Packed!

Because you demanded it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about packaging but were afraid to ask.

He's a reporter! He's an actor/director/writer! They're cops!

Joel Achenbach catches up with his college pal David Duchovny:

I lived in a dorm room next to a kid from New York named David Duchovny. He was smart, athletic, talented and confident. Over the next few years, we didn't hang out a lot, but we did play a fair bit of a pinball game named Xenon. I took the left flipper, he took the right. When we dropped in a quarter, the machine would say, in an alluring female voice, "Enter Xenon," which represented pretty much my entire college sex life.

I sensed that women found Duchovny attractive, because when they saw him they would instantly start weeping, writhing on the ground and speaking in tongues. (Standing there, ignored, I'd announce, "But I'm better at pinball.") Occasionally a beauty would disappear into his room, and seconds later the stereo would be cranked to deafening volume. I never understood how they could talk with the music so loud.

There's more about Duchovny's foray into grad school and his writerly yearnings. While I went to college with a number of folks who have gone one to some level of fame, I wasn't actually friends with any of them, and am unlikely to be writing about them in twenty years or so.

Ad Sense

A few weeks ago I signed up for Google's AdSense program; the code for it seems to generate advertising links based on keywords in the content of the pages on which it appears. And I think one knows one has posted a lot of stuff about the Terri Schiavo case when the ads appearing at a given moment are for "The Grateful Dead" and something called "Dead Doctors Don't Lie."

Mars needs viewers

Salon on why Veronica Mars rocks:

Like any high school heroine worth her weight in greasy cafeteria tater tots, Veronica Mars' mix of alienation, sarcasm and angst is palpable from across a packed gymnasium. But there's something else that sets her apart, an angry, stubborn self-confidence in the face of a very dark past, one that includes a dead best friend, a mom who skipped town, and a night when she was slipped a roofie and raped. Even with Buffy setting the precedent, this is not the sort of darkness you'd expect to find on a teen show. But as screwed up as her life has become, each week Veronica learns that the other kids at school could be facing bigger demons than she is.

This is the tasty little truth at the heart of "Veronica Mars" and one of the main reasons -- among many -- that the show has gathered a loyal audience and some promise of a second season despite unimpressive ratings. Each week, using the skills she's picked up from her detective dad, Veronica unearths the vulnerabilities and torturous circumstances behind those seemingly flat characters -- the nerd, the jock, the outsider -- who haunted us way back when. And so, along with a barrage of crimes, mysteries and missing persons, Veronica discovers that the popular jackass at school, Logan, has a self-absorbed, brutal movie-star father (played hilariously by Harry Hamlin) and a mother who, out of the blue, drives to a local bridge, parks her car, and jumps off. Duncan Kane, the dreamy ex-boyfriend who's kept Veronica at arm's length, has epilepsy, a murdered sister, and wildly dysfunctional parents to boot. And Carrie, the gossipy girl Veronica doesn't trust, who claims Veronica's favorite teacher got her pregnant? She is lying, but with good reason -- she's helping vindicate her friend, who really did have an affair with the teacher.

While such fully realized characters might be common on, say, "Deadwood," such depth is unheard of in most teen dramas. Providing this peek behind the curtain not only offers a remedy for those teenage snap judgments, it lends the world of "Veronica Mars" depth and color. We can trust, as viewers, that we'll be treated to a look at the sad or confusing or deliciously sick layers that exist underneath the pretty myth of other people's families, those layers most of us don't discover until at least our 10-year high school reunions.

Plus there's an interview with show creator Rob Thomas.

New episodes return tonight on UPN.

Undeclaration!

On a far, far lighter note, Undeclared will be out on DVD on July 5. Put it on a shelf with Wonderfalls and Firefly and make your own personal "Good Shows Killed by FOX's stupidity" collection!

More Schiavo posts

I had intended to write a thoughtful post about how my feelings on this matter derive not from any sort of medical or metaphysical certitude on my part, but rather from my recognition of my own limited knowledge and information, and the fact that the authoritative means by which these tragic situations are decided have, time and time again (I heard on CNN that there have been something like 26 separate hearings on the case), concluded that Terri Schiavo made known her wishes not to be kept alive under these situations and that her wishes should therefore be honored.

