Merry Christmas, everybody!

Quick holiday linkage

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

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

This will exceed your recommended daily allowance of WTF

Via John Scalzi:

Anchoring

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

Bacon

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

Quote of the day

From a write-up of an anime convention:

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

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

Campaigning can be weird.

Just ask Bill Clinton:

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

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

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

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

I got nothin'.

UPDATE: I take that back. I got video.

Star Trek XI is going to be AWESOME.

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

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

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

WTF Theatre: The Apple

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

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

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

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

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

Always remember...

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





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

Links count as a post.

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

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

PSA: Amazon's Veronica Mars sale

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

A gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth

Just ask Senator Bob Corker (R-TN).

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

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

THIS JUST IN!

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

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

Things like this make me miss THE BRAVE & THE BOLD

Batman meets Tim Gunn.

Kids, you prayed and you failed!

The moral is, don't pray!

Hey!

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

What he said.

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

It's not that I didn't enjoy "Ed"

...at least for the season and a half or so before he turned into a deranged stalker, and I'm always glad to see Tom Cavanaugh guest-star on Scrubs, but when exactly did he become made entirely out of David Gest?

The greatest movie never made

This is completely and totally unsafe to watch at work, school, or even, probably, at home. On the other hand, it's completely hysterical and awesome.

And they say political science isn't a science

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government

(Via Poliblogger.)

I don't think this can actually count as a TRIBUTE to Robert Goulet, exactly...

...and it's probably in poor taste, but I can't quite resist:

Stupid DC

I heartily agree with this sentiment:

It’s certainly nice that DC is re-re-re-re-releasing the first Justice League International trade paperback (I think that’s as many times as they’ve printed it in the past) as a fancy hardcover (for 25 bucks! on page 92), but wouldn’t it be nice if they released the rest of the Giffen/DeMatties run? I mean, the second trade is way out of print, I think, and no others exist. I mean, if this signals that the rest are coming, then fine. But a 25-dollar hardcover probably won’t sell well, especially for something that’s available elsewhere. DC: Masters of Marketing!

The JLI run is one of my two or three favorite comics runs ever, but DC has handled reprinting these stories about as well as it has not killing off these characters in gruesome and stupid comics. A hardcover reprinting the same contents as a still-in-print trade is, well, just about useless. One of the best things about collected editions is having an entire run of a series on your bookshelf, whether that's the Morrison Doom Patrol and New X-Men or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Bob Haney's Super-Sons lunacy. And there's no way in hell DC is going to reprint a run that included sixty issues of JLI, 35 of JLE, plus multiple annuals and specials and the occasional story by Giffen & DeMatteis in Mister Miracle in a series of seven-issue hardcovers. If the hardcover included the first year of the series and the relevant annuals, I might be willing to hope DC would eventually put out another eight books to complete the run. But trickling them out seven issues at a time? Pull the other one.

Fred Thompson is a GENIUS.

Don't believe me? Read for yourself.

Snark of the day

From this article about torture porn movies:

The Saw films represent the flagship series in the "person tied to a chair and tortured" horror genre (see also: Hostel, Captivity, The Passion of the Christ).

Becoming Dexter

Jim Emerson takes a look at the tour-de-force that is the opening credits of Dexter, one of our favorite shows:

Creating, assembling, integrating, asserting, and maintaining a personality is routine for most of us, but there's no denying it's hard work. Some of us have to do it from scratch every day. That's what so chillingly magnificent about the opening credits sequence for Showtime's "Dexter." It shows a man putting himself together (piece by piece, close-up by close-up) in the course of enacting his morning rituals. Yes, there are plenty of playful groaners about knives, flesh, and blood. Dexter is a serial killer -- albeit one who's trying to use his control-freak instincts to keep his habit manageable, within certain ethical boundaries, even as he daylights in forensics for Miami homicide. (He's a blood-spatter expert, naturally.)

It's an amazing opening sequence that's unsettling enough that we to fast-forward through it most weeks.

Five years later

Paul Wellstone died five years ago today. Ezra Klein has written a wonderful piece in remembrance:

Wellstone's populism was not an affectation, or a political posture. It was laced into the fabric of his personality. It's what made him different than other politicians. His measuring stick was not the poll numbers, not the editorial pages, not the political prognosticators, not the Sunday shows -- it was the farmers, the students, the seniors, the people. His fealty to them explains his frequent lonesomeness in the Senate. When the people are your judges, you can stand against the Iraq War in an election year, you can lose votes 99-1. You can fail to pass legislation, because you know the compromise would fail your constituents. "Politics is not about power," he would say. "Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people."
[...]
It's easier to be a liberal today, to be a progressive, to be proud. But there was a time when it wasn't. When liberalism in defense of peace was mocked, and moderation in service of imperialism was praised. In those days, it was hard to be a liberal. It must have been hard to be Paul Wellstone. He never showed it, though. He liked to quote Marcia Timmel. "I'm so small and the darkness is so great," she said. "We must light a candle," Wellstone would reply. He was ours. Would that he was here to enjoy the dawn.

My one and only encounter with Wellstone took place my sophomore year at Georgetown, when I met him at an event on campus and told him how much I'd loved the ads he'd used in his 1990 campaign. Next thing I knew he was asking me where I was from, what I was studying, how college was going, why they called the political science department the government department, what Pennsylvania was like, and how he'd almost gone to Lehigh but decided he wasn't into engineering. I'm sure there were more influential, more important, and more interesting people there, but I don't think he'd have paid one of them any more -- or any less -- attention and interest than he gave to a 19-year-old college kid. I have met a fair number of politicians in my life. Wellstone was the best of them.

Oh, for FRAK's sake...

The idiots are starting to bleat about the "War on Christmas" nonsense again.

You know, the war on Christmas that doesn't actually exist.

Shouldn't this crap wait until after Thanksgiving, at least?

(Via Oliver Willis.)

