GIT OFFA MY LAWN!

You know you're getting old when you look at the photos in the liner notes of a Traveling Wilburys CD and think, boy, everyone looks so YOUNG.

Rowsdower!

Rowsdower!

Congratulations, George & Brad!

Captain Sulu is getting married:



Live long and prosper, guys.

Five-Minute Hate: Infected

Until I read Infected, I'd never had cause to imagine a book as low-budget. That's the beauty of words, after all -- it's all imagination. If you can describe it, your reader can imagine it. It's even better than comics on that score, since you don't have to worry about whether an artist can capture what you're describing. But Infected. Infected. This book is rank nonsense, a cynical attempt to churn out a pile of crap that people who like a better caliber of this sort of crap might pick up. It's a fetid waste of paper that reads like a novelization of a movie treatment written on spec by someone who was warned that the total budget of the movie would be $4.28, tops. Each time I turned the page, I was expecting to see the silhouettes of Mike Nelson, Tom Servo, and Crow T. Robot mocking the book as I read, and I imagined each of the characters looked like a classic MST3K victim.

The tough-guy caricature CIA agent, haunted by Vietnam (which would make him, at a bare minimum, well into his 60s) and incapable of speaking in anything but cliches? Joe Don Baker of Mitchell and Final Justice fame.

The sneaky CIA director? Joe "Don't call me Martin, well, OK, sure you can" Estevez.

The pathetic, broken-down heap of an ex-college-football hero (who fights the alien infection in his body by -- and I kid you not here -- drawing on the lessons he learned from his abusive, alcoholic father)? Zap Rowsdower from the Canadian horror flick The Final Sacrifice.

The female scientist who the book forgets about a third of the way into it or so? That redhead with the geographically untraceable accent from Werewolf.

Do not read this book. This book is not your friend. This book hates you. If you are tempted to read this misbegotten abortion of a novel, do something constructive like make plans to attend a Ron Paul rally, or alphabetize your socks, or watch Fox News. Reading is fundamental. Infected is crap.

Ezra Klein on Tim Russert

...it's going to be strange indeed to turn on the TV on Sundays and not hear his voice. Presumably, he's up somewhere beyond the cloudline, hectoring God about His inconsistencies. "But Lord, in Exodus 6:12, you clearly said..."

What Obama means

A lot:

I suppose I live a sheltered life, but for some reason it hadn't crossed my mind that many African-Americans would think not just that it was very hard for a black man to win the nomination, but that it was impossible. But once it did, I found it horrible and heartbreaking, all the more so because, on reflection, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to think. (At least in its milder form -- 'he can't win' -- as opposed to the more ominous 'they won't let him win.')

I thought: it is awful that people should think that no one who looks like them could possibly be nominated by a major party; that any candidate who looks like them has to be "some kind of stunt"; that if they tell their children that maybe they'll grow up to be President some day, they believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are lying. That should never, ever be true. Not in our country.

When Barack Obama won Iowa, the ground beneath that fear began to crack. Now it has been blown apart, in the only way it could have been. And whatever any of us think about this race, or Senator Obama, that is cause for celebration; as is the fact that it turned out not to be true.

I add one thing to this: The president is the first political figure children tend to recognize, and that they do so at a pretty young age. I very much like the idea of Barack Obama being the first president that my daughter is really aware of.

Since I can't be in St. Paul tonight...

...I'll post this, instead: