Serenity Blogger Bonanza" and just got confirmation of that -- although confirmation does not equal a guaranteed seat, so this is apparently a different kind of confirmation than one would normally associate with that word. Still, its great to see Universal trying new ideas to build the buzz for the movie, and (if we get in) it will be great to see if there have been any changes since the preview screening She Who Must Be Obeyed, AKA The Best Wife Ever, made me attend without her.

I'll post some spoiler-free thoughts after the screening (should we get in); and if you're wondering what the hell this "Serenity" thing I'm talking about is, here's the studio synopsis:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family – squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

And if you're intrigued, why not visit the movie's official site?

Left hand, right hand...

One of these guys did not get the right set of talking points.

Senator Tom Coburn, R-Okla.:

"It is inexcusable for the White House and Congress to not even make the effort to find at least some offsets to this new spending...No one in America believes the federal government is operating at peak efficiency and can't tighten its belt."

Tom Delay:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) said that "Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an 'ongoing victory,' and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget," the Washington Times reports.

Autographic D'Onofrio

Vincent D'Onofrio on giving autographs:

You just have to know that when you go outside you have to sign autographs. You just have to be ready to go around the corner to buy some milk and sign an autograph or two on the way and on the way back. You just have to prepare yourself for it. And I do it. It's OK with me. I've never, ever turned one down. Gregory Hines taught me to be graceful about it, that it's really important. When you do theater, people get to stand up and clap at the end. But when you do film and TV, they don't get to do that. So people come up to you on the street. That's all they're doing, applauding you.

As I said, I've never thought of it that way before, but reading it makes it seem thunderingly obvious.

Stunt casting

This is the season when we'll finally see Tom Wopat guest-star on Smallville as an old friend of Jonathan's, an overdue bit of stunt casting no doubt prompted by the summer's Dukes of Hazzard movie. Will it take a Jeeves & Wooster remake to get Stephen Fry on an episode or three of House as House's rival from medical school?

Powerful posting

Dave of Dave's Long Box presents what he calls The Best Post Ever.

Super preview

Focused Totality provides a glimpse at Frank Quitely's artwork for the upcoming All-Star Superman book from DC. It's nice to have a Superman comic book to actually look forward to, one in which Superman might actually resemble the world's greatest superhero for a change of pace.

A comment on the post notes that some fanboys are denouncing the project on the grounds of the exceedingly minor tweaks Quitely has made to Superman's "S" emblem. I suspect that the tweaks are nothing more than someone at DC thinking, "Hey, if we have an All-Star specific 'S' we can use it on action figures and t-shirts and posters and..."

I'm just sayin', is all.

And we're back. Again.

Since my last entry, I've a) turned 31, which is practically 40, which is practically dead, and b) passed my oral prelim exam and am now ABD in political science. Just a dissertation to write and I'm officially learned. Of course, Dick Cheney is also ABD in political science, and, well, that's really a bad example, isn't it? On a more interesting hand, David Duchovny is ABD in English at Yale. Hollywood, here I come!

Spiked

It's nice to know I wasn't the only person who wondered what the hell was going on with Spike for most of the character's tenure on the latter seasons of Buffy. Turns out James Marsters himself was often at a loss:

"...That was the problem with Spike. In all honesty, that character had no objective 90 percent of the time. I would have to make it up ... To find your objective is like a gas pedal for acting. And if you can find that objective and play it honestly, it's like 'Wham!' And if you can't find it, you're mired."

Appetite for Destruction

Chris "Lefty" Brown gives praise to Guns & Roses' Appetite for Destruction:

...I love every song on this album. The weakest song that I still like is Anything Goes, and that's track 11. My favorite song is probably Sweet Child O'Mine, because of that legendary guitar intro that is forever burned into my head. It reminds me a little of the twin guitars during the Allman Brothers' Jessica only it's dripped in sex and booze of the Sunset Strip. It's hard-wired in my noggin and no amount of sugary pop songs, hip-hop, disco, or Robbie Williams will dislodge it. And I thank God for that every day.

Appetite was the CD we put on during late-night tech calls at the theatre in college when we were out of pizza and everyone's energy was starting to flag and we still had major work to do ahead of us. To this day, if I hear the opening to "Sweet Child O'Mine," I feel like I'm 19 again.

For about half an hour.

Then I get tired again.

Aging sucks.

4%

George W. Bush's unpopularity continues to grow; he's "now more unpopular than FDR, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Ford, and Clinton ever were, and has matched the highest disapproval rating of his idol, Ronald Reagan." This is not, actually, all that surprising; for all of the right wing's talk of mandates and pointing to maps where sparsely populated counties are colored red, Bush is a president who has only ever made it into office by the hair of his chinny chin chin. He lost the popular vote in 2000 and very nearly lost, as a wartime incumbent, to a less-than-charismatic candidate in 2004.

What does amuse me are the numbers reported: Bush's approval in the latest Gallup poll is an anemic 40 percent, and his disapproval is 56%. What I want to know is, what's wrong with the other 4 percent? Is there something they're waiting on? Have they not made up their mind yet?

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

Short people

This post at 2blowhards discusses some of the troubling implications of research that strongly suggests that many genetic predispositions are the key, neccessary-but-not-sufficient component of many great athletes' greatness. For instance:

One of the most remarkable physical specimens in the world is the great bicyclist Lance Armstrong. Armstrong's heart is 20% larger than a normal person's, and his body produces one-third less lactic acid than do the bodies of other top cyclists. It's thought that each one of these physical attributes exists in only a few hundred people on earth. Walker quotes one doctor, who says of Armstrong that, in terms of his physical capabilities, "He's probably one in a billion."

Of course, reading this made me think of Batman.

You see, at one point while I was watching Batman Begins I thought to myself, "One of the great things about being Bruce Wayne would be being able to afford masterfully tailored everything" (an insight I probably would not have had before I was a starving grad student; my Amazon wish list lives here, if my plight moves you). A second later, I thought, "It would sure help to have Christian Bale's build, of course."

Which got me thinking: Has anyone explored how much of Batman's success lies in his remarkable genetic luck? Sure, it was witnessing his parents' murder at the hands of a street thug that gave 8-year-old Bruce Wayne the impetus to become Batman. But he was very fortunate indeed that, as he embarked on his training, that he grew into an athletically-framed, six-foot-something guy with a lantern jaw instead of a five-foot-nothing guy with a weak chin and a tendency toward having a beer gut.

There was an Elseworlds Batman story a few years ago that took as its premise "What if Bruce Wayne was a poor immigrant in the 1930s?" Couldn't it be just as interesting a springboard to ask "What if Bruce Wayne was short and scrawny or in chronically poor health?" The closest thing I can think of to anything along these lines would be Rorshach wearing a full-face mask and lifts in his shoes in Watchmen, but that was really just an incidental detail to the main plot. The original Atom was 5'0", but had a wrestler's build and eventually got super-powers. But how would a Bruce Wayne, or similarly motivated would-be hero, whose genetic predispositions didn't help him wage a war on crime work around, or with, his limitations?

This is as it should be

I was amused to read this in a recent profile of Lynda Carter, aka TV's Wonder Woman:

...at the moment we're drawn to the display cabinet in the next room with the superhero accessories from the 1970s television series. There's that tiara, the two pairs of "bulletproof" bracelets and, yes, the golden lasso.

That's just so darn right it makes me all tingly.

Theme night!

You know it's going to be a weird evening when both the MI-5 and Farscape episodes you watch on DVD feature people getting their faces burned off.

Potter casting

Two thoughts on casting Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

1. Scrimgeour, the new Minister of Magic, should be played by Bill Nighy. I'm surprised I have to point this out.
   
2. Since She Who Must Be Obeyed and I jst finished watching Yes, Minister and are gearing up for the sucessor series, Yes, Prime Minister, I couldn't help but imagine Paul Eddington's Jim Hacker in the chapter during which Scrimgeour briefs the PM on the war against Voldemort. Sadly, neither Eddington nor his foil, Sir Nigel Hawthorne, is with us any longer. But I would be greatly amused to see Derek Fowlds play a Prime Minister who may or may not be named Bernard Woolsey in the inevitable movie of Half-Blood Prince.
   

They're dropping like flies...

I've had what must be, by all accounts, remarkable luck getting my Justice League Unlimited action figures to stand up. But the same summer weather that has brought me terminal insomnia has brought many of these figures weak knees or ankles or something. As of now, Amazo, the Atom, Dove, Elongated Man, and Hawkgirl have given up the ghost and Batman's looking a little woozy himself. Maybe I'll get myself some action figure stands for my upcoming birthday...

Grant Morrison (Hearts) NY

Fanboy Rampage links to this terrific New York Times article about Grant Morrison's reimagining of New York City in the pages of his Seven Soldiers project -- which is the closest thing to a mainline DC comic I'm reading these days. A project where minor characters are dusted off and reinvented instead of slaughtered for shock value -- just imagine!

Snark aside, even if you don't know anything about comics this is worth your time.

Since I've been gone...

Apologies all around for the recent unplanned hiatus in blogging -- which will still be light for the forseeable future as I deal with a bulletproof case of insomnia (I can down more than the recommended dosage of Tylenol PM and keep going) and a home improvement project that seems to keep expanding every time I look at it. Stay tuned...

More on Scotty

Hank Steuver on the cultural impact of Jimmy Doohan's Scotty:

As Doohan and other cast members navigated that murky area between their own lives and the fictional lives that fans so desperately wanted to connect to, an even stranger thing happened: "Star Trek" improved, got deeper, taught philosophy and diversity. Even the movie versions got briefly better -- the screenplay for "The Wrath of Khan" (1982) has an almost Hemingway tautness.

Doohan showed up for "Khan" more visibly aged and heavier than the rest of the cast, but no less game. He broke our hearts three times in that adventure, on a voyage that really took it out of poor Scotty: He weeps when his cadets die in a torpedo attack from Khan; he begs Spock not to sacrifice himself to save the Enterprise from certain cataclysm; and he gets out the bagpipes for "Amazing Grace" at Spock's burial-at-space ceremony. (Ask your boyfriend what he wants at his funeral: "Amazing Grace" on bagpipes, please. Space-torpedo coffin optional.)

In spite of a generation of derision from those who never quite understood it (or its devoted fans), "Star Trek" took on an aura of class, and Doohan reveled in it. The cultural phenomenon would, in a way, bring him his third wife (who'd waited, groupie-like with a friend, to meet him backstage at a play he was doing in San Francisco), a marriage that lasted 30 years, until his death.

Doohan was Scotty; Scotty was Doohan, and an archetypal employee/colleague/friend was given a name: Scotty is the person in your office who swears that a project cannot possibly get done by deadline, then somehow pulls it out at the last minute. His favorite words: can't, won't, need more, impossible, losing power, can't, won't, overloaded, no way.

You have to let the Scottys blow off steam, and you have to remember what they always say in the end: Aye, aye, sir.

For those of you who plan to outlive me, at my funeral I want "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "One Particular Harbour" played. During the former, the assembled mourners will be given cowbells and asked to play along. And in the event that people aren't sad enough, She Who Must Be Obeyed has instructions to play "Don't Stop Me Now."

Beam him home

Looks like it's going to be one of those weeks:

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and movies who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died Wednesday. He was 85.
[...]
In a 1998 interview, Doohan was asked if he ever got tired of hearing the line "Beam me up, Scotty."

"I'm not tired of it at all," he replied. "Good gracious, it's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."

Futuramarama

Good news from TVShowsOnDVD: A direct-to-DVD Futurama movie is in the works! Time to limbo!

Like something from Snow Crash, only less cool.

Last night She Who Must Be Obeyed was working late and, since she's the best wife ever, I was happy to drive downtown to pick her up when she was done. As I sat at a red light at close to 11:30 at night, a woman with short spiky hair, dressed in a sleeveless black top and black canvas shorts and with a mesh messenger back slung across her torso wheeled up alongside me on roller blades. By the time I decided to roll down the window and tell her she was the coolest thing I'd seen all day, she had decided to skate through the red light and continue on her way to wherever it was she was going. Weird.

RIP Jim Aparo

Via Fanboy Rampage comes news that longtime Batman artist Jim Aparo has died. Aparo's Batman is what I see when I think of the character, thanks to his lengthy run on The Brave & The Bold; I'd go so far as to say Aparo:Batman::Swan:Superman. There are some nicely done appreciations of his work here and here.

Terror and democracy

William Saletan's response to yesterday's terror attack on London is well worth your time. Here's an excerpt:

Now comes the message to "the British people" that "the British government" has brought more death on them. It's Blair's fault. It's Bush's fault. Turn against them, and the pain will stop. But it won't. As yesterday's message made clear, the bombers want us out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down. He doesn't understand that this flexibility—and this trust—are why democracies will live, while he will die. Many of us didn't vote for Bush's government or Blair's. But we're loyal to them, in part because we were given a voice in choosing them. And if we don't like our governments, we can vote them out. We can't vote out terrorists. We can only kill them.

Commuting

Of all the images that came out of London yesterday, perhaps the most striking to me was a photo of a commuter who had been caught in the blast, tie askew, bandaged at the neck and forehead, covered in dust, with a blood-spattered newspaper still tucked under his right arm. It resonates partly because it seems a peculiarly British image, with the hardwiring for stiff upper lips called unexpectedly back into action. But it also reminds me of the guy She Who Must Be Obeyed and I talked to during the pedestrian exodus from D.C. to Northern Virginia on 9/11. He worked at the Pentagon, and was pretty certain his car had been caught in the crash, and didn't know anything more than what we'd seen on TV, except that if the crash was declared an act of terror his insurance would cover the car, but if it were an act of war it wouldn't. This struck us both as a grasping at something normal and pedestrian to make sense of the insane and extraordinary, similar to how a funeral focuses the mind on the most mundane details of life, like haircuts and dry cleaning and getting a ride to the airport.

I still wonder how that guy made out with his car...

Sartorial summer

Summer would be so much easier if everyone read this article:

Only in the summer do grown and usually well-dressed women don such juvenile and unflattering styles; only in the summer do professional and otherwise passably attired men dress as though preparing to clean out the garage. If you have left your home in the past few weeks, you have no doubt witnessed some of the season's more common missteps: exposed bra straps; bare, bulging midriffs; bad sandals. And you may have asked yourself why the first warm days of the year are like a Halloween costume party—a chance for people to wear whatever (or however little) they desire. After many such alarming sightings, I set out to catalog the worst summer fashion faux pas.

More than meets the eye

One of the joys of Netflix is that, since it's a flat monthly fee, you can add just about any damn thing you like to your rental queue and not feel like you're wasting money. Last night, for instance, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I watched Transformers: The Movie, which each of us were pretty sure we hadn't seen in about 20 years. I would be hard-pressed to describe the movie as "good" in any conventional way, quite honestly, and I'd completely forgotten about the incessant, often thematically-inappropriate 80s synth-pop background music, and the vocal performances were downright strange. There's really nothing resembling characterization in anything but the broadest strokes, and there's not a plot so much as an overlapping sequence of things that happen, and some of the characters happen to be standing in the places where those things happen, and so on.

But She and I both thought that in spite -- or perhaps because -- of all that, the movie is also some kind of deranged work of cinematic ADHD genius. Because when I was 12 and saw this movie, I loved it. Loved it. Who cares that the characterizations are paper thin? A bunch of Autobots on the run from Decepticons who have been upgraded by an evil robot planet that EATS PLANETS crashed on the Planet of Junk (yes, that was its name) and fought the Junkions (robots made of -- wait for it -- junk)! And when some other Autobots eventually arrive on the Planet of Junk to rescue the first group of Autobots everyone dances to Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid" before both groups of Autobots and the Junkions fly off to defeat the giant evil planet-eating robot planet.

Plot? We don't need no steenking plot. Transformers: The Movie is wonderful and perfect just the way it is; if someone had tried to make it a proper movie with a three-act structure and character arcs the whole thing would have been ruined. This movie is the equivalent of eating an entire can of chocolate frosting, and I mean that in a good way.

Live and learn

Witchblade is still being published. Who knew? During the dark days of my tenure at Mania.com, I occasionally had to read -- and I use the term very, very loosely since the comic consisted entirely in splash pages and large-paneled pages of Michael Turner's anorexic, slow-eyed pseudofemales with words sort of squeezed in wherever they could be fit. I have to wonder if the audience that read (or rather, bought) the comic then will have any interest in a new direction that's not "about the lead character's clothes miraculously falling off."

I must own this.

The Adventures of Superman is coming out on DVD. And I must own at least this first set, which includes the less campy first season of the show as well as the Superman vs. the Mole Men movie. That's a lot of good stuff for under forty bucks.

On the use of the paper shredder as an instrument of political protest

Josh Marshall presents a reader's first-hand account of an anti-Social Security rally that would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Scratch that, it's funny AND pathetic.

The art of the deal

Rewatching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I'm struck by how fortunate it is that the Weasley twins were born into a wizarding family, since it means they deal harmless magical pranks to younger students, instead of drugs.

Best. Wife. Ever.

So I saw one of the sneak preview screenings of Serenity last night. And I saw it entirely through the good graces and benevolence of the woman known to readers of this blog as She Who Must Be Obeyed. You see, we were unable to get tickets online, so I had the brilliant, or possibly deeply, deeply geekish, idea of standing outside the theatre before the screening with a sign advertising our need for tickets. She Who Must Be Obeyed thought it was worth a try, and last night around an hour and a half before the screening we set out for the theatre, and I stood there with a sign and She Who Must Be Obeyed stood there with the guy with the sign.

About three minutes after we got there a guy in a Firefly T-shirt said he had one extra ticket. And while I was inclined to pass, since there were two of us, She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted that we buy it from him: one was better than none, and worst-case I could go see the movie and she could come pick me up when it was done. My arm thus twisted, we bought the ticket. And we continued to stand in front of the theatre with our sign altered to read that we now needed one, not two, tickets.

A second ticket never materialized, so She Who Must Be Obeyed sent me into the theatre to see the movie. This despite the fact that it was she who, way back in 1998 or so, introduced me to Joss Whedon's world of characters who get under your skin and stay there. So today I am compelled, as an insufficient gesture of thanks, to tell the Internets that She Who Must Be Obeyed is the Best Wife Ever, and that last night's display of generosity far, far above and beyond the call of matrimony is merely my latest reminder of why She Who Must Be Obeyed is also the Best Wife Ever.