Chris Dodd on telecom immunity

Chris Dodd has impressed me lately by showing real leadership opposing retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that enabled the President's assault on the Constitution by illegaly providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization. He's now got a page of his website where you can track the latest developments on this issue, and a widget for keeping track of where the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee stand:



When Dodd announced he was running, I was skeptical. But it's nice to see him putting the bully pulpit of a presidential campaign to positive use on vitally important policy issues.

Quick question for readers...

Can you see the Amazon links in the right-hand column or in the 1980s in Duluth post below?

The Office gets a convention

It's nice to see that my hometown has embraced The Office so completely that they're throwing a convention this weekend. If you're attending, though, just make sure you don't put pink highlights in your hair or curse at an overflowing toilet.

RIP Viva Laughlin

Viva Laughlin has been canceled after just two episodes, which should surprise precisely no one. The show was a muddled mess from the word go. It was an adaptation of the BBC musical murder mystery Blackpool, aired on BBC America as Viva Blackpool, and seemed determined to act out every single cliche of bad Americanizations of British TV.

Taking a limited-run show that works because it's got a limited run and turning into an aimless, open-ended mess? Check.

Taking the high-concept that's the point of the show in the first place and shunting it to the corner like that weird relative no one likes in a holiday picture? Check. The musical numbers barely showed the actors singing, or doing much of anything but walking or driving while singing.

Taking characters played by interesting-looking British people and replacing them with generically pretty American actors grown in pods? Pretty much check -- sure, Laughlin lead actor Lloyd Owen is himself a Brit, but he's much more normal looking than Blackpool's David Morrissey and his hair and wardrobe were toned down to the point of nondescriptness -- Morrissey's thinning would-be pompadour, Elvis sideburns, and bolo ties are gone, and in their place is nothing that would ever warrant a second glance on the street. Worse still is the replacement of David Tennant with some perfectly boring guy with a perfectly rhinoplastied nose.

The bottom line is that there was no point at all to making this remake; it richly deserves its cancellation and I hope it will stop any thoughts of Americanizing Stephen Moffat's amazing Jekyll series.

Tales of the Gold Monkey. On DVD.

I had forgotten this show -- which I recall quite enjoying as a kid -- even existed until I read the story about a possible release next year. I suppose it's fitting that a show that probably made it on the air to capitalize on Raiders of the Lost Ark will now make it onto DVD thanks to the fourth Indiana Jones movie. It's nice to see those wisecracking 1930s adventure heroes sticking together.

1987 all over again.

We just spent a lovely weekend in Duluth at a charming bed and breakfast with a name like something out of I Know Where I'm Going. But the important thing is that, at least in upper Minnesota, it's apparently 1987 again, if the big hair, blue eyeshadow, denim jackets, and footless tights are any indication. I suppose it's also possible that the 80s are simply making their way south after migrating to Canada in the mid-1990s, though.

Lovely.

In upgrading this blog, I seem to have completely lost all of my old Haloscan comments. This may be the last post I make here, because I am just that irritated.

UPDATE: I've turned on the Blogger comments, and am getting slowly seduced by the improved functionality of the new stuff. But if I'd known this would wipe out all the old comments, I would have relaunched this as a new blog...

Texas ruminations

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has announced she won't run for re-election in 2012, and may run for Governor in 2010. What's notable about this, to me, is that I first became aware of Hutchison when she was Texas' state treasurer and her name was routinely floated as Ann Richards' likely Republican opponent in 1994.

That changed when Bill Clinton named Lloyd Bentsen to be his Secretary of the Treasury and Richards appointed an embarassingly weak replacement for him. Hutchison ran for Senate in a special election 1993, and the 1994 Republican candidate for Governor wound up being George W. Bush. I can't help but wonder how things would be today if Clinton hadn't appointed Bentsen and Hutchison, not Bush, had run against Richards in 1994.

Still more candidates to note

People I vaguely know keep running for office; this time, they're both running for Congress in 2008.

First up is my college classmate Dan Grant, whom I did not know well but took several Government classes with, and who's running in a tough-but-winnable district in Texas.

Next is longtime Superman writer Elliot S! Maggin, whom I interviewed a few times back when I was pretending to be a comics journalist and who I've maintained an amiable and friendly e-mail acquaintanceship with since. He's running in California's 24th district.

Anyway, check out their sites, see what they have to say, and if you're so inclined, send a couple bucks their way.

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Josh Marshall sums it up and puts it in context:

There are several layers of irony and poetic justice wrapped into this honor. The first is that the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court. It's worth taking a few moments today to consider where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.

And yet this is a fitting bookend, with Gore receiving this accolade while the sitting president grows daily an object of greater disapproval, disapprobation and collective shame. And let's not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world.

Cap and Spidey apparently share the same haberdasher

Is it just me, or does Alex Ross's Captain America redesign seem to have an awful lot in common with his unused Spider-Man movie redesign?



There's nothing wrong with that, but the similarity is kind of amusing, even if taking note of it does push the Alicia Witt stuff further down the page.

I live to serve.

She Who Must Be Obeyed, taking issue with the picture of Alicia Witt I posted below, has ordered me to post more, better pictures of Ms. Witt. So, um, here they are:

Christmas in October

We went to Home Depot this weekend to check out paint chips for our upcoming bathroom redo. And what did we see there? Christmas trees.

In OCTOBER.

At least I can justify watching Bad Santa anytime I want between now and January...

Bionic

So there's a new Bionic Woman series on NBC, and since it's got many of the folks who run Battlestar Galactica on staff we've watched the first two episodes. The presence of the lovely Michelle Ryan doesn't hurt, nor does that of Katee Sackhoff, who proves once again that women named "Katee" should not be messed with.

The show's not awful, but there are some really dumb tropes whose presence annoys me, most of which center around the mysterious, possibly sinister group who bionicized (is that a word? It is now.) Jamie Sommers, the new bionic woman. The group, personified by Miguel Ferrer, acts dumb when it comes to handling and recruiting Jamie.

