Accidental Science

Last week on House, we learned that if you're in pain, and you experience new, stronger pain, the pre-existing pain gets pushed aside so your brain can concentrate on the new, more urgent pain.

This morning, I learned that if you have a truly hideous case of the flu, you can make your body forget about it for a few hours by falling down the stairs to your basement office so hard that the right side of your body, from jaw to kneecap, turns into a giant scrape-cum-bruise.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Superhero TV thoughts

On this week's Smallville: "Hi, Metropolis University? This is Georgetown. We'd like our colors and mascot back, thanks."

On tonight's Teen Titans: Who'd have thunk they could get such emotional impact and resonance from an episode whose plot was largelt lifted from Army of Darkness? This show's best moments continue to astonish me.

On tonight's Justice League Unlimited: I love Mister Miracle. I've never quite been able to quantify why exactly he's probably my favorite Jack Kirby character...but after tonight's episode I suspect it's the boundless, joyful sense of hope and imagination and freedom the character embodies. Now, if only Mattel would get to work on a figure...

PSA: Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is a masterful work of film -- one of those movies so perfect it's impossible to imagine it being done any other way, one that resonates and stays with you long after you've left the theatre. I give it my highest recommendation.

That said, if you're like me, you spent a fair amount of the movie trying to figure out where you'd seen some of the actors in it. This happens a lot with Clint Eastwood's films, since he tends to use lots of working actors. Anyway, Danger, the young boxer, is the guy who played Steven on Undeclared. The actor who played the priest was the IRA terrorist being temporarily held in Oz who tried to blow up the prison with Ryan O'Reilly's help.

Unfortunately, there are some self-righteous lackwits who are, apparently, too damn stupid to understand that art thrives on ambiguity and the presentation of an act is not necessarily an endorsement of that act, and so have taken it upon themselves to destroy the film -- literally spoil it -- by spreading plot details best unknown before entering the theatre. If you haven't seen it, don't click this next link; if you have, though, Roger Ebert does an excellent job of detailing just why this is such a despicable and lousy thing to do.

Doctor 6?

Watching tonight's episode of House, I was struck by what a Patrick McGoohan vibe Hugh Laurie gave off in that horrid turtleneck.

That is all. Go read Polite Dissent for a review of the medicine in the episode.

One more thing: Fox now has two shows -- House and That 70s Show -- featuring characters named Eric Foreman who are beset by demanding and curmudgeonly father figures. I'm just sayin', is all, here.

The Cat and the Canary

Two thought on last night's episode of Justice League Unlimited, entitled "The Cat and the Canary":

1. Casting Dennis Farina as Wildcat was perfectly inspired. I just hope Mattel's Wildcat figure lives up to the depiction of the character we saw last night.

2. On Black Canary: I didn't know you could make a cartoon character do that. Not that I object, mind you...

A rational choice query

If one forgets that one has a bottle cap for a free 20-oz. Coke product, and buys a 20-oz. Diet Coke, and that bottle cap is also for a fre 20-oz. Coke product, has one lost money on the deal, come out ahead, or what?

Ossie Davis, RIP

The AP is reporting that Ossie Davis has died after the kind of life and career that makes you feel like a complete slacker in comparison. I think his last role was in the superb, and oddly affecting, Bubba Ho-Tep, which you should run out and see if you haven't already.

Weird Sesame Street moments

This Monsterpiece Theatre transcript is probably the closest thing we will ever see to a Sesame Street/Twin Peaks crossover. Me love Cookie Monster. Him very funny.

Behind the cowbell

All you ever needed to know about the cowbell on Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper."

At my funeral, "Don't Fear the Reaper" will be played, and mourners will be given miniature cowbells and asked to play along. So if you're planning to outlive me, don't say I didn't warn you when an usher hands you a cowbell and tells you to start playing.

Boldly Gone

Star Trek: Enterprise has been cancelled. I'm going to miss the weekly adventures of that guy from Quantum Leap, and the other guy who sorta looks like Dubya did in college, and the Vulcan chick, and the black guy who did things, and the Asian lady who did things, too. I won't miss that horrid, mawkish opening song, though. It would be nice if Paramount would strip it from the episodes and replace it with an instrumental theme, or a song by Pink Lady, or sweet and blessed silence, for syndication and DVDs.

Groundhog Day

If it's almost February 2, it must be time for articles praising the sublime genius that is Harold Ramis' film Groundhog Day. Roger Ebert has written a long reflection on the film and how Bill Murray makes it work by, well, being Bill Murray.

Springtime for Smallville

I've spoken before about how Smallville has taken leave of mere shark-jumping and has instead attained a truly insane and almost willful abandonment of anything resembling sense. Last night's episode was a new high (or low, depending on how you're scoring it), so awful that we watched, slack-jawed in horror, like the opening night crowd watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a disingenuous, incoherent, and just plain hideous piece of television. "Spock's Brain" is like a fourth-season episode of Homicide in comparison.

For starters, there was the plot: Audrey, the teleporting girl who's obsessed with Clark, is discharged from the crazy house, so of course she beelines for Clark. Now that she's certifiably Not Nutty, they start going out. Jonathan and Martha contribute to Clark's ongoing psychological problems by objecting not on the grounds that the girl USED TO STALK CLARK but because she knows his secret.

Meanwhile, Lana is stalking her boring boyfriend and decides the problem is that she's not having sex with him. At which point we learn that Chloe boinked Jimmy Olsen off-screen after the first season of the show.

Let me repeat that: Chloe boinked Jimmy Olsen. I'm just sayin', here, is all.