Spoon!

If you're enjoying the nightly reruns of the long-gone-from-the-airwaves Tick cartoon on Toon Disney, check out these custom Tick action figures. Anyone remember when people were paying hundreds of dollars for a Man-Eating Cow action figure?

Newsworthiness

I've mentioned before that I grew up in Scranton, PA, and I was fascinated to read about a bizarre domestic incident involving the area's Congressman a few months ago. I didn't realize until talking to my father on Sunday, however, that the local newspaper is only now covering the story, and apparently had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing to. Nice district if you can get it.

I was also amused to read that the Congressman and the young woman in question met at a Young Republicans meeting. You can't make this stuff up. Or rather, you could, but then your editor would say something like "Leave that stuff to Carl Hiaasen" or something.

More Schmospotting

Another update on Joe Schmo actors: Steve Mallory, AKA Ernie the Heir on Joe Schmo 2, is a cast member on VH1's mildly diverting and amusing series BSTV. From the original JS, Kristen "Dr. Pat" Wiig can be seen in TV ads for Time Warner digital telephone service. Lance Krall, also of the original Schmo, has been headlining his own sketch comedy show on Spike TV. Of The Lance Krall Show I can only say two things: Apparently everyone will have their own TV show on Spike TV someday, and it's an interesting change of pace to see a Playmate of the Year doing sketch comedy.

Cruisin'

David Poland puts his finger on the sheer ick factor of the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes coupling:

Tom Cruise is acting like a guy who walked into the casino, won huge, and is on a losing streak. The smaller the stack gets, the more desperate he is to play bigger and bigger amounts to get back the winnings he has "lost."
[...]
A 40-year-old man marrying a 24-year-old less than two months after they met is desperate. There is no other appropriate word. It doesn't matter if you are Tom Cruise or if you have a movie coming or whatever else.

Listening to a report of their engagement, at a press conference a reporter floated the question of whether they got engaged at the Eiffel Tower and they confirmed. Fuck! There is no way that was not a set up. The reporter was told and given the opportunity to ask the question, rather than Team Cruise sending out a press release. Double fuck! The reason so many people think it's movie promotion is that it has all the hallmarks of something so obvious that it can only sustain for a few months, like a movie promotional scheme.

I'm generally not one to take much of an interest in the private lives of celebrities -- I think the Brad'n'Jennifer divorce is sad, and the emaciation of Lindsay Lohan downright tragic, and that seeing such happenings as anything other than real events happening to real people is kind of unhealthy -- but Cruise's recent antics are making me rather irritated with myself for enjoying so many of his recent movies and thinking he was maturing into a really interesting actor.

Nope...

Somehow Giant-Size Spider-Woman doesn't have the same ring to it as Giant-Size Man-Thing. It doesn't even have any extra oomph for the hyphenation fetishists who must be out there somewhere.

My visual dictionary

Someday, when I am a tenured nonagenarian professor rattling around an ivory tower somewhere, I will create a visual dictionary of the English language. And under the listing for "unintended consequences" I will put a picture of a man who, having spent twenty minutes trying to get silicone caulk to come out of a tube, steps on it, covering his favorite sneakers in said caulk, which he then spends over an hour trying to clean off of them, and in the process gets some of it on various household items and the refinished hardwood floors, which then must likewise be cleaned off.

Might take more than one picture, actually.

Once more for the record

Terry Schiavo was not abused:

An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband's contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner's office said Wednesday. It also found no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused.

And recovery was impossible:

"The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain," he said. "This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons."

I look forward to apologies and retractions from the amateur neurologists who spent months baselessly accusing Michael Schiavo of abuse, murder, and worse.

Boosterrific!

The Comic Treadmill takes a look at some early issues of the fondly-remebered Booster Gold solo series. I note in the comments on the entry in question that the 25 issues of Booster Gold would just fit into one of DC's just-announced black-and-white DC Showcase collections, as would the Blue Beetle series of similar vintage...

Dewberry

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have decided, after watching the first three episodes of Gordon Ramsay's hilarious FOX reality show Hell's Kitchen, that the name "Dewberry," sported by the show's requisite obese, probably mentally deficient contestant*, should be turned into a general term of derision. For instance:

• "Sorry it took me so long to buy milk, dear; there was a real Dewberry in front of me in line at the store."
  
• "Police suspect a neighborhood Dewberry is responsible for the rash of garden hose violations."
  
• "Exit polls show that the president's re-election can be attributed to a high turnout among Dewberrys."
  

You know, that sort of thing. Feel free to leave additional uses of the term "Dewberry" in the comments.


*This phrasing, or something very close to it, is shamelessly stolen from someone or other on Best Week Ever.