For instance: She complains to Ferrer that they've turned her into a freak. He says the dumb thing: Something along the lines of, we built you and we own you. Wouldn't the smart thing to say be something closer to, "You were in a car accident that cost you three limbs, an eye, and an ear, and thanks to our technology you're all superhuman and fully functional. Would you rather be hobbling around on normal prosthetics?"

Ferrer also takes a hard line in his initial attempts to recruit her. Wouldn't the smart thing to do be to offer her a job with a large salary, health coverage, and the promise of a desk job if and when she retires from field work?

Problem is, none of those things read "sinister" really quickly. And writing dumb is easier than writing smart.

An open letter to a just and benevolent God

Dear God,

Thank you for adding Alicia Witt to the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Yours,

Matter-Eater Lad

And speaking of Doctor Who...

...someday I'll have to sit down and figure out how I went from never having seen an episode a year and a half ago to grinning like an idiot and punching the air when I saw John Barrowman's name in the opening credits two episodes ago...

Couldn't they find any Americans in Cardiff?

I winced, hard, when Friday's episode of Doctor Who featured its fictional American president referring to himself as "the President-elect of the United States." I suspect the line was intended to sound like the president was using his full and baroque title, along the lines of "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith," but it doesn't work that way. "President-elect" is a precise title that refers only to someone who has won a presidential election but not yet been inaugurated. And if the guy we saw in this episode was "just" president-elect, he'd have had no actual authority to do any of the things he did in this episode -- that would have all been handled by the outgoing, incumbent president.

Anyway, Russell T. Davies should feel free to call me next time he needs a consult on American politics.

Dialogue I would have liked to hear

In last night's episode of Heroes, the interminable Mohinder snaps at a man (Stephen Tobolowsky, AKA Ned Ryerson, AKA a !@#$er from Yankton) who, Mohinder says, has been following him -- because Mohinder has seen this man at three presentations he's given! Of course, Ned Ryerson explains something that has to do with one of the show's lurking uber-conspiracies. Which is fine, for dramatic purposes, but I wish he'd said, "Yes, I have! When I attend academic conferences I go to presentations by researchers whose work interests me and overlaps with my own research! I was going to suggest we collaborate on a paper together, but since you've just pushed me down a flight of stairs, never mind."

The $30 Million Dollar Newt

Newt Gingrich is saying he'll join the absurdly crowded GOP field if supporters raise $30 million. Which raises the question: What happens if he can only raise, say, $20 million? Does he just get to keep it? There's the makings of a Max Bialystock-caliber scam there...

Synchronicity

Isn't it funny how when you have a night that consists of you thinking, "If I fall asleep now, I'll get six hours in, which is pretty good...if I fall asleep now, I'll get five and a half hours in, which isn't bad..." the next day pretty much consists of you thinking, "If I concentrate and buckle down now, I can still get six hours of solid work in...if I concentrate and buckle down now, I can still get five and a half hours of solid worl in..."?

I'm just sayin', is all.

Did that boy just say "What's a hooplehead"?

Everything you always wanted to know about the term "hooplehead" but were afraid to ask.

Had a dream last night...

...in which I was a wedding guest forced to make conversation with fellow wedding guest Peter Jackson, whom I kept confusing with Guillermo Del Toro, causing the horribly embarrassed Jackson to have to gently correct me each time I made the mistake.

Sandie Shaw had a dream last night, too:

ehPods

Since my trusty, three-year-old 20G iPod has started acting shirty (it's been skipping songs randomly, refuses to synch more than two or three songs at a time, that sort of thing) of late, I took notice of the recent announcements of new iPod models. But after seeing the new ones up close at an Apple store last night, I'm less than impressed with all of them.

Let's start with the iPod Touch -- basically, it's an iPhone without the phone. It looks cool and I thought it might make a decent replacement for my aged Palm Pilot. But the interface on it is maddening -- my attempt to get it to go to www.washingtonpost.com wound up looking like waaasgo, and then I gave up. I'm sure I could get used to the touch keyboard in time, but for many hundreds of dollars I don't want a steep learning curve, I want something that WORKS.

Then there's the iPod Classic, most notable for the insane amount of memory it has -- either 4 or 8 times as much as my current iPod. Basically, one of these could hold all of the music I own and lots and lots of videos, too, although watching a video on an iPod is the most ridiculous thing I've heard of since Oz suggested attacking the mayor with hummus. But the clickwheel is really, really slow, at least compared to my current model. If I were tech-savvier I'd be inclined to wonder whether the enormous memory makes the whole thing slower, but all I know about computers I've learned from reading Neal Stepehenson and Cory Doctorow and Wired. Again, though, for lots of money, I want something that works smoothly right out of the box.

And that brings us to the new iPod Nanos, which work fine and look great but have relatively small amounts of memory - 4G or 8G. The only problem here, really, is the price -- I'm not sure how much I'm willing to pay for such a small amount of memory, relative both to what I have now and to what's available for $50 more in the larger iPod Classics that don't appear to work very smoothly.

So the long and short of it is that I went from excited to underwhelmed about the new iPod options in about 20 minutes. Disappointing, to say the least.

My God. It's full of peanut butter and banana-creme filling.

I saw these at the campus store this morning as I was buying a bagel to replace the one I left sitting on the kitchen counter:



And, well, after that, I got nuthin'.

And you thought George Allen was bad...

Pat Buchanan is contemplating a run for the Senate in Virginia next year. That could make the 2008 Senate race there the single most insane spectacle in the country. So I can only say: Run, Pat, run!

Six years later

D is for Deadwood

I watched 8 episodes of Deadwood in 30 hours this weekend. I hope I can stop cursing before I'm supposed to teach on Thursday.

This is not the financial and diet plan you are looking for.