Then Josh Marshall did pretty much the same thing. Here's an excerpt:

The only clarity I've been able to see in this case or find in it is that there is a set of laws governing these issues in Florida and those laws appear to have been followed. Not only followed, but now submitted to numerous appeals. As for the medical questions involved -- specifically, Shiavo's level of awareness or consciousness -- from what I can tell, every independent doctor who has examined her has put her in the PVS category. Those who don't turn out to be either quacks or doctors who didn't do a complete examination.

That doesn't mean those legal or medical judgments are correct. But I know that those judgments have been arrived at by people with vastly more expertise and information at their disposal than I have.

Obviously, I lack any medical understanding to judge these issues myself and I don't know that much about the legal history of the case. But the one thing I'm quite clear on is that I won't get any more clarity on either point from the comic book coverage coming out of CNN and the rest of the cable networks. And the folks who've poured gasoline on this fire for cheap political reasons are truly beneath contempt.

And it turns out that they're also wildly out of step with public opinion on this issue. I pity the responsible, reasonable Republicans and conservatives who are caught up in this circus of cretinism; visit John Cole's site to see what I'm talking about.

Meanwhile, conservative radio host Neil Boortz, of whom I don't think I'd ever heard until I clicked a link at Andrew Sullivan's site, has this to say:

These feelings give rise to some questions of my own; questions for the devoutly religious people who are fighting to keep Terri Schiavo alive. Do you believe in God’s promise of everlasting life? Do you believe that the reward for a life well spent on this earth is a life with God in heaven after you die? If you do, then a few more questions if you will.

Do you believe that the human soul can make the transition to everlasting life while the human body that carried that soul through life clings to life on this earth? If you do, then you must surely believe that Terri Schiavo has earned and is already enjoying her reward in heaven. That being the case, why is it so important to you that the now-unneeded body of Terri Schiavo is kept alive?

But perhaps you believe, as I do, that the human soul is so connected to and integrated with its earthly body that any transition will not be made until that body ceases functioning -- until death occurs.. That being the case, why do you so ardently desire that the soul of Terri Schiavo spend five, ten, perhaps 30 years or more trapped in a useless and non-functioning body, unable to move on to whatever reward awaits her? Isn’t 15 years enough?

Encyclopedia Treadmill

H over at the Comic Treadmill is doing a comprehensive review of last year's DC Encycolpedia, which I found underwhelming. H gets into far, far more detail in his account and it's well worth a read.

If I had $704...

...I'd still be outbid on the mother of all action figure auctions. Behold, and drool.

The name game

One of the nuttier language games being played in the wingnuts' use of Terry Shiavo as a political football concerns her last name. Here's an example:

And for those who wonder why people are suddenly referring to Terri Schiavo as “Terri Schindler-Schiavo": Her husband clearly wants nothing to do with her anymore. He’s moved on to another woman, with whom he has two kids. He’s denied her rehabilitation and treatment. He just wants to kill her, destroy the evidence, and move on with his life. Clearly, her parents – the Schindlers – love her much more than he does. If she’s going to die like this, let’s help cut one of the cords that tie her to this creep.

So when Hillary Clinton started, of her own free will, going by "Hillary Rodham Clinton" in 1993 it was part of the eeevil librul feminist plot to turn women into lesbians witches who got pregnant just to have abortions, but now the right wing is proudly hyphenating a brain-dead woman's name -- without anything resembling her consent or wishes -- to make what they think is some sort of political point. That's not really surprising, I guess; after all, they're the same people who are arguing that Congress has every right to overturn umpteen court decisions affirming Michael Schiavo's status as legal guardian and medical decision-maker -- to make a decision that the same courts have concluded, time and again, is in accord with Terri Schiavo's own wishes -- just because they don't like the results of that due process.

It's almost like Terri Schiavo, her own wishes, and her marriage are absolutely nothing but means for these dirtbags to score cheap political points or something. Nah, that couldn't be it...

Go read now.