(Incidentally, how on earth does Gordon Ramsay have the time to be the greatest chef in England? He's doing this series, and BBC America has run, I think, three Ramsay series and counting, and even if his books are all ghostwritten, when the hell does he have time to run multiple restaurants?)

Peter Falk reads STAR WARS to his ailing grandson

"And every time Darth Vader said 'As you wish' to Grand Moff Tarkin, what he was really saying was 'I love you.'"

Did anyone, ever, enjoy high school?

One reads about a story like this and wonders if high school administrators go to a special center to have their brains removed, or to have their heads inserted into their own asses. Perhaps the first, then the other:

Thomas Benya wore a braided bolo tie under his purple graduation gown this week as a subtle tribute to his Native American heritage.

Administrators at his Charles County school decided the string tie was too skinny. They denied him his diploma, at least temporarily, as punishment.

The bolo, common in contemporary American Indian culture, is not considered a tie by his public school in Pomfret. If Benya wants the diploma, he will have to schedule a conference with the administrators.
[...]

In March, Benya's high school sent a letter to parents and seniors explaining that "adherence to the dress code is mandatory," with the word mandatory in bold and underlined. For girls: white dresses or skirts with white blouses. For boys: dark dress pants with white dress shirts and ties.

That left Benya's classmates free to wear bright orange, red and striped ties under their gowns at the ceremony Wednesday at the Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro. One senior girl wore a headscarf and long pants for religious reasons.

I went to a Jesuit high school where the graduation attire consisted in tuxedos for the boys and white dresses for the girls. Which made the whole thing look like a Moonie wedding. There was a pro forma "vote" on whether to wear that or traditional caps and gowns each year, which vote was always rigged or otherwise disregarded by the administration; my senior year, we were told that if we did vote for caps and gowns, we wouldn't be able to wear caps because -- I kid you not -- they could put someone's eye out when they were tossed. Perhaps the most outrageous thing about the situation was that the guys' tuxes were provided free of charge by a local company hoping to scare up prom rentals, while the girls all had to buy the exact same dress. Dumbassery, I think, is endemic to those whose chosen path in life involves being a high school administrator.

Mythology, Schmythology...

...when Fox is done making DVD sets collecting all of the "mythology" episodes of The X-Files, can we get a few sets dedicated to the more off-kilter and light-hearted episodes of the series? You know the ones I mean: "Conundrum," "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," Duchovny's first two directorial efforts, that sort of thing? And end it where the series should have known enough to stop, with the second-last episode of Season 7, which would have been a perfectly good coda to a series that had been amiably coasting since the season's midpoint.

Things I have learned in the last ten minutes

You cannot say "wang" in a Saturday Night Live rerun on E! without having it bleeped out, even if the rerun is airing at a later hour than that at which the episode in question was initially aired. Every Ladies' Man sketch ever done is now 60% less funny.

An open letter

Right Honourable Tony Blair
10 Downing Street
London, England

Dear Mr. Blair:

Last night I watched the programme Green Wing on BBC America. It had been advertised as a hospital comedy, similar in tone to the superb American series Scrubs. However, this was a blatant lie, as Scrubs is funny and Green Wing is not. It is, in fact, like a humor Dementor, in that the show seems actively to suck whatever comedic instincts or abilities the actors and scripts may have initially possessed into a Lovecraftian nethervoid. I would go so far as to say that the show was so bad that it came off as an imitation of Scrubs made by someone who cannot tell why the Joe Don Baker film Mitchell is a bad movie and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. is a good one, but instead thinks they're very similar in quality because they are both set in Los Angeles and have car chases in them. Similarly, both Scrubs and Green Wing take place in a hospital and involve set pieces, deliberately nonrealistic behavior, and absurd situations and characters. But on Scrubs such things are accomplished with charm and wit and panache and emotional truth, while on Green Wing they are done with shrieking and stupidity and clumsiness and every single word uttered by every single character on the show rings false, including "the" and "and."

As you are the democratic leader of the United Kingdom, I would like you to give me the hour of my life I wasted on this show back.

I remain, etc. etc.

Ditko!

Salon has a neat piece about Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, hands, and the sheer weird rightness (or right weirdness, or both) of his art. (Via Tony Isabella.)

Shatner? I hardly know 'er!

I suspect the upcoming DVD release of T.J. Hooker may signal that Shatnermania has jumping of the shark. Of course, I probably said the same thing about the release of the Encyclopedia Shatnerica, so what do I know?

Monochrome

Superhero costumes are often garish mixes of clashing colors -- just look at the Golden Age Green Lantern, with his bewildering combination of red, green, purple, and yellow, or Vibe's blindness-inducing original yellow, red, and black fighting togs. Some heroes get around this with sensible color combinations -- red and blue (Superman, Spider-Man, the Atom), green and black (the Green Lantern Corps), two shades of the same color blue (Green Arrow, the Blue Beetle).