From Michelle Singletary's financial advice column in Sunday's Washington Post:

Deborah McNaughton and Melinda Weinstein want us to face a simple truth: Many people consume too many calories and their unhealthful eating is costing them a piece of prosperity.

"Life would be a whole lot easier if our bank accounts grew and our waistlines stayed in the lower-digit range," McNaughton and Weinstein write in their new book, "Rich and Thin: Slim Down, Shrink Debt & Turn Calories Into Cash."

From a 1987 episode of Moonlighting:



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

Words to confuse the guy trying to hand out Bibles on campus

"Don't use it; I'm Catholic."

Trekwood

We decided to give Deadwood another chance on DVD this summer and we're glad we did -- not just because it's a terrific show, but because it's given me more ideas about casting the new Star Trek movie. Tim Olyphant could easily play Captain Kirk, and if Gary Sinise is busy Brad Dourif could probably pull off Doctor McCoy.

And while I'm casting things, they should totally get William Petersen to play Howard Dean in the movie version of World War Z.

More on Mike Wieringo

As wonderful as Mike Wieringo's work is, I don't know that I'd appreciate it the way I do if I hadn't encountered it as part of Mark Waid's wonderful run writing FLASH, fourteen (!) years ago. Wieringo's run as artist came on the heels of the epic "Return of Barry Allen" storyline, where Wally West, the former Kid Flash, finally came to terms with the legacy of his predecessor Barry. It was a smart, thrilling storyline -- someday, honest, I'll write about the special place Flash #79 holds in my heart -- and one that reset the board for the rest of Waid's run. In embracing Barry's legacy, Wally simultaneously became his own man; he stopped worrying about being as good as Barry and focused on becoming Wally.

Waid and Wieringo were a perfect marriage of writer and artist. And I think, at that particular point in my life, when I was finally settling into college and life away from home, I was a particularly receptive reader. Wally West was becoming an adult at same time I was. It was a nice bit synchronicity that made their run really resonate with me in a way that I don't think it would have otherwise. And the sheer sense of joy and freedom that leapt off of every page of Wieringo's wonderful artwork made the whole thing all the more perfect.

There's that word: Joy. Certain artists you just associate with one word or one feeling because their work seems like a monument to it. Theodore Sturgeon and love. Clifford Simak and decency. Isaac Asimov and reason. Mike Wieringo and joy. The worlds and the people he drew just looked like fun places to be -- whatever villainy the Flash faced was doomed from the start, because Ringo drew us a world where evil was a non-starter and the good guys would always prevail sooner or later. It was a nice place to visit every month.

I never met the man. I'll miss him anyway.

Trapped in the Closet conquers the world

There are even more chapters of the completely bat**** f***ing insane R. Kelly musical serial drama coming out this month. And since the whole thing will be airing on IFC, you don't have to feel bad about supporting R. Kelly's career when you watch it:

“ ‘Trapped in the Closet’ has that ‘oh my’ factor, so that you’re actually laughing at, laughing with, and actually shocked by it,” said Henri Mazza, a creative director at the Original Alamo Draft House, a movie theater in Austin, Tex., which is planning a midnight DVD screening, complete with subtitled sing-alongs and prop giveaways, like a condom printed with the words “oh my God, a rubber! (Rubber! Rubber! Rubber!)” — see Episode 4. “There’s no way you can’t enjoy it.”

Which is not to say you can understand it.

“You can’t tell if he is a genius or a guy who just saw the definition for cliffhanger in the dictionary yesterday and decided to run with it,” Mr. Mazza said of Mr. Kelly. “I think that’s one of the things that keeps you coming back. I’ve watched it 25 times at least, and I’m still going, ‘Wait, what?’ ”

LEGO my LEGO

Have you ever wondered to yourself, "Self, how would I go about making a giant LEGO-person head for a LEGO-person costume?" Wonder no more!

Mike Wieringo, RIP

Comics artist Mike Wieringo died at the obscenely young age of 44 this past weekend. I first came across his work on Mark Waid's amazing run on The Flash and was thrilled when he reunited with Waid on Fantastic Four a few years ago. His work was thrilling and joyful and buoyant, and I particularly loved the sense of movement and possibility that he brought to his work on Flash. There was no one else who drew quite the way he did, and he will be sorely missed.

Recasting Trek

Some thoughts on the actors who should join Zachary Quinto (AKA "New Spock") in JJ Abrams' new Star Trek movie:

Trying to play James T. Kirk will break just about every actor on the planet. That said, I think one of the only people who could pull this off is Christian Bale. I think Lance Mannion has also suggested this, but I haven't been able to find the post I'm thinking of on his site.

Gary Sinise is Doctor McCoy. Period.

Freema Agyeman should play Uhura. I'm just throwing this out there. She'd be awesome.

Who Wants to Watch Who Wants to be a Superhero?

Greg Hatcher takes a look at the Sci-Fi Channel's genuinely weird and strange reality series "Stan Lee's Who Wants to be a Superhero." The primary purpose of this show, I think, is to demonstrate that these days Stan will put his name and face on just about anything this side of hemorrhoid unguents. When the first season of the show aired last summer, a girl I knew in college e-mailed me to tell me that she thought of me when she watched. Then I watched an episode and fervently hoped that it was Major Victory and not the creepy, dismal, and desperate Feedback who was doing the reminding...

Entourage sucks.

So we've stopped watching it.

We'd grown steadily more and more tired of the show, as it went from a show about an up-and-coming actor and his friends to a parody of, well, nothing, really, and instead presented weekly installments of the consequence-free life of an actor and his remoras. The tipping point after several seasons of false drama -- in which situations are presented which we're told could have major negative consequences only to turn out fine through absolutely no action on the part of any of the characters in the series -- was the most recent episode about a bet over who could be first to have emotion-free sex with a strange woman, and was so unpleasant to watch that we decided the characters weren't worth inviting into our living room for half an hour each week.