That's a pretext for Chloe's stilted, statistic-citing speech to Lana about making sure you're ready and what-not. And so Lana goes off and tries to sleep with Boring Guy, who turns her down and then babbles on about plotlines no one, including the writers of the show, actually cares about. Meanwhile, Audrey wants Clark to run away with her so she gives him a necklace make of Red Kryptonite roofies and they run off to Vegas, get married, and nearly boink, but then Audrey decides she really wants Clark Clark, not Red K Clark, so she takes off the necklace, Clark freaks out, goes home, and Audrey teleports in fromt of a bullet that her former doctor -- who is now stalking her, and ealous of Clark -- shoots at Clark. But she's not killed, so it's OK. And then Marths yells at Clark for everything he did under the influence of Red Kryptonite.

If you don't watch Smallville, you may read this and think, boy, this show is really confusing, but it must make more sense if you watch it every week. You would be wrong.

I guess there are several lessons to be learned here:
1. Sex is bad.
2. If you're slipped roofies, whatever happens is your fault. Good thing the Kents didn't adopt Veronica Mars.
3. If you really want to show that sex is bad, have your characters running around half-nekkid for most of the episode.
4. A scene of a character who's been drugged for sexual purposes cavorting around a Vegas wedding suite with the person who did the drugging can be played for laughs. If you're a fucking moron, that is.

There will be bluenoses who criticize the episode for its racy content, but these people are missing the point. The problem isn't the content per se, it's the leering, sniggering tone of the whole thing and the sheer sloppiness and crappiness of its storytelling. It reminded me of the worst treatments of the sex lives of the characters on Buffy during that series' first UPN season, only worse by a factor of ten.

Smallville dug itself a pretty deep rut for its characters' romantic lives early on. Instead of setting up a Betty-and-Veronica or Gwen Stacy-and-Mary Jane dynamic among the cast members, the creators of the series opted instead to focus on everyone pining for everyone else: Pete (remember Pete? I didn't think so) secretly pined for Chloe, Chloe pined for Clark , Clark pined for Lana (apparently he likes 'em without a personality), and Lana was dating a football player...with the net result that nothing much ever actually HAPPENED to the characters, romantically.

As a contrast, consider Buffy. We knew that there were different things at stake (no pun intended) for the characters in their various relationships throughout the series, and as a result what they did and who they did it with mattered. So when Xander hooked up with Faith and we saw Willow crying her eyes out when she found out about it even though she was dating Oz, just to take one example, we cared and we understood her, emotionally. On Smallville, we've watched these people spin their wheels for so many years that as squickish as the idea of Chloe boinking Jimmy Olsen is, well, at least she did something about something. And besides, we all know Clark and Lex are the ones who want to get together...

Orange crush

The great Alton Brown was in town yesterday as part of his book tour. He was, in person, everything you'd expect him to be; he talked briefly about baking (the subject of his new book), then answered questions before signing books for the several hundred people who were there. He practices the classy celebrity art of introducing himself to everyone as they come up: "Hi, I'm Alton." Mary Jo Pehl did the same thing after her live show last year. In line, I finally had a chance to get an answer to a stupid question that's perplexed me since I was a wee lad: Why is it that, at a picnic or cookout, orange soda gets warm so much faster than the other sodas?

In fine Socratic form, Alton (if you were present for the Neil Patrick Harris incident last summer in New York, I can call him that because he introduced himself to me as such) asked me why I thought that might be the case.

"Um...it's a bright colored liquid in a transparent bottle..."

"Would it happen in cans?"

"Not if what I just said is right, because they're opaque..."

"Exactly. It has to do with the spectrum of the liquid and the opacity of the bottle. And that is not a stupid question."

I was impressed by how singly he focused his attention on me while we spoke and how damn serious he was about telling me my question wasn't stupid. He really takes the educative part of his work seriously. That's really damn cool.

Johnny Carson

As a member of the last college graduating class that watched David Letterman at 12:30 am on NBC, I really only remember Johnny Carson as the guy who was on before Letterman. So if you want insights into the man and his career, go read Mark Evanier's site. Which you should do before you read mine anyway.

Achenblog!

Dudes: Joel Achenbach, the Washington Post writer with whom I'd most like to have a beer and the author of the mind-blowing book Captured By Aliens has a blog.

Small world dept.

De Baisch of the incomparable Retroactive Continuity blog had a close encounter with the crazy, annoying guy who sings hymns on the Metro. The Washington Post's Marc Fisher wrote a column a few years ago that depicted him as a harmless, charming eccentric; Mr. Fisher has no doubt never been a captive audience for this guy's hideous, atonal performances. What I always found most intrisuive and offensive about the singing guy is that there is literally no way to avoid his singing when you're on a subway with him; you can walk past a street performer, but you simply cannot get away from an idiot singing badly in a small, confined space full of people who would probably rather be somewhere else to begin with.

A surreal question

I just spent part of the afternoon unable to turn away from the deranged awfulness that is VH1's Surreal Life. That Chyna person from wrestling -- someone, please, tell me: Is that a man?

Empirical proof

And so it turns out 30 really IS too old to pull an all-nighter on a paper. I used to just suspect it. Now I have proof. Hideous, awful, hammers-pounding-on-me-wee-brain proof. Ignorance was bliss.

Accidental TV viewing

Mikester accidentally watched Battlestar Galactica earlier this week. That's pretty awful, but not as awful as accidentally watching Galactica 1980 like I did yesterday. The horror...

Things we can learn at Newsarama

1. Hugh Laurie is likely to play Perry White in the new Superman movie.

2. Fanboys don't watch House.

3. The guy who runs Newsarama has never watched OZ.

4. The notion of "acting," in which dramatickal roles are played by individuals capable of recreating a wide range of different personality types, emotions, etc., is an alien one to the 21st Century fanboy.

5. One should really try to find one's casting news elsewhere than insular message boards.