Others, though, take a monochromatic approach: If a costume is all one color, it HAS to match!

We've got the original Ray, who dressed all in yellow; his son opted for a mix of yellow, white, and black, but was back in a variation of the original suit for Kingdom Come.

Also in Kingdom Come, we saw the Blue Beetle don metallic armor that was entirely one shade of blue.

For most of his career, Daredevil has worn a costume that's entirely red. Elektra has tended to wear either all red or all white, depending (I think) on whether she's alive or dead at the moment.

The Golden Age Robotman was entirely silver, and each of the Metal Men was all one color.

On the Justice League cartoon, Amazo started out as gray before turning golden.

I'm sure there are folks out there I'm missing. Anyone have anything to add?

Give my man a cappucino -- and make it a quadruple.

I've been enjoying Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo for years, and can't remember a time when I didn't check it out two or three times a day. So I'm really enjoying his newly-launched venture, TPM Cafe, which is a sort of group blog focusing on progressive issues and questions. The highlight of this first week of the site is a guest-blogging stint by former Senator John Edwards, focusing on poverty. I'm a big fan of Senator Edwards, and voted for him in our local precinct caucus last spring, so I'm thrilled to see him continuing to be active in public affairs and making use of the connective power of new media as part of that effort. This site looks like it will be tremendously useful and interesting, so check it out, won't you?

Ding-dong, the mural's dead

When we bought our home in January of 2004, we faced some rather unusual repainting issues. Granted, we were sick of living in white-walled apartments, as we'd done for the previous four or so years, but our inclination to paint our new home in bold colors -- an inclination borne largely from our addiction to watching DIY programs on BBC America -- became something of a necessity thanks to the preverse painting proclivities of the property's previous owners.

For instance, one might say that the front room of the house had something of an Egyptian theme going on, if one had no real knowledge of Egypt save having watched that episode of One Step Beyond with the reincarnated pharaoh on a UHF channel many years ago. The walls were a creamy yellow color, and there were what appeared to be pyramids sponge-painted in gold in two corners of the room, except that they looked like something that would have been painted before the discovery of two-point perspective. Where there weren't pyramids, there was more gold sponge-painting for what the people who did it no doubt thought was some sort of texturing effect.

It took a coat of primer and three coats of paint to get rid of the damn things.

Much of the rest of the house featured similarly awful painting -- bizarrely flat and lifeless colors combined with inartful attempts at effects, our job was not helped by the previous owners' apparent inability to spackle holes, remove nails and hooks from walls, or use painters' tape. There's no need to detail them all; suffice it to say that we covered most of them before we moved in, and are making slow but steady progress on what little is left.

Today, for instance, I painted over the Wizard of Oz mural in the basement.

You read that right: Wizard. Oz. Mural. Basement.

One corner of the basement -- the outside wall of the finished part of the basement, which houses our office and our exercise equipment (even that which is not overly vast can contain multitudes, you see) -- featured a strange painting of a nearly surreal tornado against a sloppy, scribbly blue-and-white background, with a street sign depicting the "corner" or Kansas and Oz, a painting of a farmhouse, and random cow stickers scattered around for good measure. I have a sneaking suspicion that the cow stickers came first, and the rest of the mural -- I really hate to use the word, as it implies some level of artistic skill and integrity -- was concocted as an excuse to put the cow stickers on the walls. The whole thing would have been less disturbing, I think, if it had depicted scenes from the HBO series Oz.

In a perfect world, we would have been able to get rid of the damn thing last year. But we had enough other work to do in and around the house that repainting one wall of the basement was bumped way down the priority list. A few weekends ago, however, we acquired some new storage shelving for the basement, and that gave me the excuse I needed to eradicate the bloody atrocity from our wall. I found a tan paint that the previous owners had left behind in the basement, which was a surprisingly pleasant color and, more importantly, nearly exactly matched the existing color of most of the rest of the basement, and one peeling away of the cow stickers and two coats of paint later every trace of the damn mural was gone.

Ding-dong, I say. Ding. Fucking. Dong.

Good Vibe-rations?

Scipio gives praise unto Vibe. God help me, I'm almost convinced.

Plotz

So, can anyone watch the season finale of Smallville explain to me exactly what the hell was the resolution of the Jane Seymour/reincarnated French witch subplot that's been rendering the whole show even more incoherent than usual all season long? I mean, seriously, what the hell was that thing? It's the kind of subplot that makes you wonder what the creators of the show were smoking, and why that substance isn't more heavily regulated by the DEA and FDA and Gruff the Crime Dog and those sorts of folks.