Dalia Lithwick's column on the grotesquerie of the GOP trying to ride a brain-dead woman to political advantage is must-reading. Here's an excerpt:

Let's be clear: The piece of legislation passed late last night, the so-called "Palm Sunday Compromise," has nothing whatever to do with the rule of law. The rule of law in this country holds that this is a federalist system—in which private domestic matters are litigated in state, not federal courts. The rule of law has long provided that such domestic decisions are generally made by competent spouses, as opposed to parents, elected officials, popular referendum, or the demands of Randall Terry. The rule of law also requires a fundamental separation of powers—in which legislatures do not override final, binding court decisions solely because the outcome is not the one they like. The rule of law requires comity between state and federal courts—wherein each respects and upholds the jurisdiction and authority of the other. The rule of law requires that we look skeptically at legislation aimed at mucking around with just one life to the exclusion of any and all similarly situated individuals.

And what is the overwhelming constitutional value that supersedes each of these centuries-old legal notions? Evidently, Congress has a secret, super-textual constitutional role as the nation's caped crusaders—its members authorized to leap into phone booths around the world and fly back to Washington in a single bound whenever the "culture of life" is in peril. Republicans acknowledged this weekend that their views on "the sanctity of life" trump even their convictions about federalism. Or, as Tom DeLay put it, when asked how he reconciles this bill with conservative calls to keep the federal government out of state matters, "We, as Congress, have every right to make sure that the constitutional rights of Terri Schiavo are protected, and that's what we're doing."

This congressional authority to simply override years of state court fact-finding brings with it other superpowers, including the power of gratuitous name-calling: Members of Congress unable to pronounce Schiavo's name just last week are denouncing her husband as an adulterer and common law bigamist who withheld proper medical care from her. I wonder what they'd say about my parenting—or yours—if they decided to make a federal case out of every domestic-custody dispute currently resolved in state court proceedings.

For God's sake, read the whole thing.

One silver lining, at least: The public is smarter than the GOP gives them credit for.

Let's be clear on this: The Republican Party has descended to new depths of cynicism and deceit. The party that claimed it wanted to protect marriage has voted to destroy a husband's ability to make health-care decisions for his incapacitated wife. The party that has wrapped itself in the mantle of states' rights has declared that it can and will invent from whole cloth reasons to overturn state decisions that it doesn't like. The party that imagines it has a monopoly on family values and claims it wants to get government off of people's backs has announced to the world that the government, not you, has the final say over your family's medical decisions. What's shocking isn't the new depths these cretins have found, it's the raw, naked cynicism and corruption of this showboating that's surprising.

Weird.

Hecate


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
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Before she was LOST...

...Evangeline Lilly appeared in a bunch of TV ads for a chat line/web site called www.livelinks.com, and her image appears prominently on their web site. Oh, the things one learns when one is up late watching TV.

PSA: Free light rail in Minneapolis

Light rail service will be free this evening to encourage people celebrating St. Patrick's Day not to drive after celebrating.

In other news, stay off of light rail this evening if you don't want to be vomited on.

How did Kent Brockman put it? "The day when everyone's Irish...except blacks, gays, and Italians!"

Alton Brown follow-up

When we saw Alton Brown on his current book tour, at one point he asked everyone in the assembled crowd to pretend they were asleep so he could take a picture with his digital camera and post it on his website. Which he has done, as you can see here. And the lovely blonde woman front row in the extreme left of the picture is none other than She Who Must Be Obeyed.

But that's not what I'm blogging this for.

No, I instead direct your attention to the insipid couple seated right next to She Who Must Be Obeyed, who rivalled the Gelatinous Cube from last February's Neil Gaiman event for sheer neighborly annoyingness. For starters, they were both fans of the insane stalker variety; they announced to everyone else around them that they'd seen Alton earlier in the day at another book store. The male half of the couple smelled funny, and, as you can see from the picture, he was one of those seat hogs who is somehow entitled to three chairs' worth of ass and leg room because he's a bigger fan than everyone else. And the female half, as you can see, lacked the class to actually go along with the gag, and instead is looking at the camera.

Fuckwits.

Bat-thoughts

Johanna's reaction to the Batman in the 80s collection was very similar to my own. The book seemed to exist to showcase lots of fun and exciting things that were happening the Batman books of the early 1980s, and were discarded, destroyed, or ignored in the following years. Over the weekend, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I watched a featurette on the first volume of the Batman: The Animated Series DVDs that talked about how influential the series was. And I scratched my head, because to my mind the incredible thing about that cartoon was how much better it was than 99% of the Batman comics being published at the time and since then.