Wish they'd spin off Ari and Lloyd into their own series, though...

Harry Potter reaction

I did not think Harry would be a big Journey fan, but then, he WAS raised by Muggles.

Folks are reading WAY too much into the symbolism. Sometimes an onion ring is just an onion ring.

Has Hermione ALWAYS had that much trouble parallel-parking her broomstick?

Everyone who thinks the wizard in the Members Only robes was a Death Eater sent to kill Harry is NUTS.

Air travel open letters

Dear TSA,

Thank you for not trying to take away my Tastykakes, which would have forced me to go all sippy-cup on your asses.

~

Dear lackwit parents who, having made a big show of telling your children to speak softly out of consideration of the other passengers on our plane, proceeded to demonstrate that those remonstrations had all of the weight of Soviet protections of individual rights by ignoring your children's shrieking and then taking out a laptop and playing insipid videos for them WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF HEADPHONES, thus forcing everyone in the vicinity to listen to it whether we wanted to or not,

F*** you.

F*** you rotten.

P.S. If you can afford air travel, you can afford this.

P.P.S. Why did you name one of your daughters after Elizabeth Berkeley's character from Showgirls?

~

Dear Senator McGovern,

In a just world President Gore would happily lend you, as an esteemed former president, Air Force One whenever you traveled between DC and the Midwest. Sadly, we pretty clearly do not live in such a world. It was still fantastic to meet you.

Don't leave home.

I really hope the guy who wrote this post about how awfully confusing downtown-freaking-Minneapolis is never visits New York or Washington or Chicago, because it would make his brain explode.

Of course, I say this as someone whose first reaction on visiting Chicago this spring was, "Ah! This is what a real city smells like!"

Not dead yet.

Though I'd understand if you concluded that after recent weeks' dearth of postings.

I am not actually trying to pick on Mitt Romney here.

But this story about his bizarre dog-on-the-roof incident is hilarious precisely because it goes so far out of its way not to be funny. Take, for instance, this graf:

Romney placed his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, into a kennel lashed to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario in 1983. Despite being shielded by a wind screen the former Massachusetts governor erected, Seamus expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack.

It's hysterical because it tries to talk about something that would normally be funny as if it were not. The description of the poor dog "express[ing] his discomfort with a diarrhea attack" from the roof of the car, and in apparent dismissal of the future governor's ad hoc windscreen, tries to make something ridiculous and bizarre sound like something completely commonplace, even though both the readers and the writer of the article know it is not. I mean, when I was a kid, we had a dog who pooped on the floor of the vet's office whenever she had to go to the vet's, but she wasn't doing it from the roof of the car.

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

Mighty Morphin' Mitt

This video is just plain weird. Enjoy!

They keep getting younger and younger

Inspired by Alan Sepinwall's Freaks and Geeks retro-blogging, we watched the first few episodes of that brilliant-but-canceled series this weekend. Which led me to note the curious way in which the cast members seem to get younger and younger every time I watch the show. How is that possible?

Wheel of presidents, turn turn turn...

Rumor now has it that the president on the next season of 24 may be a woman. Since the most recent season ended with Powers Boothe as Acting President after Wayne Palmer's stroke, this would presumably mean advancing the show's timeline another 4 years. Which makes me wonder if anyone connected to the show has ever heard of math.

Look at it this way: The first season took place before the election that made David Palmer president. The third season took place in fall of the next election year, a little more than four years later; John Keeler blackmailed Palmer into withdrawing from the race and was president in the fourth season. The sixth season took place three months into Wayne Palmer's term -- nearly five years after the election in season three. That's nine years since the first season; adding another presidential term puts us at thirteen years.

Now think about Jack Bauer. He had a sixteen year-old daughter in the first season. That makes Jack himself somewhere around 40 in the first season, and pushing fifty in the most recent season. Adding another term onto that gives you a Jack Bauer who's well into his fifties. There's nothing inherently wrong with an older action hero, of course, but it starts to push the bounds of believability and does a number on a lot of the inter-character dynamics of the show when Bauer's nearly a contemporary of folks like Bill Buchanan.

That said, the show could just make the new president someone appointed by Powers Boothe after Wayne Palmer's off-screen death, and have Boothe himself similarly dead. But if that's the case, I'd love to get a peek at an issue or three of Presidential Studies Quarterly from the 24 universe...

That's gotta be pretty darn unprecendented.

Congratulations to Mike Bloomberg for leaving the Republican party. One thing I did not know until this week's press coverage is that Bloomberg performed Rudy Giuliani's wedding to wife #3, Judith Nathan. Wouldn't that make for an odd debate if Rudy's the Republican nominee and Bloomberg runs as an independent? I know that if I ever run for president, I won't be expecting to debate Father Pilarz.

As long as I'm talking about Rudy's marital history, I think that if anyone brings up his first marriage to a second cousin, he should say that a first marriage to a second cousin is better than a second marriage to a first cousin.

Happy Flag Day!

One more open letter

Dear everyone who read my ID badge, did a double-take, and asked me how my name was pronounced last Monday,

No, I'm not related to Paulie Walnuts. His name is spelled and pronounced differently. Also, he's NOT REAL.

Chase, you magnificent bastard!

I watched your finale!

UPDATE: The finale seems to have made the Internet explode for the first time this year (the first two being the finales of Battlestar Galactica and Lost). I direct those who are complaining about the way The Sopranos ended to this line from Matt Stoller Seitz's spoiler-laden write-up (so don't click the link if you haven't seen the episode):

Keith Uhlich, my managing editor, called, and even though I tried to cut him off instantly, he still managed to squeeze out, "I think David Chase just pissed off millions of people."

If so, they were millions of people who weren't watching The Sopranos, but another show that they hoped would turn into what they wanted The Sopranos to be.

