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.