Contrast it to the Chi McBride evil hospital administrator subplot on House. I didn't much like it, and I didn't think it was executed especially well, but the idea was a perfectly sound one: Create a cantankerous, stubborn foil for our show's stubborn, cantankerous protagonist. It flowed completely logically from the show's premise and characters. If it didn't have the best execution in the world, well, these things happen and let's move on.

Whereas Smallville's Jane Seymour plot appeared to be about reincarnated French witches fighting over some mystical Kryptonian artifacts. Put aside the sheer cruelty on the part of the show's creators in coming up with a subplot that required Kristen Kreuk to attempt to act on a regular basis (I'm not sure if that was more cruel toward her or to us. No, wait, I am sure. It was much, much more cruel to us). Did someone in the conference room say, "Hey! You know what the young people are into today? Reincarnated French witches! There's a kiosk at at the mall about 'em, even!" Was this some stealth diplomacy initiative to repair relations with the French? I dunno, the show's produced in Canada, maybe a writer was trying to score points with a Quebecoix intern or something...

Faint praise

I think it says something about what a cesspool of butchery mainstream DC and Marvel superpeople comics have become that these pass for favorable notices of the new direction on Firestorm. I know, I know, lots and lots of people are buying books like Identity Crisis and Avengers Disassembled, but, well, lots and lots of people watch Bill O'Reilly, too.

Some more Star Wars links

This line from Roger Ebert's review sums up a lot of my feelings about Lucas and the Star Wars phenomenon:

George Lucas has achieved what few artists do; he has created and populated a world of his own. His "Star Wars" movies are among the most influential, both technically and commercially, ever made. And they are fun. If he got bogged down in solemnity and theory in "Episode II: Attack of the Clones," the Force is in a jollier mood this time, and "Revenge of the Sith" is a great entertainment.

David Edelstein of Slate makes a similar note:

It must be said that there's a touch of the term paper in how his characters' fates play out, and the actors still wear the glazed, helpless expression that comes from declaiming lines with no subtext in the direction of Creatures To Be Animated Later. But it's worth doffing our beanies to a man who wouldn't settle for Flash Gordon—who was driven to turn a Saturday-matinee space serial into something that needed the combined forces of Milton and Shakespeare to do it full justice. In the end, there's a breadth, a fullness to the Star Wars saga. It's so much more than the sum of its clunks.

I'm far from the world's biggest Star Wars fan, but I think it's important not to lost sight of the fact that these movies are the realization of an intensely personal artistic vision, and that the things on the screen are there because one guy wanted them to be. That's too often forgotten, sadly.

For something completely different, check out this old Salon article about Irvin Kershner, who of course directed The Empire Strikes Back all those years ago.

Lucas, you fool!

One of the more reliable forms of entertainment in these troubled times is watching conservatives freak out at any hint of apostasy in popular culture; very often the spectacle of one of these folks screaming "INFIDEL!" is as entertaining as (or moreso than) the original. You know what I mean: Like when an episode of 24 depicts a Muslim who isn't a terrorist, or when there's an issue of Green Lantern with the invidious message that Beating Up Gay People For Being Gay Is Wrong, and that sort of thing.

The wingnuts are out in full force over Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, of course, and Roy Edroso deserves combat pay for actually wading through all of this bilge to pick out the funniest bits and mocking them, cruelly. Another criticism I thought was hysterical came from the ever-amusing Monitor Duty, wherein it was alleged that "Lucas seems obsessed a touch too much in Eastern religions and philosophies to fully connect with a Judeo-Christian-influenced American audience."

And, really, I can see what this guy is talking about -- I mean, the Star Wars films have really been held back by this sort of thing. That's why American audiences have only paid $1,802,341,185 to see the first five Star Wars movies, after all, and it's kept the total merchandising sales to only a million bajillion dollars or so. If only the movies had been more Judeo-Christian friendly, and had less of those darn Eastern religions and philosophies in 'em, they could have made two million bajillion dollars, I'll bet!

(For the record, I enjoyed the hell out of the movie; it more than exceeded my expectations and justified the renewed excitement I felt about the movie in the wake of the wonderful Clone Wars cartoons. I want to see what Lucas does next; I'd love to see him take his CGI technology and apply it to a musical...)

Super Shorts

One more thought on an upcoming DC Comics cover: Adventures of Superman #643 depicts a Superman whose costume looks very much inspired by the recently-unveiled movie costume: Note the rather short shorts and the vaguely funky "S" shield on the comic (versus the more traditional rendition of the "S"). I wonder if this is an editorially-mandated thing, or just one artist's choice on one particular cover? Either way, I'm glad to see that the superfluous belt "S" on the movie costume hasn't made its way into the comic. Yet.