Open letters inspired by a week of grading AP exams

Dear student who took the question about the War Powers Act as an opportunity to complain about evolution, secular humanism, Nancy Pelosi, and gay people:

You did not get a poor score on this question because of your political beliefs. You got a poor score on this question because you didn't answer the question. At all.

~

Dear student who took the question about the War Powers Act as an opportunity to complain about George W. Bush, Mumia, the military-industrial complex, Fox News, and John Bolton's moustache:

You did not get a poor score on this question because of your political beliefs. You got a poor score on this question because you didn't answer the question. At all.

~

Dear person who stood behind me in line for lunch on Tuesday:

Thank you for taking the time not just to bump into me every five seconds that I stood in front of you, but for taking the time to invent new ways of bumping into me. Most people would not show the person they're annoying that level of personal attention.

~

Dear Tom Jones,

I think I showed remarkable restraint in not working lyrics from that other Tom Jones' body of work into conversation until we'd worked together for five days.

~

Dear student who answered Question 2 in Latin, Question 3 in Spanish, and Question 4 in cartoon form:

I appreciated your explanatory note that you didn't care about this exam because "Berkeley doesn't care how you do" and that your school still made you take the test. However, a number of points must be made: First, your cartoon incorrectly depicted West Virginia as siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Second, while my Latin is rusty at best, I am fairly certain that you mistranslated "United States." Third, one of the readers at my table is a California high school teacher and told me that enough good AP scores could allow an incoming student to arrive on campus as the equivalent of a second-semester sophomore. Annual tuition, fees, and housing at UC Berkeley total $20,777 for in-state residents and $39,461 for non-residents. So, clearly, someone there cares at least a little bit.

~

Dear Burger King manager and friend who were making some sort of extremely complicated transaction involving a small TV set, lots of small bills, and a truck in the parking lot, all across the counter while I stood waiting to place my order:

I saw nothing.

~

Dear residents of Daytona Beach and assorted visitors:

Put a shirt on. Please.

~

Dear Daytona County Convention Center,

You are the Battlestar Galactica of convention centers. The ship, not the show.

~

Dear Daytona Beach Hilton,

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I took such glee in abusing your policy of replacing any and all toiletries that have been opened, moved, or touched with brand-new ones while leaving the originals there. The pile of hotel toiletries I must now fit into the medicine chest in the bathroom looks cheap and tawdry.

Also, three computers in a sixteen-floor hotel do not really constitute a business center.

~

Dear Conrad Hilton,

I hope you don't get the news up there in whatever afterlife you've found yourself in.

They give out awards for this, right?

It takes a particular bureaucratic genius to schedule 12 hours of downtime on a university website the day after electronic notifications that tuition statements are available online are sent out.

Charles Nelson Reilly, RIP

You've finally made a monkey out of me!

So last night the History Channel aired Planet of the Apes. Did I, um, miss something?

Bully!

Working from home advice

It turns out that when there's a plumber working in a) the bathroom, b) the bedroom whose closet contains the access panels to the pipework in that bathroom, and c) the basement, I'm pretty much forced to stay in the office and get work done. And since the water's off, I can't even use the bathroom. It's great for my productivity, but a bit too expensive to pull off on a regular basis.

More jaw-dropping

There's a wiki for Misfits of Science. It's unsurprisingly sparse, given that it's about a show that didn't make it through the whole 1985-1986 TV season. Teh intarwebs are weird, man.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor

I just ran across this line in Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign announcement speech:

"Government exists to protect us from each other."

I'm amazed that any politician -- let alone Ronald Reagan -- actually came out and said it.

Today is the third Monday in May.

Happy Miracle Monday, everyone!

Goodbye, Veronica Mars.

It was fun while it lasted. You rocked.

Awesome sometimes turns up in the unlikeliest places

Longtime readers of this blog know that Roger Ebert is awesome. Now Roger brings word that Rob Schneider, of all people, is also capable of awesome.

Awesome can turn up in the unlikeliest of places. That's part of what makes it awesome.

Mercenaries aren't what they used to be.

Last night on 24 a band of mercenaries in the employ of the evil Chinese diplomat who's been dogging Jack Bauer for the last few seasons attacked CTU, which is fine as a plot development and all, but why on earth did Central Casting hire Hot Cops to play the mercenaries? Were the Gutbusters not available?

Edwards on Bush's veto

Iron Man may not suck.

The final version of the armor actually looks pretty frakkin' cool.

Jack Valenti, RIP

Where you start has a lot to do with where you end up.

There's been quite a lot of response to today's bizarre David Broder column today, in which he excoriated Harry Reid -- the same Harry Reid who, as Minority Leader, ran rings around Bill Frist in 2005 and 2006, took his party from minority to majority status in the 2006 elections, and has maintained an amazing level of party unity on votes like today's on an Iraq supplemental bill mandating withdrawl from Iraq -- for his "ineptitude." It's the latest in a series of terminally clueless pronouncements from on high, like his February column that predicted George W. Bush -- he of the perpetual thirtysomething approval rating -- was poised for a rebound. But when Broder speaks, people in Washington listen -- after all, he's the "dean" of the press corps!

Much of the reason Broder enjoys that status, no matter how many foolish or downright wrong pronouncements he makes, is his 1968 column predicting that Richard Nixon would pick Spiro Agnew -- then the governor of Maryland -- as his running mate. That feat of political prognostication made him a legend among reporters and the Washington establishment.

Only problem is, Broder himself admitted not long afterward that the whole column was a plant. See this excerpt from Timothy Crouse's campaign journalism book The Boys on the Bus:

Broder's fame and reknown stems from his decision to carry water for one corrupt Republican. Perhaps he's decided to close his career out the way it began.

The Riches

It's not that FX's new series The Riches is a bad show, by any stretch -- it's very good. But when I heard that there was going to be a show starring Eddie Izzard as the patriarch of a family of con artists, I thought it was going to be, well, funny. But there's been very little humor in the series thus far, and the funny quotient seems to drop with each succeeding episode. We're not quite in the realm of the relentless gloom of last spring's FX series Thief, but some light in the darkness would be very welcome.