Batman's starting to pop up everywhere with the new movie coming out, of course, though it's a far cry from 1989's Batmania. One new book I noticed was something called The Batman Handbook, the chief purpose of which was to draw attention to all of the parts of Batman lore that should be ignored if one wishes to tell entertaining Batman stories. It dedicated page after page to features of Batman's uniform: It's liked with Kevlar! It contains a distributed taser network that allows Batman to repulse any attacker with 300,000 volts! The cape is also armored! (One imagines that a real-world person putting on such an outfit would bear a passing resemblance to Ralphie's younger brother bundled up for winter in A Christmas Story. The secret identity gets lots of unnecessary attention, too: Batman has such strong control over his facial muscles that no one could ever mistake him for Bruce Wayne! Alfred specially tailors Bruce Wayne's suits so he can wear his armored Batman costume beneath them! And so on. I mean, just write good stories about Batman fighting villains and solving mysteries and stop thinking so much about how things that don't work if you analyze them too hard are supposed to work. Just accept the costume and secret identity and move on. Paul Dini gets it. Bruce Timm gets it. Their friends get it. Why does DC refuse to get it?

Social Security privatization, you're DEAD...DEAD...DEAD!

Style points for anyone who gets the reference that title was swiped and adapted from.

Geekery aside, here's Jonathan Chait's excellent postmortem on the all-over-but-kicking-the-corpse-down-the-street death of Bush's attempt to destroy Social Security.

Schmospotting

Were the creators of Arrested Development big fans of Spike TV's two incarnations of The Joe Schmo Show? Several cast members have appeared on AD in recent episodes.

Bryce the Stalker from JS2 appeared in the background of an episode as a bartender at Lucille's country club. Last night, the actor who played Piper and Austin's fathers, also in JS2, was the emcee at Motherboy XXX, and the actor who played Molly The Virgin's boyfriend on the original JS was working the front desk of the Motherboy XXX hotel.

Other cast members keep popping up elsewhere. Lance Krall (AKA Kip The Gay Guy from the original Schmo played a used car dealer on last year's Monk season finale; the actress who played Ashleigh The Bitch on the original is appearing in some sort of feminine hygeine control product ad, and the actress who played Piper has been in an electric shaver ad. Jon Huertas, TJ The Playa from JS2, has a small part in Without A Trace several episodes ago.

All of which is quite nice for these actors, and it's nice to see them meeting some success beyond fake reality TV, but when will we see Kristen Wiig, AKA Doctor Pat, again?

Some housekeeping

A few things that may be of interest: I've updated the Amazon links under my blogroll to reflect things that I've read and watched/listened to more recently than the fall of 2003. I remembered the link-generating process as much more onerous than it was this afternoon; either Amazon has streamlined things or I'm misremembering. Either way, if you want to get a sense of what's been going into my brain lately, there it is.

And I've added a handful of new names to the blogroll, so if you haven't checked those links out in a while, now is a good time to do so.

I will not be stamped, spindled, or mutilated

In theory, prelim exams are graded anonymously; a number is the only identification on the exam faculty members receive. (In practice, of course, one might be the only person taking an exam in a given field, or has discussed the exam with enough faculty members that one's identity is apparent simply from the answers one gives to the questions one chooses.) When I was given my exam by the department's executive assistant, I was told, "You are number six." I replied, as one must, really, "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

No one got it. It's not easy being geek.

Once in a while you get shown the light

Because you demanded it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias." If you want to hear a great cover of the song, pick up Jimmy Buffett's recent album License to Chill.

Not dead yet

...a state that still doesn't seem quite real after yesterday's prelim exam (the second of two eight-hour, three-question exams I must pass before proceeding on my way toward my PhD in political science; they're very much an end-of-the-beginning sort of rite of passage), which -- in addition to a surprising number of injuries I managed to suffer the last few weeks -- was the reason for the recent paucity and then absense of posts hereabouts. I'm back now, and have something resembling free time, so expect more regular posting for a while...at least until finals, anyway!