I of Newton

Cover? I hardly know her!

If only some publisher would produce a cover for my dissertation...

Jim Gilmore was not only the worst governor in the history of Virginia...

...he can't spell, either. Take a look:

It's not a "no-time-for-a-real-post-here's-a-video" post if you don't embed the videos.

Right? Right?

Anyway, go here and enjoy.

Santos? You hardly know us!

I was vastly entertained by this article in Teevee.org's annual April Fool's Day edition, both because I remember the real-world press conference that inspired it and because -- even though I barely watched The West Wing -- I was impressed by the depth and extent of the fictitious parallel political reality that show created. The article reminded me of an idea I had when a friend was explaining one of her many problems with Studio 60 to me. Sketch comedy shows, she said, always have lots of material about politics and current events. But the long lead-times involved with producing an hour-long TV drama made it impossible to do anything remotely timely on the show.

A lightblub went off in my head.

"They should say the show takes place in the West Wing universe."

"What?"

"Sure, just say the show takes place in the same world as West Wing. Then they could just make up the current events they're talking about and satirizing. One of the cast members could be awful except for his impression of President Santos, and that's why they keep him around and everyone else on the show hates him but they can't fire him til after the next election. Or as a sweeps stunt they could have ex-President Bartlet host an episode. Stuff like that."

"That could actually work."

"They should try it."

They didn't.

You really CAN find everything on YouTube

MEAT is the new BREAD!

You can't celebrate 30 Rock's renewal without Tracy Jordan's Meat Machine!

Remember Automan?

Johanna does.

24: If it's an even-numbered season, we must be invoking the 25th Amendment

Last night, 24 once again went to the 25th amendment well to add some tension to the politcal side of its drama. They did this in the second season -- devoting an episode to the "trial of David Palmer" and several subsequent episodes to the first President Palmer's efforts to regain the authority of his office, and less dramatically in the fourth, when the 25th amendment was used after an attack on Air Force One left President Keeler incapacitated. I understand why the producers keep doing to this -- it creates drama and tension and puts the president in non-physical jeopardy. But it's been used so often the series has started to suffer from musical chief executives -- the America of 24 has had six men serving as president in the nine years that have elapsed, show-time, since the first season: The unseen and unnamed season 1 president, David Palmer, John Keeler, Charles Logan, Hal Gardner, and now Wayne Palmer. If the creators of the show want to create drama by throwing the leadership of the executive branch into chaos, there are other, more creative ways to do so.

One simple way to achive this would have been to set this season on the day of Wayne Palmer's inauguration. We could have seen outgoing President Gardner trying to deal with whatever crisis was fomenting even as he prepares to leave office, tension between Gardner's national security staff and Palmer's people, and an untested president thrust into a major crisis minutes after his inaugural address. Unfortunately, this device isn't likely to be used anytime soon, since this season is set very early in the Wayne Palmer presidency, and setting next season nearly a full presidential term after this one would add even more years to the bloated 24 timeline and give us a Jack Bauer who's pushing 50.

Another, more dramatic way to do it would be to somehow cut off the main players in the political drama from the rest of the world -- for instance, an attack that isolates them in the White House bunker and leaves everyone outside uncertain about whether anyone trapped within is still alive. We could then have a low-level Cabinet secretary (say, the Secretary of Agriculture) forced to act as president for a few hours. Or take it a step further -- kill off or incapacitate the entire Cabinet and we're suddenly in the shadowy world of the continuity of government program, the rumored list of non-elected officials designated to take over government functions in the event of a catastrophic attack. It wouldn't even take too much narrative juggling to put someone like disgraced ex-president Charles Logan on the list.

My point is simply this: There are lots of ways to create tension and drama over the question of who's in charge without doing Yet Another 25th Amendment Plot. I think doing so would make for more dramatic and exciting television and help the show avoid the feeling that it's repeating the same handful of plot developments over and over.

You know who you are.

Slings & Arrows

If you've ever spent a lot of time in a theatre, Slings & Arrows -- the Canadian drama set behind the scenes of a theatre festival -- will instantly bring to mind everything that goes with it: Histrionic actors, craven administrators, ill-starred and fleeting romantic liaisons, endless budget crises, infuriating productions meetings, profound levels of sleeplessness, the endless race against the clock, the stress of opening nights...

If you've ever spent a lot of time in a theatre, Slings & Arrows will make you deeply, deeply homesick.

Still more comics journalism that sucks

From Newsarama's front-page blurb about DC's Blue Beetle series:

Despite the odds and naysayers, DC's Blue Beetle keeps gaining fans as it moves into its second year.

From this analysis of DC's month-to-month sales at another site:

03/2006: Blue Beetle #1 — 50,678 [69,752]
04/2006: Blue Beetle #2 — 43,770 (-13.6%) [50,190]
05/2006: Blue Beetle #3 — 41,711 (- 4.7%)
06/2006: Blue Beetle #4 — 38,622 (- 7.4%)
07/2006: Blue Beetle #5 — 35,490 (- 8.1%)
08/2006: Blue Beetle #6 — 33,181 (- 6.5%)
09/2006: Blue Beetle #7 — 29,079 (-12.4%)
10/2006: –
11/2006: Blue Beetle #8 — 25,861 (-11.1%)
11/2006: Blue Beetle #9 — 23,785 (- 8.0%)
12/2006: Blue Beetle #10 — 21,358 (-10.2%)
01/2007: Blue Beetle #11 — 19,865 (- 7.0%)

Alias Shazam?

Is it just me, or does this Mary Marvel action figure kinda look like Jennifer Garner?

Jack, Jack, Jack, season's off track...

As much as I continue to enjoy 24, I have to admit that this week's sequence of Jack Bauer trying to steer the nuclear warhead-laden drone plane away from its intended target was like something out of Bloo's movie trailer.



Oh: Posting status is now upgraded to "intermittent."

I did not know that.

The Bill Richardson campaign just sent me a mass e-mail from former Kennedy/Johnson-era Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. My reaction to which was, "Stewart Udall is STILL ALIVE?!?" Turns out he's alive, kicking, and 87. Good for him.

We now rejoin our regularly scheduled hiatus.

Powers Boothe=Fred Thompson?

Monday night's episode of 24 was part of the great softening-up to prepare us all for the specter of a Fred Thompson presidency, wasn't it?

(Still on hiatus, but it needed to be said. Also: Ricky Schroeder is sufficiently annoying that he made me forget to be annoyed by the continuing presence of Eric Balfour. I did not think that was possible. Perhaps Ricky Schroeder could join the cast of Heroes and make Milo Ventimiglia bearable next.)

Hiatus

I am swamped with work at the moment and have no idea when I'll be posting again.

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

It occurs to me that Scooter Libby's indictment and conviction both took place on days that I was working from home.

I should work from home more often.

I got nuthin'

Presented without editorial comment:

Yes, that was Sen. Ted Stevens at National Airport on Sunday taking charge and flinging bags off a stalled conveyor belt to help other passengers and, of course, find his own bag. "He looked quite good and in shape for a man of 83 in the middle of the night lifting bags," said fellow traveler Joe Mendelson, who worked alongside Stevens.

When the music stopped, however, neither man had a bag. "Well, I guess we're [expletive] out of luck," the senator said.

Captain Sulu rocks the house

(Via She Who Must Be Obeyed.)

Deja vu all over again

Didn't Law & Order: No Subtitle already do a Ted Haggard episode a couple of weeks before Law & Order: Criminal Intent did one?

People I know who are running for office

Dayne Walling is running for mayor of Flint, Michigan.

Pakou Hang is running for St. Paul City Council.

Please check out their sites, and if you're a constituent, I hope you'll consider voting for them.

Our ironic cousins

Simon Pegg of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead shares some thoughts on American and British styles of humor:

It's not so much about having a different sense of humour as a different approach to life. More demonstrative than we are, Americans are not embarrassed by their emotions. They clap louder, cheer harder and empathise more unconditionally. It's an openness that always leaves me feeling slightly guilty and apologetic when American personalities appear on British chat shows and find their jokes and stories met with titters, not guffaws, or their achievements met with silent appreciation, rather than claps and yelps. We don't like them any less, we just aren't inclined to give that much of ourselves away. Meanwhile, as a Brit on an American chat show, it's difficult to endure prolonged whooping without intense, red-faced smirking.

Of course, it's the mainstream output of our respective entertainment industries that tends to shape our general opinion of each other. Ask the average American what they perceive British comedy to be and you will most likely be quoted shows such as Benny Hill and Are You Being Served? (although, thanks to BBC America, this is beginning to change). The fan demographic for both shows is markedly more diverse than in their country of origin. This is probably due to their parochial peculiarity, rather than the quality of the comedy (although both shows had their moments) and perhaps explains why the American audience took to Shaun Of The Dead with such affection. A refusal to occupy that transatlantic middle ground that sometimes scuppers British films intent on appealing in America means that the film plays as resolutely British. That approach does risk certain social and cultural references being lost in translation. But not many. The only joke in Shaun Of The Dead that never got a laugh in the States was Ed's request for a Cornetto ice cream at 8am on a Sunday morning. Overall, the cast's understated reserve in the face of flesh-eating zombies just added another layer of amusement for American viewers.

When it comes to their mainstream, America's emotional openness has often given way to a sentimentality that jars with our more guarded and cynical outlook. This is why the initially enjoyable Happy Days became blighted by saccharine lessons in family values, as Henry Winkler's originally subversive Fonzie was mercilessly appropriated by the middle-class American family, castrated by Marion Ross's Mrs Cunningham and forced to sit on it (although it's interesting to note that in outtakes from the series, Winkler and Ross would often play out an irresistible sexual tension between them with stolen gropes and kisses, solely for the enjoyment of the live studio audience, hinting at darker, more interesting themes than the show itself ever tackled). Generally speaking, sentimentality isn't easy for us. It makes us nervous and uncomfortable. We become edgy and dismissive of these brazen displays of emotion.

It just gets weirder.

Joe McDade's excellent adventure continues:

In addition to the woman near the pool, a married couple told police they had seen Mr. McDade expose and fondle his genitals.

When the wife got up from her beach chair, Mr. McDade followed her to a boardwalk that leads to the hotel and, still exposed, watched her wash her feet under a shower, the report said.

The wife told police she thought Mr. McDade was a mental patient “because he did not try to hide himself,” the report said.

First Don Sherwood, now this...

What IS it with Republicans who represented my hometown district in Congress?

February 14,2007 | SANIBEL, Fla. -- A former Pennsylvania congressman was accused Wednesday of exposing himself to two women at a beach resort.

Joseph M. McDade, 75, was issued a summons on a charge of exposure of sexual organs, a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

A court date was not immediately set.

Calls to McDade's Fairfax, Va., home and at the Washington lobbying firm where he works were not immediately returned.

Happy Valentine's Day

Celebrate with a card like this one from Polite Dissent!

And a little stuffed bull shall lead them.

Bully fixes the DC Universe.

One sign your fellowship application is going less well than it could

I just misspelled "strategery."

This week just keeps getting worse...

Kirstie Alley to star in American remake of Vicar of Dibley. (Via TV Tattle.)

Paging Dr. Spaceman! Paging Dr. Spaceman!

Space makes you CRAZY. I, for one, would welcome a kidnapping attempt by Zooey Deschanel.

(Headline courtesy of She Who Must Be Obeyed.)

When Homer met Jerry

A belated video post in honor of the late former president, who did not leave the country in worse shape than he found it. Would that we could say the same for all of his successors.